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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 - 05:38am Oct 9, 2002 EST (# 4762 of 4763)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

"" What restrains state rackets from mutual extermination is their awareness that cohesion and self control assures their mutual survival. Below them, there’s the mass of humanity enclosed by exploitation and national frontiers. Dominant rackets have learned to negotiate and tolerate each other by coexisting in the state. The role of national mediation alters their function, from private looting to large scale administration and bureaucratic (and legal) access to the national treasure. In this form, modern politicians and functionaries buy themselves national pedigree, legitimacy and incomes. But the racket remains the underlying state module. Dominant classes secrete them constantly, and in a democracy this tendency is generalised in civil society. The fragmentation of commodity society and its consequent ‘war of all against all’, creates a fertile soil for rackets. As long as a strong Leviathan is not disturbed and undermined by this, rackets are tolerated even if legally proscribed
http://www.left-dis.nl/uk/rackets.htm
http://home.c2i.net/espenjo/home/fyrsten/macbeth.htm

commondata - 05:43am Oct 9, 2002 EST (# 4763 of 4763)

gisterme 10/8/02 12:59am

I've been trying to come up with plausible modes of system failure that would explain the disappearance of non-contiguous, non-terminal posts belonging only to me. I can't.

White House 'exaggerating Iraqi threat'. Who'd have thought?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,807286,00.html

Mr Albright, who heads the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington thinktank, said: "There's a catfight going on about this right now. On one side you have most of the experts on gas centrifuges. On the other you have one guy sitting in the CIA."

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense