Wolfowitz: Prototype NMD in two years
Allen Thomson
Wed Feb 27,10:17 PM ET
By MATT KELLEY, Associated Press Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?
tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020228/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/missile_defense_2
[EXCERPT]
WASHINGTON - The United States probably will have prototype
rockets capable of destroying an enemy's long-range missile
available in about two years, Pentagon officials told Congress
Wednesday.
The military plans to build silos for the interceptors at Fort
Greely, Alaska, about 100 miles southeast of Fairbanks, Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said. He told a Senate
Appropriations subcommittee that four prototype interceptors
capable of shooting down an enemy missile should be in place
there by September 2004.
Or by November 1, 2004 at the latest. ;-)
(Just kidding; I'm sure "September 2004" is merely another way of
saying "end of FY 2004.")
BTW, to repeat an earlier question, has anyone heard what's
being done wrt the Shemya X-band radar?
Fred Hapgood
> WASHINGTON - The United States probably will have prototype
> rockets capable of destroying an enemy's long-range missile
> available in about two years, Pentagon officials told Congress
> Wednesday.
I continue to be struck at the peculiar nature of the NWD debate.
In general the central proposition of the debate seems to be
whether a defense can be built that can be counted on to take
down every missile fired at it. This is clearly a preposterous
assertion. You do not need to even get down to thinking about
decoys or evasive maneuvering or anti-NWD defenses or the
intrinsic incompetence of the Defense Department. Forget all
that. All you need to remember is that we live on Planet Earth,
and on Planet Earth nothing of any complexity at all (ie,
nothing with more than three parts) works 100% of the time.
However, if you think of NMD as a way of lowering the
statistical probability of an attack, you suddenly have a proposition
worth thinking about. If you think that a life is worth $100,000,
which is about what most people carry for life insurance, and the
number of lives saved by a successful interception would be about
a million, and a NWD system is likely to intercept one warhead
over its system life you have your hundred billion $ right there.
If you think lives are worth a million each while the odds of an
intercept are only one in ten over the system life, the project
still works.
So basically we have a debate in which the proponents are politically
driven to defend the most implausible possible version of their plan.
Weird.
Andrew Case
>So basically we have a debate in which the proponents are politically
>driven to defend the most implausible possible version of their plan.
>Weird.
Well put. The flipside is that the good arguments against NMD (not
compelling, mind you, just good) are also not addressed. One example
is the risk/reward comparison of NMD vs other ways that the money
could be spent.
In the end, NMD is going to be built and deployed. If not under Bush, then
under somebody else. The important question is not *if* but *how* it
will be built. If it is done well it could be a very cost effective and
secure shield. If it is too pork-driven and too politicized it could
end up being another maginot line. Currently I'm actually mildly
optimistic, much to my own surprise.
......Andrew
--
--
Andrew Case |
ac...@plasma.umd.edu |
md
hap...@pobox.com says...
> On 28 Feb 2002 09:44:55 -0800, thom...@flash.net (Allen Thomson) wrote:
>
> > WASHINGTON - The United States probably will have prototype
> > rockets capable of destroying an enemy's long-range missile
> > available in about two years, Pentagon officials told Congress
> > Wednesday.
>
> I continue to be struck at the peculiar nature of the NWD debate.
I continue to be struck by the fact that people would
believe such self-serving statements like the quoted
statement. This statement is akin to the statements of the
American Cancer Society about how close they are to a cure.
Those statements just happen to occur during the ACS fund
raising activities. And the media keep reporting them as
though they are something other than fund raising pitches.
bevnsag
Unfortuently, everything I've heard about it so far has been the pork
and politics. And having been both in service and associated with
aerospace companies, I've seen "the military-industrial complex" from
the inside, and fear that the Maginot line analogy will end up being all
too apt.
bevnsag
Let me amend that, in that the Maginot Line was a functional system,
while the NMD will likely not be so lucky.
I'd guess it will go in one of three ways -
One- simply never get done, after spending billions, and some future
administration will proclaim the threat gone be the end of that.
Two- A haphazard and likely nonfunctional system is proclaimed
operational as a sacrificial political bargaining chip to be
conveniently scrapped before anyone can call it either a boondoggle or
get it resurrected.
Three - The system is proclaimed operational but is in no way
realistically able to do anything, with the confidence that it will
never be called upon to actually be used, as the threat was never really
there to begin with (or claims that its deterrence value kept the bad
guys at bay). Later, it will either be replaced with something that
actually has a chance of working, or as likely, go the way of one or two.
Bruce Sterling Woodcock
"Fred Hapgood" <hap...@pobox.com> wrote in message news:kegv7u0ktpaqn7r5i...@4ax.com...
> On 28 Feb 2002 09:44:55 -0800, thom...@flash.net (Allen Thomson) wrote:
>
> > WASHINGTON - The United States probably will have prototype
> > rockets capable of destroying an enemy's long-range missile
> > available in about two years, Pentagon officials told Congress
> > Wednesday.
>
> I continue to be struck at the peculiar nature of the NWD debate.
> In general the central proposition of the debate seems to be
> whether a defense can be built that can be counted on to take
> down every missile fired at it. This is clearly a preposterous
> assertion.
Yes, that's why it's called a "straw man" argument, because no one
is *making* that claim except opponents of missile defense.
Rather, the claim is that we can take down a sufficient percentage
of every missile that would be fired at it in a given scenario. For,
say, North Korea, or China, the number of missiles you have to
deal with is fairly low. For a rogue launch or a terrorist event
(yes, terrorists can attack other ways too; tankers, blah blah blah),
the number is likely to be as low as one.
