NYT: Ground-Based Great-Grandson of Star Wars Back on Agenda

[DeepModem Mom]

THE MISSILE ISSUE
The Great-Grandson of Star Wars, Now Ground-Based, Is Back on the Agenda
By CARL HULSE and WILLIAM J. BROAD

Published: June 8, 2004


WASHINGTON, June 7 - Ronald Reagan's signature vision of a space shield to protect the nation from a barrage of nuclear missiles has devolved from its original Star Wars concept to a more rudimentary system of ground-based rockets that the Bush administration hopes to put in place this year.

Launched with bravura in March 1983, Mr. Reagan's endeavor was to make enemy missiles "impotent and obsolete," he said. But technological and political realities intervened. The 1986 Challenger disaster rocked the space program and the collapse of the Soviet Union ended the cold war, rendering less urgent Mr. Reagan's plan, officially called the Strategic Defensive Initiative.

The Clinton administration explored a less advanced missile system, but the current Bush administration has embraced a version of Mr. Reagan's idea. Special interceptors now being built at an aerospace factory in Arizona are soon to be deployed in silos in Alaska, California and eventually in other sites. They are not intended to counter the threat that Mr. Reagan saw, a rain of I.C.B.M.'s from the Soviet Union, but to guard against a missile launched from North Korea or an as-yet-unidentified rogue state.

Though the magnitude of the project has been scaled back, opposition and skepticism remain. Until Mr. Reagan's death on Saturday led Senate leaders to put off most legislative action this week, the Senate had been preparing for a debate on Democratic proposals to require more testing for a system that critics say is being put into the field without an adequate gauge of its capabilities. "If we want a missile defense that works rather than one that sits on the ground and soaks up money, we should not shy away from realistic testing requirements," said Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee....


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/national/08missiles.html

[tabasco]

1. Nothing but a corporate enrichment program.

Billions wasted on a system that does nothing for national security.

[struggle4progress]

2. Boondoggle!

[Zynx]

3. Have it actually hit something....

And then we can consider it. None of the tests of BMD/SW have been close to realistic.

Realistic being that the system is up and on alert, a target is fired with no warning whatsoever on an unknown flight path, the interceptor does not know it is coming, the target uses standard decoy measures, and the interceptor takes it down before it would impact its target.

We don't have anything close to capable of doing that.

[LastDemocratInSC]

4. For every deterrent there's a work-around

The Russians recently announced that they are testing a new hypersonic vehicle that will be able to out maneuver any of the anti-missle defenses currently under consideration by the U.S.

NASA recently flight-tested a similar vehicle using a scram-jet engine.

The star-wars concept assumes that the incoming warheads, while aimed at individual targets, will follow ballistic paths. Predicting their positions so they can be hit isn't too difficult with today's computer technology. The hard part of star-wars is being to distinguish the real warheads from the decoys, and then actually contacting the warheads because they aren't very big.

The depolyment of a maneuverable hypersonic delivery system by the Russians will make any of the current anti-missle systems obsolete.

And so it goes ...

[mbperrin]

5. The money Reagan "borrowed"

from Social Security to pay for it's still gone, right?

I want my two trillion dollars back!!!