Okay over in this thread Joel wonders why everyone’s so upset about the Dubya trying to start up Reagan’s “Star Wars”/SDI program (not that it ever really went away) again. Of course, we also have to ask ourselves if the whole thing’s a good idea or not.
Personally, I think that its a complete waste of time and money. The “rogue” nations examples used to justify it are pretty pathetic. Okay, so some whacko dictator manages to get his grubby little mitts on a nuke and lob it in our direction without warning, do you think anyone’s really going to complain if we hit him back with everything we’ve got? (And, probably what we’d do would be worse than what the Romans did to Carthage.) If he decides to give us a “heads up” first, do you really think that we’ll be the only nation telling him not to do it?
I’d say the odds were greater in us having to worry about someone slipping a suitcase nuke in, than they were of N. Korea, or Saddam, or dictator-flavor-of-the-week, lobbing a missile in our direction.
Star Wars has no purpose in the current political situation. The original Reagan-era Star Wars was merely a scare tactic to get the Russians to bankrupt themselves trying to keep up with US military expenditures. But I have news for little Georgie: we ALREADY WON that fight, the russians ARE bankrupt. To proceed with this futile, expensive Star Wars plan today will only bankrupt US.
It is not a waste of time or money, Tuckerfan. However, it is misguided. You are right, the idea never really went away -but it’s been around since the space program.
Reagan was the first President to make it common Knowledge. That was a good thing then. It made the Russians spend more on defense, draining their economy, and they went bankrupt. Reagan’s arms race hurt us economically, but it hurt the Russians far more and ended the cold war. Actually a brilliant piece of brinksmanship.
It is not a good idea now. Clinton had a better take on it than W. does. Develop it, sure. Just don’t publisize it so much. We have been developing the technology for years, but we are no where even close to developing a true shield. George W seems Hell bent on deploying “vapor ware”. It is a very bad bluff and nothing good can come of it.
We should continue to develop the technology, just not as rabidly. Rogue terrorists with dangerous briefcases are the main threat, but learning to guard against ICBM’s is a still a smart move
The most likely scenario, IMO, is that terrorists will smuggle suitcase nukes into the country. The technology is there and more available to these small ‘rouge’ countries than missles capable of throwing nuclear bombs this far.
As a side note, I very much doubt the ‘success’ of the test the other day, at least until I see some independent coorboration. It wouldn’t be the first time the military had ‘faked’ test results in order to keep a project going. We’ll see what congress has to say about it (except that congress is filled with people supporting the SDI thingy).
Hey urban1, even Satan has to tell the truth once in awhile!
Seriously, though, me and some friends who’ve worked in the broadcast industry figured out that it’d be easier and cheaper to gather up the equipment necessary to fake a newscast stating that this or that US city had been nuked, and transmit it (ala Captain Midnight’s protest a number of years ago against HBO), than it would be to build an atomic weapon capable of taking out a major US city. (This would cause major “War of the Worlds” type panic.)
Nobody’s done either. Why? [George Carlin voice] Because there’s no one on the planet crazy enough to do it! [/George Carlin voice] Because if you start a nuclear war, you’re going to die! And don’t hand me that someone would do it in praise of Allah! Right, the guys strapping bombs to themselves and blowing up innocent Israelis aren’t the ring-leaders of the organizations. Those guys know that if they gave the order (or even if they didn’t) to nuke someone, the entire planet would hunt them down! As a matter of fact, the punishment meted out to those guys would probably be of Biblical proportions (i.e. killing their entire family, root and branch). This whole “Star Wars”/SDI/NMD is simply another Orwellian method of diverting resources to the wealthy. Its a complete waste of time. If someone wants to nuke us, there’s nothing we can do to stop it. They’ll find a weak link in whatever method of defense we come up with and stick the bomb there, but its not gonna happen!
Tuckerfan: I’m not sure what your point is. Are you saying that terrorists would be more likely to fake a nuclear blast than actually create one? What you do evision this deception involving? I can’t see anything short of a massive conspiracy convincing more than the most credulous members of our society.
