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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.

rshow55 - 02:17pm Mar 4, 2002 EST (#200 of 212)

Very interesting reading . . . .

Congressional Inquiry Cites Flaws in Antimissile Sensor By WILLIAM J. BROAD http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/04/national/04MISS.html

" Congressional inquiry into reports of corporate fraud has found widespread technical failures in a prototype antimissile sensor meant to track enemy warheads. It leaves open the question of whether the government contractors withheld information about those failures from military officials."

It leaves open some other questions, too. How could anyone involved believe that this basic approach was workable, tactically.

Here's a revealing pair of paragraphs:

"Investigators found that in response, the contractors disclosed new troubles in a revision to their 60- day report, on April 1, 1998. The biggest went to the heart of Dr. Schwartz's contentions that the sensor had major problems distinguishing warheads from decoys. The revision disclosed that contractors doing laboratory replays of the flight test had to exclude two-thirds of the gathered sensor data to make such differentiation work."

That is, work for an artificially easy , even ridiculously easy set of "decoys". For realistic decoys, detection would have been impossible. People involved in the simulation work, excluding sensor data, must have been absolutely clear about what they were up against. They were being asked to do something impossible, and failing to do it. And the job they were failing at was easy compared to the real tactical requirements.

Broad goes on:

"Ultimately, the Congressional report concluded, the contractors revealed enough information for antimissile officials to "understand the key results and limitations."

To understand the key results and limitations is to understand that the midcourse interception missile program that the Bush administration is committing so much honor and treasure to cannot possibly work -- for reasons that have long been clear.

We're dealing with something very strange here - - - what seems like an immunity to facts.

The more one considers the context of the situation Broad reports, the more clear it is that the missile defense system that we're proposing to waste hundreds of billions of dollars on is a fraud.

As lchic points out, facts, truth and superheros are important to the American psyche ... and a lot of things are very wrong here.

mazza9 - 09:22pm Mar 4, 2002 EST (#201 of 212)
Louis Mazza

Name one country who has given more national resources, (men, money and materiel) then the United States. Does the Marshall Plan ring a bell? How about the Polio vaccine and the eradication of small pox? Now I know that we can't claim the Beattles but there was "The King"!

LouMazza

lchic - 10:28pm Mar 4, 2002 EST (#202 of 212)

Presley sounds 'Irish' to me!
Elvis was an 'Irish Tenor' abroad. Probably took an excursion in 1840's when blight hit the potato crops and forgot to go home. http://www.elvispresleyonline.com/html/elvis_genealogy.html

lchic - 10:40pm Mar 4, 2002 EST (#203 of 212)

Marshall Plan << Marshall is an English Name http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/marshall/index.htm >> http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/marshall/mars7.html

Third world http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/business/newsid_1679000/1679585.stm

Truman~Origins of cold war Experience a 360° view of this room

http://www.trumanlibrary.org/hst/g.htm

almarst-2001 - 10:41pm Mar 4, 2002 EST (#204 of 212)

"Name one country who has given more national resources"

In absolute terms or relatively to its economy?

lchic - 10:53pm Mar 4, 2002 EST (#205 of 212)

The point regarding the American Economy is that it is 'advanced' and thus 'attracts' or sucks in the 'latest' inventions at the innovation stage of manufactured development -- it has the capital to enable production.

Therefore the economy isn't just a local economy, it is an international economy within the USA.

Europe - when it gets it's act together - could challenge the USA regarding innovative research and development enabling manufacture.

If the products of the USA are carefully looked at and their history studied - it would be shown that 'much' claimed by Homeland-America is actually from 'elsewhere'.

The richness of the USA is due to world 'effort', and as such, the USA has a duty and responsibility to put into the world an infrastructure to enable it to stay-with the USA economically.

If it doesn't - then where do the USA, Germany, Britain and France et al sell their advanced infrastructure products to?

lchic - 10:58pm Mar 4, 2002 EST (#206 of 212)

The USA expenditure on defence is said to be equal to the next 12 countries moving from top to bottom (rich to poor).

If the list started with the country with the smallest income (Nauru) and moved up the list ... just how many countries would be included ..

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/nr.html

lchic - 12:07am Mar 5, 2002 EST (#207 of 212)

Sordid Saudi - Does Friedman ever cover the http://www.guardian.co.uk/saudi/story/0,11599,662104,00.html

lchic - 12:21am Mar 5, 2002 EST (#208 of 212)

Iraq developing nuclear bomb, says Straw http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,662105,00.html

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