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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 - 02:54pm May 2, 2001 EST (#3009 of 3017)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

The biggest threat is that America is hated, and the administration, though the rhetoric sometimes sounds nice, involves too many people who act in ways to reinforce the hatred, rather than reduce it. Too many people like " disbelief" (a member of the administration, perhaps) who set up shouting matches.

We shouldn't forget what we can hope for, how important checkable facts and relations are (some things can be nailed down) and what the stakes are.

rshowalter 5/2/01 7:05am
rshowalter 5/2/01 7:13am

disbelief1 - 03:06pm May 2, 2001 EST (#3010 of 3017)

thanks for flattering me so with supposing I'm a member of the bush administration. a great compliment, for sure. the times ISN'T leftist? what planet you from little fella?

nashasobaka1 - 03:08pm May 2, 2001 EST (#3011 of 3017)

Why would any 'rogue' state waste the time/effort/money to deliver a nuclear weapon on a missle when they could easily float one into any US port city on a container ship. The likelihood of a sea/ground delivery must be 1000 fold that of a missle delivery. Star Wars is nothing more than a cash cow for the military industrial complex. The issue is $ not safety.

wrcooper - 03:15pm May 2, 2001 EST (#3012 of 3017)
The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt [and] uncertainty...appear the only result of our most accurate scrutiny....But such is the frailty of human reason. --David Hume

nashasobaka1 5/2/01 3:08pm

Yes. It's a multi-billion dollar give-away, a white elephant in the making.

Meanwhile, the International Space Station is cash-needy, and important R&D programs for a new generation of reusuable single-stage-to-orbit launch vehicles for the civilian space program have been cut. It's a disgrace.

rshowalter - 03:16pm May 2, 2001 EST (#3013 of 3017)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

The military-industrial complex could be fully employed if people were really looking after the defense interests, and national interests of the United States.

The situation is so bad, because they whole system is glopped up with so many lies, that there is little to do but keep on slam-banging into disaster.

gisterme - 03:20pm May 2, 2001 EST (#3014 of 3017)

rshowalter wrote: "LIES...The United States, from the time of the Eisenhower administration on, had a policy of threatening - in effect, scaring, the Soviet Union into a situation where long-term collapse of the Soviet Union would occur...To do that, there had to be a great deal of deception and manipulation in our dealing with the Soviets..."

Was that during the cold brotherhood? Oh, excuse the mistake, it was the cold WAR. Don't participants in wars fight to win? With regards to that I'd paraphrase Winston Churchill who said during WWII that "the truth is so precious that it warrants a vast bodyguard of lies". Of course during the cold war the Soviets were totally ignorant of this concept and so were innocent victims as they dealt with us as if we were peaceful friends. Right? Of course not.

Don't forget that it was the Soviets who occupied all the eastern European countries, not the western allies. If the Soviets had withdrawn from those after WWII the cold war would never have even happened; my own opinion is that the end of the cold war was the true end of WWII.

So if what you're calling "lies" was within the context of cold war deception, I say, better lies than nukes. Still the context of that deception does not fit the context of the present arguement. That war is over, let's get back to the present.

rshowalter wrote: "Missteps:....... When the Soviet Union did collapse, we did not turn our nuclear threats off..."

Seems to me that we're trying to do that now. Admittedly, 1,500 is a lot of nukes but far less than 7,000. Doesn't that seem like a step in the right direction to you? Still, there are a lot of nukes scattered around the ex-Soviet republics, nearly as many as ever. It's just that now they're controlled by several different governments instead of just one. Does that mean that there is no longer a threat to the US? If so, how about next week? So we disagree about when the "threat" switch should be turned off. Now seems like a good time to me.

rshowalter wrote: "...The Very Small Extraconstitutinal group:...to keep threats we were making, that our own people would not tolerate, from being known...At sometimes, almost independent of presidential will...but LeMay and related people and their successors did, as a practical matter, control most nuclear policy, with little or no effective supervision, or really capable financial accounting..."

What were the threats that we were making that our own people would not tolerate, Robert...threats of total nuclear annihilation? Or was there some greater theat that's still too dreadful to be revealed? Whatever hindsight may show, the results have been good in that the cold war has ended.

The word "almost" is key in the statement about nuclear policy being independent of presidential will. That was war this is peace. I am glad LeMay never quite got his finger on the button. :-) There still seems to be a context problem with your arguement.

rshowalter wrote: "...If we took action, and acknowledged what we did, then effective nuclear disarmament would be possible..."

Why should one acknowledge what the whole world already knows? The cold war was a war. "Cold" because the actual battle was mostly economic rather than military. What do you think of when you someone says the cold war is over? Not a military victory. So what is there to acknowledge? There was a strategy and it worked. Still though, that's been some time ago. What about now? Getting rid of some arrows and adding a sheild seems like a reasonable step.

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