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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 - 06:49pm Feb 22, 2001 EST (#756 of 759)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

mhunter20 2/22/01 10:11am I'm sure you're right that many Russians know that

some former US leaders abhor communism and used the cold war and the arms race to defeat it.

Surely these Russians must find it hard, and confusing, to see the nuclear threat continue after the fall of the USSR. How many hopes have been dashed ! How much time has been lost ! How much pain has been sustained !

I don't feel that the damage from deception is small in the US. I think the indirect costs of the deception may be much greater than the out-of-pocket money we've paid for nuclear weapons systems, large as that is. (I'm posting about that below.)

The costs seem to have been much larger in Russia. The economic burden of defense was terribly burdensome to the Soviets, and that continues for Russia. In order to keep from falling behind, the Russians have chosen to spend money on new missile systems when they have shortages of basic drugs in their hospitals. There can be no clearer evidence of how afraid the Russians are of first strikes from us.

The difficulties in Russia have been much greater than people expected a decade ago. Perhaps this is partly due to unresolved psychological damage, from a psychological warfare that was not resolved when it could have been resolved, and should have been.

rshowalter - 06:55pm Feb 22, 2001 EST (#757 of 759)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

I feel that issues of morality deserve special emphasis in a discussion of nuclear costs. Moral damage has all sorts of costs, in quality of life and straight economic terms, because the complex cooperations of productive business are, so often, based on predictablity and trust.

Therefore, moral inconsistency can be expensive. I suspect that a major problem, in most underdeveloped countries, involves such inconsistencies.

I don't see how anyone, or any nation, can adopt a "first use of nucear weapons" policy, and maintain a moral consistency - it seems to me that our nuclear policies are corrosive to our whole moral and intellectual life. rshowalt 9/25/00 3:50pm

Patterns of deception, which our nuclear policy dictates, impose operational constraints that get more and more onerous as system complexity increases.

There's another cost. Maybe bigger. When we have to take the classical position that

He who troubleth his own house will inherit the wind"

and assume that we must hide what we do from outsiders, we make it difficult, or even impossible to export the American econonomic example, something that we want to do. THE REASON IS BECAUSE THE OUTSIDERS CAN'T FIGURE OUT WHAT WE'RE DOING. And often we can't figure out what we have to do efficiently or quickly ourselves. In close quarters, when speed is important, lies are expensive, and can often be disastrous. And our nuclear policy commits us to many, basic, dynamically unstable lies. rshowalt 9/25/00 4:55pm

"You want to mess up your mind? Convince yourself that "first strikes with nuclear weapons are all right under some circumstances", and then try to put together a consistent set of moral standards. You can't. rshowalt 9/29/00 12:12pm

In #345 I said something, as a partisan Democrat, in criticism of Rick Lazio, that I've had reason to reconsider. I hope the Bush administration shows me that it CAN revitalize basic moral standards in America, and raise the standards of civility, while holding on to the many things that the Clinton administration did well. . I still believe that, if the Bush administration hopes to do so, it will have to renounce first strikes with nuclear weapons.

rshowalter - 06:57pm Feb 22, 2001 EST (#758 of 759)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Once, I met with some Russians here over on an exchange. rshowalt 9/29/00 6:30pm How, they asked, can Americans consider themselves moral in any way, and permit themselves the right to a first strike with nuclear weapons?

I had no answer for them. I don't think there is any answer to their question that can stand up to a determined cross examination.

A determined cross-examination wouldn't be hard to find, especially now that digital videotape and the internet combine so easily. Would anyone care to come and defend the morality of first strikes with nuclear weapons, with a moderator, on videotape, and with time for follow up questions?

Can anybody, actually making comparisons, stand up and justify our "we reserve the right to make a first strike" stance as morally defensible action? Can they do so with their faces, and facial expressions, on view to anyone on the internet who cares to watch them?

Our nuclear policy is morally indefensible, and corrupting.

If one can justify a first strike with nuclear weapons one can, by a quick comparison, justify anything else.

To say it is all right to use nuclear weapons under any circumstances is, pretty quickly, to throw out any workable judgements about better and worse in morality.

This is an important reason to want to rid the world of nuclear weapons, if we can.

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