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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 - 08:05pm Sep 23, 2002 EST (# 4488 of 4496)
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.

When I came on this thread, in Sept 25, 2000 rshow55 4/21/02 3:14pm , I was terribly concerned about nuclear dangers - and felt, for reasons that still seem sensible in retrospect - http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@247.xGHYaq2NAKx.2@.ee79f4e/1556 that there was at that time more than a 10% chance per year that the world might blow up - because communication between Russians and Americans was so defective, and some of their control arrangements so unstable. Now, some bombs may go off - but it seems to me that that risk of total world destruction is much smaller, perhaps because of work done on this thread. MD1999 rshow55 5/4/02 10:39am

4469 rshow55 9/21/02 5:09pm :

"One thing is clear now. Americans are very afraid of weapons of mass destruction - especially nuclear weapons - and are willing to support a great deal to protect themselves from even relatively small - temporally distant - and indefinite risks of their use.

" That's new, since September 11th, 2001.

If Iraq is justified on that basis - we have to consider other things, too.

Nuclear Dangers Beyond Iraq By MICHAEL LEVI http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/23/opinion/23LEVI.html

"President Bush wisely warns of the danger posed by a nuclear-armed Iraq, but he remains unevenly engaged in other efforts that would stem the spread of nuclear weapons. Saddam Hussein's nuclear potential has been repeatedly cited by the administration as the one unassailable reason why the American people should support an invasion of Iraq. Yet ours is a dangerous stance: If we remove the threat of Saddam Hussein while leaving the rest of our nonproliferation policy unchanged, we will achieve only a marginal improvement in our security against nuclear terror.

". . . . The same uranium Iraq seeks abroad might be bought by terrorists and fashioned into bombs. A terrorist group like Al Qaeda, if it were to obtain a nuclear weapon, would be more likely than Iraq to use it.

"And yet our responsibilities in securing nuclear materials are being ignored.

. . .

"A new investment in nonproliferation would help convince a skeptical world that we're serious about nuclear proliferation — that our obsession with Iraq is about weapons of mass destruction, not domestic politics or oil or revenge.

If the real reason for our military function was the protection of Americans -- that would make sense.

lchic - 08:09pm Sep 23, 2002 EST (# 4489 of 4496)

Pilger - BALANCE - BBC "continuing to duck" its public service duty (Tim Llewellyn, the BBC's Middle East correspondent)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,797084,00.html

'' Most of the film allowed people to tell their eyewitness stories, both Palestinians and Israelis. What was unusual was that it disclosed in detail the daily humiliation and cultural denigration of the _________ , including a sequence showing ...

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