Subject:
|
Re: A question of remembrance...
|
Newsgroups:
|
lugnet.off-topic.debate
|
Date:
|
Mon, 7 May 2001 16:28:30 GMT
|
Viewed:
|
1144 times
|
| |
|
|
In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Dave Schuler writes:
> In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Scott Arthur writes:
>
> > The people who least want to see a reduction in the military are those who
> > make the weapons. Take a look how much the companies who will work on Son of
> > Star Wars gave Dubya for his election.
>
> Ugh! Don't even start me on that ridiculous cash cow! I foresee, shortly
> after the implementation of this fine umbrella, someone boating up the
> Potomac with a suitcase bomb or a big tank full of anthrax.
> I think a real distinction can be drawn, however, between maintenance and
> upgrading of existing technologies and the creation of a system to deal with
> a created and fictitious need.
> In response to the criticism that the technology for Star Wars Jr. doesn't
> exist yet and/or doesn't work, George Will argued on Sunday that no one
> knows if ICBM's worked, but we built them anyway. Sounds like airtight
> reasoning to me! I'll have to get to work on patenting my perpetual motion
> machine.
See today's WSJ. All the pieces of Brilliant Pebbles have been tested and
shown to work (although not as part of an integrated system). Most of them
in Clementine, one of the most cost effective civilian space missions ever!
According to the (admittedly biased) author, whose facts I have not checked,
we could have had an operational Brilliant Pebbles for about 1/3 the cost of
what the Clinton Administration spent on a number of ground based tests that
didn't deliver a system.
I have to question those numbers though as I am not sure we have the launch
capability to loft all those birds, though.
Brilliant Pebbles could have, again according to unverified and biased
sources, stopped the Iraqi Scud attacks with 100% success. Something the
Patriot system did not do. Those were non nuclear yet still were a big
nuisance and stopping them early in boost phase would have been far
preferable to when Patriots stopped them. So I don't see this need as a
"created and ficticious" need.
Ground based is doomed to be less effective than space based, no matter how
you slice it. Further, the argument that because a suitcase nuke can defeat
a shield, we shouldn't build one, seems not quite 100% correct to me.
Anything that adds stability is good. MAD no longer works as a deterrent
because we don't have the willpower (nor should we) to melt the north half
of Korean subpeninsula when Kim XXX lobs a nuke at Tokyo and everyone knows
it. So it's not much of a deterrent.
It is clear to me that we CAN develop and deploy a system that can stop
missle launches anywhere in the world.
Now the question of whether we SHOULD develop and deploy a system that can
stop missile launches anywhere in the world is a different one. Is it our
duty to keep the world safe from missiles because we can??? I dunno.
++Lar
|
|
Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: A question of remembrance...
|
| (...) But is the intent of the Umbrella to stop attacks by other nations against other nations? That's how Dubya is trying to sell it, but it doesn't sound like any other nation is buying the rhetoric. (...) That's true--my example wasn't especially (...) (23 years ago, 7-May-01, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
| | | Re: A question of remembrance...
|
| (...) Um, wrong. Yet another reason to question anything coming across the pages of the WSJ. Not that I've read it since they'd declared breatfeeding dangerous to infants... I've been seeing the antiballistic missile development more-or-less behind (...) (23 years ago, 7-May-01, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
|
Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: A question of remembrance...
|
| (...) Ugh! Don't even start me on that ridiculous cash cow! I foresee, shortly after the implementation of this fine umbrella, someone boating up the Potomac with a suitcase bomb or a big tank full of anthrax. I think a real distinction can be (...) (23 years ago, 7-May-01, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
|
197 Messages in This Thread:
(Inline display suppressed due to large size. Click Dots below to view.)
- Entire Thread on One Page:
- Nested:
All | Brief | Compact | Dots
Linear:
All | Brief | Compact
This Message and its Replies on One Page:
- Nested:
All | Brief | Compact | Dots
Linear:
All | Brief | Compact
|
|
|
|
