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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 - 12:33pm May 15, 2003 EST (# 11679 of 11713)
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.

I started this year with this:

rshow55 - 08:20am Jan 1, 2003 EST (# 7177 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.o3LeaD1s9bU.722922@.f28e622/8700

" I think this is a year where some lessons are going to have to be learned about stability and function of international systems, in terms of basic requirements of order , symmetry , and harmony - at the levels that make sense - and learned clearly and explicitly enough to produce systems that have these properties by design, not by chance.

The lessons are fairly easy . . .

I'm still hoping that's right. Though sometimes I've felt I was much too optimistic at the beginning of the year. All the same, maybe not. As Benjamin Franklin pointed out

"Experience keeps a dear school. A fool will learn in no other."

People often act well - we're not always foolish as a species, as a nation, as individuals. There have been some interesting experiences that have been in the news since New Years Day. UN negotiations, the Iraq war, the absence or near-absence of WMD's in Iraq, the shuttle disaster, the Blair affair, and a lot of other things have happened that could be useful for teaching simple lessons. Including some monotonously "obvious" lessons.

One key lesson is that in those cases where it matters enough - it is very important to get facts and relations straight. The costs and risks of mistakes and fraud are so high, that even the high cost of checking has to be bourne on issues that are of exceptional importance.

Not that checking can possibly be the rule - most of the time, it is too expensive, in journalism and elsewhere. But it has to occur in an organized way, subject to rules and exception handling, if we're to solve some problems. At the New York Times, and elsewhere.

. . . . .

Sometimes, there is no substitute for showing evidence - though there often are arguments against doing it, especially when the CIA is involved in a direct or tertiary way.

These are emails I sent - modified to delete names of CIA personnel. The unmodified emails are available to the NYT - and could be made available to people who used their real names with me, and had a valid reason for seeing them.

This is a response that I made to a inquiry from Deutsche Bank Securities July of last year - when a question was asked that I believe was in response to a CIA officer. It contains a number of references to this thread.

http://www.mrshowalter.net/etterToDeutscheBankSecuritiesXd.html

This is a letter I sent to William Safire July of last year. Safire did not respond. I sent a copy to other NYT columnists as well. It contains a number of references to this thread.

http://www.mrshowalter.net/Safire_SpookAwardsNRequestXd.html

This is a letter that I sent to a number of people who have known me over the years, at about the same time.

http://www.mrshowalter.net/ToE_H_E_G_P_M_xd.html

I've made some progress toward getting my personal security situation sorted out to the point where I could work since that time.

But there is still a way to go before I can function much beyond my current status of effective house arrest.

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