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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 - 09:06am May 4, 2003 EST (# 11465 of 17697)
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.

The Times is full of beautiful, powerful stuff, and for the last three weeks I've been distracted from responding to it as much as I'd have liked to. An in-law has cancer, and my wife and I visited him and other family. My father's turning 80, and the children have gathered to celebrate, mingle, take pictures and eat together. For me, it has been a time to think about basics.

The TIMES is doing some outstanding work thinking about basics - at a time when that is necessary. I haven't had free attention to respond to much of it.

What powerful output from Bill Keller !

Digging Up the Dead By BILL KELLER http://nytimes.com/2003/05/03/opinion/03KELL.html

Moscow: Among all the unfinished business in that capital of unfinished business named Iraq, an accounting for three decades of horrors may not be the most urgent. Unless you are one of those heart-sore Iraqis haunting the newly emptied prisons and torture chambers for evidence of your disappeared children, you are likely to agree that questions of guilt can wait until the electricity is restored and the crime is contained and the schools are working and somebody is governing.

But a reckoning is due, and how Iraq faces its recent past will ultimately count for as much as the design of a transitional government or the divvying up of the oil.

Here's a Model for How to Shape A Muslim State by BILL KELLER http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/04/weekinreview/04KELL.html

and a monumental piece,

The Thinkable By BILL KELLER http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/04/magazine/04NUKES.html

That piece includes a number of important ideas - and explains a lot of problems. I don't have time, amid family celebrations, to respond to things in it that I hope to. But I would like to deal with a fundamental problem relating to the beliefs, and failed hopes, surrounding the Nonproliferation Treaty.

The essential bargain that induced nonnuclear states to sign the Nonproliferation Treaty was this: If you pledge to refrain from arming yourself with bad atoms, you will be rewarded with a supply of good atoms -- a peaceful nuclear energy program. Inspectors from the I.A.E.A. will drop by occasionally to make sure you stay within bounds -- that the nuclear fuel for generating electricity is all properly booked and sufficiently diluted. (The most difficult ingredient for a bomb maker to come by is not the design or the engineering; it is uranium or plutonium, distilled to a weapons-grade concentration.)

At the time when that was sold, peaceful nuclear energy was thought to be a solution for the essential energy problems the developing nations faced then, and face now.

rshow55 - 09:18am May 4, 2003 EST (# 11466 of 17697)
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.

For development to the standards of the rich nations to be possible for the poor nations - without an huge string to technical miracles happening together, there has to be much more energy available than is available now. And it must be available cheaply enough for rapid development to be a workable proposition.

Dealing with challenges from radical Islam in a humanly comfortable way would take some independence from oil, as well.

Many, many people thought that the problem of getting plentiful energy could be handled by "atoms for peace."

That hope is gone now.

We need to find a workable substitute. Such a solution, no matter how techincally simple - will have to be "grandiose" in scale.

Whether that's possible humanly, with checks and balances in place, I don't know. Technically, it doesn't even look difficult. Especially compared to the stakes. Certainly no harder than the transcontinental railroad. Indeed, the problems are similar. Mostly issues of human organization of technically simple jobs on a large scale.

The technical job of providing enough animal feed to permit the whole human population to eat at or close to rich country standards doesn't look technically hard either. But in a world where we haven't proviced 35$/person/year for basic medical care - what is and what "ought to be" are very different.

Global warming could also be fixed "simply" - but the solution would be necessarily "grandiose" in scale.

Eric Goode wrote a wonderful piece on "malignant narcissism" - that I hope to write about later. Stalin to Saddam: So Much for the Madman Theory By ERICA GOODE http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/04/weekinreview/04GOOD.html

Suppose a society, or a leader empowered by a society, wanted to have the effectiveness that grandiosity permits, directed to solve problems that needed solving - under reasonable social controls? With the solutions then used?

That was very much on Bill Casey's mind. One might even describe Casey as a "malignant narcissist." One might say the same of J.P. Morgan, Leland Stanford, and many other people.

I was asked to find solutions to "grandiosely large or difficult" problems - without being grandiose myself - and asked to give these solutions, on an organized basis, to the government, so that they could be reasonably used. Not buried.

It hasn't worked very well. Maybe some work on this thread has been useful.

Anyway, just now, I'm going to a birthday party.

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