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 [F] New York Times on the Web Forums  / Science  /

    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?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.


Earliest Messages Previous Messages Recent Messages Outline (14251 previous messages)

rshow55 - 09:16am Oct 3, 2003 EST (# 14252 of 14256)
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.

WISHING WON'T MAKE STAR WARS SO http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/03/opinion/03FRI3.html reads as follows. I add some supporting material

President Bush's rush order to begin fielding a costly, unproven system for ballistic missile defense by next September is proving to be riddled with risks for technical failures and budget overruns. Congressional investigators have found the current state of antimissile technology hardly up to the actual threat.

A detailed report by the General Accounting Office warns that the hurried attempt to blend 10 separate high-tech defense systems into one program is proceeding full speed ahead, as Mr. Bush ordered, but without adequate preliminary demonstrations that the pieces will ever work well together. Most pressing, a crucial Alaska radar system at the heart of the plan has not yet been shown to be ready for the job it is being adapted to do.

Still, administration officials are stubbornly pushing ahead with plans to start opening 10 West Coast missile defense bases next year. They are betting that the technology can eventually be shaped to fit Star Wars, the bullet-hits-bullet dream first envisioned in the Reagan administration.

13302 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.rOV3bskZKmY.187070@.f28e622/14989 quotes Sieve City In our nation's capital, leaking is a way of life. By JANE MAYER http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20001203mag-essay.html including this about the Reagan staff: ""The White House was so subject to everything being immediately leaked," Morris concludes, "that its essential business was done by three people -- the president, his chief of staff and maybe the national security adviser -- talking for a few minutes while the water was running." Leaks were so endemic that real secrets, like Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, were, as Morris puts it, "literally hot air -- a few quick words exchanged while walking across the lawn." . . .

There is no belittling the true concern that rogue nations like North Korea are intent on developing ocean-spanning nuclear weapons. But until the prodigious innovations of an antimissile defense have been clearly proved trustworthy, the nation is installing "no more than a scarecrow, not a real defense," in the words of Dr. Philip Coyle III, a former head of weapons testing at the Pentagon.

The Coyle Report http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/program/nmdcoylerep.pdf

. M.I.T. Studies Accusations of Lies and Cover-Up of Flaws in Antimissile System By WILLIAM J. BROAD http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/02/national/02MISS.html

Search "Keywords: Challenge, questions, and invokation" this thread . . . 12878 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.rOV3bskZKmY.187070@.f28e622/14554

The investigators warn that the uncertainty and haste make it more likely that the system, once its pieces are linked, will balk when put to actual flight tests. This would mean more funds to try to fix the program, whose eventual cost is already tabbed at $50 billion.

Critics maintain that the president's timetable is as much about the next election — about homeland security as a political issue — as it is about a credible defense. He still has a chance to deny opponents a political weapon by ordering more time and testing to show the system is workable.

cantabb - 09:17am Oct 3, 2003 EST (# 14253 of 14256)

rshow55 - 08:15am Oct 3, 2003 EST (# 14250 of 14250)

Cont'd....

- including some recent assistance, regarding perturbation and damping, from Cantabb .

ASKING you to tell us what you think you have been doing here on the Forum for 2+ years [working so 'hard] AND for substantiation of ther global claims you have been making : May be "perturbation and damping" for YOU -- because you seem UNable to focus or answer staightforward questions asked of you on your 'hard' work here for so long.

We need to Iearn how to agree to disagree clearly, without fighting, comfortably, so that they can cooperate stably, safely, and productively - and when it matters enough, we need to learn how to agree about facts.

Where do you get the idea that asking questions and asking you to focus is "fighting."

Where does the question of agreement/diagreement arise when most of us don't know what specifically you have been doing on MD ?

I believe that this thread is now, and has been for a while, the largest interconnected corpus devoted to negotiation practices in the world - or at least one of very few. It includes some probably distinguished, if anonymous, posters.

Your "self-aggrandising." Delusionary.

We're dealing with serious problems - and dealing with policies based far too much on tactics of "slime and defend."

Another cryptic comment. Another insinuation.

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 [F] New York Times on the Web Forums  / Science  / Missile Defense