My point is that despite the fact that its cheaper to fake a nuke attack, no one’s worried about it happening! As for what value this would have, stop and think about it for a moment. You’re there, watching CNN, and suddenly the newscaster breaks in whatever story happens to be going on at the moment and says that there’s been an attack on New York City and the military believes that it was a nuke. Now, when you hear that, are you going to think that hey that wasn’t the newscaster who was on just a second ago, or that it looks like someone’s cut and spliced (which can be done almost seamlessly if you know how) the whole thing together. No, you’re going to think: OMG! They’ve nuked New York! Saner people will start surfing the channels for another report on it, but most people will get hit with an initial panic that the world’s coming to an end.
No major conspiracy is needed here. Captain Midnight (or whatever he was billing himself as) was a satellite dish retailer who felt threatend by HBO’s scrambling of its signals, so he cobbled together some equipment, video taped a couple of messages and hijacked 'em onto HBO’s signal using one of the dishes he had in his back yard. Probably cost him $1000 worth of equipment to do it. Pretty damn cheap.
With the digital editing capabilities of the home computer these days, someone with the right knowledge could put together a realistic looking news account and do the same thing to CNN’s feed that Captain Midnight did to HBO’s. (They could even go to the trouble of making ones up for the other networks, if they wanted to.)
The initial panic reaction of Americans is what the terrorist would be after. Let’s face it, terrorists want to create terror. Hence the name. An episode like this might even score them a few points with people because no babies would have been killed in the process.
This is cheap, scares the hell out of people for awhile, and the terrorists, if they’re smart, probably won’t get caught.
MGibson, I have no objection to the US government spending money on things like cheaper forms space travel, but to shell out big bucks for something that’s not going to work, and never going to be used or needed even if it did work, torques me off!
Ever hear George Carlin’s rant about airport security? This is the same kind of thing. Nobody’s going to launch a nuke at anybody! Its not going to happen! Why? Because as I stated before, they’ll have their ass hunted down and exterminated.
Besides, if someone did launch a nuke at us, and it got stopped by the “shield,” how would we respond? Laugh at them? Nuke them? (“Hey! They tried to nuke us! We’ve got every right to nuke them back! So what if they don’t have a shield to protect themselves from our stuff? They should have thought of that before they tried to nuke us!”) This whole thing is one unmitigated piece of poppycock.
And I have to ask how you know that it will never be used or needed in the future? Can you tell me what the condition of the world will be in 5, 10, or 20 years with absolute certainty?
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And if the other side develops an anti-nuclear system?
Nuking them would certainly be justifiable retaliation. But I don’t know what they’d do. Maybe they’d find another solution.
MGibson, let’s take these one at a time, shall we?
Nope. I have no idea what the condition of the world will be in a year from now, much less in the time frames you mention. I do, however, believe that the following things will be true then as they are now:
No one will want to risk a nuclear confrontation, no matter what the circumstances are. The consequences are just too great.
That humans will continue to threaten one another and slaughter one another in as a brutal fashion as they have done since the beginning of time.
That whomever our perceived enemies are, they will be a mixture of ones we currently have now, and ones which are at present off the radar.
That these conditions will exist, with or without the development of SDI/NMD.
What makes you think that they haven’t already? If we’re going to toss out paranoid suggestions, let’s throw that into the mix. It doesn’t matter who builds an SDI/NMD system, someone, somewhere, if they’re really serious on attacking you, they will find away around your defenses. The French thought the Maginot Line was a good way to hold back a German advance. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now.
Nuking them would not be an acceptable form of retaliation. Period, paragraph. If we escaped a nuclear attack from some penny-anny dictator, and we responded by nuking him in turn, world opinion would be so totally against us, that it would be better to have let him nuke us. It would be seen as more heavy-handed tactics by the US, trying to bully the rest of the world. I don’t think anyone would object if we hit 'em with everything we had, so far as conventional weaponry went, but if we avoided hot radioactive death, and decided to inflict it upon someone else, that would look very bad indeed upon us.
Well, all I can say is, in my thread on the subject a few months ago, a lot of people were laughing derisively at my premise that technological advances will make a missile defense – whether it is a good idea or not – a more realistic possibility in the future.
(Now someone will come in and explain how the successful test – which is really freaking incredible, when you stop and think about it – is some kind of a fluke or aberration. Like it would even be possible for such a thing to be a fluke.)