> You do not need to even get down to thinking about
> decoys or evasive maneuvering or anti-NWD defenses or the
> intrinsic incompetence of the Defense Department. Forget all
> that. All you need to remember is that we live on Planet Earth,
> and on Planet Earth nothing of any complexity at all (ie,
> nothing with more than three parts) works 100% of the time.
Absolutely, but it's worth spending billions to prevent the loss of
a major city to such an attack. Or to prevent the loss of 8 out
of 10 cities in a larger attack.
> However, if you think of NMD as a way of lowering the
> statistical probability of an attack, you suddenly have a proposition
> worth thinking about. If you think that a life is worth $100,000,
> which is about what most people carry for life insurance, and the
> number of lives saved by a successful interception would be about
> a million, and a NWD system is likely to intercept one warhead
> over its system life you have your hundred billion $ right there.
> If you think lives are worth a million each while the odds of an
> intercept are only one in ten over the system life, the project
> still works.
Well, NMD does that too, but that's really just another way of
saying the same thing. It does also put an additional burden on
poorer nations who would seak to threaten us, because now they
would have to spend even more to counter our defense. Holding
a few missiles as a last-ditch threat in case we are winning a
conventional conflict with them is no longer a viable solution; you
need to hold a lot more.
> So basically we have a debate in which the proponents are politically
> driven to defend the most implausible possible version of their plan.
> Weird.
No, what's weird is your belief that the proponents are doing that.
Bruce
Fred Hapgood
>
>In the end, NMD is going to be built and deployed. If not under Bush, then
>under somebody else. The important question is not *if* but *how* it
>will be built. If it is done well it could be a very cost effective and
>secure shield.
It could be, but it will always be hard to *know* that, because
the critical term in the equation, which is the odds of one successful
interception, hereafter SI, is so impenetrable.
To repeat the core R/B equation: If you think the odds of an SI are one
and the cost of life is $10^5 and the number of lives saved per SI
is 10^6, then spending $10^11 on a NWD project makes sense.
But the logic is very sensitive to the odds of an SI (over the working
life of the project). If you think they are closer to 1/10 you are not
going to want to spend more than ten billion on the project (unless you
alter some other term). If 1/100, one billion, etc.
So what are the odds? If you think in terms of the usual NMD scenario
-- some madman who has access to a missile and doesn't care about
retaliation -- the odds seem low, because the core scenario is unlikely,
which means the odds of a successful launch, hereafter SL, are low, and
you can't have an SI without one of those first.
Then you have to multiply the odds of a SL by how good the system is
likely to be. This is going to be a very complicated piece of equipment
and it is going to have to work quickly. That means it is going to
require lots and lots and lots of testing. In my experience, which
mostly has to do with listening to horror stories told me by engineers
working for DOD, including a guy in a missile program, the military
tends not to do testing, especially software testing, very well, and
the little it does it tends to do very slowly -- often taking years
for a cycle that would take months in industry. Testing is often
quite political and expensive, and that slows the cycles down.
All of which means that the equipment that emerges from testing
tends to have lots of bugs in it. In the NWD context those bugs
will lower the odds of an SI, though not to zero, of course.
Next we really should think about decoys and evasive maneuvering and
all the ideas out there for attacking the NWD missiles or
their sensors directly. But frankly, when I multiply the odds of
an SL by the odds of an SI I come up with such a low number that I
lose interest.
However, there is another definition of a SI -- launches
deterred; missiles not launched that would have been
in the absence of a NWD. I frankly do not know how to
begin to calculate this term. For instance, some value has
to be assigned to the term representing the *increased*
likelihood of launching, perhaps because the construction
of an NWD system presents our madman with a use-it-or-lose-it
choice, or because the presence of the system encourages our
own politicians to push somebody one step too far.
I invite you to carry on the math from here.
Personally, I think the first really functional NWD system will
be built by General Motors to protect its corporate assets...
Fred
Martin
with the threat? From my admittedly amateur perspective wouldn't a
defense in depth of some sort be much preferable to just a few
interceptors based in Alaska? Could you deploy something such as the
airborne laser system like Boeing is developing near the threat
country or use a space based laser or a boost phase intercept missile
to kill the damned thing while it is as far away as possible? I would
think it would be much easier to kill a big slow missile in its boost
phase rather than a swarm of smaller warheads.
If it gets by that, be able to engage it with a long range ground
based system, then a THAAD type system or Aegis based interceptor all
the way down to a patriot system as a last ditch defense? Wouldn't
the cost of such a system be comparatively minor when compared with
the damage of one, let alone a dozen or so high kiloton warheads
detonating over American targets?
How much would an effective NMD cost compared to losing LA or San
Francisco Washington DC or New York? Seems like cheap insurance to
me.
Martin
Tom Billings
> On 1 Mar 2002 13:36:24 -0500, ac...@Glue.umd.edu (Andrew Case) wrote:
>
> >In the end, NMD is going to be built and deployed. If not under Bush, then
> >under somebody else. The important question is not *if* but *how* it
> >will be built. If it is done well it could be a very cost effective and
> >secure shield.
>
> It could be, but it will always be hard to *know* that, because
> the critical term in the equation, which is the odds of one successful
> interception, hereafter SI, is so impenetrable.
