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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.

bbbuck - 10:07pm Dec 8, 2002 EST (# 6378 of 6395)
"You can't eat this, it's people, it's people"-B....."What about the cherry pie?"

Fights, collecting dots, fomenting do-ray-me-fa-so-la-ti-do, stripping deceptions, burnishing conumdrums, extrapolating digressions, exposing human hearts and breasts, this will encompass goodness and evil and lay it bare. god bless us all.

Who's paying this clown? And his chimp lupey-clown-chic?

lunarchick - 06:37am Dec 9, 2002 EST (# 6379 of 6395)

no-one

and who can measure living-lives-lived
(rather than needlessly lost)
Smart thinking keeps people alive!

'BuckeyBoy -the poster' has to be on the Admin payroll

rshow55 - 08:02am Dec 9, 2002 EST (# 6380 of 6395)
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.

Smart thinking keeps people alive!

Like other people, all I can do is try to figure things out, in terms of what I know. When I "connect the dots" - I can be wrong - and I know that.

This thread may be little enough, but I've worked hard on it, as Lunarchick has, as well http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?224@168.JRxlalPwXF1^0@40679d@.f28e622/7881 , because we've thought we were making the world safer by doing so.

In my case, I'm also keeping promises I've made over a long time.

My guess, for whatever it may be worth, is that this thread is being influential enough to make a difference. In a large world - maybe only a small difference. But the way I figure it, it seems likely that we've been reducing the probability of people dying by violence - and my guess is that, in actuarial terms, we're saving something like a thousand lives for every hour we work. Thinking so, we work hard.

I believe that if staffed organizations with reasonable resources pursued the ideas set out on this thread - we could all be quite a lot safer, at rather moderate cost.

If leaders of nation states wanted to take quite moderate risks, it would happen.

lunarchick - 08:05am Dec 9, 2002 EST (# 6381 of 6395)

And so Iraq ...

lunarchick - 02:07pm Dec 9, 2002 EST (# 6382 of 6395)

Technical note: From discussion 'elsewhere' it seems the delete function on all threads has been uniformally disabled.

lunarchick - 02:25pm Dec 9, 2002 EST (# 6383 of 6395)

Link doesn't work - but looked interesting :

BBC News | MEDIA REPORTS | Text of scientists' anti-missile ...
... Friday, 7 July, 2000, 09:51 GMT 10:51 UK
Text of scientists' anti-missile letter The full text of the letter from the Federation of American Scientists to ...
news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/monitor.../823196.stm

lunarchick - 02:38pm Dec 9, 2002 EST (# 6384 of 6395)

The Marshall Plan


" Alistair says America's role in restoring Europe after World War II led to 50 years of peace and freedom ....
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/letter_from_america/2557967.stm
Monday, 9 December, 2002, 12:30 GMT LETTER FROM AMERICA BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/letter_from_america/default.stm

Alister advocate of 'The Trilby' and
'A Marshall Statue' for Europe - in recognition of Marshall's sending of 'supplies' to countries in chaos wrecked by WWII.

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