In my [the writer's] own field of physics, we make a distinction between applied physics, which is motivated by some social need, and pure physics, the search for knowledge for its own sake. Both kinds of physics are valuable, but not everything pure is desirable. In seeking to deploy a national missile defense aimed at an implausible threat, a defense that would have dubious effectiveness against even that threat, and that on balance would harm our security more than it helps it, the Bush administration seems to be pursuing a pure rather than applied missile defense—a missile defense that is undertaken for its own sake, rather than for any application it may have in defending our country.
[more] an eloquent argument by a physicist in The New York Review of Books on how a missle defense would anger our allies and fail to do what its proponents claim it would do.
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