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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 - 09:00am May 5, 2001 EST (#3325 of 3326)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

gisterme 5/4/01 11:25pm . . . . I feel the need to move slowly, and be careful, because I take what you say seriously.

I've been reading some stuff, and thinking about what to do, working through a number of questions of the form

" What would _______ think, and want to do, right here?"

For this purpose, my list includes: Lincoln, FDR, Stalin, Rice, Bush, Clinton, Putin, Helms, Rumsfeld, Raines, Jesus, Hitler, Edison, Jefferson, Hamilton, Maxwell, Kipling, Conrad, Kline, Winfrey, LeMay, Cooke, Moyers, Menken, J.Ceasar, MacArthur, Eisenhower, Snow, Will Rogers, some lawyers and associates of mine, some relatives, including all four grandparents, and some others.

I find working through the question, with my image of particular people plugged in, offers some centering, some convergence, and some help in trying to look at different points of view. Some help in focusing on what common ground might be.

This imagining takes a good deal of time, but on something as important as this, it seems worth some time. The exercise leaves me with a sense of all the perspectives I'll miss, and a tiny sense of the mass of relevant experience that others could bring to bear to issues of safe nuclear disarmament, that I cannot.

gisterme , I can't imagine who you are clearly, and can't imagine everything you can know, or what all your concerns are. I'm trying to make sure I remember that.

One of the people on the list I'm fitting into the blank above is C.P. Snow. I've found myself spending a good deal of time on part 2 of Snow's The Two Cultures and A Second Look Cambridge U. Press, 1959, which seems to apply well to where we seem to be.

It seems to me to be a time to be careful. The solutions to these problems, I believe, once we are sure of them, will be simple and direct. I feel the need to add one thing, that you may find strange at first, about what I feel needs to be done.

rshowalter - 09:01am May 5, 2001 EST (#3326 of 3326)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

There's one point I'd like to make, that many might discount, that I think is important. It involves emotions, and ceremony.

If we're to take nukes down, so that it works, so they stay down, and so that they are effectively outlawed, what we do will have to be right from many technical points of view, and will also have to make emotional sense, broadly, memorably, to most people in the world.

My proposal in #266-269 was partly based on ceremonial needs. -- The mechanics of a particular proposal aren't special -- what matters is that we find ways to get "no nukes in the world."

I hope that we can proceed to do that in such a way that even a little child can understand what gets done, and why, and remembers. I hope we can proceed so that people, generation after generation, do not forget.

We want the risk of nuclear weapons to become a thing of the past. That means fear of them should be remembered.

I came on some things I said before, that seem to fit again here.

Maybe so far so good.
2954: rshowalter 5/2/01 6:55am
2955: rshowalter 5/2/01 6:57am
2956: rshowalter 5/2/01 7:05am
2957: rshowalter 5/2/01 7:13am

We shouldn't forget what we might hope for, and what we might hope for from the Bush administration, either
1205: rshowalter 3/20/01 12:43pm

I'll be working hard, but carefully, to respond to you -- and taking time to be careful. There is a lot of common ground, all over the world, about nukes, and perhaps we can get them down, so that they stay down. If NMD can accomplish that, by decentering a frozen situation, it will have been a great thing.

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