New York Times on the Web Forums Science

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 - 12:41pm Mar 9, 2001 EST (#890 of 893)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

As technologies evolve, vulnerabilities change, and they can do so rapidly. Decisions that make great sense, from one perspective, impose new and complicated vulnerabilities. For example, people are developing the means to lay communication cable in city sewers.

This is an attractive idea -- suppose the idea is used, and becomes the established way of laying these cables in major cities for a long time (say 2-3 years.)

Now, how vulnerable have these cities now become to coordinated attack, by teams as competent as the Isaelis, for example, could field?

Other technical decisions involving the new communication technology, including many long since made, involve similar vulnerabilities. Some, of course, like the ones associated with gas pipelines, are well known and old, and involve systems other than communication and control. There are now a practically uncountable, and rapidly growing, number of such vulnerabilities in advanced societies such as ours. And our prosperity rests on complexities that make these vulnerabilities unavoidable, and in the aggregate, indefensible.

The over-simple, over-brutal logic or our nuclear weapons systems is obsolete, and radically dangerous -- even if the systems had no other problems. But the systems DO have other problems, and they are serious ones.

Nuclear weapons are obsolete, dangerous menaces, and we should take them down.

Adding the extra layer of AMD won't help.

rshowalter - 12:43pm Mar 9, 2001 EST (#891 of 893)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

We need to take care of our vulnerabilities, which are real.

One important thing we need to do is limit the way we threaten other countries, and limit the lies we tell them , so that reasonable stability and prosperity are possible.

Psychwarfare, Casablanca -- and terror http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/0

Mankind's Inhumanity to Man and Woman - As natural as human goodness? http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7b085/0

As systems become more complicated, the costs of lies, secrecy, and deception become greater -- and beyond a point, this happens at a rate something like the growth rate of N! with increasing N.

Our world could be radically safer, and richer, fairly quickly, if we recognized this.

almarstel2001 - 12:48pm Mar 9, 2001 EST (#892 of 893)

rshowalter 3/9/01 12:41pm

Given the current world disballance of conventional power, the nuclear wearpons are the only financially feasible answer of most countries agains owerhelming US conventional military. There is no full who would not understand that. And that is precisely the aim of AMD to remove the last layer of protection from anyone who may potentially come at odds with US policies.

rshowalter - 01:30pm Mar 9, 2001 EST (#893 of 893)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

All concerned ought to be able to do MUCH better than we're doing.

It should also be possible, without too much courage, for us to keep from continuing the wrenchingly dangerous technical mistakes, involving our nuclear weapons and controls, which, if nothing is done, WILL in my opinion probably destroy the world.

American forces are as good as they are - and as predominant as they are -- and as an American citizen, considering the conventional forces, I'm not unhappy --- I wish these conventional forces were militarily much better, as a matter of fact.

But there are severe limits to what can be done with military power -- and the US is being clobbered, humiliated, charged unfairly, and made ridiculous in all sorts of ways (even as our actions disserve the rest of the world) because we try to use military force where it doesn't work.

Nuclear force is essentially always unusable (and a menace and a corrupting influence in other ways.)

There are big limits to what you can do with conventional forces, too. President Bush and many of his advisors know them, and so do American officers.

But our military forces, well used, and in coordination with the forces of other nations, some of them "enemies" in other ways, CAN, with diplomacy, do a servicible job of stepping away from world destruction. -- We CAN make the use of nuclear weapons unlikely - a risk, at worst, not greater than the risk mankind faces from reasonably frequent natural disasters.

We don't have any viable choice, but to do so.

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense