“anti-missle defense is not anti but rather a show-me-it-works approach”…would you have opposed Britain’s deployment of a radar-and-communications-based air defense system in the late 1930s, on grounds that it had never been tested in combat?

It is a suggested world-wide ban. China doesn’t sign, then probably no deal

Read the parent. The Chinese will sign a treaty and them promptly break it. We won’t even have definite proof they broke the treaty until they use the weapons. This is exactly like the 1973 world ban on biological weapons. The Soviets and Chinese signed it and properly broke it in utter secrecy. Americans who claimed they broke the treaty prior to the fall of Communism were decried as hysterical warmongers in the pay of defense companies etc.

Of the many items we send aloft, how many do you think are simply that which they are said to be?

Rather my point. There is no way to tell what is in a payload headed for space. Over the last 50 years we have shot a lot of stuff into orbit and looking back no one at the time had a clue they even existed much less what they did. The Russians and the Chinese could have nukes sailing over our heads right now and we wouldn’t have a clue.

ps: anti-missle defense is not anti but rather a show-me-it-works approach

No, its “it will never work and will make the world a worse place if it does work so we will oppose even researching it” kind of deal. It’s kind of hard that credibly claim a show-me-it-works approach when you oppose the research to demonstrate that it works. Almost all the arguments to date about missile defense have been over whether to even fund research. Had leftist had their way, today we wouldn’t even have the technology to argue over deploying.

Any awareness of what sometimes goes into space under the guise of science?

Which is just evidence that liberalism/”progressivism is a form of retardation. They claim a superior way of life and then refuse to defend it and threaten anyone who does (irony?). Anyone enemy is a friend and any friend is an enemy. They can’t stand the church but are more religious about socialism (which is all faith based as it has never ever worked) than most Christians. They even have their own Obamessiah. I see another immigration – this time from the United States – in my future.

Helen, that’s my hope too. Unfortunately, this is shaping up to be the same kind of Dumbocrat entrenchment that FDR and his Soviet/Stalin worshiping advisers ushered in. Unfortunately, I think it’s more likely that we will see a decline to European decrepitude and a massive brain drain from the U.S. before we see another Reagan.

Very clearly, “progressives”–and even many mainstream liberals–have long been hostile to the very idea of missile defense. They were hostile to it when the principal threat was from the Soviet Union, and they are hostile to it when the principal threat is from rogue states, terrorists, and a brutish theocracy. They were hostile to it when the latest thing in computer technology was the IBM System/370, and they are hostile to it several generations of technology later. It seems to really bother them that any system should be so presumptuous as to interpose itself between Americans–and citizens of allied nations–and those who would launch missiles at them.