Some chickenhawks WANT us to`"shoot down" the Korean test-missile

THIS is the scariest bit of news that's out these days.. Apparently they are going to launch it if the clouds lift...on Wednesday.. I have heard at least FOUR yahoos on tv yesterday who advocate the shoot-down plan...to send a message to China as well as NKorea.

In another time, I would dismiss it as bluster and chest-thumping, but look at what they have already done.. This launch could be the perfect "excuse" to leave Iraq, AND to justify the build-up of the nuclear arms race..(cha-ching for the defense companies)...

What amazes me is that we would be so "provocative" (quoting Kindasleazy), and what if it MISSES?? The only tests that have "worked" were later found to have been fudged..

This AM I heard on the news that we had "activated" our missile shield..:eyes:..The perfect time to "test" it in real-time is to attempt to shoot down their test...and will China be "pleased" with us if we do? I seem to recall that we owe them a shitload of money, and have many US assets parked on their soil..

We don't have a JFK sitting in the Oval office... we have a guy who thinks nuance means he just found out about some sisters his Mom had...that he didn't know about

Cooper!

and lands on Oahu - killing thousands of Hawaiians. Bush would just say "those Orientals on Hawaii are just 'numbers' - collateral damage so to speak." He probably doesn't know Hawaii is a US state.

never do.

we really are not able to do that yet. We have tried shooting down missiles over the pacific but the only times we have accomplished it was by cheating. We do not have the technology worked out well enough for this.

They may just do it and pray they get "lucky"...once again "proving" how they are keeping us "safe".. It's the Hail Mary play just before an election they love... The media would be full of "pride" about how we "did it", and how "George Bush saved Alaska"

w/ the N. Korean test missile is that our inability to shoot it down exposes what a pile of bs our star wars program is. I think our gov't would be posturing a lot more if they actually had the capability.

Like the fact that our system FAILED in tests, even when they had homing device on target to follow?

Gads, they want us to show our system doesn't work as advertised? Isn't that another "bring it on" caliber dumb shit thing to do? Show nations that may wanna strike us sometime that we are sitting ducks who spent money on nothing? :wtf: Bunch of foolish twits suffering server arrested adolescence? Can we give them a bottle rocket and tell them to go outside, the grown ups are busy?


AAARRRGGGGGGGGGG Why do they hate America so?

it, and even though the only "succesful" tests were fudged, this crew only hears what it WANTS to hear, and counts on "luck".

We will be the laughing stock of the world.

So far, the test firings for the missile defense system have been less than impressive.

Even talking about it openly is a breach of diplomacy.. I know NKorea is not a "friend", but when we bluster on and on about them, it only increases their belligerence and proves to them that they need to fear us..

so that he can spend more money on defense (contractors.)

The handwriting is on the wall - he will spend every last dollar he can find so there will be nothing left for hardworking Americans and their Social Security and retirement.

Shrub is insane and should be physically removed from office "to protect himself" and us.

What could possibly go wrong.These guys get every call right.

The Bushist military is all show and no go. No reason to believe our missile system is any better maintained than our troops.

The chief Bush legacy is the destruction of American military supremacy.

Forum: Rumsfeld's folly: National Missile Defense

Sunday, January 14, 2001

...

Rumsfeld fulfilled his role perfectly, concluding that the intelligence estimate report was incorrect and strongly supporting the proposed National Missile Defense program. With this appointment, it is clear that President-elect George W. Bush intends to fulfill his campaign promise to deploy NMD as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, funding this multibillion-dollar boondoggle - a gilded jobs program for the defense industry - will not serve to make Americans safer.

...


NMD is a system of "exoatmospheric kill vehicles" (EKVs) that are launched into space by conventional ballistic missiles upon the detection of any suspicious missile activity. Guided by several types of onboard, ground-based and satellite-based detectors, the EKVs are supposed to seek and destroy any enemy missiles by directly impacting them in flight (called "hitting a bullet with a bullet"). The whole process is to be monitored by the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado and is estimated to cost between $30 billion and $60 billion to build and maintain.

The NMD program is a direct descendant of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, or better known as Star Wars). Sprung from the fevered imagination of Edward Teller and his cronies at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and made national policy by Ronald Reagan in 1983, the idea was to orbit giant satellites in space equipped with nuclear bombs and lasers. Enemy missiles were to be shot down by an intense X-ray beam, powered by a nuclear explosion and lasting only for an instant before the entire satellite was annihilated.

It was not until 1993 - and $30 billion later - that the project was deemed unworkable. Its successor was the equally hare-brained idea of orbiting hundreds of "brilliant pebbles" that would intercept and destroy incoming missiles by smashing into them. This program was justifiably renamed "loose marbles" by at least one senator.

...

In the same address that announced the White House decision, Clinton said, "It would be folly to base the defense of our nation solely on a strategy of waiting until missiles are in the air, and then trying to shoot them down."

One can go further than this and say that it will be technologically impossible to reliably shoot them down for the foreseeable future, especially if simple countermeasures are taken, and that insisting on deploying any flawed system will needlessly put millions of Americans at a heightened risk of nuclear attack.

...


http://www.post-gazette.com/forum/20010114edswan9.asp

"Anyone who thinks we would try this is only showing their ignorance."

:rofl:

Nor do we "owe" anyone that has bought US government debt securities. They arent loans, per se, they are bonds that China and anyone else who purchased them, bought KNOWING exactly what they were buying. BONDS & other Treasury securities.

No one with the United States Government went to the Chinese Gov't and took out a loan for $100,000,000,000.

Suggesting that China or any other holder of US Debt securities could "call in" their debt is untrue and demonstrates a lack of understanding of how the system works.

is horriffic, especially since we don't exactly have a thriving industrial base anymore..

But, you can also think of the imbalance this way;

They send us clothing and assorted other cheap, but tangible Wal-Mart crap and we send them......

paper.

The downside to that equation is that they can take that paper and use it to acquire weapons.

One last point.

There is an old saying - If your local bank is worth a million dollars and you borrow a thousand, the bank OWNS YOU.
If your local bank is worth a million dollars and you borrow 900,000, YOU OWN THE BANK.

I know that is simplistic, but it is, to a certain degree, true. The rest of the world has a vested interest in making sure the US economy keeps chugging along. The Chinese won't get too upset. They aren't huge fans of Kim Jong Il either. He's a pain in the ass that makes them hardly any money.

a rather long article, but it sort of sums up what our defensive capabilities are ...not...
.....................................

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58080-2004Sep28.html


THE BUSH RECORD: Missile Defense
Interceptor System Set, But Doubts Remain
Network Hasn't Undergone Realistic Testing

By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 29, 2004; Page A01

At a newly constructed launch site on a tree-shorn plain in central Alaska, a large crane crawls from silo to silo, gently lowering missiles into their holes. The sleek white rockets, each about five stories tall, are designed to soar into space and intercept warheads headed toward the United States.

With five installed so far and one more due by mid-October, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is preparing to activate the site sometime this autumn. President Bush already has begun to claim fulfillment of a 2000 presidential campaign pledge -- and longtime Republican Party goal -- to build a nationwide missile defense. But what the administration had hoped would be a triumphant achievement is clouded by doubts, even within the Pentagon, about whether a system that is on its way to costing more than $100 billion will work. Several key components have fallen years behind schedule and will not be available until later. Flight tests, plagued by delays, have yet to advance beyond elementary, highly scripted events.

The paucity of realistic test data has caused the Pentagon's chief weapons evaluator to conclude that he cannot offer a confident judgment about the system's viability. He estimated its likely effectiveness to be as low as 20 percent. "A system is being deployed that doesn't have any credible capability," said retired Gen. Eugene Habiger, who headed the U.S. Strategic Command in the mid-1990s. "I cannot recall any military system being deployed in such a manner." Senior officials at the Pentagon and the White House insist the system will provide protection, although they use terms such as "rudimentary" and "limited" to describe its initial capabilities. Some missile defense, they say, is better than none, and what is deployed this year will be improved over time.

"Did we have perfection with our first airplane, our first rifle, our first ship?" Rumsfeld said in an interview last month. "I mean, they'd still be testing at Kitty Hawk, for God's sake, if you wanted perfection." This notion of building first and improving later lies at the heart of the administration's approach, which defense officials have dubbed "evolutionary acquisition" or "spiral development." Bush has scaled back President Ronald Reagan's vision of a vast anti-missile network and pursued a less ambitious system. At the outset, the system will be aimed only at countering a small number of missiles that would be fired by North Korea, which is 6,000 miles from the West Coast of the United States.

snip.....