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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 - 07:31am Apr 28, 2001 EST (#2692 of 2705)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Is consistent with: 1016: rshowalter 3/15/01 8:23am
the most fundamental logical operator is not

. X implies Y and its opposite

........but

. X is consistent with Y and it's opposite.

Put enough consistencies and inconsistencies together, in a tight structure, and you come as close to proof as human beings can come. This is standard procedure in court

rshowalter - 07:32am Apr 28, 2001 EST (#2693 of 2705)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

2629: rshowalter 4/26/01 11:14am
2630: rshowalter 4/26/01 11:18am
Often this matching to clear focus - this matching to a confident focus - is impossible. Much in the past can never be reconstructed.

But on issues of importance, if we do the work, we can find out a great deal.

Findings of consistency, again and again, from many statistically and causally independent connections, can "nail something down."

On the issues of nuclear weapons, missile defense, and military balance on which this thread deals, that work seems to me to be worth doing.

possumdag - 08:54am Apr 28, 2001 EST (#2694 of 2705)
Possumdag@excite.com

T.W.: from above:

'But the most forceful memories made me ashamed, and something more — they rendered me unrecognizable to myself. Maybe that's why I had forgotten them; they didn't fit my idea of myself.'

This relates to IDENTITY.

Many people can't shape their identity to know who they are and where they fit within their nation. When chaos and confusion regarding identiy persist then they, perhaps their community, break down.

The problem with VietVets has seen high suicide rates. With AfAms their socio-cultural system hasn't yet re-established after repression.

After a Missile attack .... how long would it take .. for normalisation to occur ?

rshowalter - 10:06am Apr 28, 2001 EST (#2695 of 2705)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

There would be no normalization -- it would be impossible to regain most of the sociotechnical system lost -- the experience (much of it psycholpathological) of the North Koreans, who experienced devastation on the scale of a small nuclear attack -- shows some of the distortions that must be expected.

Even in a "small" nuclear war is possible -- we're talking about not only death. We're also talking about degradation on an unimaginable scale -- for as far as the eye can see in space and time.

For a "midrange" nuclear war - - we're talking about loss of everything in the world people value -- even for the survivors -- a new dark age.

The most probable event is that the nuclear exchange, however it starts, will go off like a string of firecrackers, and end all higher vertebrate life on earth.

rshowalter - 10:10am Apr 28, 2001 EST (#2696 of 2705)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

We should step back -- and think of what needs to be done ( simple things would suffice ) to keep this from happening.

Identity - sanity -- for individual humans and groups of humans -- take

a lot of talking;

a lot of reconciling;

and a lot of complex accomodations among people (each having to have some identity, some place, some nurture, and some common ground.)

These things are hard for the human animals that we all are.

Trigger all the most primordial insticts, fill minds with agony, anger, and fear -- and every kind of ugliness imaginable will occur. The Nazis showed that, again and again.

The Nazis knew well how to degrade, in aid of killing, as part of killing, and to weaken, in leu of killing.

People deeply influenced by Nazi ideology, and American patterns just as brutal connected to mass bombing, invented, developed, and maintained the nuclear terror. -- And they made it surpass in terror and ugliness anything Nazi Germans were able to achieve.

We should take nuclear weapons down, and cleanse ourselves of the patterns that made them possible. Patterns that let Americans, so careful about gentleness in other ways, sit back, unperturbed, while the President of the United States threatens people with nuclear destruction.

Or lies, for no purpose but to terrorize.

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