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

To: Ish who wrote (111928)	8/18/2003 7:01:22 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

One of my favourite photos is one I took in 1976 from the bottom of the Twin Towers with a blue sky and shining lines dwindling into distant perspective. Our son Tarken was born later that year, named after a Turkish guy's cartoon character tarkan-sitesi.com - Sezgin and his wife [and children] had been hospitable to us in 1974 while travelling in Istanbul [with tanks all around - we didn't know that they were nearly at war with Greece at the time]. In 1999, on the way to Telecom99 in Geneva, to see Globalstar in action and to be there for the start of service, I took one of our daughters, [then aged 19], who was travelling with me, to New York, which she loved, and to see the Twin Towers, which I loved. Not just for the architecture but for what they represented - World Trade = free and voluntary interchange among people. I was also a civil engineer once upon a time, so admired the whole thing. There's a photo of Bernie Schwartz [Globalstar's and Loral's boss], leaning against the window frame of a building in New York, with a Globalstar phone and the Twin Towers in the distant background, having placed one of the first calls to the San Jose facility which runs the satellites and gateways. As you might know, Globalstar went bust, starting from the failure of a Zenit rocket launched from Kazakhstan. 12 satellites were lost which set Globalstar back so long and added such costs that the whole thing was in trouble. The launch was also a thrill for me as it represented the conversion of ICBM nuclear weapon delivery systems to something constructive and the end of a threatened nuclear Armageddon which had loomed over my whole life. Swords to ploughshares. The launch apparently went well and my wife and I went out to celebrate. At San Jose, they celebrated too. BUT, the person reporting on launch progress had lost contact with the launch managers and so had read from a script rather than actual telemetry data. In fact, the three self-monitoring computers on board messed up and crashed the rocket. After the celebrations, we came back to earth with a thud. That led directly to the implosion of Long Term Capital Management and the ramifications thereafter. Long Term Capital Management had quite a stake in Globalstar. At the beginning of 1998, our son [then aged 21] was diagnosed with Non Hodgkins Lymphoma, a usually fatal disease. He has survived and now has good prospects of doing so. Hope springs eternal. But Globalstar has gone [though the system is still operating which is some small consolation and might yet act as a framework to continue with a better system and technology]. The Twin Towers have gone. Siers S100 [Brad], Edwina, Kelly Kameyer and the people going thud have gone. So much has gone. No wonder people get old and tired with the constant emotional wear and tear. It's so great to see little 21st century children, without the scars on their hearts and only young tears in their eyes. With no memory of the MADness. <Those thuds made an impression on me that will last the rest of my life. I also watched the A&E special on how those towers got built. It boggled my mind how anyone would want to destroy that much work. > Life's a giggle, but there are interludes which are fit only for tears and weary resignation. My wife and I watched the destruction [being replayed - I was woken by a cellphone call from Tarken] of the Twin Towers from a rented house in Paihia in the Bay of Islands on a most beautiful day. It was totally idyllic and as beautiful as what exists that day looking out over the town, water, boats and trees. Yet simultaneously and insanely the destruction of magnificence elsewhere was under way. But at least it was a lot less than MAD [mutual assured destruction] as seen with Dr Strangelove. Imagine what it was like in Hiroshima. The memorial there is heart rending too. As is so much. Okay, rant off. Enough of the maudlin memories. Mqurice