New York Times on the Web Forums Science

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 - 08:59pm Oct 18, 2003 EST (# 15228 of 15228)
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.

From Bosnia to Berlin to The Hague, on a Road Toward a Continent's Future by ROGER COHEN http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/15/weekinreview/15WORD.html ends as follows:

" Communism promised equality. Hitler promised the 1,000-year Reich. Milosevic promised glory. All the West offers, alongside the prosperity of this boardwalk, is the rule of law. It's enough. It's more than enough on a continent that now knows, as no other, the price of the law's absence. .....

For the rule of law to be enough, the rule of law has to be respected, and information flows have to be good enough (and organized well enough) so that crucial decisions are reasonably made.

Because, as Friedman says in Global Village Idiocy http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/12/opinion/12FRIE.html , "the world is being wired together technologically" there are new technical possiblities that can permit us to connect more humanely and efficiently, socially, politically, and culturally, when it matters enough to the people involved.

Lchic and I did a 2 hour, 70 post session on negotiation in the middle east that I think summarizes a good deal about new opportunities in conflict resolution made possible by the internet, and prototyped to some degree here MD1999 . The session goes from http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.eea14e1/1253 to http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.eea14e1/1318 . It includes many links to this NYT Missile Defense thread. The suggestions are directed, by way of example, to Friedman and Fisk, but are flexible, general, and inexpensive. I believe that if the staffed organizations of Europe, the US, and other countries thought about these opportunities, and adapted them their needs and responsibilities, the good things being talked about and hoped for could become real, in realistic, nutsy-boltsy, comfortable human ways. And the things we fear could start to fade away.

If we can learn to be clear about what we think and feel - agree to disagree when that is necessary - and grow up a little - a lot could get better.

That's partly a technical and partly an emotional problem. And a problem of growing up.

I'd be more effective - and so would lchic - if, in the ways that matter, I could get "out of jail."

On national defense - including missile defense .

Courageous Arab Thinkers By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/19/opinion/19FRIE.html is beautiful. So, often enough, though not always, is The New York Times.

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense