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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 - 05:05pm Dec 24, 2002 EST (# 6996 of 7000)
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.

North Korea Warns the U.S. to Negotiate or Risk 'Catastrophe' By HOWARD W. FRENCH http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/24/international/asia/24CND-KORE.html

SEOUL, South Korea, Dec. 24 - North Korea warned today of an ``uncontrollable catastrophe'' unless the United States agreed to a negotiated solution to a standoff over its nuclear energy and weapons programs.

The statement came as a stiff pre-emptive rebuff to a conciliation-minded, newly elected president in South Korea, and as a warning to other countries that their efforts to mediate the crisis would be futile.

There has been plenty of reason to be concerned about uncontrollable catastrophe for a long time.

Most people, and most successful organizations, handle tensions of all sorts all the time, and it looks graceful, facile, and comfortable. When tensions look awkward, or ugly, I think that says something important. And when tensions look unbearably, starkly ugly, it means something is wrong, something is defective, something ought to be changed.

It seems right to quote from Psychwarfare, Casablanca - and terror http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/0 - - which is partly a running summary, with condensed references, of this thread:

"Most people, and most successful organizations, handle tensions of all sorts all the time, and it looks graceful, facile, and comfortable. When tensions look awkward, or ugly, I think that says something important. And when tensions look unbearably, starkly ugly, it means something is wrong, something is defective, something ought to be changed.

---------------------------------------------------- rshowalter - 10:05pm Oct 24, 2000 BST (#5 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/4 . . .)

If you wouldn't mind, I'd like to speak of something that concerns me, where the balance is very ugly, and the situation is both menacing and paralyzed. I'm speaking of our current usage of nuclear weapons, and the threats of nuclear use. These usages don't look anything at all like the healthy balance of cooperation and threat that characterize stable peaces between nation states. The nuclear "balances" are ugly. Garish. Inflexible. Brittle. Not understood. Uncontrolled. There is a NEED for balance, but the need is conspicuously unmet. On aesthetic grounds, which connect to intensely practical grounds, I think we should get rid of nuclear weapons. They CAN'T be in balance, because of their nature, and because of some unchangeable aspects of our human natures. They have produced a graceless, dangerous paralysis, functionally and logically, that is both uglier, and more dangerous, than anybody wants to understand. My life has been blighted by this, because I've understood enough about them to be tainted with their ugliness, and inherent imbalance.

If history goes on, people may look back and say that the best thing about nuclear weapons (after they are gone) may be that they forced us to confront ourselves, and the necessity of graceful compromise we must face as animals, in areas where we've been denying rather than compromising, and where denial didn't work on matters of nuclear war.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- rshowalter - 10:08pm Oct 24, 2000 BST (#6

We are agressive animals, hunting animals, dangerous animals, animals well adapted to fear, and it has seemed most civilized to simply ignore this. But that has carried costs. One of them is that our denial has made the history of nuclear weapons unbearably dangerous, ugly, and threatening to our survival.

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