New York Times on the Web Forums Science

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 - 03:27pm Apr 29, 2001 EST (#2732 of 2738)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

I very much liked What's Taught and Learned About Who Killed Christ by GUSTAV NIEBUHR http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/29/weekinreview/29NIEB.html

He quotes Alan Wolfe on an essential matter:

" the tolerance Americans express does not require theological understanding. "It's really just a sort of warm feeling toward people," he said. "It's just, `I don't know much about Jews, but we shouldn't be nasty to them, no one should be nasty to anybody.' "

Deep understanding would be nicer. But even a superficial understanding has some uses -- how much better the world would be if the "warm feeling" described had some influence on American military policy, and our sense of proportions -- especially with respect to treatening first strikes with nuclear weapons. Or using nuclear weapons at all.

Here's another quote from a Neibuhr

" The inertia of society is so stubborn that no one will move against it, if he cannot believe that it can be more easily overcome than will ever be the case. And no one will suffer the perils and pains involved with the process of radical social change, if he cannot believe in the possibility of a purer and fairer society than will ever be established. These illusions are dangerous because they justify fanaticism, but their abandonment is perilous, because it inclines to inertia.

from Moral Man and Immoral Society by Reinhold Neibuhr ......... the lead quotation in THE ORIGINS OF THE TUBOJET REVOLUTION by Edward W. Constant II ... Johns Hopkins Press, 1980 .

A world with radically fewer nuclear weapons, or none, would not be so sweeping a socio-technical change as the turbojet revolution, technically or intellectually, though it would take some work. Nor is the idea necessarily hopeless. The current patterns of action on which US nuclear policies are based are unsupportable mistakes .

possumdag - 03:35pm Apr 29, 2001 EST (#2733 of 2738)
Possumdag@excite.com

Thread on Russian Space Tourist

possumdag - 03:45pm Apr 29, 2001 EST (#2734 of 2738)
Possumdag@excite.com

Were Bush not threatening China, and expenditures on arms not required, then China would do well to improve the quality of the air that it breathes.

India - Delhi: standards for buses have been set. The old buses that spew out polution have been declared illegal to be removed from the road.

A decrease in the filth in the air figures is an improvement in public health

rshowalter - 04:02pm Apr 29, 2001 EST (#2735 of 2738)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

If we did more careful book-keeping, we could ALL breathe cleaner air, and have a better quality of life in many ways. And the engineers now being stockpiled on the "make work" boondoggle that Star Wars has become would have plenty to do.

If the technical resources now wasted on military expenditure were redeployed, I believe that the world could be a much more healty, richer place, with problems like global warming solved, in a forseeable future.

Nation states need reasonable, solid defenses. They need to be able to defend their interests. It doesn't have to be as expensive as it is.

And nuclear weapons make no positive contribution at all, and are obsolete menaces that could destroy the world. Star Wars solutions won't help that.

rshowalter - 04:43pm Apr 29, 2001 EST (#2736 of 2738)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?7@174.jap1aqGBmGb^1892360@.f0ce57b/2929 We need to look at what our technical vulnerabilities actually are.

The Chinese know them.

If Americans did also, reasonable decisions about stepping away from nuclear terror could be made.

We HAVE no workable nuclear shield that does what we want - make our nation invulnerable.

The Chinese can cheaply defeat missile defense, and ALL our offensive nuclear weapons systems are also vulnerable. So is our nation's entire socio-technical system.

Attacks from computers, just in terms of information flows, can be very serious, and are essentially impossible to defend against -- and this becomes much, much more true when some physical damage is done at any of millions of indefensible points in the sociotechnical structure, and coordinated with ordinary hacking.

The complexity of the universe of possible attacks, and the speed with which many attacks could be combined, makes our old technical assumptions obsolete. In the new, internet world, our nuclear weaons are terrible liabilities, and not assets at all. Missile Defense would make things even worse, if the word "worse" means anything in such a mess as this.

(2 following messages)

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense