Article

2003-05-21 International

Missile shield gains support across globe

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Posted by Dar 2003-05-21 09:24 am|| || Front Page|| [11 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 oh yeah, bush got all huggy with Putin, hes a great guy, he likes missile defense, etc. Then Putin co-leads the axis of weasels. Im still waiting for the white house to explain whats going on in Russia, how it misjudged Putin, and what the implications of that are wrt missile defense (did Putin okay missile defense only cause he had no choice, and secretly decided to undermine us elsewhere) so far the inclination seems to be to blame the French, and claim that its Lukoil driving Russian policy in the Mideast, not Putin.

Posted by liberalhawk 2003-05-21 09:54:40|| 2003-05-21 09:54:40|| Front Page Top

#2 Doesn't matter whether Putin likes it or not, missile defense is going to happen at some point. If opposition to missile defense collapsed among other nations, that's fine, but in the event that opposition DIDN'T evaporate, it probably wouldn't factor into the decision to go ahead with a missile defense plan anyway.

Posted by Bomb-a-rama 2003-05-21 14:12:02|| 2003-05-21 14:12:02|| Front Page Top

#3 "So much for the denigrating talk of "Star Wars"
and the predictions that it'll never work."

It always depended on the threat you were
defending against. Against thousands of
warheads and decoys with fast-boost launchers
from the old USSR--not a chance. They could
trivially overwhelm our detection systems, not
to mention our interceptors. The APS report
was pretty conclusive.

Against a dozen missiles from North Korea
a missile defense might be possible. Not easy,
even so.

Posted by James 2003-05-21 19:45:52|| 2003-05-21 19:45:52|| Front Page Top

#4 The science behind the "midcourse" segment of the defense is murkier than I'd like; the major public sources on it (like the Union of Concerned Scientists) have a well-known bias. Reading between the lines, I think we have a good decade to go before we could deploy a system that we can trust to shoot down ICBMs.

Posted by Ray 2003-05-22 02:01:25|| [campuscgi.princeton.edu/~ray/weblog/] 2003-05-22 02:01:25|| Front Page Top

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