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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?

rshowalter - 10:22am Apr 4, 2001 EST (#1968 of 1972)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Great guide to internet sources from a great organization: http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/nukenotes/jf01nukenote.html

rshowalter - 10:55am Apr 4, 2001 EST (#1969 of 1972)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Auditing Classes at M.I.T., on the Web and Free by CAREY GOLDBERG http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/04/technology/04MIT.html

" Other universities may be striving to market their courses to the Internet masses in hopes of dot-com wealth. But the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has chosen the opposite path: to post virtually all its course materials on the Web, free to everybody."

An enormous advance for, and endorsement of, openness. Secrecy doesn't work well. And, because of the importance of human contacts openness is much less threatening to institutions than they think.

MIT is making itself more of an asset to the whole world.

almarst-2001 - 11:04am Apr 4, 2001 EST (#1970 of 1972)

Lunarchick,

"The Chinese Way" was very interesting.

Here is a recepie for a disaster:

What to Do About China - Don't “contain” Chinese Communism; fight it.

By Frank J. Gaffney Jr., former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy under President Reagan. - http://www.nationalreview.com/contributors/gaffney040301.shtml

rshowalter - 11:08am Apr 4, 2001 EST (#1971 of 1972)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

let me print out parts of that very interesting article

Jan/Feb. 1997 Vol. 53, No. 1 The Chinese Way by Chalmers Johnson Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/1997/jf97/jf97johnson.html

" The East Asian arms race has two primary causes. The first is Chinese irredentism. The second is America's lack of a serious long-term vision regarding relations with China and Japan-the only two nations today that could threaten U.S. national security.

" The Clinton administration's failure to understand China's emergence as a superpower, or to staff the National Security Council with high-level Asia specialists, has left a vacuum that the military-industrial complex and others with a vested interest in a new Cold War have quickly filled. With the Pentagon now the principal architect of American foreign policy in East Asia, the results thus far include renewed American intervention in the ongoing civil war over Taiwan, the first military crisis in the Taiwan Straits in 30 years, and an American-Japanese drift toward a policy of "containment" of China.

. . . . .

" But China has a legal claim to Taiwan that is older than the U.S. existence as a nation-one that is considerably stronger than Japan's claim to Okinawa or the U.S. claim to Hawaii. Both Okinawa and Hawaii were independent kingdoms when they were annexed by their current sovereigns, something that was never true of Taiwan.

" Whether the Chinese mainland and Taiwan are reunited, or go their separate ways, or find some middle ground, it will have been the result of their own actions-not of actions by the United States. Ezra Vogel of Harvard, recently on loan to the CIA, is almost certainly wrong to believe that we have a "constructive, creative ambiguity" in our relations with both sides that keeps them off balance. I believe that Evan Feigenbaum of RAND has it right: "The primary danger to the present status quo is . . . that either Beijing or Taipei will miscalculate or misread the other's moves. . . . Mixed statements of U.S. policy contribute to the possibility of miscalculation."

" The United States mistakenly believes that its role is crucial to any change in the situation. But post­Mao China actually has a good record in dealing with Taiwan. China's military maneuvers during 1995 and 1996 were rather desperate warnings to Taiwanese leaders not to try to reenlist the United States in the Chinese civil war. They came about not because the use of force is the logical conclusion of Chinese policy, but because Taiwan seemed to be succeeding in gaining American and Japanese support for intervention.

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