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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?

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

lchic - 10:24pm Sep 13, 2002 EST (# 4300 of 4307)

Gareth EVANS / Bush Address
""long shopping list that was laid out in the speech, going well beyond the removal of ... support is there for going down the removal of weapons of mass destruction ... demonstrate it has the intent to misbehave ... the critical thing is to concentrate everyone's mind in the way that I'm sure Colin Powell wants to but there's always the question mark about others in the administration.
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/s676116.htm

lchic - 10:27pm Sep 13, 2002 EST (# 4301 of 4307)

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/

lchic - 04:58am Sep 14, 2002 EST (# 4302 of 4307)

Phillip Adams | """The US has to learn that its worst enemy is the US," Adams had written, accusing the US of madness, brutalities, self-destructiveness, violence and Christian fascism. http://www.geocities.com/phillipadamsfanclub/adventures9.htm

"" Phillip Adams' Introduction argues that for bigotry to be dealt with it first needs to be recognised, and then challenged - social friction rather than niceness is needed. http://www.anu.edu.au/parsa/antitheses/1997/AntWin97review.html

Back to nuclear overkill
The Weekend Australian , 14-09-2002 , Ed: 1 , Pg: R32 , 1034 words , FEATURES
GEORGE W. Bush is, God help us, US President, despite receiving fewer votes than Al Gore. For this he can thank his brother, Jeb, the devious Governor of Florida, and his father's conservative friends on the US Supreme Court. Having stolen the elec...

[Subscribe or trot round to AussieEmb library ]

;)

lchic - 05:11am Sep 14, 2002 EST (# 4303 of 4307)

Back to nuclear overkill
The Weekend Australian , 14-09-2002 , Ed: 1 , Pg: R32 , 1034 words , FEATURES GEORGE W. Bush is, God help us, US President, despite receiving fewer votes than Al Gore. For this he can thank his brother, Jeb, the devious Governor of Florida, and his father's conservative friends on the US Supreme Court. Having stolen the election, one of the most mediocre men to hold office was given unprecedented power by, of all people, Osama bin Laden.

Now 12 months later, the nuclear clock - stopped a t a minute to midnight when Mikhail Gorbachev accidentally ended the Soviet Union and the Cold War - is ticking again. Thanks to tpolicies of unprecedented recklessness by Busha nd co, we've a grwoing nunclear danger.

Nobel prize-winnning physicist Steven Weinberg, who has served as a consultant to US agencies on national defence issues, warns:
"The US possessea s an enormous nuclear arsenal .... ve've about 6000 operationally deployed nuclear weapons, of which roughly 2000 are on intercontinental ballistic missiles, 3500 on submariene-launch ballistic missiles and a few hundred carried by bomber aircraft. These thermo-nuclear weapons are considerably more powerful than the fission bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

Russia maintains a nuclear arsenal of comparable size, though with a different mix of delivery vehicles. and though Bush and Vladimire Putin have signed a treaty clalling for reducing operationally dployed nuclear weapons on both sides to about 3800 in 2007 and to about 1700 in 2012, the rate of reduction is agonisingly slow.

Moreover, the weapons are not being destroyed or dismantled, simply mothballed. The US Defence Department's plans have been laid out in a classifed Nuclear Posture Review (Jan9) which calls for the retention of about 7000 intact warheads, a large number of plutonium pits (the fission bomb that triggers a thermonuclear explosion) and other weapon components. "Looking at these figures," writes Weinber, "one can hardly help asking: What are all those nuclear weapons for?"

lchic - 05:18am Sep 14, 2002 EST (# 4304 of 4307)

Steven Weinburg Nobel Physicist

lchic - 05:26am Sep 14, 2002 EST (# 4305 of 4307)

Mathematicians bio index
A-Z born -500AD to 1957AD
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history//BiogIndex.html

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