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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (1385)	9/25/2001 1:54:22 PM
From: Jerry in Omaha	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

John, <<I do not agree that missile defense is a fantasy>> Perhaps you're right. Together with you I really believe that with enough bullets and practice any exceptionally skilled cowboy can draw his revolver, shoot twice, and put the second slug cleanly through the first shot's hole shot smack through the middle of a silver dollar tossed high into the air. But that's not the real issue, is it? The oft heard "rogue nations" public arguments supporting the so called missile shield in the first place, IMO, mostly are propaganda pudding for the public. The rational reason to attempt to construct such a shield, I believe, is the absolute necessity for the preservation of missilemen, their infrastructure and continued refinement of their technology of terror. [Like it or not, as doctors traffic in pain and attorneys in conflict, so do missilemen traffic in terror.] Unlike the innovation and testing demands of real world hardware and ballistics, today's thermonuclear payloads can be modeled and tested on a supercomputer. Voila! A nuclear test ban treaty! [N.B., other signatories don't have our supercomputer capacity.] And also now, voila, the logic of our needing to bail from the ABM Treaty. A long term contract between the resources of government, academia and private enterprise must be negotiated, funded and signed to stem the real threat of a brain drain of young highly skilled engineers and technicians to a heavily venture funded high tech sector. Once lost, the unique knowledge and specialized skills of real career and paycheck needing people is almost impossible to reacquire. That argument may be somewhat weaker today, but the fact remains, that until the advent, perhaps, of quantum super duper computers, as long as we're in the missile business that business has to innovate and grow, or wither as the former Soviet program. And that means continuing to innovate, build and test. Practice, practice, practice. I'm no fan of the ABM missile shield as it is bound to be a distraction from what appears to be, what with the recent noise from FARC, a three theater special ops war campaign of indeterminate length against both terrorism and drugs in each of those three theaters. Even though I don't agree, I do, however, have an understanding what all the fuss is about and why it is so important to so many. Jerry in Omaha