Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Bomb
The Boston Globe Online runs a Washington Post story about a scientific critique of the administration’s missile defense program. In case you’ve forgotten, this is the Republican spending initiative to funnel government money to defense contractors.
The APS report said interceptor rockets would have to be ”substantially” faster and larger more agile than any developed so far.
They also would need to be very agile, the report said. Further, to stand any chance of catching up with an enemy missile, the interceptors would need to be positioned generally within 400 to 1,000 kilometers of an enemy’s launch pad. And after detecting a launch, US authorities would have only about a half-minute or so to decide whether to fire, risking confusion between peaceful space launches and missile attacks, the report said.
So, basically the report is saying that 1) we need better rockets to have any hope of ever making the system work, and 2) even if we can develop better rockets we need to know ahead of time where a missile will be fired from. Sounds like a great way to waste a few hundred billion dollars!
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