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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?

mikejenn2 - 11:33pm Dec 14, 2001 EST (#10406 of 10657)

I checked out Armel7's news link. Putin looks like he's grieving for the glory of the past but anticipating getting something nice.

sduluoz - 07:43pm Dec 15, 2001 EST (#10407 of 10657)

Gazoga-

Jack Hitt wrote an article in the NYT pertaining to this point back in early August (8/5 to be precise). He made the argument that MD is part of a larger plan to weaponize space. Check out it out in the archives: "The Next Battlefield May Be in Outer Space"

"gazoga - 05:54pm Dec 14, 2001 EST (#10405 of 10409)

This is a totally offensive move. Creating orbital weapons of mass distruction. Best D is a good O?! Something else is going on here. It is not being voiced, but there's too much capital being spent on an unworkable plan. Ergo, it's a misdirection."

liberace3 - 03:10am Dec 16, 2001 EST (#10408 of 10657)

http://www.kalaschnikow.de/kalauk/txt/2001/eussner15.html

The Battle Against Eurasia

ONE CENTURY OF THE US GEO-STRATEGY IN THE OLD WORLD States are captives of the geographic conditions in which they historically emerge, evolve and exist. The "insularity" of the US power, which has no land ways of communication with the Eurasian continent, the world's richest storage of planetary resources determines the outright expansionism of the US foreign policy.

From 1823 the "Monroe Doctrine" (which provided for the interference of the US in the event of the newly independent states of South America being threatened by Europe) became an ideological tool of extending the US hegemony over the Western hemisphere. In 1895 the US State Secretary Richard Olney, referring to the Monroe Doctrine, frankly stated that "on this (American) continent the US is practically sovereign, and all it decrees becomes a law".

The US formulated the objective of becoming "practically sovereign" also beyond the Western Hemisphere by widening the limits of expansion as a top priority of its foreign policy, when the country became a great power at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The spirit of the American "frontier" - the advance of the first colonists from the coast deep into the mainland, seizing new lands and exterminating the native population there - became the spirit of the US foreign policy strategy - now on a global scale. As Zb. Brzezinski emphasized when tracing the really existing lines of "geo-strategic fronts" of a geopolitical struggle for domination over Eurasia on the map of the world, the front line of the US "defense" should always remain overseas.

Brzezinski wrote in his book "The Grand Chess Board: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives" in 1997 that from the moment the continents started interacting, i. e. more or less over the last five centuries, the center of world domination had been located in Eurasia … However, in the final decade of the 20th century a tectonic shift took place in the international relations. A non-European state became the main arbiter of domination-submission relations in Eurasia and the solely domineering power in the world for the first time in the history. The defeat and disintegration of the Soviet Union were the final acts in the ascension of the state of the Western Hemisphere, the US, to the role of the sole and truly global power.

Zb. Bjezinski's idea is simple: the shift of the "geographic axis of history", or the "heartland" (terms used by H.D. Mackinder to denote the expanse coinciding with the historical territory of Russia, and later on - the USSR) from Eurasia to the American continent should be considered as the result of a "tectonic shift" - the collapse of the Eurasian superpower. However, the postulate is false in its essential element. It proclaims a geostrategic objective of the US elite, but omits the fact that there is a great distance, far from being already overcome, between the objective and today's reality.

To become a new "heartland" the US dramatically lacks the essential -resources . Due to its extreme geographic eccentricity, a hypothetical world with the American continent as its heartland could only be a world of a "golden billion" forcing the remaining five billions of the population of Earth into a social and economic ghetto. The US elite is aware of this fact, yet it craves for "practical sovereignty" on a global scale. This forces the US to extend the action of the Monroe Doctrine over to the main continent of the Eastern Hemisphere as the planetary geostrategic center.

An important element of the US political tradition, the "frontier" has never been just an ordinary boundary in its European meaning. This is not a line dividing the states, but a front line of advancing movement to be pushed continuously outwards. This is an unlimited expansion of force , the main vector of which is nowadays the NATO eastward and south-e

lchic - 05:04am Dec 16, 2001 EST (#10409 of 10657)

Russia: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/16/weekinreview/16TYLE.html

Why should Russia 'blink' if the USA moves from the 'stable' 1972 situation to a 'spacial' one?

Putin is moving the Russian Economy back into play.

Which of What above on the board was actually checked-tested-worked .. is there much for Russia to lay awake worring about?

If the US did the 'wrong-thing' by the world from space -- would there be a kneeJerk reaction at ground level that would bring the US into line?

So who'll be the winner, the nepotistic-Child of a default agent or THEE PresidentAgent who had the talent to get to the top? -- Odds on the latter.

lchic - 05:12am Dec 16, 2001 EST (#10410 of 10657)

In a nutshell - it says what? liberace3 12/16/01 3:10am

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