New York Times on the Web Forums Science

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.

almarst2003 - 03:15am Mar 30, 2003 EST (# 10761 of 10766)

Before the Iraq invasion started, many Americans imagined the campaign in terms of Hollywood movies or the video-game abstraction of the television coverage of the first Gulf War – that virtual reality in which we drop bombs and only the enemy dies, and off-camera at that. - http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/article.asp?id=578

fredmoore - 05:42am Mar 30, 2003 EST (# 10762 of 10766)

Thousands of Muslims who say they are ready for martyrdom have flocked to Iraq since the U.S.- led war began, a sign that a prolonged stay of U.S. and British forces may turn the country into a magnet for ALARMISTS seeking a new jihad.

rshow55 - 07:34am Mar 30, 2003 EST (# 10763 of 10766)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

8877-78 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.FolgaZBy6WO.2308498@.f28e622/10403

At this time - where so much depends on questions of fact - and on ideas, and common humanity - it seems to me that the following article, and especially its ending - ought to be of interest to NATO, to the UN Security Council members - and to the larger worlds.

The Sunshine Warrior by Bill Keller Sept 22 2002 http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/22/magazine/22WOLFOWITZ.html

The piece is on Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, and was the featured piece in the NYT Magazine of Sept 22. Wolfowitz can, according to Keller's story, plausibly claim to be the main author and profit of the Bush administration's Iraq policy.

Keller's piece ends:

Wars that defend our safety may command a higher price. What price? Would the danger posed by a nuclear-armed Saddam be worth, say, the lives of thousands of American soldiers, if that is what the experts estimated it would take to disarm him by force?

Wolfowitz posed the question himself and answered no. Weapons of mass destruction would not be enough to justify the deaths of thousands of Americans. And in any case, thousands killed would mean the mission had gone badly wrong.

But Wolfowitz was not letting the discussion end there. Later, he e-mailed me an afterthought about that grisly calculus of going to war against Iraq.

' 'So if that's what you estimate the costs of action to be, then you have to have something more on the other side of the ledger than just the possession of weapons of mass destruction,'' he wrote. Whether that ''something more'' that would justify that greater sacrifice meant evidence that Iraq was on the verge of using its weapons, or the prospect of establishing Iraq as an outpost of democracy, or a smoking gun tying Iraq to Sept. 11, he did not specify. ''In the end, it has to come down to a careful weighing of things we can't know with precision, the costs of action versus the costs of inaction, the costs of action now versus the costs of action later.''

We're now in a situation where the Bush administration has escalated beyond the standards set by Wolfowitz - a man thought to be a radical - an ultra-hawk - only a few months ago.

Could it be that the interests involved in maintaining an enormous military-industrial complex continuously bias argument to more and more confrontational positions - in a process without adequate controls?

I think there's a great deal of analogy between the "careful decision making" we saw in the shuttle disaster, and "careful decision making" about military (and diplomatic, and moral) matters today.

9354 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.FolgaZBy6WO.2308498@.f28e622/10890

We need logical tools, and human insights, that make closure possible, and agreements resiliant, to a degree that they haven't been before.

9040 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.FolgaZBy6WO.2308498@.f28e622/10566 reads:

But our "logic" - is mostly a choosing between many alteratives going on or being fashioned in our heads - and in the course of that choosing - people believe what "feels right."

But what "feels right," most often, is what, in our minds "cooperates with the interests of authority - with our group." Look at Pritchard's notes on Milgram's experiment - and on Jonestown - to get a sense of how wrong it feels, for most people, to go against authority. http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~epritch1/social98a.html

We need to face the fact that there is more need to check - especially when "the ties that bind" are involved - than people feel comfortable with.

On this thread, again and again, there have been technical arguments - and with absolutely stunning, monotonous regularity - gisterme has presented arguments that make no technical sense at all - that are perversely wrong - and feels right about them.

He, or his maximum leader, seem to have military judgemen

(3 following messages)

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense