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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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rshow55 - 05:06pm Dec 24, 2002 EST (# 6997 of 7000)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Here's a civilized fiction about human nature, that is almost unbelievably dangerous when it enters into calculations involving nuclear weapons. Somehow, despite the evidence, people somehow believe that when human being are threatened, they retreat. They retire. They run away.

This is a lie. When people are threatened, they react. If they have no alternatives to reacting by fighting, they fight.

This amounts to a "sign error" in our nuclear calculations. We've thought that, to maximize stability, we need to maximize threat. This is a recipe for explosive malfunction of stressed people. The fact is, to maintain military balances, threats have to be nearly ever-present, but controlled, and fit, in calibrated ways, to what we want to happen.

Nation states threaten each other, in various implicit and explicit ways, all the time. They must. But too large a threat elicits escalating confrontation, or a war of explosive disarray. There are many examples, especially in this century.

Because nuclear threats are too large, nuclear weapons are not useful military instruments, if the objective of the military is balance, or containable conflict. Nuclear weapons guarantee insults on the other side so great that fights can only be to the death. They are extermination weapons.

To "civilized people" who think people shrink when threatened, these weapons have a certain "perverse beauty." But this is a dangerous misunderstanding. People when threatened, will fight, and if the threat is high enough, rational controls go by the wayside, especially when undisciplined troops are involved, as they so often are. The United States has held the Russians near the edge of an uncontrolled fight reaction since the middle fifties, and using some very effective psychological warfare, has forced them into paralyzing the Russian nation with excessive, ill chosen military spending.

Now, long after the cold war should have ceased, we continue with the nuclear threats, because we've forgotten, or never admitted, how we've been using them. Now that we've won the Cold War, we should get rid of the nuclear weapons, and make an overdue peace.

Nuclear weapons may have saved the world from communism, but they had terrible moral and practical costs, and we should eliminate them now, because they could (in my judgement, if things go on, they will) destroy the world.

We might get a dividend from this exercise. If we learned more about how humans deal with threats, we might know a great deal about designing our nation states for peace, and not always partly inadvertent war.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- rshowalter - 10:11pm Oct 24, 2000 BST (#7

Nuclear war has bothered me because of personal experience. As a bookish boy with big muscles and a forceful disposition, I found that I had to fight or defer, found that I fought pretty well, and learned something about fighting, both with individuals and with groups. When I went to college, I got interested in some matters of applied mathematics which had military significance, where it was felt that, if the Russians solved a certain class of control problems before we did, we might find ourselves, without warning, stripped of the capacity to fly planes that could survive air-to-air missile attack. That is to say, we'd find ourselves without an air force, and conceivably losers in a war with the very terrible Soviet Union. That made the problem interesting to me, and I've kept at it, and made some progress on this class of problems, since.

There was a difficulty. Here was an instability. Change a simple mathematical circumstance, or perceptions of it, and perceptions of military risk shifted radically. If we could lie to the Russians, and say we'd cracked the problem, we might scare the hell out of them, at trivial cost. Just a little theatrics in the service of bluff. Scaring the other side,

rshow55 - 05:07pm Dec 24, 2002 EST (# 6998 of 7000)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

There was a difficulty. Here was an instability. Change a simple mathematical circumstance, or perceptions of it, and perceptions of military risk shifted radically. If we could lie to the Russians, and say we'd cracked the problem, we might scare the hell out of them, at trivial cost. Just a little theatrics in the service of bluff. Scaring the other side, with bluffs (lies) is standard military practice. I found myself asked to get involved in what I took to be serous Russian scaring. I refused to go along, after talking to some people on the other side, because of my old fighting experience. It was my judgement, right or wrong, that they Russians were already plenty scared enough, and if scared much more, they might lose control, and fight without wanting to. I may have made a big mistake.

Later, at gisterme's suggestion, I set out more detail on the technical issues involved - http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/354 and thereafter, and especially #334 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/357

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I've been concerned with these issues, and this thread has adressed them again and again - but with respect to the Korean situation, it may make sense to read some of my personal story, and my sense of the Cold War, in reference to the movie Casablanca , in PSYCHWAR, CASABLANCA, AND TERROR http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/0 . Especially the core story part, from posting 13 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/12 to posting 23 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/22

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I think the points made are worth remembering as we deal with the North Koreans.

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