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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 - 04:52pm Jun 9, 2003 EST (# 12439 of 12441)
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.

My Sept 27 2000 posting http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/6 continues with five partly true but partly misleading paragraphs - where I was "too easy on myself" and perhaps less courageous than I should have been.

"Change a simple mathematical circumstance, or perceptions of it, and perceptions of military risk shifted radically. If we could lie to the Russians, and say we'd cracked the problem, we might scare the hell out of them, at trivial cost. Just a little theatrics in the service of bluff. Scaring the other side, with bluffs (lies) is standard military practice. I found myself asked to get involved in what I took to be serous Russian scaring. I refused to go along, after talking to some people on the other side, because of my old fighting experience. It was my judgement, right or wrong, that they Russians were already plenty scared enough, and if scared much more, they might lose control, and fight without wanting to. I may have made a big mistake.

"But I did become convinced that the United States was carrying on a very careful, calibrated, but terrible tactic.

"We were maintaining the Russians at a level of sufficient fear that they spent much more than they could afford, in money and manpower, on their military. The feeling was that, if we kept at this, for many years, the Soviet system would become degenerate, and collapse of its own weight. I believe that this is what in fact happened.

"I'd been appalled at the tactic (as I understood it) because I didn't think the controls were good enough, and feared unintended, world destroying war might result.

"But when the Soviet Union fell, my guess was that the tactic had been maintained, and controls had been good enough, and the plan had worked. Nuclear weapons, used as terror weapons, had defeated the Soviet Union, yet never been actually fired.

. The five paragraphs above fit the argument I was making - and at the time seemed right for the purpose. But it implies that I was outside the "conspiracy" - and shocked when I found out about it. In fact, I had been personally involved in the discussion of, and the honing of, the idea that it might be possible - over a period of time - to defeat the Soviet Union by maintaining them in a state of enough fear that they would collapse. I'm sure this was an idea that was discussed by others - not just my idea - but it was an idea that Eisenhower and I discussed at great length, and as carefully as we could - as the only way we could imagine to "win" the Cold War - something we felt we had to do. In our discussions, we were both clear that it was critical that if this policy was carried out - it had to be carried out in a meticulously calibrated fashion - over a long time - so that collapse could occur over a long time, on a chronic basis - not on an acute basis which, I felt, would be far too likely to lead to explosive instabilities and the destruction of the world.

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