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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 - 02:34pm Oct 19, 2003 EST (# 15234 of 15240)
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.

Bluffs are inherently unstable. We're having some very basic problems with foresight - and a very high stakes issue of foresight leads the news today:

State Department Foresaw Trouble Now Plaguing Iraq By ERIC SCHMITT and JOEL BRINKLEY http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/19/international/worldspecial/19POST.html

Several officials said the study's warnings on security, utilities and civilian rule were ignored by the Pentagon until recently.

I've been concerned with technical questions involving foresight for my entire adult life.

- - - -

At my first meeting at Gettysburg, in late September 1967, D.D. Eisenhower handed me a copy of C.P. Snow's Science and Government - and some key quotes from Snow's book are set out in 12486-90 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.a6aGbSx3PN9.3524755@.f28e622/14140

But the issue of foresight - central to Snow, to Eisenhower, and to challenges we face now - wasn't set out squarely in those quotes - and foresight was a central theme of that book.

We've made some gains since 1952, and since 1960, but we've lost some substantial things as well.

These excerpts from C. P. Snow's Science and Government ( from the Harvard U. Press 1961 edition - originally the 1960 Godkin Lecture on the Essentials of Free Government and the Duties of the Citizen pp 79 to 84 ) fit today, especially in light of http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/19/international/worldspecial/19POST.html . Snow speaks of lost chances, and dangers:

"One of these dangers is that we are beginning to shrug off our sense of the future. . . .

"We seem to be flexible, but we haven't any model of the furture before us. In the significant sense, we can't change. And to change is what we have to do.

" That is why I want scientist active in all the levels of government. By "scientists" I mean people trained in the natural sciences, not only engineers, though I want them, too. I make a special requirement for the scientist proper, because, partly by training, partly by self-selection - they include a number of speculative and socially imaginative minds. While engineers - more uniform in attitude than one would expect a professional class to be - tend to be technically bold and advanced but at the same time to accept totally any society into which they may happen to be born. The scientists proper are nothing like so homogeneous in attitude, and some of them will provide a quality which it seems to me we need above everything else.

. . .

"I believe scientists have something to give which our kind of existential society is desperately short of: so short of, that it fails to recognize of what it is starved. That is foresight.

. . . . .

"For science, by its very nature, exists in history. Any scientist realises that his subject is moving in time - that he knows incomperably more today than better, cleverer, and deeper men did twenty years ago. He knows that his pupils, in twenty years, will know incomparably more than he does. Scientists have it within them to know what a future-directed society feels like, for science itself, in its human aspect, is just that.

. . .

". . . in their youth (scientists) are often not good at the arts of administration. As one thinks of the operations of the Tizard Committee ( which developed radar just in time to let England win the Battle of Britian ), it is worth remembering that their decisions were carried out by professional administrators. If these had been replaced by scientists, the scientists would almost certainly have done worse.

"But that is only half of it. I spent twenty years of my life in close contact with the English professional administrators. I have the greatest respect for them - more

rshow55 - 02:36pm Oct 19, 2003 EST (# 15235 of 15240)
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.

(Snow continues)

"I have the greatest respect for them - more respect, I think, than for any professional group I know. They are extremely intelligent, honorouble, tough, tolerant, and generous. Within the human limits, they are free from some of the less pleasing group characteristics. But they have a deficiency.

"Remember, administrators are by temperment active men. Their tendency, which is strengthened by the nature of their job, is to live in the short term, to become masters of the short-term solution. Often, as I have seen them conducting their business with an absence of fuss, a concealed force, a refreshing dash of intellectual sophistication, a phrase from one of the old Icelandic sagas kept nagging at me. It was: "Snorri ws the wisest man in Iceland wh had not the gift of foresight."

"Foresight in this quotation meant something supernatural, but nevertheless the phrase stayed with me. The wisest man who had not the gift of foresight. The more I have seen of Western societies, the more it nags at me. It nags at me in the United States, just as in Western Europe. We are immensely competent; we know our own pattern of operations like the palm of our hands. It is not enough. . . . . . . It would be bitter if, when this storm of history is over, the best epitaph that anyone could write of us was only that: The wisest men who had not the gift of foresight.

Snow's Godkin Lecture ends there.

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