From: Spike Jones (spike66@ibm.net)
Date: Thu Oct 14 1999 - 22:41:15 MDT
Billy Brown wrote:
> These days they are much easier, so ABM systems are becoming
> feasible. In another decade they will be fairly insignificant problems,
> thanks to continuing improvements in computers, sensors and
> telecomminications.
Thy faith shall save thee. Thanks Billy!
> At that point the problem collapses to a contest of agility between reentry
> vehicles and missile-killing devices.
Im betting on the kill vehicles. As time goes on, they actually get smaller
and cheaper to build, because you get the economies of scale. Consider
the THAAD missile: It isnt very big, 340 mm diameter, length on the order
of 4 meters. Top speed 7000 horseturds per fortnight. Altho they must
be manufactured with excruciating care and quality control [as my much-
chastised employer found out] they arent *that* difficult to make. It has
a manufactured sapphire targeting window, which is said to cost $60K, but the
*real* hi tech part of THAAD is in... the software! And one that is
written, its free to replicate.
> The days of MAD are numbered...
Hope so. I think you are a few years younger than me, so you may
not know what Im talking about when I mention duck-and-cover drills.
But be sure it did untold psychological damage to our young people.
I like to think that the technologically advanced nations can help developing
nations by providing leap-frog technologies. For instance, poor nations
need not pay for all the expensive infrastucture of telephone lines everywhere
since they can leap directly to cell phones.
In like manner, the US can spare developing nations the crushing expense
of each dictator needing her own nuclear subs, bombers, missiles, etc.
She can leap-frog to THAAD missiles and save billions of defense dollars,
then use her nation's resources to actually build something useful, like
we have here in the sillyclone valley: vast sprawling neighborhoods of
half million dollar tract shacks.
Oh by the way, LMCo the maker of the successful THAAD missile
is having a half price sale on its stock. Today the stock price was half
what it was a year ago... {8-[
{8^D spike
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