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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 - 10:28am Jun 4, 2001 EST (#4490 of 4495)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

There are days when the editorial and OpEd pages of THE NEW YORK TIMES seem stunningly beautiful - totally admirable to me. Today is such a day. Every editorial, and every OpEd piece a hit for me -- with good, profoundly right points - worthy of careful thought and respect.

Perhaps the piece I found most impressive was Zell Miller's.

At many, many levels, we have a "trust deficit" -- and it gets in the way of many good things that would otherwise be possible.

gisterme - 01:50pm Jun 4, 2001 EST (#4491 of 4495)

rshowalter wrote: "...weve had large groups of people knowingly acting to make it possible to reduce large populations, almost all innocent in military terms, into masses of rotting unburied corpses.

There is no reason to think that the US population, or the Russian population, was in any substantial doubt about what was being done, and threatened, by our military forces..."

That arms race happened, Robert. But that wasn't the result of passiveness on the part of the "innocent" populations, was it? Wasn't that the result of fear by those populations, especially in the west, based on perceptions of what the "other side" was doing within the cold war context? "We can't let them have the power to destroy us with impunity, therefore we must have the power to destroy them too." I think that's what motivated and justified the development of the US nuclear arsenal beyond the few aircraft deliverable A-bombs existant at the end of WWII. Isn't that the basis of rationale that ultimatedly lead to the MAD concept?

It seems unfortunate, but the kinds of disinformation campaigns that began in WWII carried right on forward into the cold war. The USSR does everything it can to make the west feel that the USSR is far more powerful than it really is. The west responds by building weapons to match the perceived power of the USSR. Meantime the USSR is working as hard as it can to make itself as powerful as the perception it has created in the west, the west sees that and...etc., etc. So goes a viscious cycle that, eventhough now ended, leaves as it legacy tens of thousands of operable strategic and tactical nuclear weapons with no particular targets. So, whatever the cause, its that negative legacy of the cold war that we have to deal with today in this different world environment.

Let's don't forget that the other legacy of the WWII/cold war era is the most fantastic technological revolution in history. An awful lot of money assumed to have gone down the rat-hole on military R&D development programs during the cold war has managed to re-appear as the basis for marvelous new civilian technology, especially from the US and UK programs. Let's hope that the new tools that have resulted from the postive part of the cold war legacy can be used to undo the negative part.

gisterme - 02:16pm Jun 4, 2001 EST (#4492 of 4495)

almarst wrote: "Pear Harbor - Hiroshima-Nagasaki...Payback?

Not payback almarst. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the result of the estimated half millon or so American dead that would have been necessary to invade the Japanese home islands and force a surrender. That doesn't take into accout millions of Japanese that would have also died in the fight.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not payback at all, almarst. They were the result of a strategic military decision that sacreficed a couple of hundred thousand Japanese, to save a total of millions on both sides and bring that war to an end. Where's the crime in that? As far as I can tell, considering the wartime context, if there's a crime there at all, it is that the Japanese didn't surrender in time to prevent that decision.

rshowalter - 03:02pm Jun 4, 2001 EST (#4493 of 4495)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Those are helpful responses, gisterme . Not the whole truth, of course, but you can't put the whole truth in a few words.

Some other parts of the truth are ugly. You're not denying that. But it is CLEAR that you can't deal with this situation in terms of simple right and wrong -- simple justice -- the situation is just too complicated for that.

I was really impressed with Senator Zell Miller's The Democratic Party's Southern Problem http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/04/opinion/04MILL.html , and it seems to me that the history and complexity of the story of the American south, these last 200 years and still today, has a lot to say about difficulties we face trying to work out a workable end and reconstruction to the Cold War. The end and reconstruction that occurred after the American Civil War worked badly in many, many ways -- and the Civil War itself might never have happened had negotiating skills, and graces, been more sophisticated on both sides.

And there sure have been blunders - during "the War" (and in Richmond Va, where I went to high schools, you always knew that was the Civil War) tactics that didn't fit technology made for wrenchingly high casualty lists -- and after the War, when reconstruction worked so badly, from so many points of view -- with scars and hostilities and inefficiencies and resentments that are still important today.

Americans haven't been so good at making peace among themselves -- but some of the problems we've had may illuminate some of the problems we now have finding real world peace, in a world where war just doesn't make sense any more.

rshowalter - 03:03pm Jun 4, 2001 EST (#4494 of 4495)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

My mamma claimed that she was fourteen years old before she learned that "damn_yankee" was two words.

And there are still people in the South (can you believe it?) who resent The New York Times.

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