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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.

almarst2002 - 10:55pm Nov 22, 2002 EST (# 6195 of 6213)

Lets conduct a small poll:

On a scale of 1 (the least0 to 10 (the gratest) what are the 10 most concerning threats the World is going to face in this century?

Here is my choice:

1. Bio-Terrorism

2. Deterioration of Environment

3. American Empire controlling the World energy resources

4. Widespread social upheavals, civil wars and revolutions due to a growing economic inequality and deterioration of the global economy

5. Future deterioration of the global economy due to the wars and social instability

6. Global deficit of the fresh water supply sparking more wars

7. Unprecedented waves of the migration of population from areas affected first by spreading famine, wars and growing economic gap between nations

8. Final collapse of what have remained of the so called "leading democraties" busy of building anti-immigrant walls, fighting terrorism and crime within and wars abroad. Forced to spend more and more for defence and suppression of world-wide social upheaval and unrest.

9. Increasing tendency to look for a scapegoat among national minorities in a search of "simple solutions" for a "simple problem" designed to satisfy the public in 30-sec. "Politicomersials".

10. Accidental missile lounch which couldn't be stopped due to the lack of the MD.

almarst2002 - 11:29pm Nov 22, 2002 EST (# 6196 of 6213)

But other sources describe the financial records as “explosive” and say the information has spurred an intense, behind-the-scenes battle between congressional leaders and the Bush administration over whether evidence highly embarrassing to the Saudi government should be publicly disclosed—especially at a time that the White House is aggressively seeking Saudi support for a possible war against Iraq. “This is a matter of the foreign-policy interests of the United States,” said another administration official, who cited the need to prevent a rift in the U.S.-Saudi relationship. - http://www.msnbc.com/news/838867.asp?0cv=KB10&cp1=1

9/11 Report Says Saudi Arabia Links Went Unexamined - http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/23/international/middleeast/23TERR.html

[Putin]"We should not forget about those who finance terrorism," Putin said, noting that 15 of the Sept. 11 terrorists were Saudi citizens.... "What can happen with armies, arms, weapons that exist in Pakistan, including weapons of mass destruction?" - http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=524&u=/ap/20021123/ap_wo_en_po/bush_putin_28&printer=1

lunarchick - 12:00am Nov 23, 2002 EST (# 6197 of 6213)

Threats and Risks C21

Existential Risks
Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards
Nick Bostrom / Department of Philosophy / Yale University
http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html

How to Debate the China Issue - Human Rights Without China Bashing http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/papers/china/index.html

Environment http://www.csrforum.com/csr/csrwebassist.nsf/content/e1g2.html

Bio-T http://engineering.dartmouth.edu/~ethreats/ethreats6.html

Nuke-Iraq nuclear-tipped "bunker-buster" bombs against buried terrorist weapons in Iraq, should Congress approve funding http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa083102a.htm?iam=momma_100_SKD&terms=white+paper+Threats+risks+international+2002 http://www.cdi.org/

Air Travel http://www.airsecurity.com/hotspots/HotSpots.asp

Berk-Research http://www.berkeley-research-term-papers.com/catalog/economy_7c.html

+ + computer hacking - e-mail - online realtime attacks

lunarchick - 12:51am Nov 23, 2002 EST (# 6198 of 6213)

"" Willful Self-Destruction

15

Global war Together, the United States and Russia still have almost 19,000 active nuclear warheads. Nuclear war seems unlikely today, but a dozen years ago the demise of the Soviet Union also seemed rather unlikely. Political situations evolve; the bombs remain deadly. There is also the possibility of an accidental nuclear exchange. And a ballistic missile defense system, given current technology, will catch only a handful of stray missiles— assuming it works at all. Other types of weaponry could have global effects as well. Japan began experimenting with biological weapons after World War I, and both the United States and the Soviet Union experimented with killer germs during the cold war. Compared with atomic bombs, bioweapons are cheap, simple to produce, and easy to conceal. They are also hard to control, although that unpredictability could appeal to a terrorist organization. John Leslie, a philosopher at the University of Guelph in Ontario, points out that genetic engineering might permit the creation of "ethnic" biological weapons that are tailored to attack primarily one ethnic group (see #11).

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