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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.

rshow55 - 05:51pm Nov 8, 2002 EST (# 5554 of 5556)
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.

You're being unfair to lchic. And murder and mayhem are an ugly form or 'suasion, whoever does the killing.

Though sometimes deadly force is necessary.

rshow55 - 05:56pm Nov 8, 2002 EST (# 5555 of 5556)
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 think the remarks by Ambassador John D. Negroponte, the United States permanent representative to the United Nations set out in http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/08/international/08UN-NEGROPONTE-TEXT.html are excellent, and an interesting and useful step along the way toward the renegotiation of a clearer, more usable, more understandable international law. It is not a lawless and irresponsible statement of position.

It is part of a renegotiation and clarification of old rules, old standards, and old norms of international law.

When Roosevelt was thinking about the formation of a United Nations, the key objective was to outlaw agressive war - to achieve reasonable safety for human beings. Just before his death, F.D.R. wrote this:

" Today, we are faced with the pre-eminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships --- the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together in the same world, at peace."

(This quote was on the last page of the American Heritage Picture History of World War II , by C.L. Sulzberger and the editors of American Heritage , published in 1966.

Roosevelt, like all practical politicians, knew that for reasonable function there sometimes had to be exceptions to rules - that to meet the objectives for which the rules were made, there had to be some exception handling - for good enough reasons. Reasons that almost always involve balances of interests.

When the United Nations was formed - the overwhelming rule set out was the outlawing of agressive war - defined in stark territorial terms - and the key objective was human safety and a world stable enough so that different peoples could live together and work together.

The prohibition of agressive war, set out in the stark territorial terms in which it was defined in the UN charter, has been largely achieved. But if the objective is safety and human welfare - there has to be more than just a simple prohibition on agressive war - and sometimes there have to be exceptions to that rule - if the fundamental objective of human safety and stability is to be served in an imperfect world.

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