Slashdot Mirror
India and US to Cooperate in Space Exploration
p1234 writes "India and the US plan to cooperate in the exploration and use of outer space. India's first mission to the moon, Chandrayaan-1, is scheduled to be launched later this year. This is the culmination of long-term planning on both sides of the Atlantic. Apart from India's moon mission, Nair said a probe of Mars by India was very much on the agenda.'Our scientific community would like to see what new things we can find. It is not just for the sake of sending a probe to Mars. Yes, we have an agenda by 2012, by then we should have a Mars mission.'"
Not trying to troll here, but it would seem that India could use our already sizable knowledge of space exploration, and we can use cheap engineers. I wonder if this has anything to do with the general decline in engineering enrollment at US Universities?
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China and India are likely to be very serious rivals, rather than friends. Both have huge populations, and are developing countries trying to break into high-tech. Being right next to each hurts rather than helps.
Iran seems an extremely unlikely partner as well. India is an open democracy, with a far freer society, and are not predominately Muslim. I also don't see much that Iran could offer India to begin with, as India is technologically much further along.
Russia... Maybe... Though India has much stronger economic ties with the English speaking western world than it does with Russia. Are Indian car makers trying to buy the Range Rover and Jaguar brands so that they can sell such branded vehicles to Russia? China? Iran? Not likely.
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India's greatest strength over Iran is it's liberal education, particularly in colleges and universities. That is why the technocrat generation in India is much larger and better trained than the ones in Iran.
Interestingly, a lot of Iranian students are now interested in pursuing higher education in India, particularly after Ahmadinejad expelled liberal professors from Iranian Universities, and Iranians have a harder time getting into western universities because of political problems. I spent a summer in the Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India and there were several Iranian students with very progressive and liberal outlook , unlike the Ayatollahs (they got me hooked on Dariush Mehrjui http://www.opendemocracy.net/arts/iranian_cinema_2595.jsp films) who were all cursing the Islamic theocracy in Iran.
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Iran has gas, India needs gas, and there was a pipeline deal from Iran to India through Pakistan, which pretty muched got nixed because of U.S. pressure.
Russia has historically strong ties with India and still sells it a lot of weaponry. With the rise of a the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as an emerging military alliance between Russia, China, various Central Asian countries, and now Iran, India has to choose whether to ally with her neighbors or the U.S. The stakes are pretty high geopolitically.
If that is true, then there are a lot of government officials being grossly negligent in their duties. If I were the US president, I'd already have a military strategy for destroying or smuggling out those Pakistani nukes in case their government were replaced with a radical islamic government.
Even at the peak of anti-American sentiments after the invasion of Afghanistan, the hard-liner Islamic political parties never got more than 11% of the popular vote. Most political parties in Pakistan are moderate, and the nukes are buried deep in the military chain of command, which is secular.11% is more than enough. And we don't know how secular the military chain of command will remain. Given what has happened in the past with the Pakistani nulcear program, this isn't something that I'd rely on.
Pakistan remains firmly in the pocket of the United States. And there's enough inertia from both Pakistan and the United States to make sure that these traditional allies remain that way.Pakistan isn't firmly in anyone's pocket. And given how shaky (and illegitimate) their government is right now, you're whistling in the dark.
Maybe he meant a bomb which works by compressing Muslims until they reach critical mass? Do they then split into a Jew and a polytheist and emit a high-energy atheist (which then collides with another Muslim causing a chain reaction)?
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