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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

rshow55 - 05:15pm Feb 27, 2002 EST (#11893 of 11896)

Oil may be a "new frontier" -- but there are limits to what can be done with information flows as they are -- and the world is a long way from a "new world order."

Other nations are influential, too, especially when they care about the same things -- and their influence is being felt.

And there are "new frontiers" regarding information flows, as well. "Blocking the formosa straight" isn't a likely event - - by the US, China, or any other power. And its strategic significance would be limited -- the cost of ships going some extra distance isn't a big thing.

For the Cold War to be ended, and for new world arrangements satisfactory to other countries, not just the United States, things need to be clear. Many of the things that need to be clarified are being clarified, it seems to me.

Ill advised as some of Bush's rhetoric may be, he is making adjustments. And on missile defense, there is a great deal of deception -- but the stuff doesn't work well enough to be a real threat.

rshow55 - 05:18pm Feb 27, 2002 EST (#11894 of 11896)

MD5990 rshowalter 6/25/01 10:57am ... MD5991rshowalter 6/25/01 11:03am

Getting past lies is crucial when things matter.

A sense of proportion helps, too.

The way people get around lies, almost every time that is actually done, is by applying consistency relationships, again and again, until the lie becomes less and less plausible -- and then fades away, discredited.

MD5994 rshowalter 6/25/01 12:05pm

Patterns have been built that assume facts can't be, or won't be checked -- or the checking won't be attended to. . Here's a quote I really like, from my favorite detective story writer -- Dashiell Hammet in The Thin Man 1933, speaking of a sexy, interesting, treacherous character named "Mimi". He's asked by a police detective what to make of what she says:

" The chief thing," I advised him, "is not to let her wear you out. When you catch her in a lie, she admits it and gives you another lie to take its place, and when you catch he in that one, admits it, and gives you still another, and so on. Most people . . . get discouraged after you've caught them in the third or fourth straight lie and fall back on the truth or silence, but not Mimi. She keeps trying, and you've got to be careful or you'll find yourself believing her, not because she seems to be telling the truth, but simply because you're tired of disbelieving her. "

Advocates of missile defense have gaping holes in their arguments -- and many european military and political officers weren't even polite about it in Bush's last trip. But the money to be made by getting the lie accepted is great enough that -- they keep trying -- and unless they're checked .... that can be a winning strategy. Too often, it is.

The internet makes checking considerably more possible, and makes memory enough to keep count of lies more feasible. But it takes work.

Because the truth matters here, the work is worth it.

rshow55 - 05:19pm Feb 27, 2002 EST (#11895 of 11896)

MD8211 rshowalter 8/28/01 4:35pm

From Envisioning Information by Eward R. Tufte, p. 50

" We thrive in information-thick worlds because of our marvelous and everyday capacities to select, edit, single out, structure, highlight, group, pair, merge, harmonize, synthesize, focus, organize, condense, reduce, boil down, choose, categorize, classify, list, abstract, scan, look into, idealize, isolate, discriminate, distinguish, screen, pidgeonhole, pick over, sort, integrate, blend, inspect, filter, lump, skip, smooth, chunk, average, approximate, cluster, aggregate, outline, summarize, itemize, review, dip into, flip through, browse, glance into, leaf through, skim, refine, enumerate, glean, synopsize, winnow the wheat from the chaff, and separate the sheep from the goats."

Since so many ways of seeing and connecting to information are possible, how are people to agree?

Especially when people have different basic beliefs, different interests, and come from different backgrounds and assumptions, both intellectual and emotional?

At one level, people will NEVER agree about everything on any complex subject such as missile defense, and it would be both unrealistic and inhuman to ask them to, or force them to.

At the same time, different people, with different views, have to cooperate in ways that fit human and practical realities, and it often works. It happens because, in areas where accomodation occurs, there are common bodies of fact , that people may feel differently about, but about which they agree in operational terms. So that people can be "reading from the same page" -- and with the pages objectively right.

We need some islands of technical fact to be determined, beyond reasonable doubt, or in a clear context.

We need those "islands" to be clear, at a level beyond politics - - at a level where people with very different interests and feelings can refer to "the same page" - and a page including points that can be both widely understood, and widely trusted.

Unless we can get these "islands of technical fact" we're very unlikely to reach good decisions. And the human stakes, and the stakes for the whole world, are high enough that we need good decisions.

Moreover these facts have to be understandable to, and persuasive to, the people actually involved , with the ways of thinking they actually have, the interests they actually have, the feelings that they actually have, and the level of knowledge and attention that they can actually bring to bear.

It isn't possible to get "everything" that clear on a complex subject -- or even most things. But getting a few key things clear would help a lot. I believe that we've moved in that direction.

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