>
> To repeat the core R/B equation: If you think the odds of an SI are one
> and the cost of life is $10^5 and the number of lives saved per SI
> is 10^6, then spending $10^11 on a NWD project makes sense.
To repeat what has been said on this newsgroup for many years:
"Your model of why we build BMD is inaccurate".
The reason to build BMD (far more than Clinton's crippled NMD)
is to allow us to defend other people's freedoms of action, even
when someone assaulting them has a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile.
The freedoms of action of our friends and allies make it possible for
us to participate in the networks of the industrial world. If we want
to be an industrial society, we need a world where industrial freedoms
are not easily assaulted and restricted.
Therefore, the ability to defend those freedoms, in spite of a world
where local hierarchs are hostile to those freedoms, and where they
have nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles, requires a multi-layered
(3+ layers, IMHO) BMD system that is continually updated,
with new systems being introduced in one layer or another
every 5 years or so.
Those ballistic missiles, that the current BMD policy would negate, are
in small arsenals, and will not be able to saturate the defenses we can
afford, if both Congress and the Administration are serious about
funding the needed multi-generation engineering developments, as
new systems are needed to counter new penetration aids.
Your calculation above is thus a very minor point in the real uses
of BMD on a day to day basis for US policy. The real point is to
make the initial useful investment in ballistic missiles as high as
is possible, thus making it less likely that local hierarchs will start
to build them. Arms Control, at its finest!
Regards,
Tom Billings
Tom Billings
Multi-layer concepts are now the standard
assumption of BMD planners once again.
The only time that single-layer systems have
been planned is when the Sec. Defense or the
President wasn't interested in ever really having
BMD in the first place, but still wanted to be
seen to be "doing something". We no longer
live with McNamara as SecDef., or Clinton
as President. Unless a new Clinton is elected,
we probably are over the hump on this primary
problem in BMD.
Regards,
Tom Billings
Andrew Case
>Rather, the claim is that we can take down a sufficient percentage
>of every missile that would be fired at it in a given scenario. For,
>say, North Korea, or China, the number of missiles you have to
>deal with is fairly low. For a rogue launch or a terrorist event
>(yes, terrorists can attack other ways too; tankers, blah blah blah),
>the number is likely to be as low as one.
The rogue state argument is inadequate justification for spending
billions on NMD. The probability of a WoMD attack on the US by
a state other than another superpower in a cold war MAD type
scenario is incredibly small. In all of history how many times
has a state attacked another state knowing that the result is
guaranteed total annihilation? I can think of only one (the
war of the Triple Alliance) - no doubt there are at least a couple
more, but it's clear that this scenario is incredibly unlikely.
There are strong arguments in favor (notably the one Tom Billings
advanced elsewhere in this thread), but the lone crazy dictator
argument isn't one of them.
Kris Crockett
"Andrew Case" <ac...@Glue.umd.edu> wrote in message
news:a5qon3$3...@y.glue.umd.edu...
> Bruce Sterling Woodcock <sirb...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> >Rather, the claim is that we can take down a sufficient percentage
> >of every missile that would be fired at it in a given scenario. For,
> >say, North Korea, or China, the number of missiles you have to
> >deal with is fairly low. For a rogue launch or a terrorist event
> >(yes, terrorists can attack other ways too; tankers, blah blah blah),
> >the number is likely to be as low as one.
>
> The rogue state argument is inadequate justification for spending
> billions on NMD.
The Social Security argument is inadequate justification for taking my
money, promising to give it back later, and then giving it to a third party
to try and convince everyone the system ain't broke (commonly known as a
pyramid
scheme).
Wow, shooting down stupid government programs is easy, isn't it. If the
majority demands it, or it makes for good soundbytes, it WILL happen, no
matter how stupid.
The probability of a WoMD attack on the US by
> a state other than another superpower in a cold war MAD type
> scenario is incredibly small. In all of history how many times
> has a state attacked another state knowing that the result is
> guaranteed total annihilation? I can think of only one (the
> war of the Triple Alliance) - no doubt there are at least a couple
> more, but it's clear that this scenario is incredibly unlikely.
>
> There are strong arguments in favor (notably the one Tom Billings
> advanced elsewhere in this thread), but the lone crazy dictator
> argument isn't one of them.
Read up on North Korea. It's not a happy situation.
|
md
<13fcb593.02030...@posting.google.com>,
Martin_S...@hotmail.com says...
> How much would an effective NMD cost compared to losing LA or San
> Francisco Washington DC or New York? Seems like cheap insurance to
> me.
Building a system to defend against aliens' continent
busting weapons could be cheaper than the cost of losing a
continent. So, you could say it would be cheap insurance.
However, if you factor in probability of such attack, then
it may not be "cheap" at all.
And still, everyone wants to ignore the fact that those
touting any system are the very people who stand to gain
most from the expenditure. And people still want to believe
their promises of an "effective" system.
Allen Thomson
> Therefore, the ability to defend those freedoms, in spite of a world
> where local hierarchs are hostile to those freedoms, and where they
> have nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles, requires a multi-layered
> (3+ layers, IMHO) BMD system that is continually updated,
> with new systems being introduced in one layer or another
> every 5 years or so.
>
> Those ballistic missiles, that the current BMD policy would negate, are
> in small arsenals, and will not be able to saturate the defenses we can
> afford, if both Congress and the Administration are serious about
> funding the needed multi-generation engineering developments, as
> new systems are needed to counter new penetration aids.
