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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.

lchic - 05:38am Oct 9, 2002 EST (# 4762 of 4766)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

"" What restrains state rackets from mutual extermination is their awareness that cohesion and self control assures their mutual survival. Below them, there’s the mass of humanity enclosed by exploitation and national frontiers. Dominant rackets have learned to negotiate and tolerate each other by coexisting in the state. The role of national mediation alters their function, from private looting to large scale administration and bureaucratic (and legal) access to the national treasure. In this form, modern politicians and functionaries buy themselves national pedigree, legitimacy and incomes. But the racket remains the underlying state module. Dominant classes secrete them constantly, and in a democracy this tendency is generalised in civil society. The fragmentation of commodity society and its consequent ‘war of all against all’, creates a fertile soil for rackets. As long as a strong Leviathan is not disturbed and undermined by this, rackets are tolerated even if legally proscribed
http://www.left-dis.nl/uk/rackets.htm
http://home.c2i.net/espenjo/home/fyrsten/macbeth.htm

commondata - 08:35am Oct 9, 2002 EST (# 4763 of 4766)

There are four main arguments against missile defense (aside from technical feasibility):

[Stupidity] It is an expensive waste.

[Deception] The danger of rogue missile attack has been greatly exaggerated.

[Hypocrisy] The United States is itself increasingly dependent on its own missiles, especially cruise missiles, while trumpeting warnings over the dangers of missile proliferation and possible missile attack on the United States.

[Aggression] The great damage from deploying missile defenses is to intensify competition in nuclear weapons.

http://www.ucsusa.org/security/missile.hill.html

Any more?

rshow55 - 08:38am Oct 9, 2002 EST (# 4764 of 4766)
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.

A post by commondata just got deleted - but it seems to me reasonable to post this.

Commondata my sense is that posts were deleted for a reason - a reason that I understand, and have some respect for - especially since this thread has been put back up - and with as few deletions as there were - all after 4740 rshow55 10/3/02 9:14am on the 3d. I have these postings, and have responded to some of what was in them on a Guardian Talk thread Psychwarfare, Casablanca -- and terror . . . #330 on . . . http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/352

Here are the commondata postings that were deleted.

. . . . . .

commondata - 10:06am Oct 3, 2002 EST (# 4741

rshow55 10/3/02 9:14am

"It seems to me that Gisterme did not "work hard", and that the "dirty academic administrative discourse" was effective in the same way as a high school debating society bully can be. A human silverback thumping his chest. I don't think that the usefulness or otherwise of this thread should be defined in terms of assumptions about the identity or "importance" of its participants. But then I have a LOT more posts to read.

"Gisterme claims four out of six successful tests - here is what Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Delaware, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said in July 2001 after the third total and first successful test:

" "It's kind of confusing to some of us and some of the experts out there as to what the purpose of this new test range is," Biden said on Fox News Sunday. "[It] doesn't seem to realistically fit any kind of real new threat or existing threat that we would face."

. . . . .

commondata - 11:53am Oct 3, 2002 EST (# 4743 of 4746)

Understood, but if Gisterme is Rice then the president's not listening, he's laughing.

. . .

commondata - 12:48pm Oct 3, 2002 EST (# 4746 of 4746)

gisterme 10/3/02 12:18pm

The article I took the quote from also comes with a more Republican outlook, "There is a threat," Lott told Fox. "It's real, it's here, it's now. We need to move beyond the old way of thinking."

http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/07/15/missile.test/

If there is a real threat, here and now, that the missile defense system could remove then it's from others' ballistic missiles. The negotiation of the destruction of these weapons is a moral and logical imperative. Robert is right when he says IT IS NEVER ALRIGHT TO USE NUCLEAR WEAPONS. That doesn't seem like a difficult thing to understand. The diversion of massive human resources into something more constructive will immediately benefit millions of people across the planet. That's not naive. It could be done. Carefully, in ways that Robert has outlined, if you like.

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