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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 - 10:37pm Oct 15, 2002 EST (# 4926 of 4936)
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.

For run-of-the mill classified work, there are procedures, set out to some degree in a fine article

Code Name: Retract Larch
If the government's system for labeling its billions of secret documents seems utterly incomprehensible, then it's working exactly as planned.
by WILLIAM M. ARKIN http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20001203mag-lexicon.html

" No one knows exactly how many secrets the United States government maintains, but by some estimates its safes and secure rooms contain tens of billions of pages of classified documents. In addition to being marked either Top Secret, Secret or Confidential, many of these pages are assigned a "compartment," a unique code word for whatever surveillance effort, covert operation, special-access program, classified research initiative, military exercise or development effort the document refers to."

But when things are sensitive enough, and communication difficulties (or legal difficulties) are significant enough - - nothing at all is written down.

Consider my situation - and what I was asked to do. I was first recruited in 1967 - only a few years after 1962 - in a world where high government officials, who knew the score - were terrified that the world might not survive - that stability was tenuous and explosive, uncontollable instabilities seemed very near.

""FOR 13 days starting Oct. 16, 1962, "the world stood like a playing card on edge," as Norman Mailer put it, while President Kennedy and his closest aides faced down the threat of Soviet missiles in Cuba. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/13/weekinreview/13PURD.html?8hpist

I was assigned to find a way to match animal guidance capacities in the late 1960's, at the height of the Cold War . People who guided me at that time were entirely sure of what would happen if our missile components could be guided with the facility animals show. It would become technically easy to shoot down winged aircraft. It would become technically easy to detect and destroy submarines. It would become technically easy to sink ships.

That sort of instability, mishandled - could easily have lost the Cold War - or ended the world. Everybody involved knew that - not only intellectually - but viscerally, too.

Try to imagine how concerned people were - how much pressure they put me under - how concerned I was - - and how responsible I felt.

I have no records. Is that any surprise?

rshow55 - 10:43pm Oct 15, 2002 EST (# 4927 of 4936)
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've been trying very hard to come in and communicate my results -- results that a rational and patriotic government would want and need to know - for a decade.

Working at the job full time for more than two years now.

I've tried to do as Casey instructed. Considering everything, I think he had good insights about what I'd be up against.

Is that just a story? After all, I have no records.

And there is a record that I sustained brain injury - working to crack a problem in differential equations - when AEA failed. There are also records of hard work, and good work, done since.

I have no records proving my relationship with Casey. Couldn't have. But I've been asking for help, and telling consistent "stories" - - for a long time.

Look back at technical history -- is it likely that people in missile guidance would have missed the fact that they were falling terribly short of animal performance? How big would the risks involved have looked in the 1960's, 1970's, and early 1980's?

If you want to "call me Ishmael" - - I've been at the business a long time - - and have done some technical work to back up my "story." Psychwarfare . . 229-339 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/352

There are some messes that need to be cleaned up.

It is not in the national interest to make trillion dollar deployment errors. Or to grossly overstate threats. Or to conduct ourselves so that we maximize, rather than minimize conflict.

Or to cause more unnecessary deaths than anyone could reasonably count - and do so, apparently, without either regret or apology.

Enron and similar frauds, ugly as they are, are tiny, and of small importance, compared to the mess that the United States military-industrial-political complex has become in too many places.

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