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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?

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rshow55 - 08:01am May 13, 2003 EST (# 11632 of 11633)
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.

There's a quote I heard so long ago that I can't remember who I heard it from. Maybe everybody's heard it.

"When you're up to your ass in alligators - it is hard to remember that your objective was to drain the swamp.

Casey and I both smiled about that one. Both of us had lots of "alligator problems" - Casey many more than I .

I was in the swamp draining business - trying to solve basic problems.

I've been sweating, over the past days and weeks, wondering how to do that effectively now.

Here's a central simple point - one Steve Kline knew - and demonstrated by experience. If you are wishing to to something basic but big - that necessarily displaces "alligators" - you need some protection, and some organization.

Casey knew that. I was working - not with terrible originality - but working pretty hard - to solve central problems that bothered Roosevelt, Eisenhower (both Dwight and Milton) and plenty of other people. Bothered Marshall. And I believed, and Casey believed - that the only hope was for me to stay focused on the simple and basic problems - and work on the assumption that once solutions were at hand - they could be implemented with government assistance.

It was, in a lot of ways, a problematic enterprise, and not without corruptions and moral problems (including some of my own.) And in my case, some things, I felt, went very right but some other things terribly wrong. I'm trying to dig out - in ways Eisenhower or Casey would approve of - and "up to may ass in alligators."

I'm afraid of alligators, though I sometimes deal with those fears.

I believe that most of the problems the world has now were understood - at some very basic levels - by many of the key leaders of the United States (and the United Nations) in the years before 1960 - and that the hopes C.P. Snow (and Casey) had in the 1960's ought to be achievable now.

But there is no alternative to facing up to some facts - and to some exception handling.

Basic things need to be adressed, and solved in a fully satisfactory manner - at necessary scales.

Sure looks possible to me. But for it to be possible - there has to be some exception handling. And sometimes - when problems are obvious - with obvious solutions - the power and will to apply those solutions has to be found. Within safeguards - but necessarily with the "breaking" or "stretching" of some "rules."

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