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Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

alty53 - 11:29am Jun 12, 2001 EST (#4842 of 4855)

To Dirac 10: I have you figured for a bright and articulate early 20's white boy living in a comic book fantasy world of naive assumptions about the technology fix and about big power politics......space is just another battle ground where if you get your forces to the field first, you will most certainly prevail in battle.......that is the geopolitical strategy of the Bush crowd and your unsupported denials to the contrary will not change that......and by the way........it took Kepler more than twenty years to plot the eliptical orbit of Mars.......you are at a ground based tracking station and have a half hour to plot and track a 30 meter long missile coming at you with a variable velocity on a variable trajectory and heading for an unknown destination while at the same time your location is also moving at about 1000km per hour.......solve the problem smart boy........

smartalix - 11:41am Jun 12, 2001 EST (#4843 of 4855)
Anyone who denies you information considers themselves your master

He can't even sort out the difference between intercepting an incoming warhead and intercepting the ICBM during boost.

rshowalter - 11:45am Jun 12, 2001 EST (#4844 of 4855)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Solve the problem with NOISE with calibration questions, and with real people and real equipment -- (add a little chaff, say -- ) Well, it might be done. ... But if you look at what the radars can really do, and look at the resulution that is actually there -- and run through the errors, which go one on top of another -- it is recklessly far-fetched to assume that this is an "effective defense."

Or that something like a "lasar" could solve the problem. You have to aim the lasar.

But with a little modification of trajectories, easily arranged with a small bottle of compressed air, and a valve -- you'd find that even a "perfectly calculated zero noise" trajectory would miss -- because you'd be assuming a pure ballistic trajectory, when the warhead was doing something else.

Want to do better, without fancy calculations. You need a lot of data points to prodigious resolution, and there's no way to get those data points, in the real world.

Another point. Ever been on a ship, or an airplane, or looked at the forces on a rocket when the rocket was burning? Things rock and shake -- enough to make missile defense a VERY tough proposition.

Not worth doing. We could, and must, make peace instead.

rshowalter - 11:46am Jun 12, 2001 EST (#4845 of 4855)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

My own judgement is that dirac is a real professional.

smartalix - 11:49am Jun 12, 2001 EST (#4846 of 4855)
Anyone who denies you information considers themselves your master

If he is, he is a sloppy one.

rshowalter - 11:50am Jun 12, 2001 EST (#4847 of 4855)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

almarst might be interested in these. We DON"T have all the answers about how to get economic growth, and some of the answers being pitched very hard may be being pushed for empirically unsupported political reasons. But "bastions of capitalism" such as HBS are subject to evidence and argument.

Special Report Global Alumni Conference 2001 Leading in a Changing World: Innovation, Transformation and Growth http://hbswk.hbs.edu/topics/special_reports/ Ford's Jacques Nasser led a Who's Who of business luminaries speaking at this year's conference.

Globalization Great Divide in the Global Village http://hbswk.hbs.edu/topics/globalization/ Is politics preventing globalization from closing the income gap between rich and poor countries? In his Foreign Affairs article, Professor Bruce R. Scott examines the growing gap between poverty and wealth in the global village.

rshowalter - 11:51am Jun 12, 2001 EST (#4848 of 4855)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Perhaps he's meticulously serving the people who pay him -- muddying the water, degrading the discourse, prefenting closure.

rshowalter - 11:55am Jun 12, 2001 EST (#4849 of 4855)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

MD825 rshowalter 3/4/01 12:27pm. . . MD826 rshowalter 3/4/01 1:04pm

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