![[F]](../_images/site.gif) New York Times on the Web Forums  Science
Nazi engineer and Disney space advisor Wernher Von Braun helped give
us rocket science. Today, the legacy of military aeronautics
has many manifestations from SDI to advanced ballistic missiles. Now there is a controversial push for a new missile defense system.
What will be the role of missile defense in the new geopolitical
climate and in the new scientific era?
    (272 previous messages)rshowalt - 10:56am Sep 25, 2000 EDT (#273 of 396) Another thing. Nuclear weapons are morally and logically corrosive to individuals and systems. They've done terrible things to William Jefferson Clinton, who tried to think coherently and messed up his (very impressive, admirable) mind in ways that have been expensive to him and the rest of us. If you say
"it is all right to use nuclear weapons first sometimes" and keep thinking that, every moral judgement in your head is subject to logical collapse. It is like a fatal bug in a computer program.
The LOGICAL and MORAL costs of nuclear weapons are higher than anybody seems to appreciate.
Not only that, they're a lot less stable than people think, and could easily destroy the human race, pretty soon, if we don't get rid of them. Which would be easy to do, and the best thing that ever happened to the defense of the United States, and the political-military stability of the world.
The only REALLY TOUGH part is that some American policy makers would have to admit to some confusions, and some missteps. Guys who haven't been thinking of themselves as ordinary fallible human being would have to admit that they were. And maybe apologize for a few things. That's the hard part. The only hard part. The rest of the problems involved in getting rid of nuclear weapons are pretty easy. We could do it this year. The Russians could make that schedule, and we could, too. If it happened like that, Bill Clinton would be remembered, for 100's of years, as one of the greatest Presidents the United States ever had - and deserve to be.
demiourgos - 11:52am Sep 25, 2000 EDT (#274 of 396)
Smalltalk developer, Web developer beckq, well noone uses sarissas any longer. They are the weapon that Philip of Macedon developed along with innovations in the standard Greek phalanx which permitted him to conquer much of the super-Mediterranean region.
rshowalt - 12:11pm Sep 25, 2000 EDT (#275 of 396) And Philip's son was one of the monsters of all time. Trained by Aristotle, so he could out-talk anybody. Had a sure-enough, fail safe pattern for getting any army at all to panic, and attack him in uncoordinated dissarray, so he could slaughter them, one after another, after another, after another, ad nauseum .... all the way to India. Or China, I suppose, if his troops hadn't finally stopped him. Alexander totally lost his sense of proportion, and any vestige of humanity that mattered in military politics, and butchered tens of thousands more people than he had the tiniest reason to.
He NEVER learned that the purpose of military action is establishment of a workable CIVIL SOCIETY. Alexander the Great was a monster, like Hitler, who only knew how to agress, never to make a stable peace.
Now we have nuclear weapons, that absolutely guarantee that, after they are used, no peace can be made. Only extermination is possible. And the controls we have on them are unstable, to boot.
We should get rid of the damned things. We could do it this year.
beckq - 01:55pm Sep 25, 2000 EDT (#276 of 396) demiourgos
Incorrect. They have been improved on. They have not been eliminated. Thanks for playing.
beckq - 01:58pm Sep 25, 2000 EDT (#277 of 396) rshowalt - 10:38am Sep 25, 2000 EDT (#271 of 276)
Excellent. So we are in agreement. Nuclear weapons will exist until something 'better' a better weapon comes down the tubes that makes them absolete.
I could not agree more.
beckq - 01:59pm Sep 25, 2000 EDT (#278 of 396) rshowalt - 10:56am Sep 25, 2000 EDT (#273 of 277)
Sounds like an Indian I know who fell in love with the BJP so much he wanted to wash away the very history of his own country and replace it with nothing more then when dear ole V took office and onward.
Even if this post arrives in another forum-I win.
rshowalt - 03:50pm Sep 25, 2000 EDT (#279 of 396) We already have a lot of good weapons, and we can build more fast, and the US is FAR from undefended. Get rid of nuclear weapons, that nobody can use anyway, and our militaries have stable jobs to do.
A big thing we need is moral rearmament that is logically workable.
Now, we've become corrupted, attempting to justify the unjustifiable with evasive words. "Willy_Nilly) #6238, in the favorite poetry forum
is an example of how facile, yet dangerous, the logical corruption of nuclear weapons can be.
willy_nilly "Favorite Poetry" 9/23/00 10:43am
When you use the words "threat" and "threaten" in the grossly undefined, multiple meaning way used in this piece - this is what you get ......
"I, the president of the United States, can kill anyone I want, for any reason or no reason, and no one can stop me, or question me, because I can use these genocidal weapons without qualm or fear, and can justify anything at all I wish to, with facile, beautiful sounding words." It is a brilliant performance, and the logical degeneration in the piece is stunning - because it acts as if first strikes are justifiable, which they are not, and operationally permissable, which they are not. If Clinton were put on a witness stand, with videotape, and a competent lawyer (Gerry Spence might be best) were to walk through the word usages in this passage in context, it would be chilling. The passage is one of the scariest things I've seen, and it is standard, classic U.S. military doctrine.
We may be "the good guys" in most ways, as President Clinton so rightly says. But our military posture is garishly out of kilter with the rest of us, and the rest of the world knows it, and resents it, and we should fix it. Using implicit and semi-explicit threats of first strike nuclear weapon use, long a standard U.S. negotiating tactic, is a kind of psychological warfare that's poisoning the world.
And giving us real, motivated enemies who might otherwise be allies or much safer competitors.
If we fixed that, we'd be much better defended than we are today, and we'd have fewer, and less motivated enemies. We need a strong defense, and
if you take away the nuclear weapons, we have one. We're a tough, strong, well armed, coordinated people, who know our own businesses well, who work together, and we know how to move fast.
Who would dare attack us on our own soil? What business do we have elsewhere, manufacturing enemies, and paralyzing other people's minds (yes, that's exactly what I mean, especially with respect to the Russians) with Communism dead?
  (117 following messages)
  
  New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense |
