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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 - 12:57am Apr 4, 2002 EST (#1049 of 1077)

Everything is simple in war
but the simplest thing is difficult

These difficulties accumulate
and produce a friction
which no man
can imagine exactly
who has not seen war.

Clausewitz, On War 1832
Quote

lchic - 01:01am Apr 4, 2002 EST (#1050 of 1077)

The superior man is firm in the right way, and not merely firm.
Confucius, Analects, 551-478 B.C.

lchic - 01:54am Apr 4, 2002 EST (#1051 of 1077)

Tourists Rescued From Bethlehem In Armoured Convoy http://www.guardian.co.uk/uklatest/story/0,1271,-1635114,00.html

He chose to continue to suffer rather than sacrifice his principles. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uklatest/story/0,1271,-1635119,00.html

Palestinians vow 'long resistance' http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_1910000/1910086.stm

lchic - 01:59am Apr 4, 2002 EST (#1052 of 1077)

Louis Mazza ---- > takes the diversionary yellow brick road to nowhere land .... via a 1982 Sci Fi novel ... mazza9 4/3/02 11:51pm .. a latter day Toto sent to rescue his mate from the Bush!

lchic - 02:11am Apr 4, 2002 EST (#1053 of 1077)

Times of stability don't happen by accident, people have worked hard through history, to provide decades of productive peace via common culture and belief systems, together with political strategies, that gave an even course.

rshow55 4/3/02 11:01am + content impressive Showalter !

rshow55 - 06:40am Apr 4, 2002 EST (#1054 of 1077)

MD1048 mazza9 4/3/02 11:58pm , speaks of mass murder by nuclear weapons, suggesting an example where Israel makes " Damascus, Baghdad, and Mecca glow for the next several millennia." and asks

" "Justifiable? You tell me."

Mazza's question was directed to almarst , who has been discussing issues of justification and proportion, and working for a safer world on this thread since March 4, 2001, but I feel like responding too.

At the level of language, stripped of notions of proportion and context, anything can be justified. In the language of angry, threatened people, practically any horror a person can think of has been suggested. Militaries have justified, and continue to justify, horrific and disproportionate responses, as a matter of course. That's been true for more than 5,000 years, and ought to give everyone pause who deals with people of military background, or with political administrations that draw disproportionately from military circles.

In language, any "crime" on one side can justify a "response" on the other -- with no proportion at all. Mazza has been a master of that sort of disproportionate discourse often enough on this thread, and also a master of distraction, of defocusing.

MD1035 rshow55 4/3/02 3:40pm asks

"What might have to be added to the argument that war should be obsolete, made 90 years ago, that would make that argument effective? Perhaps not so much. We need to be better than we are, when it counts, about facing facts. For technical reasons, and perhaps moral reasons as well, it is getting easier for us to "connect the same dots" so that, on issues that matter enough, we're "reading off the same page" -- whether we like the facts or not. We may also be getting closer to learning, really understanding, really facing, basic facts about how easily and brutally and bravely people fight - - how natural it is, under too-common circumstrances, for people to fight to the death, and kill effectively and coldly. If we understood this, we might master the basic etiology of war -- and make wars both less likely and less costly.

With weapons of mass destruction too-widely available, we've got good reasons to work to do this -- because we face risks that stunts like "missile defense" can't address MD14-15 rshow55 3/1/02 6:07pm ... MD84 rshow55 3/2/02 10:52am - but that more insight might be able to.

We have reason to pay attention, and to "connect some dots." MD1027 rshow55 4/3/02 11:01am

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