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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 - 03:10pm Apr 17, 2001 EST (#2324 of 2332)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

I have materials gathered, and partly organized, but I'll be at least an hour more, perhaps two, before I can answer you as well as I can today. To your question

" A Case of "dirty glasses" or DIRTY NATURE?"

I'll answer, "both."

We see some things badly, perversely, in monotonously counterproductive, cruel, and dangerous ways. All people tend to do this, in one way or another.

And we all, though we may be "like angels" in some ways, are "like monsters" in others. As a species, we have, all of us, some dirty nature to control.

And if we can do, not perfectly, but better than we're doing, a lot of ugly things can be made less ugly, and there's a chance for beauty in places where things are now dark. On matters of military balances, we need to do better than we've done, and that ought to be possible.

rshowalter - 07:33pm Apr 17, 2001 EST (#2325 of 2332)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

I'll continue to work on a good answer to the questions raised in almarst-2001 4/17/01 1:43pm and almarst-2001 4/17/01 2:09pm. -- but I stopped, and I think for good reason, to read RUSSIA IS FINISHED: The unstoppable descent of a once great power into social catastrophe and strategic irrelevance by Jeffrey Tayer in this May's edition of The ATLANTIC MONTHLY

Tayler's piece is curious piece -- and it seems to illustrate some essential concerns, not only about Russia, but about the looming tragedy of nuclear destruction (I've sometimes felt like writing something that might have been titled THE WORLD IS FINISHED )

The piece sets out some real problems, and at the same time illustrates, in severe fashion, some of the psychological problems we've been discussing here. Things are too black, too white, too predictable, too simple, too determined, and too hopeless in this piece, as they are in a lot of discourse, history and decision making we've been discussing and lamenting here.

I wish my old partner, Steve Kline, were alive to read and talk about it.

Here's Tayler's first paragraph

" During the Cold War years, I percieved Russia through a Cold War prism - as a land of vast, frozen twilight realms of steppe and forest where a drama was being acted out that involved players of satanic evil or saintly good and doctrines that promised either mankind's salvation or its ruin. I developed a passion for the country, a passion that derived in part from a weighty postulate: that what happened there concerned not only Russia, but the world. In its Soviet incarnation, Russia had nuclear weapons and a powerful military, a threatening and subversive ideology, a tendency to invade its neighbors and meddle in their affairs, and the might to wreak havoc on other continents. Russians I came to know spoke of the future of their country as if it would be the fate of humanity, and I agreed with them. . . . ."

I find this passage very beautiful from some perspectives, in some spots, but on balance, very ugly indeed - in interesting ways. It says much about Russia, but also says much about the mind of Tayler - a mind, in many basic ways, much like mine or yours. A mind that classifies, and uses implication logic, in curiously confindent but inappropriate ways.

Later, Tayler says:

" . . . . . I arrived at conclusions at odds with what I thought before: Internal contradictions in Russia's thousand-year history have destined it to shrink demographically, weaken economically, and, possibly, disintegrate territorially. The drama is coming to a close, and within a few decades Russia will concern the rest of the world no more than any Third World country with abundant resources, an impoverished people, and a corrupt government. In short, as a Great Power, Russia is finished.

" Why this should be so will be apparent during a look back at the last decade and how its events stemmed from Russia's Eastern Orthodox civilization and a decimating, isolating, long-ago invasion whose consequences determine the relation between citizen and state to this day."

"Determine" in the line above is treacherous -- and all too common. Logical coercion is claimed where nothing of the sort exists.

rshowalter - 07:35pm Apr 17, 2001 EST (#2326 of 2332)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

In rshowalter 3/17/01 5:31pm there's this:

" When we apply SIMPLE models of structure to circumstances that have a more complicated structure than we are thinking of, we can get into trouble."

Tayler's piece illustrates this kind of trouble, in a number of ways and at a number of levels. How easily, and convincingly, people can mislead themselves, and others. How natural, even inevitable, dangerous oversimplifications can seem. How easily we accept models in our head that are too simple, and accept properties of the model as somehow determining reality. How intolerant of "contradiction" we are as animals, and at the same time, how often we see them, where systems are structurally complex, and different statements apply in different structures, with no real logical contradiction at all.

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