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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?

lunarchick - 09:45am Apr 21, 2001 EST (#2464 of 2467)
lunarchick@www.com

Metros have a physical blueprint

Running trains and building-in safety is complex the human element over-rides red-signals

The first AUTO-Plane is due to fly, possibly across the Atlantic, people will be elimated from the process .. lessening pilot error with Leg-Thrombosis

If the inanimate can be programed into peaceful usefulness - why not find the programs that fit into people's heads with respect to peace.

rshowalter - 10:49am Apr 21, 2001 EST (#2465 of 2467)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

It may be a short list of things -- simple enough to fit in people's heads.

But wrenching, in some ways, too.

People may have to face up to how much they need each other; how vulnerable they are to each other; and how vulnerable they become, as animals, when the net of assumptions that fills their heads, and organizes their lives is challenged.

Whether the challenge is right or wrong.

If the challenge is serious, people may be willing to do almost anything, including lie and kill, in order to fend off the challenge.

In China, today it is easy to see irrational behavior of that kind (largely easy because we have distance from China -- it is, for us, another world.)

But we have just the same problems outselves, and the history of the 20th century - which in many ways was such a horror and a disappointment compared to the 19th century - is full of tragedies, and horrible, monstrous inexplicable tragedies like World War I, due to a very few, very human, very dangerous vulnerabilities.

If we knew these vulnerabilities, we could live in peace much more often, and be safer and richer.

But we couldn't be proud in quite the same way - and feel certain of ourselves in quite the same way -- we'd have to be proud a bit differently, and confident a bit differently.

Perhaps is is impossible. But if it is totally impossible, so that not even the most basic lessons can be learned, the world is likely to end.

rshowalter - 10:55am Apr 21, 2001 EST (#2466 of 2467)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

We are animals. Whether some God watches over us or not -- we, all of us, make up our truth as we go along -- and very often do so correctly, though we are not correct always.

We can, both individually and collectively, and fairly easily, get into "do loops" that cause us to fight -- and escalate - and kill -- and proceed in this way with no limit save the limitation of the weapons at hand.

With current levels of wisdom and negotiating skills, and with nuclear weapons around in the numbers that now exit, this is likely to end all the life on earth advanced enough for people to care about.

There is a little of Timothy McVeigh in all of us, and a great deal of McVeigh in all the people who've been trained to use nuclear weapons. The training couldn't work any other way.

We need to be a lot more careful than we've been about human abilities and needs.

Nuclear weapons need to be taken down, at least to the level where the world will survive.

We should find safer ways to fight. Ones that are proportionate, ones that offer some hope that, after particular fights have ended, peaceful life can resume. Ways to fight that let the human race go on - and allow hope that it might even go on with increased decency.

rshowalter - 11:20am Apr 21, 2001 EST (#2467 of 2467)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

It wouldn't take conscious escalation on the part of fighting animals to end the world.

The controls on nuclear weapons are so precarious that the world could easily end -- with nuclear missiles all firing off like a string of firecrackers - on the basis of a nontrivial number of "random" events - some technical, some involving a "running amok" of a very few people.

Everybody involved with firing nukes is already about 1/4 crazy due to the stresses of their situation, and the severity of their training.

The machinery is now very old, and the human organizations have long been degenerate, rigid, and demoralized. The human organizations manning the missiles do not understand, and have not understood for a decade, why they are there.

Some very critical design decisions are essentially forgotten now.

The technical backbone of the US system - our telephone net, is now changed beyond recognition, and far more vulnerable than before. The notion of "telephone based security" is now a very grim joke. -- There is no reliable, checkable "telephone security" worth betting anybody's life on. --- The system is neither simple enough, nor well enough documented, to ever again fit the needs nuclear weapon designers were clear about when these sytems were built.

The control design decisions that matter were made in the Eisenhower administration - and it is now a very different world.

Nuclear weapons are obsolete menaces. We should take them down.

Perhaps they played a necessary historical role.

In all events, we are alive now.

Our friends, relatives, and the friends and relatives of other people are alive . . . .

We should take steps to see that it stays that way.

- - - -

A relatively few people may have to admit to some lies, and some frauds. It is in the interest of the world to see that they do it. Whether they are punished is not so important. But the frauds -- which have us slam-banging into disaster -- should end.

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