Nicole,

I have never advocated as desireable the blowing up of any apartment blocks. When I said that:

"No-one is advocating the slaughter of Iraqi civilians. The Iraqi's are being offered every opportunity to ensure that that does not happen - all they have to do is comply with what they signed up to do back in 1991."

I simply state the case that the Iraqi Government should comply with the UN resolutions and allow UN inspection teams to verify beyond doubt to the international community that Iraq has complied with those resolutions.

In this the Iraqi Government would be a lot more convincing in their statements if they went to the UN and supported the new US resolution regarding the UNMOVIC Inspections. Instead, they have:

1. Issued an invitation to the UN to send inspection teams to Iraq without pre-conditions.

2. Made a declaration that they do not possess any WMD.

3. Introduced conditions governing the activities of the Inspection Teams on their return.

You said:

"We're willing to spend $400 billion a year and have 100s of thousands of soldiers plus millions of workers laboring to prepare for war."

The United States of America spends that on defence anyway - irrespective of Iraq.

The SDI programme you referred to is being pursued to defend your country against the likelyhood of a rogue attack - a one off. Doug drew your attention to recent successfull tests and you countered by mentioning that homing devices were fitted to the target missiles. There are a couple of good reasons for fitting those homing devices Nicole:

1. In taking on a ballistic missile target armed with a nuclear warhead you are faced with a heavy, dead weight target (parabolic ballistic trajectory). Extremely difficult to deflect, so you have to destroy it. That calls for a massive charge, or a number of smaller charges that succeed in breaking up the target warhead. To test whether or not the pattern of charges and size of charges is correct you must first set up a trial where you can guarantee interception - hence # 1 requirement for a homing device.

2. Simple test safety, if your anti-missile missile looks like it is being "seduced" by another target you can use the homing device to put it back on the right track, and if that fails you self destruct.