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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 - 03:45pm May 3, 2001 EST (#3166 of 3173)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

I also think force would have a role to play.

For prohibition of nuclear weapons, inspections would have to have teeth.

I don't see why the international community couldn't, and shouldn't, impose REAL risks on leaders of nation states who refuse inspections. -- if the requirement was balanced, so that even the Presidents of Russia and the USA had to permit inspection or face risks - it might be both justifiable and practical.

I don't see why such an arrangement would be unstable. (Tit for tat responses would make little sense.) With the penalties clear and in place, it seems likely to me that inspections would occur with little fuss.

rshowalter - 03:55pm May 3, 2001 EST (#3167 of 3173)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

The "verification gauntlet" is getting better. lunarchick 10/30/00 7:18pm
Instrumentation gets better and better, communication gets better and better, data processing gets sharper and sharper - surprises get harder and harder to come by.

In another decade, surprises will be harder still to arrange.

We're coming into a world that will be much more stable, much better for defense rather than offense, once existing nuclear weapons come down. And a world where we can make nuclear disarmament stick.

rshowalter - 04:00pm May 3, 2001 EST (#3168 of 3173)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Cant' prove I'm right, but it is clear that Dawn Riley and I care.
rshowalter 5/1/01 7:09am

wrcooper - 04:24pm May 3, 2001 EST (#3169 of 3173)
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

COST OF BMD/NMD

wrcooper - 04:32pm May 3, 2001 EST (#3170 of 3173)
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

Bush's Anti-Logic Shield

by ROBERT WRIGHT

Slate, May 2, 2001

Building the ambitious missile-defense system outlined yesterday by President Bush would mean abandoning the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, but that has never much bothered the Bush administration. As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld puts it, "The Soviet Union, our partner in that treaty, doesn't exist anymore."

One thing Rumsfeld doesn't bother to add is that when the Soviet Union died, its successor states—most notably Russia—agreed to inherit its treaty commitments. Another thing he doesn't add is that they did so at the insistence of the United States.

In fact, they did so at the insistence of a president named Bush. I guess American officials forgot to tell the Russians that, though the Soviet Union's offspring would be expected to keep treaty commitments, Bush's offspring wouldn't be.

I don't want to make too much of this. After all, George W. Bush now seems to be suggesting not unilateral withdrawal from the ABM Treaty but a negotiated withdrawal—forging a new "cooperative relationship" with Russia. And I guess there's a chance that he means this more sincerely than he meant his pledge to forge a new cooperative relationship with Democrats.

Besides, the main problem with missile defense isn't the legal niceties. The problem is that it lies somewhere on the spectrum from useless to counterproductive. That is, it would either not affect the chances of my dying prematurely or increase them. I don't consider either of these outcomes worth the price tag—which, realistically, is somewhere between $60 billion and $1 trillion.

Exactly how effectively a missile-defense system would fend off missiles is open to debate, but one thing it has already proved its imperviousness to is logic. Bush yesterday trotted out a series of bullet-ridden rationales and held them up proudly, as if oblivious (which he probably is) to the withering criticism they've already been through. For example :

Barbarians at the gate : The basic rationale for missile defense has long been that people like Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il are savages not subject to the deterrent logic of mutually assured destruction. These men, Bush said, are "gripped by an implacable hatred of the United States of America. They hate our friends. They hate our values. … Many care little for the lives of their own people. In such a world, Cold War deterrence is no longer enough."

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