New York Times on the Web Forums Science

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?

lunarchick - 06:42pm Nov 8, 2000 EDT (#485 of 488)
Bush got votes from the first half of C20, Gore the second.

x

vikingdevil - 10:05pm Nov 8, 2000 BST (#24 of 29)

MsMonkey #19 [The President (since 1998) is Mohammad Rafiq Tarar, the Prime Minister (since 1999) is Pervez Musharrat... It's actually not that important that you know]

- well I think its only good manners to know the name of the person who you are pointing your missiles at (if not the correct country/grid references)

VD

X

rshowalter - 08:26pm Nov 8, 2000 EDT (#486 of 488)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

It would be nice, if before the firing of a nuclear missile, all involved in the decisions had to copy down the names of the people likely to be killed or hurt. Only that - so much easier than squeezing a trigger, even from a distance, and having to watch the result. Just a LITTLE sense of what was being done. How much more hesitant people would be to commit mass murder, if they could only fire missiles, after counting up the number of probable dead, at a sitting, making a little mark on paper for each life lost, without getting up for any reason.

The people involved should also look at, and smell, unburied corpses in various stages of decay. For at the simple, easy pulling of some switches, they will be making many of these corpses - too many to bearably count, much less smell or see.

All for weapons that have no workable military use, that have control problems today that no one could defend in public. These nightmare weapons may well have been justified during the Cold War. But the Cold War is over. We should take the damn things down.

kalter.rauch - 08:48am Nov 9, 2000 EDT (#487 of 488)
Earth vs <^> <^> <^>

Rshowalter......no subtlety was intended, but you do miss my point. You can chalk up my call to conquest and plunder to chronic megalomania, or too much TV......

I was trying to place nuclear energy and weapons into the context of other major technological advances aquired by mankind very recently. SETI philosophers postulate a bottleneck, or filter, that may drastically limit the number of advanced technological species in the galaxy. It is thought that most species discovering nuclear energy will shortly afterwards self-destruct, but the few percent of planets which survive the initial critical period will rapidly evolve into stellar civilizations (the so-called "Type II" races). As to what happens when Type II cultures cross paths out there......we have only Terran myth to feed speculation.

It is now Man's turn to prove his mettle or die in the trying.

rshowalter - 09:48am Nov 9, 2000 EDT (#488 of 488)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Kalter I'm FOR nuclear energy (just as I'm for chemical engineering, but not for massive releases of nerve gas that could easily destroy the world, that have been technical possibilities for three generations now). I think the best thing that could happen to nuclear engineering would be the effective outlawing of nuclear weapons. The stigma and terror associated with the weapons has undermined the essential and important positive aspects of nuclear energy. With more openness, and more disciplined engineering and testing, nuclear aspects of our peaceful future, especially our energy budget, could be credits to the human race, rather than the messes made now.

The job of having THIS planet survive the discovery of nuclear energy is pretty straightforward, but the time is NOW.

And it can be done. Almost all the pieces are in place. The desire for taking the weapons down, at least to the level where the world will survive, is widely placed. A take-down strategy that will permit the weapons to be taken down without assuming nonexistant trust is available (probably many such strategies are available.)

Now, the hard part is literary, artistic, journalistic, psychological -- finding a way to get people to look at the problem, long enough to solve it, rather than have them recoil, and look away in terror.

I think there's reasons to think that this human, emotional part of the problem can be solved, too. I've seen pieces of that solution, that seemed very good to me, on these threads.

It seems to me that getting nuclear weapons down would be one of the great, saving achievements in world history. It would permit a continuation of world history. And I think it can be done, and done pretty soon, if people, including not only the Generals and politicians (though we need them, too) but also the poets, the literary culture, the "intellectuals," could just work us past this impasse, an impasse of the head, and the heart, and of visceral fear.

Once that happened, the politicians could give the right orders, and the military could execute them. That can't be done, on a matter so vital as this, without understanding from the voters.

I'm not objective here - I'm terribly afraid that these things are going to blow. But the solution, in human terms, seems so easy, and so cleansing. We need to recognize that we have an impasse where trust is impossible, and humanely, and with some discipline, use the distrust we have to do a necessary job for ourselves and all humanity.

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense