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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 - 05:02am Mar 29, 2002 EST (#937 of 944)

What is a “just war”? http://abc.net.au/compass/thisweek/default.htm

What is a “just war”? Should we risk killing and maiming civilians in order to fight terrorism? Is it even possible to ‘fight fair’ against perpetrators of terrorism?

_{On Good Friday, a traditional day of reflection about human deficiencies and personal responsibility, Compass looks at an issue that embroils us all since September 11.}

London-based professor of moral philosophy, Jonathan Glover, has spent several decades trying to understand how the atrocities committed throughout the 20th Century in two world wars and Nazi or Stalinist genocide came about. By analysing the ethics of those who perpetrated these acts, Glover has recently published his book “Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century” to warn us of how easily we can slide into inhumanity.

[ http://www.samuelbrittan.co.uk/text25_p.html Glover concludes by saying that 20th Century wars, massacre and genocide came from combining the psychology of human beings who have "a strong propensity both for getting trapped into conflict and also for cruelty and mass killing" with modern technology. His last words are: "It is to the psychology that we should now turn." I hope he will do so more completely in another book. As director of the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics at King¹s College London and the author of books on the philosophy and biology, he would be well placed to do so. ]

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Seen any feature articles covering the ethics and morals of a 'just war'?

One point made was that with modern technology the military technical operater doesn't see the victims - their suffering ... the feedback is blunted.

A war artist working amongst US pilots working over Afghanistan noted their concern re contents of their lunch box was higher than the moral concern of having just killed a few hundred people.

Can a Nuclear war ever be regarded as a 'just war' .. ?!?

Glover says it is necessary to turn to psychology - is war (and nuclear war) more about the working of the MIND than the technology ?

applez101 - 11:58am Mar 29, 2002 EST (#938 of 944)

lchic - you've got several good points there.

'A Just War' is entirely a mental process.

A) It is the mental recognition/identification of an affront, then

B) The willful decision to employ violence to punish the affront.

It ignores discussion, debate, negotiation, the possibility of misidentification, and as soon as the concept of 'just' seeps in, limiting the scale of violence can become increasingly difficult.

Consider for example:

a) How on Earth could the Japanese commit those atrocities to other human beings during the Second World War? I mean truly vile inhumane acts. (Watch 'Japanese Devils' if you get the chance, BTW) Relatively easily actually: the soldier got it into their heads that all non-Japanese were animals, lower than sub-humans; and that 'everyone was doing it' and the reprisal for disobeying orders and the group ethos would be too painful.

Japanese are not unique to this experience or to the possibility of repeating such atrocities. Any group of combatants that have had their sense of personal ethical limits removed can end up on that path.

This is what makes the military particularly dangerous. It actively seeks to remove many of those ethical limits to help people commit the universal evil of killing other humans. It generally does this by absorbing as much of the personal ethos and responsibility into the leadership structure. "Don't think, obey - 'cause your leaders know best. You think, you die, we die. Don't let us down."

This produces a massive opportunity for abuse.

-I would add that the US and its soldiers have already perpetuated similiar atrocities for equally flimsy reasoning in the Philippines and Vietnam.

b) The heavy investment in technology by the US military has further removed the combatant from a sense of personal responsibility for the act. The sense of acting 'justly' further diminishes that sense of acting evilly.

-->This is why I find discussion about the development and deployment of low-yield nuclear weapons ('bunker busters' and the like), and that idea that this acceptable particularly worrying. Is it one more step on the primrose path of desensitising people from the acts of violence they commit for ideology?

almarst-2001 - 03:13pm Mar 29, 2002 EST (#939 of 944)

"Just War"

1. The privilage to claim so is always left to the victor to say. There is no independent impartial perfect JUDGE. Even the US seem to appropriate the title.

2. Can any war be just? No. Because the people who kill and die have nothing to do with the cause and gains of the result.

3. Can it be even worst in a 22nd Century? Looking to the end of the last one and the beginning of the new one - CAN and very likely WILL. Unless the US shadow "rulling class" is thrown to the place it belongs to. Unless the America's mass culture of arrogance, ignorance, self-rightness and messionic zealot, coupled with feeling of invencibility and allmightness come to the end. A highly unlikely scenario, except a case of massive suffering and really terrible consequences to the much of the American public.

Its pretty hard to even chose the least of the evils.

lchic - 04:12pm Mar 29, 2002 EST (#940 of 944)

JustWARlinks : ^{http://www.mamma.com/Mamma?query=just+war&qtype=0&x=63&y=11}

A Succinct, Incomplete, Presumptuous, and Wholly Inadequate Overview of the Elements of Just War by Nile Stanton http://faculty.ed.umuc.edu/~nstanton/JWTheory.htm

A libertarian just war is virtually unimaginable. http://www.dimensional.com/~boardman/nap/justwar.html

A Just War? / Stephen R. Shalom (nyt/Kosovo) http://www.zmag.org/CrisesCurEvts/a_just_war.htm

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