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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 - 09:14am Oct 3, 2002 EST (# 4740 of 4742)
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.

I very much appreciate gisterme's hard work on this thread, after some absence, between 5:13 pm yesterday and 3:00 in the morning today.

If gisterme is not Rice, gisterme has many of the same capabilities - including those of both clean and dirty academic administrative discourse.

The analogies between US military policy and patterns of enronation are uncomfortably close. Perhaps some things are coming to a head.

Some of the things gisterme said were outrageous - - big lies - - and it makes sense to deal with those things carefully.

If I'm right about who gisterme is, some politicians know about this thread, and are asking questions. If those questions are sensible and responsible, that means that some things long hidden - sometimes "hidden in plain sight" - are going to be understood and exposed.

Gary Hart is profoundly right that the democrats need a defense policy based on rationality and truth. Republicans need one, too. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/03/opinion/03HART.html

It is in the interest of all Americans of good faith, and all world leaders of responsibility, to establish some key facts and relations on which important matters of world safety, decency, and material prosperity depend.

I believe that this thread, viewed a pretrial discovery - contains a lot of useful material.

Because of format, this thread can't take anything to closure. But patterns discussed here at length, with much Bush administration involvement over many months - could establish a lot, beyond a reasonable doubt, by the standards jury trials take, if people with real power wanted that to happen.

commondata - 10:06am Oct 3, 2002 EST (# 4741 of 4742)

rshow55 10/3/02 9:14am

It seems to me that Gisterme did not "work hard", and that the "dirty academic administrative discourse" was effective in the same way as a high school debating society bully can be. A human silverback thumping his chest. I don't think that the usefulness or otherwise of this thread should be defined in terms of assumptions about the identity or "importance" of its participants. But then I have a LOT more posts to read.

Gisterme claims four out of six successful tests - here is what Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Delaware, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said in July 2001 after the third total and first successful test:

"It's kind of confusing to some of us and some of the experts out there as to what the purpose of this new test range is," Biden said on Fox News Sunday. "[It] doesn't seem to realistically fit any kind of real new threat or existing threat that we would face."

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New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense