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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?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

lchic - 12:43am Apr 10, 2002 EST (#1227 of 1237)

IS WalkerBush the weakest USA leader - ever? lchic 4/9/02 10:54am

The ferocious battle for Jenin camp - a square kilometre housing 16,000 people - last night entered the bloody lore of the Middle East: a fiasco for Israel, an immensely costly victory for the Palestinians, who reportedly suffered as many as 100 dead, with corpses rotting in the lanes of the camp for days.

As night fell, Israeli helicopter gunships and tanks resumed their bombardment of the camp

"There was no massacre. There was a very tough war there

Red Crescent yesterday warned of the dangers of an epidemic because of the corpses decomposing

It was the disaster critics of Israel's offensive had been predicting for some time.

"They came with giant sledgehammers, and they destroyed the walls from one side to the other," said a metal worker who lives in the camp, but did not give his name for fear of reprisal.

The soldiers then hauled men out of the captured homes, beat them, bound their hands and blindfolded them, stripped them to their underwear, and shipped them off to an Israeli military base for questioning, said the metal worker, who was detained for 24 hours. "They beat my brother - 100 times they hit him with their batons, on his shoulders, his stomach and his back," he said.

On Sunday, the fourth day of fighting in the camp, the mosques remained in Palestinian hands, and the call for prayer from the minaret ... "The Israelis would go crazy when they would hear the sound of the azaan ," the metal worker said. "They would just start shooting."

There was no water, and food was running out.

"I am 200 metres away as the crow flies from the refugee camp, and I do not know what is happening inside," said a Palestinian Red Crescent official in Jenin town. "We have not entered the refugee camp in eight days. We don't know how many dead are lying there, or how many injured. We only hear the sounds of gunfire and war." http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,681676,00.html

lchic - 01:18am Apr 10, 2002 EST (#1228 of 1237)

America it seems is duty bound to deflect that billion dollar subsidy from Israel to Palestine - to assist the rebuild!

Will these Palestinians be making a group-action claim against Israel for 'loss of breadwinner', 'kidnap', personnal assault, loss of limbs and function, psychological trauma-torture, home replacement, infrastructure replacement, roads replacement .... etc etc etc

There must be a group of Arab Lawyers in the USA working on this - right now - the Isreali's have no understanding of the 'value of money' it seems!

rshow55 - 09:48am Apr 10, 2002 EST (#1229 of 1237)

Maybe people are paying more attention -- thinking harder -- and revulsion for war -- even with much, much lower body counts than often occur in wars -- may be growing, and focusing.

Some things that seem "impossibly ugly" go on - and are not corrected, even when the correction is "clear" -- because things that have to be done at the same time for fundamental reasons are not done at the same time - in large part because of failures of rules and negotiating techniques.

Failures of rules and negotiating technique in areas where people already know many of the difficulties.

Problems, once they get bad enough so that people face them, often do get solved. Maybe some progress can be made in the Middle East, too.

rshow55 - 09:59am Apr 10, 2002 EST (#1230 of 1237)

I've been looking at the question -- how would you really get an unlimited supply of solar energy - in technical terms, the basic ways forward are clear - but actually doing it is much less clear.

I've done a lot of looking, some calculating - and I've gotten to this question.

"How would you make a fully believable, interesting movie about doing this job?

By the time the movie was done, if the job was actually technically realistic -- people would know a lot about how, in enough detail to raise the organizational, financial, and political resources needed to do the job.

In fact, getting a business proposal good enough for the job, and getting the movie done -- share a lot of elements -- and might be done in parallel.

The way I'm looking at it now, to make either the movie or the project real, Vladimir Putin would have to be a "star." In at least these ways. He'd have to write a committment letter that was clear, and clearly in the interest of Russia and the EU - so that the project could make sense as a business proposition. He'd have to do a cameo appearance in the movie. -- He'd have to support the project, at the level of a few phone calls - so it could actually be done.

Would these things take "miracles"? Maybe. But if you could get these miracles -- you might be able to get the rest of the miracles required, as well.

More later -- but at the level of structure - raising the resources for a project as big as this one -- enough so the project would actually work -- would be a major "production" - - and involves very many of the skills movie making also requires.

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