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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?

mikewiz50 - 06:21pm Jul 19, 2001 EST (#7252 of 7257)

The NMD System is nothing less than an attempt to further dominate and exploit the world, to protect "our way of life" grounded in greed and arrogance. To control space equates to utter domination of the earth--the goal of the U.S. empire.

It is, moreover, another way to bankrupt this nation as it takes needed funds from programs that would better benefit all of society, not just corporate America.

Further still, it pushes the world closer to nuclear, biological, and chemical annihilation. This nation is the most arrogant and evil nation in history. It already initiated three nuclear wars (Japan, Iraq and the Balkans) and is willing to risk another by its absolute contempt for and disregard of the ABM Treaty and other arms control agreements.

When will the people of this nation rise up and stand against this evil? Stand against corporate greed, corporate crime with no consequence, lies, betrayel, mass murder of the innocent, infernal bombings that seem unending, and have yet to bring into being a single democratic government respectful of human rights? Stand against the lunatic lunge for world domination that unrelentlessly threatens nuclear war while continuously polluting the planet with nuclear rubish which has caused countless victims of cancer?

Let us not forget that depleted uranium (DU), produced by the U.S., is sold or freely distributed to over fifty "friendly" nations. It has has already killed more people than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. Is it not time for the decent people of this nation to stand and say ENOUGH! to this race to oblivion which has raged for fifty-six years now? And we dare point to Hitler as the most evil of all, while the dead, maimed, and dying together, make for a holocaust that drawfs crimes of the Nazi's. The silence of the masses is deafening. Will it end before it is too late?

lunarchick - 07:15pm Jul 19, 2001 EST (#7253 of 7257)
lunarchick@www.com

'We'll get the kids to swim off first, then let the crocodile swim behind them, give 'em speed, just sort of a fun thing to entertain them.' Darwin.
So that's how the Aussie's train!

rshowalter - 07:46pm Jul 19, 2001 EST (#7254 of 7257)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Diplomatically, the news reports indicate that the Bush administration has had a bad day.

But technically, the results may be even more serious.

rshowalter - 07:52pm Jul 19, 2001 EST (#7255 of 7257)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Missile Interception Test Was Hit-and-Miss, Pentagon Reports by JAMES DAO http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/19/national/19RADA.html

"WASHINGTON, July 18 — A prototype missile defense radar had a malfunction after a successful interception test on Saturday and was unable to confirm that a mock warhead had been destroyed , the Pentagon said today.

"The prototype being developed for tracking long-range missiles by using finely focused, or X-band, radar waves is intended to help guide intercepting missiles toward targets and assist in differentiating warheads from decoys, Pentagon officials say.

Coment: X band radars use cm waves - radars using these wavelengths were developed and used in WWII -- and their properties are well known

"The officials said the prototype X- band radar stationed on Kwajalein atoll in the Marshall Islands successfully performed those tasks in the test Saturday.

"The result was a direct hit on a mock warhead, which was demolished in a collision with the intercepting missile , or kill vehicle, 140 miles above the Pacific.

Comment: The term "demolished may be right, but according to the Coyle Report . . http://www.house.gov/reform/min/pdf/nmdcoylerep.pdf , a hit is not a kill.

"Pentagon testers were also counting on the X-band radar to help them confirm that the warhead had been destroyed. Instead of doing that, the system froze because it was inundated with data from debris created by the collision, a Pentagon official said.

"The radar was so sensitive it overwhelmed its information processing ability,"

Comment: All radar is sensitive -- light travels 30 cm in a nanosecond -- object identifications require resolving nanosecond and subnanosecond difference on very faint signals. There is no easy, or robust way to deal with noisy signals, or signals from geometrically complicated or ornate physical circumstances. That's one of the reasons that it takes years to build a new radar - when the basic technology has been under intensive development for almost seventy years. The electronics isn't easy to build, and it is finicky, drifty, difficult to build and maintain stuff. In addition - it is only range (time) information that is resolved -- for the scales needed, there is essentially no angular resolution of the target at all. The more signal processing, the better noise can be handled, up to a point. But discriminating complex physical situations is inherently difficult - and that won't change.

"Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, said. "The system locked up, like your computer at home. It was too much work to track all the debris."

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