Tom has been noting these things -- completely correctly, IMHO --
for quite some time now. Also IMO, they are really important
aspects of the missile defense topic with programatic and budget
implications that seldom receive the attention they deserve. We
aren't talking about just procuring and operating one thing, but
rather entering into a complex, probably expensive process that
will extend into the indefinite future. This will require continuing
political committment even if specific threats are sometimes absent
or remote, and in the face of competing demands on tax dollars. Which
demands are expected to become increasingly great in the next decade.
Another aspect of the competition for money is likely to arise
because the Missile Defense Agency is slightly misnamed; it's
really the Missile Defense *Development* Agency:
From www.defenselink.mil/news/Jan2002/b01042002_bt008-02.html
See also www.defenselink.mil/news/Jan2002/d20020102mda.pdf
"The MDA is charged with developing the missile defense system
and baselining the capability and configuration of its elements.
The military departments will procure and provide for missile
defense operations and support."
I.e., MDA gets to develop the systems, but the services get to
buy and operate them. What happens when the Air Force has to
make a choice between buying space-based lasers or F-22s?
Also, because BMD is famously and correctly described as a "system
of systems", the services are going to have to do a lot more
cooperating and trusting each other than has been the norm. As an
example, Navy anti-ICBM systems will be totally dependent on Air Force
systems for early warning and mid-course tracking and discrimination
functions.
In some cases there are also roles-and-missions implications.
For example, an Aegis cruiser will become less robust in the
air-defense/anti-cruise missile role in proportion to the number
of MK-41 cells it loads with SM-3 and successor ABMs.
Etc.
None of this is makes BMD impossible, merely very demanding in terms
of national and bureaucratic politics.
Tom Billings
Indeed, it makes the task a transformational operation.
That is precisely why so many in the military hierarchies
and civilian governmental hierarchies are so willing to
quietly resist it. It is also why so many in private hierarchies
which get much governmental largess are unwilling to see
this change take place. It will shift flows of government
resources, creating new channels where there are none now,
and eventually diverting private flows through new markets.
Those who benefit from current channels are as unhappy
as a Mississippi riverbank plantation owner who found that
someone upstream was digging a new channel for the river,
which would *not* then flow past his property, and did
everything, legal and otherwise, to stop it. If he didn't, a
major advantage of his property went away. The same
thing is the case with numerous hierarchs in regards
BMD today.
Bruce Sterling Woodcock
> >Rather, the claim is that we can take down a sufficient percentage
> >of every missile that would be fired at it in a given scenario. For,
> >say, North Korea, or China, the number of missiles you have to
> >deal with is fairly low. For a rogue launch or a terrorist event
> >(yes, terrorists can attack other ways too; tankers, blah blah blah),
> >the number is likely to be as low as one.
>
> The rogue state argument is inadequate justification for spending
> billions on NMD.
False. It's entirely adequate for *us*, and for the majority of
the American people. It's not entirely adequate for *you*, but
you have different priorities than we do.
> The probability of a WoMD attack on the US by
> a state other than another superpower in a cold war MAD type
> scenario is incredibly small.
Thank you. We've been looking for someone like you who
knows *exactly* what the odds are that a human may do
something. Please apply your infallible wisdom to solving the
other social problems in the world to demonstrate your
competence.
> In all of history how many times
> has a state attacked another state knowing that the result is
> guaranteed total annihilation?
Firstly, there are no guarantees. More precisely, we cannot
ensure that total annihilation is a guarantee *we* can ensure.
Secondly, it's not about just "states"... it is about people.
Certainly there have been cases when a state, or an individual,
knowing their death is imminent, have launched suicide attacks.
Or even when it's not imminent... witness 9/11.
> I can think of only one (the
> war of the Triple Alliance) - no doubt there are at least a couple
> more, but it's clear that this scenario is incredibly unlikely.
No, they are very likely. Anyone of us would say it's entirely
reasonable to think that if UBL knocked over the twin towers,
we'd totally annhilate him and his network. UBL may not have
seen it that way, and even if he had, there's little reason to think
that would have stopped him. In any case, it certainly didn't stop
those who *carried out* the attack, who were willing to die.
There are certainly people willing to die to set off a nuke in the
US. You're focused too much on rationality.
> There are strong arguments in favor (notably the one Tom Billings
> advanced elsewhere in this thread), but the lone crazy dictator
> argument isn't one of them.
Yes, it is, and it's one of the strongest.
Bruce
Bruce Sterling Woodcock
"Allen Thomson" <thom...@flash.net> wrote in message news:501f9880.02030...@posting.google.com...
>
> Also, because BMD is famously and correctly described as a "system
> of systems", the services are going to have to do a lot more
> cooperating and trusting each other than has been the norm. As an
> example, Navy anti-ICBM systems will be totally dependent on Air Force
> systems for early warning and mid-course tracking and discrimination
> functions.
That's why they've been running "War Games" to simulate the
missile defense almost continuously for, oh, I dunno, for as long
as my brother has worked at the JNTF, and possibly much
longer. 15-20 years or more.
Bruce
Andrew Case
>> The rogue state argument is inadequate justification for spending
>> billions on NMD.
>
>False. It's entirely adequate for *us*, and for the majority of
>the American people. It's not entirely adequate for *you*, but
>you have different priorities than we do.
It's a boogeyman. The fact that large numbers of people buy it
doesn't make it reasonable. The number of cases where leaders
of states commit suicide by attacking overwhelmingly more powerful
foes is tiny. The onus is on those who would spend billions to
defend against a given risk to show that the danger warrants the
expense.
