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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 - 08:30am Apr 12, 2001 EST (#2181 of 2185)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Many people involved with the preparation of the CNN Special Report Rehearsing doomsday felt that it would galvanize the nation into action on disarmament. Some of Ted Turner's actions since it aired may be explained by concern that it did not. This much is clear. The people, in Russia and the US, charged with firing nuclear weapons expected them to come down when with the fall of the iron curtain, and cannot understand why they did not.

- Rehearsing Doomsday ... "Even with the end of the Cold War, U.S. missile silos are poised to launch ..." text adaptation of CNN's Special Report, which aired Sunday, October 15 at 10 p.m. EDT http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2000/democracy/nuclear/stories/nukes/index.html

Truths that seem like they should be strong enough are still -- "somehow too weak". That doesn't mean the truths are untrue. It means that the persuasive means, taken as a whole, have to be made more effective.

rshowalter - 08:32am Apr 12, 2001 EST (#2182 of 2185)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Practical concerns and moral concerns about nuclear weapons are mixed rshowalter 11/19/00 1:53pm

There's an impressive list of Americans and people of other nations, including prominant miltary, political, religous, and business leaders, publicly supporting prohibtion of nuclear weapons. rshowalt 10/4/00 5:08am Many more people, including many of the highest rank in American society, feel the same way.

There are people, and some of them actively recruited by the Bush administration, who are for nuclear weapons, in the ways that matter. But they are neither so numerous nor so distinguished a group by American or world standards.

rshowalter - 08:38am Apr 12, 2001 EST (#2183 of 2185)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

"DOES THE UNITED STATES NEED NUCLEAR WEAPONS?" Radio Broadcast test, 6 February 1994, Center for Defense Information http://www.cdi.org/adm/Transcripts/721/ sets out very important facts and ideas, that are true, but still "too weak."

For the survival and prosperity of the world, these ideas need to be strengthened in terms of their persuasiveness. Here are excerpts, including some notable quotes from Secretary of State (then General) Colin Powell.

rshowalter - 08:40am Apr 12, 2001 EST (#2184 of 2185)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

"Admiral EUGENE CARROLL, Jr: The problems of nuclear weapons are unending and there are no benefits. Up until 1955, I was like Joe Citizen. I thought that nuclear weapons were good. They kept the peace. They made the United States powerful. But in 1955, I trained as a weapons delivery pilot for the US Navy and, by 1956, I was standing watch on an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean, ready to go behind the "iron curtain" with a nuclear weapon and destroy a target. But to destroy one marginal military target, a supply center, the one weapon would have also killed 600,000 people. You can't justify fighting with that type of destructive power.

"NARRATOR: War is about killing people and destroying things. Nothing does this more effectively than nuclear weapons. The indiscriminate and uncontrollable nature of nuclear weapons, however, makes these weapons unusable.

"Admiral CARROLL: If you go to war and use nuclear weapons, you destroy everything that the war is about, and so no one wins. You end up with radioactive rubble and destruction beyond imagination.

"Admiral STANSFIELD TURNER: You cannot win wars by using nuclear weapons. The side effects are too great.

"Mr. WILLIAM COLBY: Over the last 15 years, we've not been playing with death and destruction, we've been playing with the possible elimination of life on Earth, except for a few worms down in the mud somewhere. Because if any number of those weapons had gone off, civilization would have gone and most humanity would have gone by the radiation and all the rest of it.

- - - -

NARRATOR: General Colin Powell, while chairman of the Pentagon Joint Chiefs of Staff, indicated the military useless-ness of nuclear weapons. According to General Powell, nuclear weapons are "a wasted investment in a military capability that is limited in political or military utility." [23 September 1993]

Here is General COLIN POWELL speaking on 10 June 1993, at Harvard University:

" Under agreements that we have negotiated just over the past few years and will come into effect by the end of the decade, we are bringing the number of our nuclear warheads down from over 20,000 when I became chairman four years ago to just over 5000. And today I can declare my hope and declare it from the bottom of my heart that we will eventually see the time when that number of nuclear weapons is down to zero and the world is a much better place."

NARRATOR: The United States built 70,000 nuclear weapons and only detonated two in war. Those two bombs destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 people in 1945.

Admiral CARROLL: Since that time, we have never found a reason or an excuse to use a single nuclear weapon. Even though, for example, we were engaged in a protracted war in Korea, even though we went down to a serious national defeat in Vietnam, not one of our 30,000 nuclear weapons was useful.

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