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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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lchic - 08:43pm Oct 7, 2002 EST (# 4741 of 4757)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

The Bush speech as reported nyt today .... yes ... well

That guy needs a speech writer!

~~~~~~~

Here's a Letter to an editor I chanced upon ..

One in ten Iraqis dead or deported

Letter to the Editor

AT the end of the Gulf war in 1991 the Shiites of southern Iraq rose up in rebellion against Saddam to try to shake off the dictatorship under which they had been living.

The uprising was brutally crushed by the Iraqi army and Saddam's nine internal security services. For example, in Amara (near Basra) they made the Shiites, or anyone who looked religious, lie down in the streets and then buried them alive under asphalt.

Some 60,000 to 70,000 people were killed in and around Amara in 1991. During the 1990s, the regime killed about 300,000 Shiites in southern Iraq.

These events, regrettably, were not the only crimes against humanity committed by Saddam.

In the Anfal campaign in the late 1980s, the Iraqi regime destroyed 4000 Kurdish villages in the north of the country. Between 100,000 and 150,000 Kurds were killed, some with poison gas. Around a million more people were sent into internal exile.

Since 1979, Saddam has been directly responsible for the deaths of approximately one million Iraqi citizens and a further one million Iraqi soldiers who died in wars which he instigated against Iran and Kuwait.

Between 1.5 and 2 million Iraqis have been internally displaced and a further 4.5 million Iraqi refugees are scattered across the globe. Altogether, 10 per cent of the Iraqi population has been killed or deported.

These statistics are well known to human rights organisations that have worked inside Iraq but sadly have received little coverage in the world media. Dr Leanne Piggott Lecturer, Middle East Studies The University of Sydney

DURING the Vietnam War, Communist fellow travellers and the anti-war movement claimed the US was only after Vietnam's oil. Note the fabulous wealth Vietnam derives from its oil.

G. Townley

Croydon Park, SA

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/sectionindex2/0,5746,ausletters1^^TEXT,00.html

rshow55 - 09:58pm Oct 7, 2002 EST (# 4742 of 4757)
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.

The lead front page story on Sunday was this:

Israel Set to Use New Missile Shield to Counter Scuds By MICHAEL R. GORDON http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/06/international/middleeast/06MISS.html

Israel is ready to use a missile defense to protect Tel Aviv and other major population centers if they come under fire from Iraq.

It includes an excellent interactive feature: Israel’s Antimissile System.

Impressive as the results of that system are - - the program illustrates the technical challenges of ballistic missile defense - especially for longer range missiles, and with the complications of decoys. The Isreali system might perhaps lend itself, at moderate cost, to some of the insights described described in the example of 4533-4547 rshow55 9/25/02 4:38pm . Radars and controls at the heart of the system, good as they are - might be subject to further improvement.

I posted references to MD4739-40 rshow55 10/3/02 9:06am and some later postings on a Guardian Talk thread Psychwarfare, Casablanca -- and terror #330 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/352

Including links to CIA and my security problems, 3774-3779 rshow55 8/17/02 5:58pm

Perhaps some of those security problems have occurred in the past because I haven't stated clearly enough why I felt I needed to be careful, and needed to be debriefed. It seems to me that the reasons for my feeling so ought to be clearer now.

When National Security Adviser Rice wrote this, I believe she wrote something profound and hopeful. I'm doing the best I can to help make it true.

" Today, the international community has the best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century to build a world where great powers compete in peace instead of continually prepare for war. . . . . . The United States will build on these common interests to promote global security. "

" The National Security Strategy of the United States," http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/20/politics/20STEXT_FULL.html . page 2.

For that to be true - we need to make decisions based on correct information .

We also need to make sensible judgements based on what we know - and ought to know. It is dangerous, and wasteful, for us to put too much faith in systems that are vulnerable, and can easily become ineffective.

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