If it even happened, of course, we only have their word that it did. < eg >
However, in three tries, we have successfully hit one missile when
we knew it was coming,
we knew where it would be launched,
we knew when it would be launched,
and the single (pre-determined) trajectory was being monitored from dozens of sites.
This is not dissimilar from the initial trials of the Bradley as a defensive weapon where they filled it with water, removed all the armament and fuel, and it didn’t blow up! when they shot it with a single, non-exploding round.
I have no trouble with the idea that we should continue development of the technology. Making the production of such a device a priority (and, thus, encouraging Russia and China to begin looking for ways to defeat it) and abrogating the ABM treaty when we do not have anything that will truly work is stupid.
Milossarian, I have no doubt given enough time and money, we could come up with an effective NMD system, but what’s the point? As I’ve stated before in this thread, nobody’s going to nuke anyone!
The political fallout from a nuclear strike is would be so bad that no one woud ever dare do such a thing.
Let’s take a hypothetical situation:
El Whacko Dictator decides that he wants to prove to the world that he’s the big shot who should be listened to, so he lobs a nuke at some neighboring country. It hits, millions of people die. The lucky ones go quickly, the rest die horribly from radiation poisoning.
What do you think is going to happen? Do you think that the rest of the world is going to say, “Ooooh, El Whacko’s one bad, Mo-Fo! Let’s leave him alone?”
Not going to happen. The rest of the world is going to deliver El Whacko an ultimatum: He can either turn himself in and be prosecuted before the world court, or he and his nation can expect certain destruction in X number of hours.
The nut jobs the CIA/NSA/FBI/any other “alphabet agency” you care to name consider to be a threat know this! They’re not going to bother with nukes (or biological weapons) as they know that as long as they continue with the occassional bombing, kidnapping, mass-murder, and assassinations, the rest of the world isn’t going to bother them too much. Once they enter the nuclear arena, however, they will be taken very seriously.
This whole thing with the NMD is simply another case of “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.”
Why is Putin all of a sudden for us developing Star Wars? Especially right after we have a successful test? Could it be that he is trying to pull a Reagan on us?
More to the point, Tucker. If your hypothetical whacko military dictator does decide to nuke someone, it’s not going to be with a sophisticated and expensive missile system that would be stopped by our anti-missile shield. It’s going to be by some suicide terrorist with a van.
The Star Wars defense shield would, however, serve a very useful purpose – it would send millions of dollars of taxpayer money to the fat cats who run the military-industrial complex. It would mean that the military has a huge expanded budget, and the companies that manufacture weaponry would make fortunes from it, at taxpayer expense.
And we are surprised Mr Bush and the Republican CEOs are pushing this plan? Where’s Dwight Eisenhower, now, when we need him?
[Edited by C K Dexter Haven on 07-22-2001 at 03:09 PM]
You have to look at it from the interests of the American people. By “American people” I of course mean those who worked hardest to get GWB into office. They, the executives of the large defense contractors, spent their hard-earned dollars on campaign contributions to ensure that policies friendly towards them would get enacted. They spent many hours at fundraisers and conventions at which they probably didn’t even charge too much overtime. They toiled over workshops where they convinced lawmakers, using the most convoluted logic, that NMD was a realistic achievement that would ensure American supremacy and invulnerability evermore. That, and it would help the “American people.” It could be easily sold, and it would help the “American people”, you know, with their kids college fund, their retirement fund, the villa in the South of France, and that Porsche Carrera that they always wanted.
NMD is a stupid, expensive idea that will do nothing except promote a bloated defense industry and a new arms race. We are paying untold billions for an easily defeatable, somewhat impractical system that will be as effective in the real world as Dumbo’s magic feather.
To the OP : certain doom. Not necessarily by military alone, but certainly by a combined new arms race and a return to the Reagan-like deficit spending on impractical military systems.
Horrible idea. Every other country in the world knows that if it uses a WMD (Weapon of Mass Destruction) against us or our troops we will reply in kind. The principle of MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) is at work here. So a direct attack by missile, aircraft, or artillery delivery is out of the question for any leader who wants to live. our threat is from state-sponsored terrorists who would smuggle a bomb into the country in a semi or something and detonate it in a major city.