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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?

lunarchick - 08:03pm Jul 31, 2001 EST (#7667 of 7772)
lunarchick@www.com

GI: on comparing apples with oranges:
you wanted the reader to assume that the USA individual's contribution to MD was less than the cost of a packet of cigarettes, but didn't put figures on the table.

Thinking about the cost of a packet of cigarettes there are factors that are part of cost - yet go uncosted.
These would include the pollution and degregation of the environment through spraying tobacco field crops - does the market price of tobacco leaf represent the true price?
Additional to this is are the known social and health costs. eg:
see and recent thinking that cigarettes link directly to forms of depression and asthma, and commercial and domestic fires. On risk.
The true cost of smoking is so complex that it can't be determined, nor can alcohol wrt the impacts on road safety, domestic violence, and personal health. http://www.doh.gov.uk/images/pointer1.gif

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Landmines(search)as shown have hidden costs .. unusable land lost to food, and the prosthetics industry, together with the loss of functionality of individuals .... were this costed in USA $ claims it is substantial -- and were claims being made against the USA, it would be an encouragement to halt their use and clean up mined areas.

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With respect to MD the questions include:
Does the technology work?
Are the people developing it aware of only the micro-aspect their team work on, rather than having a full concept of the system.
Could money be used to better effect
Could engineers be employed in worthwhile ways
A list of NEEDS for the world would relate first to basic survival, and then employment.

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WRT Biological weapons - rejected outright this week by Australia.
People can understand the horrors or biological weapons. Each has experienced illness and sickness through life. To inflict biological trauma on others is therefore both understood and rejected.

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The 'coldness' regarding the USA's policy of 'bombing from a distance' ... relies on the people of the world not seeing each other as brothers and sisters .. which they now do - thanks to improved communications and the efforts of writers and film makers.

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WRT the 'Shield' .. it seems that the main players can't understand it ... making the 'publics' of the world rightfully skeptical!

lunarchick - 08:08pm Jul 31, 2001 EST (#7668 of 7772)
lunarchick@www.com

ISP WORM- CodeRed is expected to signficantly slow down computers - making communicational efforts difficult. So much for the 'power of one' with respect to drawing universal attention to a security deficit in lines of MS computer code.

rshowalter - 08:15pm Jul 31, 2001 EST (#7669 of 7772)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

If a nation state got serious about doing damage over the internet -- it could accomplish effects massively greater. No advanced society is "invulnerable" now -- our new "electronic nervous systems" rule that out. All advanced nations, the US perhaps most of all, live in "glass houses" now.

A good reason for people to be peaceful.

And technical changes are undermining old assumptions. For example, the US nuclear forces, as of a year ago, and almost certainly still today, are controlled in decisive ways by phone systems, with voice identification critical at a number of stages.

The phone systems are porous and vulnerable in ways never imagined. And now voice identification can no longer be trusted - - voice simulation has "come into its own."

Our nuclear installations are obsolete menaces, which could destroy the world, and we should find ways to take the damn things down.

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