Missile Defense Is Missing the Mark

Given the myriad serious problems facing this country, from terrorist attacks to unemployment, overseas job flight and the decimation of the health care system, literally the last thing we need is a multibillion-dollar Maginot Line in space (“Kill Vehicle Scores a Hit With Proponents of Missile Defense,” March 26). The issue is not whether it works; the issue is whether anybody can manage to say, without laughing, that we are probably going to be attacked by a costly, antiquated weapon like the ICBM.

If Congress has taken so many payoffs from the weapons contractors that it feels it has no choice but to approve this program, can’t we just give the contractors the money? That way we can still have our corporate welfare system for Raytheon, et al., but without the dangerous boondoggle.

Stacy Bermingham

San Diego

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I am continually amazed at the ingenuity and inventiveness of the defense industry--and the arrogance. Developing a system that can be described as hitting a bullet with a bullet is a fantastic scientific achievement. However, when queried about the ability to cloak a warhead from the exoatmospheric kill vehicle’s infrared sensors by cooling or insulating, its response is that it is “technologically unfeasible.” I find that answer disingenuous, since we use similar cryogenic technology to cool the sensors in the kill vehicle. And even if cooling the warhead isn’t feasible, wouldn’t placing it inside one of 10 identically heated balloons also render infrared discrimination moot?

Any country that can design, construct and launch an ICBM armed with nuclear weapons can certainly develop a cloaking system, or are we to blithely assume its scientists are not as ingenious or inventive as ours?

Stephen Harvey

Laguna Niguel