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Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

mhunter20 - 10:02am Feb 23, 2001 EST (#762 of 766)

rshowalter 2/23/01 6:23am

Interfax quoted Ivashov as saying, Even America's allies do not believe in the fairy tales about the threats from other states which Rumsfeld talks about.

This would seem to be a major issue of disagreement.

rshowalter - 10:35am Feb 23, 2001 EST (#763 of 766)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Involving checkable facts. And arguments that ought to be reviewable in public.

A major question is "how hard is it to deal with these threats in other ways?"

Is the US, or MUCH better, a cordinated force including the US, Russia, and other forces allied to enforce nuclear safety, incapable of handling nuclear threats from the likes of N.Korea, where people are desperately poor, and much is in dissarray, or Iraq, also a poor country in disarray?

Are we a militarily incapable nation, among other militarily incapable nations, struggling to find buck-rogers solutions for work that ordinary military forces should be able to do?

And are we prepared to risk the survival of the world, to save ourselves from the discomfort of some reasonable military discipline?

rshowalter - 10:47am Feb 23, 2001 EST (#764 of 766)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

We are dealing with weapons that, if not controlled better than they are today, are likely to reduce much or all of the human population of the world to rotting unburied corpses.

Under these circumstances, we ought to check facts in ways that can actually determine them,. and we ought to consider alternatives.

As a matter of record, to which this thread and surrounding circumstances testify, it is remarkably difficult to get even "simple" things checked, even after the President of the United States looks at them. We have an irrational, paralyzed, and very dangerous system, out of control, and now beyond public supervision.

If some simple facts could be determined, we could reduce nuclear terror radically from where it is.

The situation is ugly and needs to be redeemed.

rshowalter - 11:05am Feb 23, 2001 EST (#765 of 766)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

We need secular redemption of our nuclear circumstances. The solution needed must be not only redemptive in theory -but redemptive and detonative - a solution that actually propagates. A solution hat actually works, rather than fizzles. rshowalter Science News Poetry 2/14/01 9:09am

The terms redemptive and detonative are used here in a technical sense, that some might understand by reading the following pieces of expository poetry.

Exposition of what redemptive means in this context

Exposition of what a detonative solution means in this context.

Here is a key point. Sometimes the solution of a problem is actually simple, even stark.

And yet the answer is not admitted, because the cost of admitting the real situation is just too high. LEARNING TO STAND

Under these conditions, a widely understood idea, that is secular as well as religious, makes sense. We ought to consider "the golden rule", and we should try to bring disciplined beauty to our consideration of it. Because the problems here are so important, that only beautiful, well formed solutions can be safe.

It doesn't help to call people stupid or immoral, or to penalize them otherwise, when that stands in the way of much larger objectives.

We need to find a way to end nuclear terror. A way that works. That means, we need to find a way that works for the people and organizations that are in fact involved, as they are, from where they are, step by step.

rshowalter - 11:09am Feb 23, 2001 EST (#766 of 766)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

I'm thinking of setting out, in detail, examples showing how terrifyingly vulnerable our nuclear weapons systems are, and how terribly unstable the system is.

The vulnerablity, to me, seems almost self evident.

Do the people in charge of these weapons really think they've considered all their vulnerablilities, and taken them all into account?

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