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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.

almarst-2001 - 10:07pm Mar 13, 2002 EST (#500 of 522)

"We hear a lot about rogue states these days. You know, the rogue states that refuse to ratify important treaties, the ones who refuse to allow international inspections of their weapons of mass destruction, the ones who ignore U.N. resolutions, who violate human rights with impunity and who refuse to sign on to human rights conventions? You know, those rogue states." - http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/5208

"It's hard for most Americans to think of the United States as a rogue state. We're a democracy, after all. Our elections are free and fair (well, some of the time).

"But our foreign policy is far less accountable to democratic ideals, or to the global community than we like to think. The problem isn't isolationism -- we're engaged (at least our military forces and our U.S. manufactured weapons are) all over the world. The problem is unilateralism -- our tendency to act out our unchallenged 'super-power of super-powers' role without concern for what others in the world think."

lchic - 10:13pm Mar 13, 2002 EST (#501 of 522)

One thought would be for each 'place', each town in the USA to twin with a small town in need ... and help those 'elsewhere' people to grow .. to get a water and power supply to get the beginnings of an economic system that supplies jobs and incomes .... they already realise that the National Geographic - girl with the green eyes .. is a child who needs 'a fair go' just as their children do ... America could help the world step-up to a new and better level.

almarst-2001 - 10:17pm Mar 13, 2002 EST (#502 of 522)

""If you say that you believe in deterrence, and then you say it can't deter rogues, then what is the point of threatening them?" asked one former senior State Department official. "There's a contradiction here." - http://atimes.com/front/DC13Aa01.html

rshow55 - 10:22pm Mar 13, 2002 EST (#503 of 522)

Sure is -- but the contradiction is necessary, to justify continuation of jobs and status in the US military-industrial complex -- but these mistakes (both practical and moral) are NOT in the interest of the United States as a country.

rshow55 - 10:22pm Mar 13, 2002 EST (#504 of 522)

http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7b085/127

How do you make people properly appalled and ashamed of people willing to use nuclear weapons?

If this is an "unnatural" question, we have to arrange social patterns, and explanations, that make it a common question. If this question was as widely asked, and as clearly faced, as it should be, full nuclear disarmament would be a practical proposition.

". In perhaps the most famous, Dr. Stanley Milgram's study of obedience to authority, the subjects meekly delivered what they believed were potentially fatal electric shocks to another person when ordered to do so by an experimenter in a white coat."

That's an ORDER! Milgram (1963) - the classic study that showed that people would follow orders, even if it inflicted damage, or even death, on an innocent, pleading human being:
http://www.fsu.umd.edu/dept/psyc/southerl/prism/bill.htm
http://www.usafa.af.mil/dfpfa/CVs/Bertha/Psyhero.html
http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~epritch1/social98a.html
http://www.abacon.com/baronbyrne/chapter9.html
http://www.psychology.org/links/People_and_History/

lchic - 10:25pm Mar 13, 2002 EST (#505 of 522)

A lot of peoples have a shame system - loss of face etc

How to make the horror of nuclear 'a shame job' .. ?

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