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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?

rshowalter - 06:40am Jan 9, 2001 EST (#550 of 553)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Note -- I did not say that we should abandon all work on missile defense. I WOULD say, that we ought not to commit prototyping resources, as often as we now do, before we have a design that "works on paper" to reasonably high standards.

Now, unless I have it wrong, people are "going into engineering labs, playing around, and hoping something turns up."

Committing serious resources to projects that look on paper like they won't work.

Am I being unfair? I could be - but from my distance, a lot of the work looks like that.

I also think that people who are looking to get right answers, in a program where mistakes are so obviously fatal, and where things have not gone well, ought to be actively looking for mistakes - so that the mistakes can be fixed, and progress can be made.

If mistakes are found, then hope of success in the future increases.

The system isn't working that way. Some months ago, I made contact with a man I've known a while, and respect, who is, at the least, "well connected" with the CIA. We discussed a number of things - among them, my view that they have mistakes in the math they are using for guidance and control that probably, in my view, eliminate any good chance of their system ever working, especially in multiple attack circumstances. He told me he consulted with some of his associates, and asked questions that lead me to think it probable that he did. Contacts went so far that I gave this man information about e-mail accounts that let him or his people monitor my e-mail -something I told him I didn't like, but that they could do. I have reason to believe this monitoring has occurred.

This man was also given an invitation to accompany me if he wished, with associates if he chose, to meetings I was proposing to have with an influential non-governmental organization.

To check the S-K math efficiently, they'd have to talk to me. They've acted in such a way as to indicate to me that they take my work somewhat seriously, and yet they have not done so. It would be easy for them to do so. I'd cooperate totally, and they have reason to know it.

Perhaps I'm biased (no doubt I am) but I've come to doubt their confidence in their StarWars work, and their public statements about it.

In terms of my own experience, and interpreting what I read in the news, it seems to me that they aren't conducting a serious, public spirited effort to defend the country in a workable technical way, but are doing something else.