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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 - 11:03am Feb 26, 2001 EST (#786 of 790)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

mister_shadow 2/26/01 3:54am your suggestion that we need to get solutions that make sense, that fit basics, is surely right.

You're also certainly right when you say

If our goal is to reduce the threat of rogue powers with nuclear missles, a ballistic missle defence is not the effective way to do this.

Unless and until a ballistic missile defense is workable this is obviously true. And if this ever occurs, it will take years. And there are other, much cleaper, ways of keeping nuclear missiles out of the hands of rogue (read small) nations. Conventional military action can easily do this, with changes in international rules much easier to get than a missile defense system.

But on your last answer, you are dangerously incomplete - which means, in isolation, as you may have intended it, wrong:

Arms reduction and fostering high standards of living and democracy in those rogue powers is the way to do this.

A part of the way --- but the ugliness of the world is quite real, and nation states, including the US, have every right and every obligation to ensure themselves an effective, flexible, workable defense. We need a solution to our defense needs, and the defense needs of the world, of disciplined beauty. rshowalter 2/9/01 1:53pm

rshowalter - 05:11pm Feb 26, 2001 EST (#787 of 790)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

It seems to me that human actions work best according to the following pattern: rshowalt 9/25/00 7:36am

"Get scared .... take a good look ..... get organized ..... fix it .... recount so all concerned are "reading from the same page ...... go on to other things."

I think that's the pattern that works best for problem resolution in individual minds, and I think this is the pattern that works best when groups solve problems in satisfactory ways. I think this is the pattern that characterizes most of the aesthetically pleasing and practically efficient problem solving people do.

Our relationship to nuclear weapons has been nothing like this, historically -- the problem solving has gone terribly and perversely wrong.

People haven't known what to do. The situation is conflicted and complicated. But some things seem especially clear.

There has been a lot of deception on all sides, built into our military posturing.

Openness, by making first strikes more obviously implausible, would make us all safer, and could do so without any real sacrifice in deterrance.

If nuclear terror is to be made much less, or ideally eliminated, effective ways of enforcing prohibition of nuclear weapons are going to have to be found.

That would be distinctly easier if the United States renounced the first use of nuclear weapons, and would be progressively easier as the physical ability of the nuclear powers to make a militarily useful first strikes got smaller and smaller.

rshowalter - 08:07pm Feb 26, 2001 EST (#788 of 790)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

In rshowalter 2/9/01 1:53pm Dawn and I defined beauty as it could be applied to military circumstances.

Good military theory (and practice) is an attempt to produce beauty in Heisenberg's sense ( proper conformity of the parts to one another and to the whole ) in a SPECIFIC context of assumption and data.

Everything has to fit together (and, I think, be clearly describable in words, pictures, and quantitative descriptions, linked together comfortably and workably, both as far as internal consistency goes, and in terms of fit to what the military theory is supposed to apply to in action.

Military theories that are useful work comfortably in people's heads, so that they can guide real action..

Our nuclear postures and circumstances are as far from beautiful as they could possibly be. One might call them ugly. But they are a particular, special, kind of ugly.

There is no SPECIFIC context of assumption and data that really works for our nuclear policy, or for our understanding of the world that policy is built for.

I've been reading a lot of "defense theory" in journals like "International Security" -- and after all these years, nobody seems agreed on the most basic facts.

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