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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?

lunarchick - 03:19pm Mar 13, 2001 EST (#969 of 977)
lunarchick@www.com

Why would Presidents determine to avert their gaze from Nuclear matters when the red-phone dydactic is embedded in world-psyche ?

rshowalter - 04:05pm Mar 13, 2001 EST (#970 of 977)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

lunarchick 3/13/01 3:19pm There might be many reasons for wanting to "avert one's gaze."

The Nation's FEATURE STORY | March 26, 2001 is

The Old Man and the CIA: A Kennedy Plot to Kill Castro? ... by DAVID CORN & GUS RUSSO http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010326&s=corn

The piece ends with this:

. "Forty years after the Kennedy glory days, it is well known that John Kennedy's Camelot had its dark side. Debate remains over how dark. The March 16 memo offers evidence that John and Robert participated in one of the ugliest exercises of those turbulent days. Blowing away Castro at the onetime home of Ernest Hemingway, an author admired by John Kennedy as well as Fidel Castro, sounds more like derring-do conjured up by a novelist than a plan contemplated by an Attorney General in the presence of a President. Yet that's the most logical reading of this piece of the incomplete historical record-- "

When murder is an option for people in an organization, and there are no checks and balances, might fraud be an option as well? If not in the beginning, after the accumulation of experience over many years?

With MANY things to be hidden, the inclination to hide anything and everything can be compelling -- and will become more reflexive, and less subject to examination, with the passage of time.

Big technical mistakes can be made, and hidden, in such an environment. So can big misunderstandings. So can big frauds.

Recent stories in the TIMES show how rigid military organizations can be, and how hard it can be for corrective action to occur in them.

In the CIA, for fundamental reasons, all these problems are worse.

And nuclear policy has been almost unsupervised by the President, and by the Congress, over a period of forty years. Eisenhower was the last President who understood it pretty well (and the basic engineering for our missiles and submarines was done on his watch.) That was a long time ago.

almarst-2001 - 04:30pm Mar 13, 2001 EST (#971 of 977)

rshowalter 3/13/01 4:05pm

The more I know about Eisenhower, the more I like the man. Unfortunatly, he seems rather an exception then common among Presidents.

Interestingly, he was not choosen among most admired and famous by American people. The Clinton, on the other hand, was.

rshowalter - 04:48pm Mar 13, 2001 EST (#972 of 977)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

He was a grind. He attended to details. I think Eisenhower was a very great man. Though he made mistakes that killed thousands of people, and knew it. In his position, the best of human beings, under the best of circumstances, make mistakes.

In tight quarters, people make moral mistakes, as well - and Eisenhower made some of those, I believe, as well. But he tried hard, he had the good sense to distrust his subordinates when he could, and when he had messes of their making, or his own, he tried to fix them. Often did.

I believe that everybody who cares about the survival of the world should consider carefully the concerns about the military-industrial complex set out in the FAREWELL ADDRESS of President Dwight D. Eisenhower January 17, 1961.

The core things Eisenhower warned against have happened. In many ways it is humanly understandable -- but there is a mess, it is as dangerous as it can possibly be, and we need to fix it.

rshowalter - 04:58pm Mar 13, 2001 EST (#973 of 977)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Fixed positions are considerably more vulnerable to circumvention than they used to be -often more vulnerable by many orders of magnitude. ..

That means we face new risks, but new opportunities, as well.

I believe that it might to great good to illustrate this, in a way that might dramatically aid the cause of world understanding and safety. As an example, not necessarily of something to be done, but of the things that could be done.

Suppose the government of Russia were to stage a nonlethal attack on the information flow defenses of the United States of America.

An entirely nonlethal attack, in the cause of peace.

I offer the following thought experiment. rshowalter 2/21/01 4:28pm

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