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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 - 06:14pm May 27, 2003 EST (# 12104 of 12130)
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.

Elaborate is right. - - though sometimes graceful , too.

Graceful is hard. Succinct is, too.

Here, from James Reston's Deadline - is a quote from Eisenhower, with a leadup from Reston:

"When Stalin died . . . (Eisenhower) sent the usual messages of condolence to Moscow and then called Emmett Hughes" (the speechwriter )

"Look, I'm tired," the president said, "and I think everyone is tired of just plain indictments of the Soviet regime. I think it would be wrong - in fact, asinine - for me to get up before the world now to make another of those indictments. Instead, just two things matter. What have we got to offer the world? What are we ready to do to improve the chances of peace.

"Here is what I'd like to say: Let's talk straight - no double-talk, no sophisticated political formulas, no slick propaganda devices. Let's spell it out, whatever we really offer . . . withdrawal of troops here or there on both sides . . United Nations-supervised free elections in another place . . . free and uncensored air time for us to talk to the Russian people and for their leaders to talk to us . . and concretely, all that we would hope to do for the economic well-being of other countries . . Here is what we propose. If you - - the Soviet Union - - can improve on it, we want to hear it. . . ."

That was 1953. It sounds hopelessly naive today.

In 1953, it was clear, and front-and-center that competitive economic systems (both with plenty of planning) were in competition - and a key question was economic well being - for the whole world.

We were, in Marshall's mind, in Eisenhower's mind - and in the minds of most leader of the world - in a competition between planned systems - with different characteristics.

And economic development, as much or more than anything else, was the way to keep score.

rshow55 - 06:15pm May 27, 2003 EST (# 12105 of 12130)
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.

Planning ended up working much less well than we, or the Russians, or anybody else hoped. Simulations at large scales didn't work well enough - for anybody. Showstopper problems - like the energy problem that dominates so much of our news today - didn't go away or get solved.

By 1959, Eisenhower made a statement that reads like desperation today:

" I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than are governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it."

He'd had a lot of experience about "governments getting in the way" by then.

It was a big disappointment to the man who went into the presidency thinking that the high achievements in administration and technocratic management that the US had working in WWII, and in the Marshall Plan, could be stabilized and generalized.

fredmoore - 09:47pm May 27, 2003 EST (# 12106 of 12130)

Robert ...

Eisenhower was an expert at understanding complex systems, their timings and dynamics, to achieve objectives. His approach was in a sense Newtonian. Why he had problems and WAITED on interrupts was the fact that the USSR because of all the debasing violence of its early 20C history had become Quantum Mechanical in a social sense, like a kid with a new toy. It had become minimalist survivalist, capable of good and evil in the one moment and most of all given the right focus it was powerful in ways that a Newtonian thinker like Eisenhower could hardly comprehend.

In their quest for world dominance the Soviets befuddled Eisenhower who essentially had marshalled all his forces for a lasting peace. But you can't blame Eisenhower as he would have done an excellent job of picking up the pieces of the puzzle as they emerged had he been able to live long enough.

What eventually changed was that the resulting Soviet threat debased the US Psyche to such an extent that it became more than a match for the Soviets in a quantum mechanical sense. This is in large part because the coherent power of a QM system is dependent on alternating between states with high degrees of Freedom and those with low degrees of freedom. If you continue to pump a system at low degrees of freedom it just wears out as we saw with the fall of communism.

The moral of this story is that in order to survive powerful external threats, bad things are going to invade your otherwise peaceful, unblemished psyche. As Marlon Brando said in Apocalypse Now ... "in order to fight a war you must become war". You should not fret at the bad things that occurred during the Cold War. Things could not have been any other way in order for the free world to survive.

Notwithstanding any of this, I wish Eisenhower were still alive as I think he would have understood that the root cause of these historic upheavals was an overpopulation of central and eastern Europe beyond its capacity to supply necessary energy and life giving low entropy to its people.

Furthermore, this little QM dance between stability and chaos is not over, as world populations are currently on the increase, sustainable energy stocks are dwindling and new technologies whose research depends on fossil fuel capital, is slow to achieve new benchmarks.

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