We could include Russia and China in the project. The PRC and Russia's developments would happen regardless of BMD, so that is not a real impact. No one said 'rely' on the system. You act as if diplomatic and economic efforts stop when we build BMD. Simply incorrect. As I've pointed out before, new nuclear nations are more at risk of things like accidental launches because they don't have 50 years of protocol on safety and because they empirically do not want to open their programs to outside scrutiny. You can just keep saying 'diplomacy is the way to go' over and over, but in the past it has neither stopped aspiring nuclear powers from proliferating, nor has it made those proliferations safer. Finally, you still don't deal with miscalculation, among other dangers of proliferation. And yet ending the Cold War is hardly a small return on the original $80 billion, correct? Although there is no ONE variable that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, many ex-soviet leaders give SDI more credit than you do, btw.Ending the Cold War led to the so-called 'peace dividend' started with Bush Sr. I wonder how much money was saved? Don't know for sure but its certainly billions and again that cuts the economic argument. There are tangible benefits already accrued from this program, but if you want to just keep pretending there aren't, then I guess we're done. The real answer to the asteroid problem is that you're right, its international in nature and we'd undoubtably see an international response. So that probably shouldn't be a priority. BMD sucks up an added advantage by getting us a head start on asteroids defense. Yes, we're having a hard time now, but that's not really a convincing objection. EVERY major undertaking throughout human history has been difficult in the beginning. Finally, I don't know HOW you can say 'this is the only benefit I see from this program' when I listed about 20 above. I guess the women who don't die from breast cancer feel differently. The people who breathe less pollution, the hazardous waste workers that have less health problems, the astronomers that can examine the universe more closely, the people who won't die from heart attacks because they were diagnosed early....I guess there's no benefits to these programs I can see either...
Hayes Street; The problem is that this isn't something that we can have both ways. There is a clear economic consequence regarding spending priorities since we don't have unlimited resources. There is an opportunity costs associated with spending tens of billions on BMD instead of other solutions. The other problem is that development of BMD clearly hurts our diplomatic efforts because it antagonizes both our opponents and allies. We can't expect diplomatically convince other nuclear powers to refrain from developing and proliferating nukes when we appear to be undermining MAD. But how as SDI ever stopped proliferation since it hasn't worked? Especially since things are worse now than they were in the 80's. Still the few successes in non-proliferation are due to diplomacy, South Africa, Brazil and recently Libya. As I said before we have the technical capabilty to deal with this by working using diplomacy to slow proliferation and working with existing nuclear powers to better safeguard their systems. See above why its difficult to do this at the same time we develop SDI. Any non-proliferation and economic benefits from the end of Cold War have been lost because we didn't follow up with a god diplomatic effort, and still haven't, to secure the arsenal of the Soviet Union. This is one more of those opportunity costs that are incurred by spending on SDI. As I said before I don't deny that SDI played a role in the fall of the USSR but if you look at what was happening its very likely that the USSR would've collapsed even if we didn't spend a cent on SDI. Either you're arguing for a bait and switch program or justifying every pork barrel spending program out there. Any major undertaking produces side benefits. If we build colonies on the Moon and Mars I predict we'll have immense side benefits. Does that mean we should fund all of them? I agree with everything your bring up there but why then does it take funding some massive program with an unrelated goal to get it? As I said before noone justified the Apollo program based on getting teflon and microcomputers they were good but in the end the goal was the Moon. Something that while it spent a lot of money didn't cause us diplomatic headaches and wasn't opposed by an opponent program to develop countermeasures. We don't see that with SDI. To sum things up. You bring up some very good points and I'm not against SDI in theory but I just don't see how it can be done practically and without causing us other headaches.
