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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?

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rshow55 - 11:10am Mar 3, 2002 EST (#153 of 160)

A key set of qustions, relations, and facts involve a technical dream - - that Americans, Russians, and others feel differently about. The dream, like all dreams that people work for, can only become real if it is consistent with the facts.

. The dream is the idea that American military forces, and the United States as a nation, can be made immune to missiles, long range or short range, carrying nuclear weapons or other destructive means, and that the United States, at the same time, can have decisive weapons, including missiles, and "space based" weapons, that will permit it to dominate all other nations with impunity.

That "dream" -- whether you are for it or against it, depends, for its practicality, on technical facts.

One cannot, as a matter of logic, rule out the dream "in general." But one CAN rule out specific means proposed to implement it. One can rule these implementations out (barring miracles that can be specified) using information in the open literature.

Facts are safer than scenarios based on fictions. It is in the interest of virtually all Americans, and in the interest of the rest of the world, to evaluate this "missile defense" dream, and its relation to US military and diplomatic policy.

A great deal is technically clear now. MD84 rshow55 3/2/02 10:52am

lchic - 01:12pm Mar 3, 2002 EST (#154 of 160)

!

lchic - 02:00pm Mar 3, 2002 EST (#155 of 160)

_{Superman flew around in space 'thinking' between posting and arrival at destination.}

Here's a thought:-

On Stories, caught a night-time movie. It was about a person under hypnosis who was living in the now, the life of a person who'd died half a century perviously ....... the question was, would the ENDING be the same - that is death - or - could it be turned towards a more constructive solution ...

Isn't it the same for MD .. does the NOW ENDING to the story have to be the old ending ...

Or could it be turned towards a more constructive solution ..... the Nukes ARE TAKEN DOWN

Who's going for which ending?

lchic - 02:24pm Mar 3, 2002 EST (#156 of 160)

Has the US lost its way?

Does everybody hate America? Maybe the world is just concerned at the lack of visionary leadership from such a powerful nation

http://www.observer.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,661105,00.html

rshow55 - 02:52pm Mar 3, 2002 EST (#157 of 160)

People are concerned. There's time for some serious thinking, about happy endings.

Why should Bush take Europe seriously?

"Simplistic", "absurd" and in "unilateralist overdrive". Europeans know what they don't like about President Bush's "axis of evil". But if the European Union can't get its own foreign policy act together, nobody is going to listen Steven Everts Sunday February 17, 2002 http://www.observer.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,651636,00.html

And about patterns that get in the way of happy endings, and in the way of decisions that people can understand and respect.

The "political technology" that sustains the "missile defense" boondoggle, and much else that has grown cancerous about the US military-industrial complex since the "end" of the cold war, is powerful, and understanding how powerful it is, and how it works, is important so that it can be countered. It is important that facts be established, and decisions based on them. When the public is informed, paying attention, and acting wisely this happens. But the nightmare irrationality of much of US foreign policy, and the missile defense boondoggle, is based on other "logic."

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