>> The probability of a WoMD attack on the US by
>> a state other than another superpower in a cold war MAD type
>> scenario is incredibly small.
>
>Thank you. We've been looking for someone like you who
>knows *exactly* what the odds are that a human may do
>something.
Not *exactly* - just enough to know that they are very small. Where
are the historical precedents? If this is a likely human behavior,
then presumably it has happened in the past on multiple occasions.
Hint: it hasn't happened but a few times in the whole course of
human history. You're more likely to be killed crossing the road
than in a WoMD attack on the US.
>Please apply your infallible wisdom to solving the
>other social problems in the world to demonstrate your
>competence.
Sheesh! feeling a little snippy today, are we?
>> In all of history how many times
>> has a state attacked another state knowing that the result is
>> guaranteed total annihilation?
>
>Firstly, there are no guarantees. More precisely, we cannot
>ensure that total annihilation is a guarantee *we* can ensure.
There are never guarantees. If you want a guarantee of safety you
are SOL. Its a game of probabilities, and the probabilities favor
people who are canny enough to gain power in the first place being
canny enough to avoid pointlessly getting themselves killed. As to
killing the attacker - if you think there is any hope in hell of
somebody launching WoMD tipped ballistic missiles at the US and
living more than a couple of weeks you seriously underestimate
the persistence and vigor of our armed forces.
>Secondly, it's not about just "states"... it is about people.
>Certainly there have been cases when a state, or an individual,
>knowing their death is imminent, have launched suicide attacks.
>Or even when it's not imminent... witness 9/11.
...and NMD would have shot those planes down how? Ballistic missile
technology is sufficiently complex that only states can hope to
develop it. Private individuals could in principle do it, but not
without hope of detection, and detection would result in destruction
if hostile.
>> I can think of only one (the
>> war of the Triple Alliance) - no doubt there are at least a couple
>> more, but it's clear that this scenario is incredibly unlikely.
>
>No, they are very likely.
So where are the suicidal leaders of nations? If this threat is as
real as you seem to think then there should be multiple examples
of leaders who knowingly got themselves killed, and of aides and
generals who collaborated in the their own destruction.
>Anyone of us would say it's entirely
>reasonable to think that if UBL knocked over the twin towers,
>we'd totally annhilate him and his network.
We will.
>UBL may not have
>seen it that way, and even if he had, there's little reason to think
>that would have stopped him. In any case, it certainly didn't stop
>those who *carried out* the attack, who were willing to die.
They were flying *airplanes* not ballistic missiles. A couple of
Patriot batteries in downtown Manhatten might have stopped the
attacks, but BMD would not have had any impact at all, apart perhaps
from sucking money away from US conventional forces who have to deal
with the cleanup job in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
>There are certainly people willing to die to set off a nuke in the
>US. You're focused too much on rationality.
Sure there are. But they don't have ballistic missiles. I am focused
on rationality, for the simple reason that the irrational grasping
for the NMD talisman would have done nothing to help 9/11 and might
well have made the situation worse.
>> There are strong arguments in favor (notably the one Tom Billings
>> advanced elsewhere in this thread), but the lone crazy dictator
>> argument isn't one of them.
>
>Yes, it is, and it's one of the strongest.
It's good at convincing people to go for NMD. It's not a reasonable
response to either 9/11, or to the rogue nation threat to the *US*.
Fred Hapgood
>To repeat what has been said on this newsgroup for many years:
>
>"Your model of why we build BMD is inaccurate".
Of course. That was my point -- or did you miss that? Let me
try again.
There are two families of justifications for NWD. One is absurd,
while the other may very well make sense, or if it doesn't, it comes much
closer to doing so. The weirdness I was commenting on is that NMD
proponents seem to a man to prefer the preposterous justification to the
reasonable one. So yes, I do understand that you are not building
on my model. Like I say, that's the point.
The justification that makes sense, or almost, comes framed in
traditional R/B terms, which means that it accepts that the chance
that a given warhead will be intercepted is, in this life, less
than one, perhaps considerably less. The goal it sets for itself
is just to lower the odds that a random warhead will hit. The one
that is preposterous to the point of absurdity assumes that the
system is perfect and is generally perceived to be perfect.
> The reason to build BMD (far more than Clinton's crippled
> NMD) is to allow us to defend other people's freedoms of action,
> even when someone assaulting them has a nuclear-tipped ballistic
> missile.
This is what I mean. The idea that India and Pakistan (for instance)
would feel free to attack each with conventional arms because both
could be confident that if the other launched a missile the US
system would be certain to snag it is so profoundly unrealistic I am
at a loss to know where to begin. Nobody with any experience in the real
world and any real responsibilities would ever rely on an enormously
complicated, one of a kind system, whose only claim to
functionality was surviving a course of military testing. The
more a person understands about this problem, the less he will expect.
(For instance, do you have any glimmerings of intuition as to how
hard just the security piece of this system is going to be to write?
You think about that for a while.)
More than likely nobody would expect it to work at all, but
it is impossible for me to imagine a sane person's betting
his country -- *his country* -- on the assumption that the US
system will work always, every time, at a success rate of
1.0000000, etc.
And if you can't promise perfection and make it credible, if
you have a system that people think has some probability of
failure, then you leave everyone with a huge incentive to
build as many ICBMs as possible (so as to get as many
through the system as possible). Even our friends would
want to do that, because who knows how long we will be
be their friends? (If you're responsible for a country's
security you think this way.)
