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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 - 08:35pm Apr 26, 2001 EST (#2640 of 2644)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

They'd feel much less agony than Kerrey felt.

And this must be something that Kerrey knows, too.

Nuclear weapons make mass murder easy - too easy. Though not entirely easy. You could know this too - especially if you'd seen the faces, and the rigidity of the missileers, of all ranks, in CNN's Special Report, REHEARSING DOOMSDAY ...which aired Sunday, October 15, 2000 at 10 p.m. EDT. http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2000/democracy/nuclear/stories/nukes/index.html

The television images of the missileers' faces are rigid and dark. These people know what they are doing, and what they may do. They are prepared to kill thousands and millions of times more people than Kerrey's unit killed. They can find the ego strength, and the peer reinforcement, to do it.

In important ways, the greatest hardship the missileers face is boredom --

Missile Commander.

rshowalter - 08:38pm Apr 26, 2001 EST (#2641 of 2644)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

In md2616: rshowalter 4/26/01 7:05am I said:

"If a young man does something terrible -- something that could easily end both his life and his self esteem -- if, under these circumstances, you "pin a medal on him" and give him special rewards and protections -- you have a co-opted individual, who will have a hard time indeed, at later times, refusing "reasonable requests."

That may have happened to Kerrey - and in some real senses, he may have been something of a thoughtless monster at 25.

I think I was something of a monster at that age, too. I was trained, under easily imaginable circumstances, to kill innocent people. Trained to do so, on my own authorization, without hesitation, if I found they happened to know more than they should, and that constituted a compelling national reason. And I was confident that if I did so, in the heat of action, I'd be backed up, whether I showed good judgement or not, so long as I tried to do well. I took it for granted that Russians, under some circumstances, would do the same to me.

I took it for granted that many thousand of innocents were being slaughtered in Vietnam. I felt at the time that, considering everything at stake, that the murderousness of Vietnam was justified.

Compared to nuclear war, which was very real and very completely imagined to people I worked with, the killing of 20 innocents at close range, while wrenching and regrettable, was a small misfortune - thousands of times smaller than things we had to think about, fear, and consider ourselves capable of doing.

Kurt LeMay, and other military people responsible for firebombing knew themselve capable of killing millions - and knew the human consequences of what they were doing, in the senses that ought to matter for responsibiltiy.

Kerrey did something ugly.

But Kerrey was co-opted and used, as well as co-opting and using.

Bronze Stars are highly prized, carefully researched directions - and having one makes a difference to any career, in or out of the service. I don't see how the people who awarded Kerrey his Bronze Star could have been in doubt that they were perpetrating a fraud.

And, at at time when terrorizing the Russians was a central national objective, American officers felt that America's military threat posture could not "show weakness" -- and terrible actions were even, from a certain perspective, part of reaching for a "larger good."

I have no doubt that Kissinger, and very many others, all through the government, felt that way, and acted in the monstrous ways they sometimes did for that reason.

rshowalter - 08:39pm Apr 26, 2001 EST (#2642 of 2644)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

For all I know, the terrible decisions, the terrible callousness of the Cold War was justified.

For all I know, the whole world might have ended if we had not terrorized the Russians as we did.

Perhaps the slaughter in Vietnam and elsewhere, while not just, was nonetheless not in vain.

No one can know.

But the Cold War ought to be over , nuclear weapons are obsolete, morally repugnant menaces, and we should take the damn things down.

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