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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 - 11:13am Sep 19, 2001 EST (#9452 of 9486)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

The bombing survey after the war showed that Lindemann's estimate was ten times too high. The actual effort in manpower and resources that was expended on bombing German was greater than the value in manpower of the damage caused. The loss of high-quality manpower squandered will never be recoverable. The military effectiveness of Great Britain was far less than it could otherwise been.

Great Britain never would have spent its resources and blood in the way it did, if it had understood the mistake that had been made.

The mistake was made because of a scenario not unlike those of "paradigm conflict". Here is Snow:

" I have used the phrase "closed politics" before. I mean any kind of politics in which there is no appeal to a larger assembly - larger assembly in the sense of a group opinion, or an electorate, or on an even bigger scale what we loosely call "social forces." .......... "In my type specimin (the bombing decision) during the whole of his conflicts with Lindemann, Tizard had no larger body of support to call on. If he had been able to submit the bombing controversy to the Fellows of the Royal Society, or the general population of professional scientists, Lindemann would not have lasted a week."

For reasons of personal politics, Tizard and Blackett were ignored, and they could not (or at least, did not) get to other competent people who could judge the matter. To an extent amazing under the circumstances, they were marginalized, called crazy, and shunned. After reading Kuhn, one might be less surprised.

Here is Snow:

" I do not think that, in secret politics, I have ever seen a minority view so unpopular. I sometimes used to wonder whether my administrative colleagues ......... would have acquiesced in this one, as on the whole they did, if they had had even an elementary knowledge of statistics." ........ "The Air Ministry fell in behind the Lindemann paper. The minority view was not only defeated but squashed. The atmosphere was more hysterical than usual in English official life; it had the faint but just perceptible smell of a witch hunt. ..... Strategic bombing, according to the Lindemann policy, was put into action with every effort the country could make."

Kuhn describes all scientific groups as examples of "closed politics."

The key issue is that when there was credible reason to doubt a "established" decision, checking was denied.

rshowalter - 11:14am Sep 19, 2001 EST (#9453 of 9486)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

I've heard people I trust guess that the mistake cost about an extra year of fighting in World War II. That seems right to me.

Thinking of Jewish losses, and Allied losses, and even German losses, the costs incurred because checking was denied, on a big-scale matter of life and death, makes one want to turn one's head away.

Or ask for checking, as a right in both the moral and the operational sense.

That would take some change in mores, or some "social architechture". But not much.

rshowalter - 11:16am Sep 19, 2001 EST (#9454 of 9486)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

This time, unless we insist on the checking we need for right answers, losses to all of civilization are likely to be immense, the avoidable suffering will be tremendous, and it is quite likely that the world could be reduced to a lifeless ball, full of nothing but rotting unburied corpses.

The logic of the world is so interconnected that all of the questions that would need to be checked for much better, warmer, safer, more workable answers than we have now are on this thread, or would be encountered in the course of checking the explicit issues where checking has been asked for here.

rshowalter - 11:25am Sep 19, 2001 EST (#9455 of 9486)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

A simple observation about sequences, and a suggestion.

MD269 rshowalt 9/25/00 7:36am

To deal with the issues involving nuclear weapons, we need to deal with some other things, as well. We could.

almarst-2001 - 12:45pm Sep 19, 2001 EST (#9456 of 9486)

Bill Maher calls U.S. cowardly; FedEx pulls ads from show - http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/headline/entertainment/1053183

"We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away," said Bill Maher, the host of Politically Incorrect. "That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly."

And that was the strategy of the US military at least since WWII.

That was exactly a strategy attempted over the Serbia. To a lesser extend then US Air Force commander Gen. Short and NATO commander Gen. Clark pushed for.

Those are the as much a war criminals and terrorists as any kamikadze bombers with one exception - they put at risk only their careers, not lives.

Any military strategy based on a use of wearpons against masses of civilian population and infrastructure is just an ultimate coward version of terrorizm.

And the NMD goal is just to make this crime safer to commit.

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