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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 - 12:21am Mar 26, 2001 EST (#1509 of 1513)
lunarchick@www.com

Conventional?

rshowalter - 06:34am Mar 26, 2001 EST (#1510 of 1513)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

We need to make war much, much less likely -- and less likely to involve civilians. The pictures in #1509 are wrenching, and well known. There are many, many, many cases, all over the world, of such ugliness -- many too many for a person to so much as glance at.

Conventional war is terrible - and the indiscriminate, stupid use of conventional weapons against civilians, and as terror, is especially terrible.

Terror bombing is terrible. The worst possible terror bombing is nuclear war - both in the qualitative horror involved with the deaths, and the lack of decencies like burial, and in the enormous, numbing, huge number of deaths involved. Nuclear war is something Presidents of the United States threaten other countries with. It is insane, and reprehensible.

We need to make the world safer, and more decent. There will still be plenty of ugliness, whatever we do. But we can make it better than it is.

rshowalter - 06:42am Mar 26, 2001 EST (#1511 of 1513)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Superb stuff Lunarchick ! As your stuff so often is.

I'll take time to savor it, and think about these postings ! How I wish I could know what you know, and think in the wonderful way you do. It is an honor, and a pleasure, to be enriched by contact with you.

rshowalter 3/25/01 4:08pm
rshowalter 3/25/01 4:12pm
rshowalter 3/25/01 4:13pm

Lunarchick and I are asking the question:

What is it that the Russian state, and the Russian nation, cannot do, in communication with outsiders, that it would need to do, to increase its own status and prosperity, and serve the cause of fairness, honor, world survival and peace?

We might also ask such questions of other nations, including our own. But the questions make sense to ask about Russia. Lunarchick's postings offer very good suggestions, and guides to thought.

And there are MANY possible ways to incrementally reduce, by learning, the gaps that now impoverish Russia, and endanger the world (and impoverish America, morally and materially, and endanger us, too.)

rshowalter - 06:47am Mar 26, 2001 EST (#1512 of 1513)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

I'm thinking of some contacts that might strike Russians as offensive and outrageous. For just that reason, they are useful to think of, at the level of "thought exercises" -- and perhaps at the level of discussions -- at the same limited, but incrementally useful level as the discussions with authors I've suggested.

One question that occurs to me is incremental steps toward "diplomatic relations" with ExxonMobil . Especially on the issue of getting right answers - determining truth. It turns out that, for essential reasons, ExxonMobil has a corporate interest in objective truth (though its interests are complex.) They also have an ad on the "OpEd" section of the NYT on the Web, today. http://www.exxonmobil.com/news/opeds/

rshowalter - 06:48am Mar 26, 2001 EST (#1513 of 1513)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

If the state of Russia had the sophistication, social skills, and contacts of this one man, in addition to its own, it would be much more able to succeed in complex, mutually respectful and profitable cooperation with other nation states, and at the level of global business.

Corporate Social Responsibility Challenges
Gitelson Symposium, Columbia University Remarks by Ken P. Cohen , Vice President, Public Affairs, Exxon Mobil Corporation January 26, 2001 http://www.exxonmobil.com/exec_speeches/index.html

A Business Perspective: Developments in International Organizations and Technology Given at The Council for the United States and Italy Lake Como, Italy Remarks by Ken P. Cohen , Vice President, Public Affairs, Exxon Mobil Corporation http://www.exxonmobil.com/public_policy/presentations/kpc_int_org_tech.html

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