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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 - 10:20pm Apr 22, 2001 EST (#2527 of 2532)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Another Secret Tiananmen Document Is Leaked by ERIK ECKHOLM http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/23/world/23CHIN.html

If China has to take desperate measures to fend off truth, she has some reframing of her problems yet to do.

In essential ways, China's leadership knows what to do -- that is to take historical responsiblility.

How much better, for all concerned, if China found a way - in her own way, to actually do it !

Nuclear weapons, too often, are the ultimate threat - used to fend off something percieved as too threatening to be faced -- the truth.

If people would just relax enough, and collect courage enough, to face the truth -- and the need for redemptive solutions - when "perfect justice" just isn't possible -- we could live in a more prosperous and peaceful world.

Pretty often, the things that seem "impossible to face" would be handled pretty easily, by all concerned, if they were simply faced.

lunarchick - 01:46am Apr 23, 2001 EST (#2528 of 2532)
lunarchick@www.com

Regarding Asia. The pricing system isn't a stated 'price', rather, it is 'what the suckers will pay'. So tourists passing through might be prepared to pay the first priced asked, but, long stayers on local-ish incomes feel they are really ripped off every time they want to buy.

I suppose this pricing system operates regarding trade. Primary output sold from Australia is first offered to Japan - who set a price - and other Asian nations buy in lower down the pricing scale.

It operates regarding products generally. Generic products (sometimes first quality) sell at lower prices than brand labels. The guides are quality, and for other items functionality. What is the function of the item? By paying 'more' do we get a 'better' product ... or does it have vanity appeal?

Even so in the west people like to see the price ... yet then again ... i noted (possibly in this paper) that the health prices asked of the poor are far higher than the health-product/output bought by the big funds who lever their price right down leaving NO MARGIN for doctors to offer cut price charity work for the really poor .. who presumably die young from lack of attention .. that's the price for being poor.

So with Missiles .. how are these priced ... outrageously by all accounts .. sorry no accounts available ... and missiles are Generic product with maintenance cost ... and unusable -- for if they were their brothers and sisters would reign down on the sender ... so on missile defence --- how much do they spend .... err !?

rshowalter - 10:47am Apr 23, 2001 EST (#2529 of 2532)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

lunarchick 4/23/01 1:46am
price is a big thing in buying decisions.

And by sensible accountings of benefits and risks, our nuclear weapons are not worth paying for and neither are the hoaxes about missile defense now being pushed by the Bush administration.

But price isn't the only thing. People are visual animals, and their ability to make decisions about proportion, and aesthetics, are tightly linked to the visual.

Often, people can't understand enough about something to act (it takes confidence to act) without seeing what it is that is being sold. The point is made in ARMED TO EXCESS by Bob Kerrey ... NYT , OpEd, March 2 http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/02/opinion/02KERR.html
reproduced also in 1831: rshowalter 3/31/01 1:14pm

Here's Kerrey:

" Part of the reason that Congress has not been pressing for steep reductions is that members of Congress have never seen the actual missile targeting plans developed by the military in response to presidential directives. For twelve years in the Senate — eight of which I served on the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence — I tried without success to get this briefing. In fact, I was unable to find a single member of the Senate who had been briefed. Mr. Bush should order his military commanders to brief members of Congress on the targeting plans.

" ...... A map of Russia that contained thousands of red circles each indicating a nuclear detonation would convincingly show the extent of the excess nuclear capability we have.

That map, in fact, would show that our nuclear policies are, and have long been, insane . The military knows it, and so they've fought so hard to conceal anything about how our nuclear arrangements work.

rshowalter - 10:52am Apr 23, 2001 EST (#2530 of 2532)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Including the fact that the US only very seldom drills "retaliatory" scenarios -- the US military rehearses first strikes predominantly. --

Not a pretty fact for us to know.

But an essential fact for the Russians to know, because the purpose of nuclear weapons, in US policy, since the Eisenhower administration, has been to terrorize the USSR (now Russia) so completely that she is paralyzed, cannot run her own society well, and collapses under the weight of fear, rigidities, and expenditures.

It seems to me a very good question:

Why didn't we turn this threat off with the fall of the Soviet Union?

We didn't. We should have done so. Our own military people expected us to do so.

The only answer that makes sense to me involves corruption on a large scale, where so much skimming went on that the "military industrial complex" didn't dare turn the missile threat off. Perhaps, though, there are other explanations.

No matter how many other wonderful things that US can be proud of, we should be ashamed of ourselves here.

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