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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 - 09:06pm Feb 22, 2003 EST (# 9229 of 9233)
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.

My Survival Kit By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/23/opinion/23FRIE.html

"In the past few weeks I've started to have a heretical thought: Are we overreacting to 9/11? Are we going to drive ourselves crazy long before Osama bin Laden ever does?

_ _ _ _

"In an open society, there are simply too many threats, too many openings and too many interactions that are built on trust. You can't even begin to secure them all without also choking that open society. Which is why the right response, after a point, is not to demand more and more security — but to learn to live with more and more anxiety.

"Because the question is not whether there will be more attacks. There will be. The question is whether we can survive them and still maintain an open society.

Survive them? At least so far - the threat has been survivable indeed. Since 9/11, about 300 have died at AlQueda's hands - and even 9/11 - for all the trauma - barely budged overall mortality statistics in New York State.

_ _ _

The greatest risk to the US is its own imagination A cult of secrecy only increases the grave danger of terrorism by Martin Woollacott http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,899911,00.html

An important reference, much discussed on this thread, and not containing details in any way denied by gisterme , is THREATS TO USE NUCLEAR WEAPONS: The Sixteen Known Nuclear Crises of the Cold War, 1946-1985 by David R. Morgan http://scienceforpeace.sa.utoronto.ca/WorkingGroupsPage/NucWeaponsPage/Documents/ThreatsNucWea.html

For context, see #292 Sept 25, 20001 http://www.mrshowalter.net/a_md00100s/MD290.HTM

We need to do better than that Hobbesian standard.

Gisterme's 9184 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.C7SNaBMr3zV.0@.f28e622/10710 is important, I think, but I'll defer an annotation of it till the morning.

Friedman's point bears repeating:

"In an open society, there are simply too many threats, too many openings and too many interactions that are built on trust. You can't even begin to secure them all without also choking that open society."

As a practical matter, open societies, when they work well - don't have much reason to be anxious - because members of open societies that work have enough good will to TAKE CARE OF EACH OTHER and find an enormous number of interlocking ways to do it.

We need to help the international community move in that direction. We can, if we don't blow it.

For that reason - the most important thing that the United States can do is act as part of an international community that agrees on the key things that matter. The rest of the world is cooperating in many, many ways. We have to continue to find ways to make this work.

If Bush doesn't screw up things done so far - this could work out well.

out.

lchic - 09:30am Feb 23, 2003 EST (# 9230 of 9233)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

"" Nebuchadnezzar was both soldier and builder. It was he who captured Jerusalem and carried away seven thousand armed men and a thousand 'workers in iron' as well as the King of Judah to captivity in Iraq. It was also Nebuchadnezzar, however, who patronized the arts and industries of Mesopotamia, and encouraged the study of astrology. Bricks stamped with his name and unearthed by archaeologists all over southern Iraq show that he built temples and palaces in a great man. y cities. He also outdid the work of the Assyrian Kings in Nimrud and Nineveh by his beautification of Babylon.

http://www.geocities.com/iraqinfo/

"" Iraq is a land of beauty and turmoil. Once better known as Mesopotamia, it is a land of two great rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, which sweep down from the mountains of Turkey to meet, eighty-five miles north of the Arabian Gulf, at one of the alleged sites of the Garden of Eden. This land is the cradle of great civilizations.

Iraqis are proud of their past (dating back some 5,000 years) - proud of forebears like Hammurabi, Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar, and of ancient Babylon, Ur of the Chaldees, Nineveh and Nimrud and the countless other sites of Iraq's antiquity which outnumber those of Greece or the Valley of the Nile.

.......

Babylon is a suburb of Bagdhad

lchic - 09:50am Feb 23, 2003 EST (# 9231 of 9233)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

map - iraq

http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/INFO/MAP/SITE/Iraq_Site_150dpi.html

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