----- Original Message ----- From: "John D. Giorgis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, November 19, 2002 5:53 AM Subject: Re: Missile Defense in a New Strategic Environment
> And as for ignoring human rights abuses by Russia - wasn't the price we > paid for being permitted to attack Afghanistan? My view is that a quid pro quo was set up in December, covering a good deal. Bush could have offered the ABM treaty as a carrot. Maybe he did, but it wasn't considered much of a carrot. or the price we paid to > expand NATO? or the price we paid to get the Iraq resolution through the > UNSC? The last was clear to me: we gave in at least as much ground as France and Russia on the resolution. We agreed to have the resolution state that the UN was just going to talk some more about things if Iraq doesn't cooperate. The US got the inclusion of "serious consequences." If you look at what's going on now, and compare it to the administration's retoric of the late summer, you will see a tremendous difference. The analyis that I've read suggests that Powell ended up being more influencial than Cheney. I'm guessing it had to do with the question: "OK, our army has beaten Hussein, now what?" >This argument that somehow we have traded acquiesence to Russia's > human rights abuses for agreements for Russia looks more and more shaky > every time it is used, and indeed appears to simply be the default means to > discredit any foreign policy achievement by President Bush. Well, his achievements are mixed. The Israel-Palestine situation has deteriorated on his watch to the worst I remember since '73. Maybe it wasn't his fault, but benign neglect was clearly not a good foreign policy option. He told the world that the US would do what we please on a number of issues. The results of this are still uncertain. He has repeatedly stated that the US was not in the business of nation building. Thus, we have the present situation in Afganistan; the Taliban are out, which is good, but the warlords rule the country without much interference. >After all, it sets an impossible standard for Bush - i.e. successfully getting a nuclear > power to change their human rights behaviour i the matter of a year, maybe > two years, while at the same time diminishing all the things that he has > achieved. No, the standard is not agreeing to look the other way. > >The ABM systems do not pass the BS test I use for new technology. The test > >isn't foolproof, but I'd be very curious to see why they don't do the > >things that successful and innovative designers tend to do with hard > >problems. Instead they do the thing that usually leads to failure: > >compress the schedule and backload the high risk portion of the test. > > The reason for this is that the political opponents of missile defence have > no tolerance for failures of any sort - and would use failures to kill the > program, arguing that any failure would demonstrate that missile defence is > technologically impossible. So, we have a multi-billion dollar PR program? For at least 20 years, I have read thoughtful articles that acknowledge that a missle can be made to hit a single other missle, but talk about the extreme difficulty in countering a swarm of drones. IIRC, there was a 100-1 cost advantage to the drone maker. One of the folks who has been a persistant critic has agreed that there was a possibility that a spaced based laser system could knock out the missles and drones that a borderline nuclear power might throw at the US. He favored research into the underlying technology. > But considering that a few years ago, these political opponents were > arguing that it was technologically impossible to even hit a missile in > flight, Huh? I've been reading about it for about 20 years. I'm sure you can find some idiot who has said that, but the criticism has always been that you cannot 1) Count on 100% 2) Seperate real warheads from cheap drones. I'll grant you that reducing the problem from stopping >1000 missles to stopping <20 changes the first problem considerably. But, the 2nd problem has been prominent for as long as I've been reading serious articles on the subject. >and now they are arguing that it is impossible to hit certain types > of missiles in flight, I find it hard to call the current process a total > failure. OK, howabout a meaningless hollow success? Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
