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

To: i-node who wrote (376544)	4/6/2008 12:51:10 PM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 1577147

"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." I am just pointing out the magnitude of the problem. Something you still don't seem to grasp. Yet, despite your inability to understand the problem, you think it can be readily solved. Which, when you think about it, questionable in your case I realize, is a pretty stupid way to go. I am not bitching that SDI isn't finished. I am just pointing out that it doesn't have a prayer on anything like a rational time frame. The job it is tasked to do is just too large. "ABM and NMD are outgrowths of the former SDI; work in progress that gets better over time. " Their goals are also much more limited. Max. of 200 warheads, for example. Much simpler threat scenarios. Which is why, if you really meant these programs, you shouldn't have mentioned SDI. Like the Patriot missile system, they have much simpler jobs to do. "I said that Carl Sagan was an idiot for claiming it couldn't be done." No, he was spot on. "Anyone who was paying attention at the time and didn't have a clue about the magnitude of the problem or our level of technological expertise knew he was FOS." Fixed. Look, Reagan was promising to start fielding SDI in 7 years. That would have been impossible, and the clueful knew it. "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. " Nonsense. Under the current START agreement, the Russians have over 4000 warheads they can deliver by either ICBMs or SLBMs. Stopping them with better than 99.9% confidence is not in the cards for, at best, decades. Because that is the only reasonable level of protection that means anything. Now, you might want to argue that we shouldn't worry about the Russians or the Chinese. Our real concern should be Iran or North Korea who can only launch dozens of IRBMs. Well, personally I don't buy the "crazed leader" meme. They are facing exactly the same equations that the Soviets faced. Unless they can destroy us totally, they aren't going to launch. While they might not care what happens to their people, they do have a compelling interest in keeping their own personal molecules from being impurities in a nuclear glass. And that is assuming we are even a reasonable target for them. Which, for Iran really isn't the case. They are much more worried about dealing with their Sunni neighbors than raining nuclear destruction down on us. And NK is much more concerned with keeping SK out and possibly crippling them in case they decide to swoop down again. If that is even in the cards. At the moment, NK wants to keep the food and fuel flowing in from the south. Their chosen method has been to posture and threaten. "Even though SDI as originally conceived has morphed into numerous different programs" Because the original SDI didn't have a prayer. All of the present approaches are based on the things that everyone agreed could probably work. Stopping a limited number of warheads mainly in the terminal phase is something that is just a matter of technology. They are all ground and air based, with only sensors being space based. The objections have alway been to trying to stop a massive attack with space based assets. "The so-called "brilliant pebbles" concept is currently undergoing evaluation for use in connection with MDA, after having been discontinued in the 90s." It was canceled for a reason. There are two big problems. One, space based anti-missile assets are banned by the ABM treaty. Two, to get adequate coverage, you need thousands of these things. Even if we dedicate all of our launch capacity to this, it would take decades to get a functional system in place. FWIW, in the 1970s Jerry Pournelle pulled together a group of SF authors, people from JPL and the military to brainstorm ideas for ballistic missile defense. Many of their ideas were later incorporated into SDI. The one they felt had the most promise was what they called "flying crowbars". That led to "smart rocks", which led to "brilliant pebbles". Jerry and Larry Niven later incorporated many of the ideas into their novel "Footfall".