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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 - 07:19pm Jun 16, 2001 EST (#5295 of 5299)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

And there's been little updating in a decade -- since the military felt, quite reasonably, that the missiles were to be taken down. A lot has happened, technically, this decade.

Bad as this may seem, the real situation is worse. And much worse than it used to be. Because of technical details, including one "big" detail that cookies2 , who was our "Bill Clinton stand-in" on this thread, went to some pains to keep concealed. I've been reluctant to discuss these details . . In Dr. Slatton's sermon http://www.wisc.rshowalt/sermon.html one level of instability was eloquently discussed - at a level that has been "common knowledge" through the culture for years - though people have been paralyzed and haven't acted on it. At the "top" of the system - a mistake could send things off.

But it is worse than that - - because it is so easy to simulate a mistake at the top . . . That's the third level.

These are things that ought to be easy to check, from a systems point of view, except that we're dealing with a system where nothing can be checked in the ways that are expected in other complex systems.

Let me get some links, and do a little framing.

rshowalter - 07:26pm Jun 16, 2001 EST (#5296 of 5299)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

On September 25th, after a full day discussing nuclear matters with becq , who had some rank, and who I then believed was Bill Clinton, I made a request that should have been adressed as a matter of course -- but, somehow, it couldn't be. MD304 rshowalt 9/25/00 5:28pm

It still seems to me that it might be a good way to deal with some of the details involved in level three. I've been impressed that no one was able to follow up on the request, in any reasonable way at all. That's because the system is paralyzed by fear -- and the fear, it seems to me, is there for good reason.

Let me take a while to collect some things. . . .

rshowalter - 08:43pm Jun 16, 2001 EST (#5297 of 5299)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Sorry to be so slow. Here's some interim stuff, in case anyone is reading this, and bored to be kept waiting.

On March 1, I did some posting in a Guardian poetry thread, and some of my argument, about key nuclear controls (which, one can see from Rehearsing Doomsday , are telephone controls) , is set out in #1281-1282 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee79f4e/1565

My sense of risks (about a 10% chance of the world blowing up per year, or 1.6 million "statistically expected deaths per day" is set out in #1279 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee79f4e/1563

#1273 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee79f4e/1556 is an "expository poem that refers to something that happened to me in October of last year, where there are, I believe, journalistically solid records corraborating events. It starts

Before witnesses, not long ago
I blew through
Nuclear controls that apparently
hadn't been changed since the mid-60s'

I may have misused the word "nuclear controls" -- what happened is that my phones were cut off with "red alert" signals -- and I got through the isolation using patterns that were nuclear controls in the '60's and 70's , according to patterns I'd been taught then - and ran into operators, and procedures -- the same as I'd known then . . .

Back then, those patterns and sequences would have been useful for firing off missiles.

Given some responses, then and afterwards, I came to believe, though I cannot prove, that these same controls are still in use. . . . . and of course, that could be wrong.

What isn't wrong -- or can be easily be checked, is that the nuclear missile controls in the United States arsenal use telephone links that appear -- (again, I can only guess, but it is an informed guess) to be terribly vulnerable . . . so that a few people, or just a little psychopathology (grief, perhaps) could start firing missiles.

Something else isn't wrong --- and can be checked. Can partly be checked by looking at my experience. That is that the human aspects of our nuclear control system are terribly rigid, and resist most of the kinds of checking that people would expect them to have.

I'll be a while going on . . . .

Given that the issue here is a chance of the end of the world, why is this hard to get checked ?

possumdag - 09:04pm Jun 16, 2001 EST (#5298 of 5299)
Possumdag@excite.com

Interesting to note that Globalism means that telephone systems are exposed, in that, any company can buy into any where. The once Nationally Run communications systems - that might have had checks and balances in place - just don't exist today. So who, in terms of Nations, is in control of anothers communications system. It's a global conundrum.

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