> Those ballistic missiles, that the current BMD policy
> would negate, are in small arsenals, and will not be able
> to saturate the defenses we can afford,
Again, this is magical thinking. In the real world all outcomes
are statistical. You spend as much as you like -- there will
always be a chance that a warhead will get through. Always.
Remember the guy who flew through the entire Soviet Air Defense
System to land on Red Square? What were the odds he would get
away with that? But he did.
Fred
Bruce Sterling Woodcock
"Andrew Case" <ac...@Glue.umd.edu> wrote in message news:a5re7e$h...@y.glue.umd.edu...
> Bruce Sterling Woodcock <sirb...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> >
> >"Andrew Case" <ac...@Glue.umd.edu> wrote:
> >> The rogue state argument is inadequate justification for spending
> >> billions on NMD.
> >
> >False. It's entirely adequate for *us*, and for the majority of
> >the American people. It's not entirely adequate for *you*, but
> >you have different priorities than we do.
>
> It's a boogeyman. The fact that large numbers of people buy it
> doesn't make it reasonable.
Reasonable is a different claim. I think both positions are
logically defensible. *Adequate* is a subjective evaluation
based on assumptions of odds and value of life and the like,
which is something we obviously disagree on.
> The number of cases where leaders
> of states commit suicide by attacking overwhelmingly more powerful
> foes is tiny. The onus is on those who would spend billions to
> defend against a given risk to show that the danger warrants the
> expense.
Yes, and the onus has been met, by showing how much such
things could hurt us. You disagree because you have different
priorities, but it's not like we're *not* justifying it with numbers
and are claiming irrational religious reasons for doing it.... we
are being quite rational; you just disagree on the numbers.
> >> The probability of a WoMD attack on the US by
> >> a state other than another superpower in a cold war MAD type
> >> scenario is incredibly small.
> >
> >Thank you. We've been looking for someone like you who
> >knows *exactly* what the odds are that a human may do
> >something.
>
> Not *exactly* - just enough to know that they are very small.
That seems pretty exact to me.
> Where
> are the historical precedents?
Any murder-suicide is a precedent. The difference is simply a matter
of scale.
> If this is a likely human behavior,
> then presumably it has happened in the past on multiple occasions.
> Hint: it hasn't happened but a few times in the whole course of
> human history.
False; it's happened numerous times.
> You're more likely to be killed crossing the road
> than in a WoMD attack on the US.
The loss to the economy of people being killed cross the road,
however, is less than the loss from a WoMD attack. When you
do the multiplication, factoring in all the other consequences, you
arrive at a number that justifies a defense at that level.
> >Please apply your infallible wisdom to solving the
> >other social problems in the world to demonstrate your
> >competence.
>
> Sheesh! feeling a little snippy today, are we?
You're the one who says you know the odds. Rather than
put faith in your expertise, I'd like you to demonstrate it first.
> >> In all of history how many times
> >> has a state attacked another state knowing that the result is
> >> guaranteed total annihilation?
> >
> >Firstly, there are no guarantees. More precisely, we cannot
> >ensure that total annihilation is a guarantee *we* can ensure.
>
> There are never guarantees.
Then you should not have used guarantee in your faulty question.
> If you want a guarantee of safety you
> are SOL. Its a game of probabilities, and the probabilities favor
> people who are canny enough to gain power in the first place being
> canny enough to avoid pointlessly getting themselves killed.
Regardless, the smaller probability is still important.
> As to
> killing the attacker - if you think there is any hope in hell of
> somebody launching WoMD tipped ballistic missiles at the US and
> living more than a couple of weeks you seriously underestimate
> the persistence and vigor of our armed forces.
I made no claim as to how long they might live. It's irrelevant.
> >Secondly, it's not about just "states"... it is about people.
> >Certainly there have been cases when a state, or an individual,
> >knowing their death is imminent, have launched suicide attacks.
> >Or even when it's not imminent... witness 9/11.
>
> ...and NMD would have shot those planes down how?
Several ways, but again you miss the point.
These people launched suicide or attacks which would lead to
their death in retaliation. It did not stop them; thus, it may not
stop then in a WoMD attack.
> Ballistic missile
> technology is sufficiently complex that only states can hope to
> develop it. Private individuals could in principle do it, but not
> without hope of detection, and detection would result in destruction
> if hostile.
Perhaps, but again irrelevant. States already have them, we can't
guarantee the actions of future people, and rogue launches can still
happen.
> >> I can think of only one (the
> >> war of the Triple Alliance) - no doubt there are at least a couple
> >> more, but it's clear that this scenario is incredibly unlikely.
> >
> >No, they are very likely.
>
> So where are the suicidal leaders of nations?
Read your history books.
> If this threat is as
> real as you seem to think then there should be multiple examples
> of leaders who knowingly got themselves killed, and of aides and
> generals who collaborated in the their own destruction.
There are, but that really isn't the point. The most recent is the
Taliban/Al-Quada/UBL/
> >Anyone of us would say it's entirely
> >reasonable to think that if UBL knocked over the twin towers,
> >we'd totally annhilate him and his network.
>
> We will.
And yet he attacked. So much for your theory.
> >UBL may not have
> >seen it that way, and even if he had, there's little reason to think
> >that would have stopped him. In any case, it certainly didn't stop
> >those who *carried out* the attack, who were willing to die.
>
> They were flying *airplanes* not ballistic missiles.
