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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 - 06:58am Jul 2, 2001 EST (#6395 of 6401)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

"It is, meanwhile, practically impossible to open the New York Times without reading a solemn admonition, either from the Administration or from the paper itself. Colin Powell lectures Robert Mugabe. George Bush takes a high moral tone with Serbia. All are agreed that wanted men should be given up to international law. All are agreed that however painful the task, other societies must face their own past and shoulder their own grave responsibilities. For a long time I have found it somewhat surreal to read this righteous material, but the experience of ingesting it now becomes more emetic every day.

"The seven Condor countries, groping their way back to democracy after decades of trauma, are making brave and honest attempts to find the truth and to punish the guilty. Time and again, commissions of inquiry have been frustrated because the evidence they need is in archives in Washington. And it is in those archives for the unspeakable reason that the United States was the patron and armorer of dictatorship. There is a heavy debt here. Is there not a single Congressional committee, a single principled district attorney, a single leader in our overfed and complacent "human rights community," who will try to help cancel it? Or are we going to watch while the relatives of the murdered and tortured seek justice by lawful means, and are waved away by armed bodyguards if they even try to serve a scrap of paper on the man whose immunity befouls us all?"

When the issue of trust about nuclear policy and balances arises, this is a central question, that we cannot reasonably ask the Russians (or our NATO allies) to put aside.

I'll be keeping a promise made yesterday soon.

lunarchick - 07:50am Jul 2, 2001 EST (#6396 of 6401)
lunarchick@www.com

'do unto others as thou would do unto yourself'

So the USA is happy to point the finger, but not itself to be scrutinised.

rshowalter - 08:00am Jul 2, 2001 EST (#6397 of 6401)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

MD6376 lunarchick 7/1/01 8:23am . . .

Is there anything regarding this specialist problem solving approach that would be of interest to this board ?

I think so.

I don't think I'm doing US security any harm, or telling anyone anything very surprising, when I say that in the late 1950's and early 1960's, work at Fort Deitrich on biological warfare also included much work on "animal intelligence" -- especially as it related to guidance. How was it that birds or bats had so much greater ability to intercept moving tartgets than the best missiles? The idea crystalized - and it was an entirely reasonable idea, that there must be a gross mistake in the mathematics being used in our guidance systems -- the disparity between the clumsiness of manmade missiles, and the relatively fantastic grace and accuracy made this idea seem compelling. There were somewhat similar huge disparities involved in language processing and cryptography, as well. We had fast, powerful actuators, and plenty of speed and accelleration on our missiles -- but control was very problematic - and the instabilities encountered when tight control was attempted (a problem that was still central last year in MD experiments) were stunning and embarrassing, beside what animals such as bats could routinely do. It became clear that, if animal level control facility, or anything close to it, were achieved in our air to air missiles (or the Russian missiles) combat balances would shift radically. Then, as now, air to air missiles often missed. With good controls, they wouldn't.

The story I heard is that McGeorge Bundy got interested in finding ways to get breakthrough math, and one of his initiatives, very informal, was to have the Ford Foundation fund the Cornell Six Year Ph.D. Program -- which brought together a lot of high test score, high achievement kids. I was one of these.

In ways that were informal but highly disciplined I got recruited for a very unconventional, intense education. My impression was that I was told anything that I could use searching for answers people wanted, got all the instruction people could arrange for me, and was pushed as hard as they found it humanly possible to push me. My impression also was that my technical output earned my keep, from a fairly early stage. Kids are impressionable, and during this time, people found that the more they could tell me I was unusually smart, the more they could justify working me unmercifully, with my agreement. In many ways, I knew most of what was interesting before I came to Cornell -- I'd been deeply influenced by the Patent Office, by the process of invention, and by the questions involved in finding out how to do real, effective optimal invention, not in Edison's world, but in the much more complex and differently challenging, world of today.

Perhaps the only really unusual part of my training was that I was taught to identify and solve differential equations in my head, using the series method. It was arduous to do this - but it did give me an ability to spot mathematical structures, and classify problems, that was useful. I believe that, before 1972, I knew every mathematical stumper that the government knew about -- had a sense of most technical anxieties -- and knew in some detail why the problems mattered. I also solved some problems, and I believe more than earned my keep -- most of these problems I solved, I believe, mostly because of my patent training.

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