New York Times on the Web Forums Science

Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

rshowalter - 08:18pm Jun 30, 2001 EST (#6361 of 6364)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

There would be an exception on resolution - for a limiting case -- but it would take 3 radars, widely separate, looking at a single target (and being sure they were looking at the same target) - and getting positions from distances (where radar resolution can be extremely good). But the problems with doing that -- in any kind of a chaffy or noisy or ambiguous environment - or with multiple targets (or from rocking ships, or moving, shaking airplanes or rockets ) are extreme.

There's a long, long list of reasons why the anti-missile systems can't work -- unless DOD has a long list of corresponding, and quite specific, miracles --

The odds of having those miracles seem small indeed -- and involve matters that Congress should be able to check -- directly or at least by carefully crossexamining officers, subject to perjury penalties - about key properties of these "classified miracles."

On this thread, if you search "shuck" -- you come up with some comments of mine which I still find good about the technical validity of missile defense -- comments that are, I believe, and very much in the national interest.

rshowalter - 08:27pm Jun 30, 2001 EST (#6362 of 6364)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

A matter of community standards:
MD 2392 rshowalter 4/18/01 10:24pm

rshowalter - 08:34pm Jun 30, 2001 EST (#6363 of 6364)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

MD2176 rshowalter 4/28/01 3:10pm makes a proposal that gisterme objected to, on the ground that, she felt, it violated classification rules. Perhaps, with a modification, bolded, it would not:

MD1735 rshowalter 3/29/01 7:44pm

I repeat MD1724 rshowalter 3/29/01 7:01pm ... The basic physics here is all unclassified.

"Why doesn't the military, or Lockheed Martin, or some other reputable source of engineering talent, get a real person, with a name and a face, in front of a video camera, with me or any of a number of other people who could do the job, with UMPIRES there so he couldn't lie ---- and establish, beyond any reasonable doubt at all, that these missile defense schemes aren't respectable engineering, but are a fraud instead.

New part bolded: ... That is, if one asks "Can they be done on the basis of unclassified engineering and physics information."

One can then agree, clearly and publicly, on the "MIRACLES" that DOD must have achieved to develop a working system

That wouldn't be absolute proof that the thing couldn't be done -- but it would be good argument -- and it would connect to matters that Congress, or other nation states, could find ways to verify.

"The proceedings can be put on a video feed on the internet -- for everyone to see.

"The U.S. Patent Office has people with sufficient competence and integrity to do the umpiring job, but the British Patent Office -- or people from their opposite number to our NIST - might be better.

"Some Russians watching might make it even clearer.

"It should be possible to set this out in public, so that anyone, at leisure, could get on the internet and look, believe their eyes, and check details.

"I don't see a way to escape the conclusion that people in the American "military industrial complex" have been putting the whole world to really massive risk and inconvenience on the basis of a fraud.

"And done so in gross disregard of the national interest -- to keep old lies from being uncovered, and to enrich themselves illegally.

rshowalter - 08:36pm Jun 30, 2001 EST (#6364 of 6364)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

It seems to me that the present administration, doing what it is doing, on the basis of what it knows, is being irresponsible to the point of treason.

There may be other explanations, but I haven't yet imagined them.

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense