…and Bush’s missile defense system still failed.

Surely the highly paid companies working on this project know that hitting a bullet with another bullet isn’t something worth pursuing- especially when the easy way around that is for North Korea (or whomever) to send more than one “bullet” at a time and not have the common decency to send us a flight plan with on-board military grade GPS to track it with. I assume everyone is aware that the real threat is someone FedExing a bomb into one of our ports- if we had any sense we’d put the money there. In any case, the companies I speak of are being paid $10 billion a year to shut up and try to make Bush’s missile system work.

Seems to me if you’re going to throw ridiculous amounts money at this kind of thing high intensity lasers would be the way to go.

Before you say anything, yes, I’ve seen “Real Genius” and I understand the dangers of a maniacal college professor who hates popcorn forcing his students to build a laser weapon. (”Why’d you build that mirror Kent!?!?”)

Pulling out my old physics textbook, it appears that light is quicker than a missile which shuts itself down before even launching for some unknown reason. Barring any interference from Kent, a laser should fire more reliably than a missile… and your only worry (aside from those huge honkin’ nuclear missiles headed your way) would be friendly fire- if the laser is space based attempts to shoot down the missile that miss would hit the earth somewhere… and if it’s a ground based system you don’t want to start blinding alien species or shooting down satellites or space stations…

Uh… okay… maybe this idea still needs some work. As wacked-out as this idea is, it’s more reasonable than what they’re spending $10 billion a year on right now. It appears to me this is just a huge give-away to missile makers who aren’t getting as many orders for ICBMs as they used to.