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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.

lchic - 01:27pm Mar 13, 2002 EST (#448 of 484)

Gentlemen, I say we are witnessing a beginning of new and totally differernt kind of nuclear confrontation. manjumicha2001 3/13/02 1:16pm

rshow55 - 01:29pm Mar 13, 2002 EST (#449 of 484)

There should be social and economic suasion -- from a number of angles -- to bring both the N. Koreans and the United States into line on this sort of thing.

Nukes are extermination weapons -- once used -- people and peoples fight to the death. Rationality is adjourned. We have to do better than that.

And if preemption has to be used - it should not be nuclear.

rshow55 - 01:31pm Mar 13, 2002 EST (#450 of 484)

Backing away from fights -- and reasonably pre-emption, too, take more complicated stances than those the administration focuses on.

rshow55 - 01:38pm Mar 13, 2002 EST (#451 of 484)

It ought to be easy to get the N. Koreans sane enough (and secure enough for valid reasons) to eliminate these terrible risks.

Or, if pre-emption was required, it ought to be possible to do so on a non-nuclear and not very bloody basis.

But the solutions that can possibly work have to be complicated - - they have to load information and logical systems -- even overload them -- and the best ones have to appeal to beauty, and hope, and not just fear - - and the administration is doing a lot of things wrong.

lchic - 01:40pm Mar 13, 2002 EST (#452 of 484)

On a personal level i suffered the trauma of a 'small' injury a couple of days ago .. should be right in about a week. Evenso, a minor trauma does give insights ... makes one think ... how do people fare in situations where there are massive injuries ... where rehabilitation is necessary .. how do people fare where there are human losses .. where there are shortages of medical materials and professional medics.

Transposing from individual trauma to world scale is barely imaginable ...

Raises the point --
Who are these people who could intervene and politically assist where disputes turn nasty - but don't
Before unnecessary and irreparable damage occurs.

rshow55 - 01:42pm Mar 13, 2002 EST (#453 of 484)

The Koreans are but marginally well defended for simple challenges. They are vulnerable, both as a culture and as a military structure - to more complicated ones -- especially in mixes, quickly switched, where to defend against one attack is to be helpless against another -- with a lot of attacks possible.

We are stupid to get into such simple minded, brutal - gruesomely immoral cycles of death. We can do better, and must.

And other nations ought to insist on it.

rshow55 - 01:49pm Mar 13, 2002 EST (#454 of 484)

We have to understand some basic things about how fights work, for intervention to be very workable.

As of now, people don't know how to make peace very well.

We need much more clinical understanding of how escalatory fights happen, and how they may be stopped.

We're dealing with the "cancer" of human socio-technical systems -- and just as we can't prohibit cancer, we can't prohibit war. But to the extent that we understand mechanisms, we can ameliorate, and prevent.

To reduce or eliminate cancer, we have to know how it works. The same goes for war patterns.

From the logical point of view, it doesn't look so difficult to do now. But emotions run high, we're talking about deeply emotional and natural patterns - - and the difficulties of "paradigm conflict" are very important.

Morality is very important - and so are institutions. But as of now, we need more understanding, too.

And some pruderies don't work. Sometimes, fights do have to happen. When they do, they should be under decent control, and have reasonable, close to minimal costs.

And the ends shouldn't just set up the next fight.

rshow55 - 01:56pm Mar 13, 2002 EST (#455 of 484)

These costs are TOO HIGH -- and setting up the next fight happens too often -- it surely happened in Korea . We have to do better than this - - much better.

Washington has a love affair with terror by Robin Miller

" Let's examine our use of terror directed against civilians to achieve political or military goals, beginning with the atomic devastation of Japan. http://www.nctimes.com/news/2002/20020310/60236.html

lchic - 02:04pm Mar 13, 2002 EST (#456 of 484)

Mexican president, Vicente Fox is looking after his people working in the US http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/13/politics/13AMNE.html - humanitarian progress!

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