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

To: combjelly who wrote (376525)	4/6/2008 10:21:33 AM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577126

And as I have pointed out, you need a very high probability of success if you expect this country to survive a major nuclear exchange. A half of dozen warheads is enough to push this country back into the stone age. Even assuming that hostilities end at the moment that happens, there is no way that we could avoid hundreds of millions of deaths. Your argument is stupid. In one breath you're telling us how critical it is to have missile defense, then in the next breath you're bitching because the system Reagan started isn't finished yet. ABM and NMD are outgrowths of the former SDI; work in progress that gets better over time. You are right that its capabilities today are limited; I've never suggested anything other than that. I said that Carl Sagan was an idiot for claiming it couldn't be done. Anyone who was paying attention at the time knew he was FOS. And David Parnas (a computer scientist for whom I have the greatest respect) was outspoken against SDI on the basis that you could never develop the necessary software. Obviously, he was dead wrong. Today, we have shown it can be done and at this point it is merely a matter of time and improving technologies -- computers, software technologies, GPS, etc., before which a reasonable level of protection can be achieved. Even though SDI as originally conceived has morphed into numerous different programs, a great deal of the early SDI research is still active in one way or another. The so-called "brilliant pebbles" concept is currently undergoing evaluation for use in connection with MDA, after having been discontinued in the 90s.