Kent Mesplay asked for policy advice about the current "star wars" weapons proposal.

"Missile shields" are an economic, technological, and foreign policy disaster.

During the "first" Gulf war, the mass media *and the classified "intelligence" given to the Joint Chiefs and the President* were full of reports of the brilliant performance of the "Patriot" missils system, which was reported to knock down the unpatriotic "Scud" missiles launched by the evil doers. Over time it came out that those reports were all lies, and less than one in 25 "Patriots" launched actually had any effect at all on its target. "Scuds" just don't have good guidance, and tended not to hit anything important when they landed.

But the public (including most of the Congress) was left with the strong and false impression that you could reliably hit a transorbital ballistic missile with another missile using 1990 technology. Which was, I suspect, the whole point of the exercise, since Scuds were never much of a threat to anything. Patriots vs. Scuds was a weapons marketing project. The delivery vehicle was Cable News Network.

Since then some technologies (e.g. memory density, high energy lasers) have gotten amazingly better, and others (e.g. software reliability) have stayed about the same or gotten worse. It *may* be possible to hit a missile with another missile today, or even with a laser beam, if you know roughly where it will be launched from, *almost* all the time.

But we will never know. The *social* structure surrounding the technology (dishonest, profit-seeking corporations selling to corrupt and ignorant Congresscritters, military procurement officers retiring to cushy lobbyist jobs) makes it absolutely impossible to get *reliable* information about how well it works, how "safe" it is, or even how much it really costs. (Which is also the real problem with commercial nuclear fission.) No matter how good or bad the technology is, it is impossible to build a "missile shield" of *known* reliability. And the enemy knows that. A "missile shield" *of unknown reliability* isn't a credible defense. It's not even a credible deterrent. Its only real functions, therefore, are as an *offensive* weapon and a way to funnel money to politically connected vendors.

But the war-mongers drink their own Kool-aid. Once it's built, a strong faction in the Pentagon and State dept will actually believe they have neutralized whatever threat the "missile shield" was supposed to thwart. Without the threat, they will see no incentive to pursue diplomatic solutions to anything. Some of them will use it as an argument for more wars of aggression.

And the nations the thing is pointed at will be forced to react in two ways. They'll have to waste money on countermeasures, and they'll have to move to a higher defense condition. Make it easier to push the button because you have to do it faster. Fewer controls and safety checks between a radar malfunction and the next all-out world war. Sideline the cooler heads who don't want to do that, and promote the war-mongers.

In the 1980s, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility recruited enough credible experts to convince the Congress that Reagan's "Star Wars" was infeasible. (Notably David Parnas of AT&T.) Could not be made reliable at any cost. Star Wars' political momentum was unstoppable, but that knowledge (that it was a stupid boondoggle) led to a compromise. Instead of doubling spending every year until Star Wars "worked," which was the original proposal, it would just flush about $5B/year down the gold plated toilet to politically favored "defense" contractors, forever, and everyone would shut up (or lie) about its lack of progress.

The software reliability issues which made Star Wars infeasible have never been solved. They've gotten worse as software has gotten more complex and difficult to manage and test. Very large systems will always behave in ways their designers couldn't anticipate.

So I think the Green position is "missile shields" are just another cycle in the arms race, making us all less safe not more, and wasting vast sums of money, and we're opposed to the whole arms race.

I'd also like to say something about the big lie known as "defense spinoffs." For as long as there has been a weapons business, weapons salesmen have been claiming that advanced weapons development creates new technology with valuable civilian applications. It's generally been a lie. Computer and communications technology has been driven for the last twenty years by entertainment systems. The fastest CPU chip available is in the Playstation 3. (and it was made by IBM, not Intel.) The recent build-out of the Internet, which is much bigger than the more famous one in the late '90s, and the advances in fiber optic technology to support it, is to support music and movie downloads and electronic record-keeping. Hospitals and insurance companies that moved from paper to electronic images move a hell of a lot of data around. Video gamers buy new high-end computers every year, in their own little arms race. Little Hollywood graphics shops build the fastest supercomputers (racks and racks of little Linux boxes) to render lifelike hair and feathers and water quickly.

The military only starts using that stuff when it's been around long enough to make it through their long qualification cycles. And anything developed for the missile shield will be specialized enough that it doesn't have any application in civilian life. If anything, it squanders scarce engineering talent on useless, harmful junk.

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