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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 - 06:06pm Sep 27, 2003 EST (# 14059 of 14065)
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.

On my first posting this year, I wrote this:

7177 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.6Ccmbx8gJap.2305699@.f28e622/8700

I think this is a year where some lessons are going to have to be learned about stability and function of international systems, in terms of basic requirements of order , symmetry , and harmony - at the levels that make sense - and learned clearly and explicitly enough to produce systems that have these properties by design, not by chance.

The lessons are fairly easy, I believe, though not difficult to screw up. A problem is that perfect stability - and complete instability - are mirror images - and issues of balance and correct signs can be, in a plain sense, matters of life and death. And cost. For individuals, and whole systems.

Cantabb's last post asks some superb questions - but I have to evaluate them in terms of the sixty-plus other postings cantabb has put on this thread in the last few weeks. I would love a chance to answer these questions in a way that could illustrate both how to produce stable resolutions to conflict - and how to generate escalatory fights without end. I think I could trust cantabb to illustrate the "always fight" part - but I'd like a chance to illustrate issues involved with resolution, as well.

Here are the questions - with very short and necessarily incomplete answers:

(i) what is it specifically that you have been "working on" on this thread

Generally - I've been working with lchic to clarify the patterns of good reasoning and good negotiation that people have been using successfully as long as the human race has been in existence - using new internet tools that make a degree of crossreferencing possible that hasn't been possible before - and in interaction with the most skilled wordsmiths and intellectuals I could find. Also in interaction with gisterme and almarst - who have represented, at least roughly - the Bush administration and Russian point of view in areas where communication and understanding have been dangerously deficient. Another major objective has been to try to work out and teach enough so that people could avoid mistakes and fights that now go on with monotonous and lethal regularity - and endanger the world. I've had other objectives, too - some set out in passages that I think are the more important the more "obvious" they are. http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7b2bd/1792 . . http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7b2bd/1793

(ii) do you have access to any relevant information, other than what's been public and easily accessible to anyone.

How should I know? I've heard that everything is available on the net, these days . . Though there can be challenges of collection and organization. I've said some things from time to time on this thread - and I'm not denying a single thing I've said here. http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee9cff9/2379 I know some things about exception handling that I think people need to learn.

(iii) what do you think you have achieved so far, using whatever approach you say you have been using, and

It seems to me that the most tangible achievement has been the corpus itself - and the degree of thought from gisterme and almarst that the corpus shows. I've assumed (some would think wrongly) that with clearer understanding of areas of agreement and disagreement - problems in international relations can be resolved with many more win-win solutions - and much less conflict. That's been based on the assumption - that some may think naive - that people can learn how to agree to disagree clearly, without fighting, comfortably, so that they can cooperate sta

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