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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 - 06:06am Apr 30, 2001 EST (#2758 of 2760)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

rshowalter "Reader Discussion: 'One Awful Night in Thanh Phong'" 4/29/01 5:36pm

Dawn Riley and I, and some other people, including a Russian figure who seems to think like a Russian leader, have been discussing issues of nuclear balances, and missile defense, here in the NYT - Science - Missile Defense thread.

The thread is extensive, and represents an effort to set down, using techniques the internet makes possible, an open corpus, with many crosslinks, adapted to assist in the focusing of an issue toward closure. Dawn Riley and I believe that, as a technical exercise showing the practical possibilities of this, the thread has some value.

The substance deals, of course, with a matter of life and death for the entire planet.

A summary of the thread, which is too large for easy reading, but not for sampling to check quality, is set out in a few pages with many links in http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/159

The Kerrey matter is not central to this work, but it is related, in part because of Kerrey's very good OpED piece ARMED TO EXCESS ... NYT , OpEd, March 2 http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/02/opinion/02KERR.html and in part because nuclear war involves atrocity on an almost unthinkable scale. The Kerrey story tends to make that more thinkable.

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" If more Americans could rise to (Kerrey's) level of moral sensitivity, current grave risks to the survival of the whole world could be ended."

rshowalter - 06:07am Apr 30, 2001 EST (#2759 of 2760)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

rshowalter "Reader Discussion: 'One Awful Night in Thanh Phong'" 4/29/01 6:05pm

The OpEd piece War and Memory by TOBIAS WOLFF http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/28/opinion/28WOLF.html deals with the Kerrey-Vietnam story, and is also relavent to nuclear weapons matters.

I've copied the piece and annotated it, bolding a few passages for emphasis, and added some comments: rshowalter 4/28/01 7:25am
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rshowalter - 06:08am Apr 30, 2001 EST (#2760 of 2760)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

rshowalter 4/28/01 7:32am : 2629: rshowalter 4/26/01 11:14am
2630: rshowalter 4/26/01 11:18am

Often matching to clear focus - matching to a confident focus - is impossible. But on issues of importance, if we do the work, we can find out a great deal.

Findings of consistency, again and again, from many statistically and causally independent connections, can "nail something down."

On the issues of nuclear weapons, missile defense, and military balance on which this thread deals, that work is worth doing.

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