Re: Ada and the NMD

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <slrn9pfbm4.ln.randhol+abuse@kiuk0156.chembio.ntnu.no>, Preben
Randhol says...
>Yes but as I understand the argumentation it is the protection of USA
>against rogue states (not Russia) that is the target. And it doesn't

You are making the mistake of believing that the current arguments you hear are
the *actual* reasons for making it. Things don't work that way here. We come up
with a government program or weapon system, then go looking for good
rationalizations for building it.

This very issue was touched on in, of all places, one of Douglas Adams' "Dirk
Gently" books. I'd give a quote, but I don't have the book handy. Essentially,
one of the main characters struck it rich by creating a sort of reverse-theorem
prover that you could give a conclusion, and it would come up with a set of
plausible-sounding steps to get you to that conclusion. When he got it
completed, the US DoD came in and bought the whole project. He claimed that he
recognised some of the argument patterns in the Congressional Star Wars
arguments. :-)


>have to land to be harmful. I mean just look at the extent of the
>nuclear downfall from Tsjernobyl.

H-bombs and shoddy Soviet nuclear fission plants are *quite* different from each
other. Most folks in this country never figured that one out either, though.

>> silly as the  Star Wars program itself. Almost. There *are* good
>> reasons for being against it,
>
>Such as it is easy to fool the system with flares or something like that
>if I remember correctly?

That's a particularly good one in my book. Why should I, as a taxpayer, spend
loads of my money developing something that will probably be defeatable with
some simple cheap countermeasure? Sure, we can then try to counter the
counter-measure. But that just leads to a vicious cycle where the baddies will
always inevitably be one step ahead. In the end I see tons of money spent for
very little gain. Better to just use the dough to send the terrorists to college
or something. Get them all jobs maintaining Perl code, and they'll be too busy
to even think about blowing anything up. :-)

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