Friday, May 11, 2007
The Bush administration wants to install 10 interceptors in Poland and
tracking radar in the Czech Republic – like the type of system that
doesn't work in Alaska. Congress is unlikely to provide the money. The
Safeguard ABM system was abandoned, the Strategic Defense Initiative was
stillborn, and Bush's National Missile Defense is turned off. Ballistic
missiles are easier to make than to stop. The only meaningful defense has
always been the threat of retaliation. But a chilling article in today's
NY Times asks “retaliation against whom?” Missiles carry a return
address. Bombs carried in by terrorists do not.
At the annual AAAS Science and Technology Forum last week, one-time
physicist Jack Marburger, told science policy wonks that prospects for
increased science funding are poor. Marburger observed that science has
been held to a constant slice of the federal pie for the past 40 years,
and he says it's not going to change now. He cited “competing societal
priorities,” by which he must mean the war in Iraq. “New researchers will
either find new ways to fund their work, or they will leave the field.”
Seventeen years ago, Dan Goldin, then head of NASA, pushed hard for a
major effort, called Mission to Planet Earth, to monitor changes in
Earth's environment from space. The head of the Space Subcommittee, Dana
Rohrabacher (R-CA), hated the idea, and transferred funding to the Space
Station (WN 14 Nov 97) . I recalled
the episode when I read an op-ed in Wednesday's Washington Post in which
the heads of the three top climate/oceanographic labs warn that the shift
of NASA funding to Moon/Mars is threatening observations of our own planet
at a very critical time.
Last week at the Republican presidential debate, moderator Chris Matthews
asked whether any of the wannabes did not believe in evolution. Sam
Brownback, Mike Huckabee and Tom Tancredo raised their hands. John McCain
waffled: “I believe in evolution, “he said, “but I also believe when I
hike the Grand Canyon that the hand of God is there also.” The Sunday
Washington Post pointed out that they weren't that far from mainstream. In
an ABC poll a year ago, 61% thought Genesis is literally true.
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