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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 - 11:37am Jul 19, 2001 EST (#7222 of 7236)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Putin wants peace, and balance. So do many, many people and nations, all over the world.

Key points, concisely made, about REAL problems the world, and especially the US, needs to face, if real peace is to be possible. Problems much more tangible than the threat of rogue missiles -- problems which, if better adressed, would give America more to be proud of, and less to fear.

MD1092 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?14@184.0R72ageHrbu^5409113@.f0ce57b/1181... and Putin yesterday:
RUSSIAN PRESIDENT CALLS FOR COMMON EUROPEAN SECURITY AND DEFENSE ZONE - http://english.pravda.ru/main/2001/07/18/10470.html

MD4468 lunarchick 6/3/01 5:10pm ...." Interesting to note how the adult cowards of the world pick on children to brainwash and carry out adult hatreds." . . . .

MD4469 rshowalter 6/3/01 5:50pm . . . "To some degree, the "adult cowards of the world" do the same to all soldiers -- who are put into situations where they do (and believe) what they're told. Human beings, including young adults, are easy to train, suggestable, and obedient. Young children are essentially helpless before authority.
SN1422-1423 rshowalter "Science in the News" 8/29/00 7:26am ... The point is well illustrated by
The 'Heathen a poem by Rudyard Kipling on military training ... SN1427 rshowalter "Science in the News" 8/29/00 8:03am

From MD317-324 lunarchick 9/27/00 9:38pm

That's an order !
classic study in this area: http://www.fsu.umd.edu/dept/psyc/southerl/prism/bill.htm
http://www.usafa.af.mil/dfpfa/CVs/Bertha/Psyhero.html
http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~epritch1/social98a.html
http://www.abacon.com/baronbyrne/chapter9.html
http://www.psychology.org/links/People_and_History/

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/playground/pd.html
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/playground/pdref.html

http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~russell/brbomb.htm ..... http://www.mcmaster.ca/russdocs/russell1.htm

Trying to lie about Chernobyl backfired http://www.animatedsoftware.com/cassini/thebeast.htm

Changing hearts: how to?

coldWar http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/macdon.htm
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/sasianuk.htm (1995IndiaPakistan)

http://www.psc-cfp.gc.ca/prcb/rd/hrsystem/levlegie.htm
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/interventions/thinktanks.htm

rshowalter - 11:37am Jul 19, 2001 EST (#7223 of 7236)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

MD4471 rshowalter 6/3/01 6:21pm

The Innocence of 'Pearl Harbor' by JOHN W. DOWER http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/03/opinion/03DOWE.html . . . contains powerful, useful language and ideas, referring to the movie, Pearl Harbor , as representation:

" When Pearl Harbor is bombed, the attack force passes over a field of youngsters playing baseball (a scene featured in the film's advertisements). The camera follows the explosives to their human victims — and then dwells there, interminably, amid the carnage. Although the Doolittle raid killed about 50 civilians, including some schoolchildren, we never see this or hear of it. Nor are we told, in the film's epilogue, how inexorable was the terrible logic of the war: Pearl Harbor leading to the Doolittle raid, and this in turn to the firebombing of over 60 Japanese cities, culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The death toll from the atomic bombs alone was nearly 100 times that at Pearl Harbor.

" Payback, many Americans will respond. But this does not get us very far when it comes to trying to convey the nightmarish insanity of war in our time, where the line between combatant and noncombatant has been eliminated and that between victim and victimizer so often dissolves.

. . . . .

"How different it would be if on both sides of the Pacific, we could turn Prime Minister Higashikunis wish around and simultaneously remember both Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima (and all that came both before and in between) — not as a trade-off, but as a tragedy. An enormously powerful, humanistic film waits to be made here. But who would dare do this? Who would go see it?

The people of the world need to be able to appreciate the hypothetical movie Dower speaks of. We need to step back from horrors that came to be considered normal during WWII - - - horrors that were magnified, almost beyond belief, in the nuclear terror -- horrors that need to be ended, so that the world will survive, and so that we can be more decent.

It is not all right to blow up innocent bystanders, who happen to be loosely labeled enemies -- whether it is done by a suicide bomber - or a button pusher -- and the horror is worse as the numbers of people killed increase. We now live in a world where, under easily imaginable circumstance, the all of humanity could be reduced to rotting unburied corpses.

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