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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dan3 who wrote (130269)	1/3/2001 11:31:04 AM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1572598

eck Edison tried over 10,000 different materials before he found one that worked for his light bulbs That's more than we can afford. The money that will be required to try out 10,000 different approaches to shooting down missiles, at a couple of $Billion each, will bankrupt our society. 10,000 different approaches would be crazy in this case but that doesn't mean we have to give up at the first sign of any dificulty. Building a successful anti-missile system probably can't be done That would depend on what you mean by "successful anti-missle system", and "can't be done". If you mean build a system that can defend 100% (not a single warhead gets through out of tens of thousands) against any possible missle attack, includeing a massive with extra missiles and counter measures then you are right. If you mean a system with a decent chance to shoot down one non-mirved missile with no countermeasures when we are willing to devote a trillion dollars and 40 years to the effort then you are just about definitely wrong. I used both extremes to show the importance of being specific here. If you mean a system with a high chance to shoot down every missle in a small attack or most of a medium sized attack, and you are willing to spend about a quarter of a percent of the GNP to do it and are willing to wait over 10 years from the go ahead for the system to be fully operational and effective then I think it can probably be done. and aggressively trying to do so will probably cause the Russians to bombard us with nuclear warheads first - just in case we can build such a system. Why? So that we can destroy them in turn? A massive "bolt from the blue" attack from the Russians is unlikely, they would try to get us to back down from building the system first. If they threaten and rattle sabers for awile our nuclear rediness would be increased and we would get a massive attack off against them as well. If they really are that irrational that provides more of a reason to have a defense (but leaves a tricky question about hot to get it deployed without provokeing dangerous lunatics with nuclear weapons) I just don't think it's a good idea. What would be OK would be research, with no hardware built I do think that some of missile defense suporters are a little optimistic about the time table. I think we should do development and testing as well as research, but deployment is not something that is just a year or two away. But the forces driving this process are defense contractors that are far more interested in building several hundred Billion dollars worth of hardware - regardless or whether or not it works. Sure they want to make a bunch of money from this, but their long term success depends on produceing products that work. I don't think hundreds of billions will be spent without more success in tests. Tim