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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.

lchic - 04:33am Jan 21, 2003 EST (# 7861 of 7868)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

"" To be sure, Mr. Kim is not the crazy playboy he was said to be in the 1980's and 90's, when intelligence reports on him were full of lurid stories of Swedish blondes and S-and-M videos. As better defector evidence emerges, it turns out that the Great Leader is actually a smart and self-confident sophisticate who surfs the Internet and watches CNN; any day now we may find that he's a fan of Wall Street Journal editorials.

One of the assessments of Mr. Kim that rings most true to me comes from Cho Myung Chul, a defector who has known Mr. Kim since childhood. Mr. Cho describes the Great Leader as a fine pianist and Ping-Pong player, smart and outgoing but, alas, also an aggressive risk-taker.

Mr. Cho remembers attending a briefing after the gulf war, in which the North Korean army brass explained why Iraq had lost. "They said Iraq lost because it had been too defensive. `You've got to take the offensive,' they said. `Iraq didn't use all its weapons [presumably biological and chemical weapons]. If we're in a war, we'll use everything. And if there's a war, we should attack first, to take the initiative.' "

Mr. Cho estimates that there is an 80 percent chance that Mr. Kim would respond to a U.S. military strike on the Yongbyon nuclear facilities by launching a new Korean War.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/21/opinion/21KRIS.html

wanderer85us - 08:30am Jan 21, 2003 EST (# 7862 of 7868)
America is not always right - Peace, brothers and sisters.

Bush - Nixon w/o the brains.

lchic - 08:48am Jan 21, 2003 EST (# 7863 of 7868)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

North Korea, he says, is a modern-day Nazi Germany. And its "Dear Leader," the 60-year-old President Kim Jong Il, is practicing genocide.

From Dr. Vollertsen these are not empty charges. He has had access to witness North Korea's famine conditions in a way no other Westerners have. He traveled to North Korea in 1999 with the German relief agency Cap Anamur (known in English as German Emergency Doctors), working to rehabilitate the nation's hospitals. A month after his arrival, Dr. Vollertsen found himself treating a patient who was badly burned by molten iron. Dr. Vollertsen unhesitatingly offered his own skin for the grafting procedure. In front of government officials, a doctor stripped skin from his left thigh with a penknife.

Impressed by his unselfish act, Mr. Kim's government awarded Dr. Vollertsen the prestigious Friendship Medal. They gave him a VIP passport and driver's license, allowing him to travel freely across the country without the usual government restrictions.

These were gifts the government would one day regret. They allowed Dr. Vollertsen to discover and secretly videotape a nationwide famine. Bouncing across the countryside in a Jeep, Dr. Vollertsen encountered starving children who were nevertheless forced to engage in daily, two-hour songfests idolizing the "Dear Leader." He saw gangs of undernourished children working on a 10-lane highway project. He watched doctors perform an emergency appendectomy on a girl without anesthesia. He met adults who were desperately afraid, always under surveillance, dousing their depression with cheap alcohol. He found a staggering infant mortality rate and, among children who did survive, significant declines in height, weight, and IQ. "It's easier to brainwash unintellectual children," Dr. Vollertsen observes dryly. ... more~see ...

http://www.worldmag.com/world/issue/03-09-02/cover_1.asp http://www.worldmag.com/world/

lchic - 08:52am Jan 21, 2003 EST (# 7864 of 7868)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

ME Tourism DOWN

"" Editorial cartoons, too, are about just one thing. In one, a sheik trudges away with an oil barrel on his shoulder and a bullseye penned to his backside. Bulletholes pierce both the oil drum and the target. In another, a cowboy, looking decidedly Texan in boots and spurs, shows his hand to the Saddam Hussein look-alike at a cardtable. Every card reads, "War."

Egyptians in the street uniformly oppose a war, but not based on rank anti-Americanism. For them it comes down to the economy. In countries where oil and other industries are largely state-owned, tourism is a time-honored source of revenue for the average Middle Easterner. Under the cloud of war, visitors are down. ...more~see ....

http://www.worldmag.com/world/issue/01-25-03/international_2.asp

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