*IRRELEVANT.* Pay attention, will you? They were willing
to risk being killed, and some even suicided, to carry out those
attacks. So they would surely risk being killed, and even suicide,
to carry out an even GREATER WoMD attack.
> >There are certainly people willing to die to set off a nuke in the
> >US. You're focused too much on rationality.
>
> Sure there are. But they don't have ballistic missiles.
Wrong, and irrelevant even if true, since they could *get* ballistic
missiles. We need a defense *before* then; waiting until it's too
late doesn't help.
> I am focused
> on rationality,
Well, you should not be focused in the context that you are assuming
the attackers are rational.
> for the simple reason that the irrational grasping
> for the NMD talisman would have done nothing to help 9/11 and might
> well have made the situation worse.
The only one tying NMD directly to 9/11 is you. I was making a
logical point about the motivations of people which was completely
lost on you in your knee-jerk reaction.
> >> There are strong arguments in favor (notably the one Tom Billings
> >> advanced elsewhere in this thread), but the lone crazy dictator
> >> argument isn't one of them.
> >
> >Yes, it is, and it's one of the strongest.
>
> It's good at convincing people to go for NMD. It's not a reasonable
> response to either 9/11, or to the rogue nation threat to the *US*.
It's a reasonable response to both, and a lot more things besides.
Bruce
Allen Thomson
> That's why they've been running "War Games" to simulate the
> missile defense almost continuously for, oh, I dunno, for as long
> as my brother has worked at the JNTF, and possibly much
> longer. 15-20 years or more.
One hopes the services have been paying attention, will craft
their budgets in accordance with the lessons learned in the games,
sacrifice monies previously intended for Favorite Program A
to advance Joint Missile Defense Program B.
The Navy is perhaps the most obvious test case: will it equip
Aegis cruisers with the data links and associated ironmongery
to function as floating Fort Greeleys (the land-based BMD site)?
Also give up carrier battle group air defense capacity to contribute
to CONUS defense against the Taepo Dong-2 or -3?
Me, I think that the services are going to have to be hit
over the head by some fairly large clubs wielded by da Prez
and/or Congress before they do such things.
Bruce Sterling Woodcock
"Fred Hapgood" <hap...@pobox.com> wrote in message news:qqn28uokrimebftla...@4ax.com...
>
> >To repeat what has been said on this newsgroup for many years:
> >
> >"Your model of why we build BMD is inaccurate".
>
> Of course. That was my point -- or did you miss that? Let me
> try again.
>
> There are two families of justifications for NWD. One is absurd,
> while the other may very well make sense, or if it doesn't, it comes much
> closer to doing so. The weirdness I was commenting on is that NMD
> proponents seem to a man to prefer the preposterous justification to the
> reasonable one. So yes, I do understand that you are not building
> on my model. Like I say, that's the point.
And, as I said, your perception is incorrect... the justification that you
are assigning to proponents of NMD is not the preferred one. It is the
straw man that opponents of NMD *ascribe* to NMD proponents,
precisely to undermine support for it among those who don't know any
better. The fact that you continue to promulgate this notion is not
helpful.
Bruce
Edward Wright
> The number of cases where leaders
> of states commit suicide by attacking overwhelmingly more powerful
> foes is tiny. The onus is on those who would spend billions to
> defend against a given risk to show that the danger warrants the
> expense.
Not for anyone who was paying attention on September 11.
George William Herbert
>Bruce Sterling Woodcock <sirb...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>>"Andrew Case" <ac...@Glue.umd.edu> wrote:
>>> The rogue state argument is inadequate justification for spending
>>> billions on NMD.
>>
>>False. It's entirely adequate for *us*, and for the majority of
>>the American people. It's not entirely adequate for *you*, but
>>you have different priorities than we do.
>
>It's a boogeyman. The fact that large numbers of people buy it
>doesn't make it reasonable. The number of cases where leaders
>of states commit suicide by attacking overwhelmingly more powerful
>foes is tiny. The onus is on those who would spend billions to
>defend against a given risk to show that the danger warrants the
>expense.
I believe that a sufficiently robust reading of the political
science examinations of crisis management and deterrence made
in the last decade or so, starting with Jervis and working outwards,
indicates that there is credible reason to believe that nations
in general, and nuclear capable nations in particular, are not
robustly capable of handling confrontations and crisies without
occational escalations to wars and quite potentially nuclear wars.
Most wars in the last few decades were initiated by the eventual
loser, and in many cases caused the initiators destruction
as a government (if rarely as a nation).
There is also the perverse and extremely dangerous inversion
of stabilizing versus destabilizing in perceptual response
to an opponents actions once a crisis psychology sets in
among a national leadership team. That effect alone can
easily support a contention that a nuclear war is likely,
if not inevitable, as the situation stands today (though
perhaps less likely involving the US).
It is my firm opinion, having spent the last 5+ years researching
this because I was uncomfortable with classical deterrence
theory, that the NMD opponents tendency to believe in
classical deterrence is dangerous and naive. There is good
research and case study literature out there.
It is also fair to point out that the classical NMD proponent
stance is also fairly badly mapped to the realities of crisis
stability and management. A number of the destabilizing aspects
of NMD its opponents fear are legitimate and should justifyably
be examined and addressed at the appropriate level within US policy.
There is also the aspect that nearly everyone wants to play down,
that of avoiding cohersion by other nuclear powers. The US was
able to work with the Soviet Union to establish a reasonable
set of groundrules and avoid us threatening each other for
tactical purposes in crisies. The same may not be true for
North Korea, China, or Iran.
