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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 - 04:00pm Apr 20, 2001 EST (#2442 of 2446)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

rshowalter 2/22/01 6:55pm
rshowalter 2/22/01 6:57pm
Would anyone care to come and defend the morality of first strikes with nuclear weapons, with a moderator, on videotape, and with time for follow up questions? Internet videocasting is now inexpensive.

Can anybody, actually making comparisons, stand up and justify our "we reserve the right to make a first strike" stance as morally defensible action? Can they do so with their faces, and facial expressions, on view to anyone on the internet who cares to watch them?

Our nuclear policy is morally indefensible, and corrupting.

If one can justify a first strike with nuclear weapons one can, by a quick comparison, justify anything else. (minor matters like incest, or single murders, fade to insignificance.)

To say it is all right to use nuclear weapons under any circumstances is, pretty quickly, to throw out any workable judgements about better and worse in morality.

This is an important reason to want to rid the world of nuclear weapons, if we can.

rshowalter - 04:01pm Apr 20, 2001 EST (#2443 of 2446)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

And our nuclear weapons are now terribly vulnerable, and cannot be made invulnerable. rshowalter 2/22/01 7:01pm They are obsolete menaces, that degrade us all, and threaten the survival of the world. We should take them down.

rshowalter - 04:04pm Apr 20, 2001 EST (#2444 of 2446)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

rshowalt 9/29/00 12:12pm
Here is Mohammed Bedjaoui , President of the World Court , para. 20 of the appended Declaration, 8th July 1996.

" Nuclear weapons, the ultimate evil, destabilise humanitarian law which is the law of the lesser evil. The existence of nuclear weapons is therefore a challenge to the very existence of humanitarian law, not to mention their long-term effects of damage to the human environment, in respect to which the right to life must be exercised.....Atomic warfare and humanitarian law therefore appear mutually exclusive, the existence of the one automatically implies the non-existence of the other" -

We ought to get ourselves out of the bind above, by getting rid of nuclear weapons. It is technically easy, it is militarily safe, it is prohibitively dangerous for us if we do not, but, alas, it is hard. The U.S. has to recognize some history, and have a change of heart.

rshowalter - 04:11pm Apr 20, 2001 EST (#2445 of 2446)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Other countries, it seems to me, ought to encourage the US to do so, by taking actions that they can take without the participation of the United States. There are many such actions, given a little ingenuity.

If American businessmen were asked, consistently, all over the world, to defend themselves and their interests every time the US made an explicit or implicit threat to use nuclear weapons, the practice might well cease. After some competent American negotiators convinced themselves that, here, the economically rational thing to do, and the morally right thing to do, were the same, some interesting, fruitful discussions might follow.

And Mutually Assured Deterrance might follow the current Mutually Assured Destruction of the World.

rshowalter - 04:12pm Apr 20, 2001 EST (#2446 of 2446)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Though some of the actions involved might be called "grandstanding" -- given the stakes involved, they might still be justified.

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