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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 - 07:53pm Oct 19, 2002 EST (# 5061 of 5066)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

:)

volchin "Science in the News" 10/19/02 7:29pm

lchic "Science in the News" 10/19/02 7:50pm .....

rshow55 - 08:33pm Oct 19, 2002 EST (# 5062 of 5066)
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.

Lchic and I have known each other a long time ! 484-486 lunarchick "Health in the News" 3/1/00 5:30am

And I'm grateful for what we've done together.

Health in the News #486 includes this:

I feel that when news people, and then the public, ask questions about the judgement and caution of the medicos, though the medicos may sweat, the questions are likely to do much more good than harm.

Not just the medicos, either. Are our military people any better - any more honorable - - any wiser ?

rshow55 8/13/02 5:07pm

At the same time, we need to know that whole cultures -- including high status specialists within cultures - can be radically, ornately, gruesomely wrong. It has happened very often in the past. The history of medicine offers some wrenching examples - and Kipling explains how compelling a totally wrong set of medical views can be in Our Fathers Of Old http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?13@@.ee79f4e/241

People's head get full of "explanations" -- and have since history began. But are these "explanations" good ones?

An individual within a culture can have no way to tell - judging that individual by realistic human standards - unless, when enough things go wrong - checking is morally forcing.

Until it is - dangers and costs will be much higher than they have to be.

Md 3704_3705 rshow55 8/13/02 5:07pm

I need a security problem dealt with - - and then the way might be clear for doing that. It would be a public service - and something very many serving officers in the US military would welcome.

_

rshow55 - 08:37pm Oct 19, 2002 EST (# 5063 of 5066)
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 believe that Patrick E. Tyler's Officers Say U.S. Aided Iraq in War Despite Use of Gas http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/18/international/middleeast/18CHEM.html should be read carefully and repeatedly by citizens and nation states, all over the world. And by news organizations, too. There is a lot of substance, and, with a little thought, there are a lot of implications and leads from Tyler's story. MD3804-3806 August 18, 2002 rshow55 8/18/02 8:32pm

We need to find ways to do better in the future than we did in the past.

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