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Missile Defense

Nazi engineer and Disney space advisor Wernher Von Braun helped give us rocket science. Today, the legacy of military aeronautics has many manifestations from SDI to advanced ballistic missiles. Now there is a controversial push for a new missile defense system. What will be the role of missile defense in the new geopolitical climate and in the new scientific era?

kalter.rauch - 08:58am Nov 8, 2000 EDT (#480 of 481)
Earth vs <^> <^> <^>

The fact of the matter is......"getting 'rid of' nuclear weapons" is to admit mankind isn't "ready" for this magnitude of power. This isn't the same as saying "mankind isn't ready for small pox...therefore destroy the last stocks". To rid the world of atomic weapons would be tantamount to abandoning the evolutionary leap into outer space. Yes, nuclear energy is a terrible mastery of power. But how much more awful is the Human Will To Power...to Rule...To Master All that He surveys?!?!?

No!......We have delivered into Our Hands many marvelous Tools for Conquest...for Plunder...for Extending The Hand of Man Across The Stars!!! To turn back now...when proof of World Catastrophe shows the Danger hanging over us all...to ...grovel... before The Fire like a mindless beast......

This is a Glorious Age of Great Opportunity. The olden days are gone...tottering gravestones marching into a grey past.

Tomorrow is a Dazzling Sword!!!

rshowalter - 01:45pm Nov 8, 2000 EDT (#481 of 481)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

You're for mass murder? You're for activities that make what Hitler did look ordinary, if not tame? The military people most responsible for these weapons, mostly hate them.

I think the MORAL issue is an essential one, and recommend "The Moral Flaws in our Peace" by Tyler Stevenson of Global Security Institute, http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/07/26/p9s2.htm which was published Wed, July 26, 2000 in THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

Here are quotes:

"Our nuclear-war plans require at best what would be hanging offenses at Nuremburg - the wholesale burning of millions of civilians.

"There is a breathtaking evil in our sterile arguments of strategic necessity and the invention of a doctrine of a Mutually Assured Destruction .

I think even people who live near Los Alamos should be uneasy with their "Dazzling Swords." People have been able to commit mass murder for a long time. In Rowanda, simple tools suffice. As human beings, we should refrain from such atrocities. The number of dead, the manner of the dying, the lack of burial, and the sheer loss of all humans hold dear should make us turn away from nuclear weapons, and get rid of them. All that takes is the will to do so, and to do so in ways that take into account the fear and distrust inextricably linked to these weapons, so that we can use that distrust, rather than be defeated by it in negotiations based on a fiction of "trust."

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