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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 - 07:58pm Mar 11, 2002 EST (#399 of 407)

Bertotdt Brecht's essay, WRITING THE TRUTH, FIVE DIFFICULTIES is in my version of his play, GALILEO , set into English by Charles Laughton.

It includes this:

" It takes courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak."

One reason why truth may be too weak is that it isn't made dramatic enough. lchic 3/11/02 7:34pm is dead right - - it has to be dramatic enough.

Exposition matters. Attention to detail matters. Drama, clarity, and vividness matter.

There's a phrase that I read once. Three words.

" Hitler went unchecked."

Hitler subverted an entire society based on nonsense and lies, many ornately detailed, and destroyed much of the world in doing so. He hoped, in the senses that matter to most of us, to destroy the whole world. In the ways that mattered, he wasn't effectively checked at the level of ideas. Or at the level of force, nearly early enough.

http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?14@201.dX0SaJJVFJ9^1931625@.f05e1ab/1592... rshowalt "Science in the News" 8/23/00 7:31am

We need to keep it from happening again. The United States is a VERY different country from Nazi Germany - - though there are too many similarities for my taste. Still, the connections of the Bush family, and the right wing of the Republican Party, to NAZI roots ought to be remembered from time to time, especially when insturments of extermination (nuclear weapons) are considered.

Sometimes it is appropriate to be dramatic.

And a key thing that can be checked is the technical side of the "missile defense" boondoggle. rshow55 3/11/02 2:15pm

lchic - 08:03pm Mar 11, 2002 EST (#400 of 407)

What would a blow-up icon .. of a boondoggle .. look like ... would it be photogenic ?!

manjumicha2001 - 12:18am Mar 12, 2002 EST (#401 of 407)

rshow:

I think I have said it before but here it goes:

I agree with you that NMD is a program that is 50 years old and has proven to be terminally challenged by the laws of physics. Having said that, however, I do not believe the world turns based on merits alone. Pathos (either of a nation or people) matter and more often than not, it is the driving force of the events that shape history. American people WANT TO believe that NMD works and politicans (and whatever-hypernated-complexes associated with them) will happily oblige them and make some buck in the process.....that my friend is the wheels of history. You and others' (including myself) feeble efforts are all marginal side notes to the main march.....don't you think?

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