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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 - 08:06am May 13, 2003 EST (# 11633 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.

I've been as straight as I've known how to be - and as courageous as I've felt was rational.

But I haven't always told the whole truth - and some statements on the board - and in some correspondence that NYT columnists were sent contains a story that is only partly true - with "complicating" parts not set out. Here is language that I sent, through an indirect channel - expecting CIA officers to read it. Problematic passages are bolded .

MD2116 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.LlD0a2rI9aH.111198@.f28e622/2621

"AEA was an effort to make specific breakthroughs in automotive design, which were made; to greatly extend the culture's ability to apply and fit mathematical analysis to complex engineering tasks; to demonstrate a new engineering business structure generalizing Lockheed's "skunk works"; and was a test bed that the government and I hoped would let me find the "hidden problem" in applied mathematics that seemed crucial in missile guidance and much else. There's more to say, and I'll be more explicit. A great deal about AEA can be checked, in detail - and I'll open any and all records, and explain the situation as best I can - according to patterns set out in MD1152 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.LlD0a2rI9aH.111198@.f28e622/1468

MD2104 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.LlD0a2rI9aH.111198@.f28e622/2608 includes this:

I was involved in the academic-military equivalent of an "extreme sports" stunt -- and it has been more complicated - in part because it has involved a mix of security problems, and paradigm conflict problems . . . .

It has been, for me, the most fascinating nightmare imaginable.

And taunting, because, in so many ways hope - intoxicating hope - has seemed so close.

Here's a statement that may seem strange to you, manjumicha , but that seems central to me.

Before AEA blew, in the early 1980's you could say, and I would have said, that we were very close to a triumph for almost everybody concerned, and for America -- a triumph for the military, for high officers like Casey, and even a triumph for humane values . . . for all the ugliness the Cold War involved. We were doing something new, something important, and it was working - - and Steve Kline had good reasons to take half time leave from his Stanford Professorship - against passionate opposition - to work on the project. A lot of people had reason to be proud - - - of themselves, and of America.

. Then Casey "pulled a plug" -- for reasons that made operational sense at the time.

. Then something unexpected happened - - I broke. Badly. For a while, I actually lost the ability to read.

Casey pulled the plug on AEA's Oppenheimer offering in December 1979.

I broke in 1985.

A lot happened in that interval, and later, that I didn't set out. I'm wondering how to tell about that - and think now that I should. I hate to have to set those things out in public. But I see no alternative now, that can be possible without help.

Casey managed Reagan's presidential campaign, and from 1981 on Casey was Director of CIA and "up to his ass in alligators."

That got in the way of draining some "swamps".

I believe that it would be very much in the national interest to adress, now, problems that concerned us then.

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