All of that said, I think that in the end I am forced to conclude
that NMD is beneficial and should be built if it can be made to
work reliably against moderate attacks. The odds of a small to
moderate nuclear war breaking out are probably close to unity,
as the world stands today, and the US cannot afford to be the
victim of such an incident.
-george william herbert
gher...@retro.com
John Schilling
>Bruce Sterling Woodcock <sirb...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>>
>>"Andrew Case" <ac...@Glue.umd.edu> wrote:
>>> The rogue state argument is inadequate justification for spending
>>> billions on NMD.
>>
>>False. It's entirely adequate for *us*, and for the majority of
>>the American people. It's not entirely adequate for *you*, but
>>you have different priorities than we do.
>It's a boogeyman. The fact that large numbers of people buy it
>doesn't make it reasonable. The number of cases where leaders
>of states commit suicide by attacking overwhelmingly more powerful
>foes is tiny.
12/7/1941
9/11/2001
OK, we may pedantically argue that perhaps Emperor Hirohito and Mullah
Omar did not actually decide or even endorse the decision to attack in
those two cases. Maybe it's just defense ministers of states who
commit suicide by attacking overwhelmingly more powerful foes. But,
in general, the number of such instances in history is not tiny, it
is *huge*.
In particular, such attacks seem to be directed against the United
States every two or three generations. Whether they are initiated
by heads of state or merely by defense ministers strikes me as rather
less important than the fact that they are made without warning and
with the most destructive weapons available to the attacking state.
And yes, I know that plotting a curve on the basis of two data points
is rather iffy. With the increasing probability of the third data
point being nuclear, I submit the extrapolation is warranted.
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*schi...@spock.usc.edu * for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *
Carey Sublette
> ac...@Glue.umd.edu (Andrew Case) writes:
>
> >Bruce Sterling Woodcock <sirb...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>"Andrew Case" <ac...@Glue.umd.edu> wrote:
> >>> The rogue state argument is inadequate justification for spending
> >>> billions on NMD.
> >>
> >>False. It's entirely adequate for *us*, and for the majority of
> >>the American people. It's not entirely adequate for *you*, but
> >>you have different priorities than we do.
>
> >It's a boogeyman. The fact that large numbers of people buy it
> >doesn't make it reasonable. The number of cases where leaders
> >of states commit suicide by attacking overwhelmingly more powerful
> >foes is tiny.
>
> 12/7/1941
>
> 9/11/2001
>
> OK, we may pedantically argue that perhaps Emperor Hirohito and Mullah
> Omar did not actually decide or even endorse the decision to attack in
> those two cases. Maybe it's just defense ministers of states who
> commit suicide by attacking overwhelmingly more powerful foes. But,
> in general, the number of such instances in history is not tiny, it
> is *huge*.
The degree to which anyone in the Taliban leadership was aware of the plotting
for 9/11 is unknown, it appears the information was severely restricted
even in the top echelons of al Qaeda.
I dispute the claim that there are many cases in which states or regimes
intentionally commit suicide. There are many cases in which wars are
initiated by the side that eventually loses, but in few cases did the
initiating state expect that to be the outcome.
A weaker state may initiate war with a stronger one, if it feels that
the stronger will "settle" at some point on terms that are favorable -
there are many cases of a stronger nation negotiating an end (or even
accepting outright defeat) a war it could have won if cost were no
object.
Japan believed something rather like this would come to pass in WWII.
But I know of no cases remotely similar to a nuclear attack on an urban
area against a foe able to annhilate the attacker with a tiny fraction
of its standing arsenal.
It is important though for the certainty of devastating retaliation be
abundantly clear, so that no prospective attacker can fool himself into
beleiving otherwise. This one area where ambiguity does not serve
anyone's interest.
George Herbert is right though that the implausibility of a pre-planned
attack does not rule out the possibility of blundering into nuclear war
in a crisis.
> In particular, such attacks seem to be directed against the United
> States every two or three generations. Whether they are initiated
> by heads of state or merely by defense ministers strikes me as rather
> less important than the fact that they are made without warning and
> with the most destructive weapons available to the attacking state.
This last comment ("most destructive weapons available") is certainly
untrue, as the absence of gas weapons being used in WWII demonstrates.
> And yes, I know that plotting a curve on the basis of two data points
> is rather iffy. With the increasing probability of the third data
> point being nuclear, I submit the extrapolation is warranted.
Carey Sublette
John Schilling
>> 12/7/1941
>> 9/11/2001
So would I, but neither I nor Dr. Case used the term, "intentionally".
Nations which embark upon courses of action which will in fact surely
result in their destruction, usually harbor the misguided belief that
they will survive the experience and the intent of enjoying some great
victory. Why they do this is an interesting subject in its own right,
but the fact remains that they frequently do.
When someone eventually launches a nuclear missile at the United States,
they may well expect to survive and they will almost certainly die
instead. This offers no protection whatsoever to the intended targets
of the missile.
Bruce Sterling Woodcock
"Carey Sublette" <care...@earthlink.net> wrote in message news:MPG.16eb60318...@news.earthlink.net...
But many of these cases a rational person woudl *expect* that to be
the outcome. Almost any country attacking the US (or attacking
another country the US is going to protect) is reasonably going to be
defeated, and its leaders possibly killed. Yet this did not stop them.
One could argue, as you now are, that they didn't *expect* that outcome...
but that's just the point: leaders and nations aren't always rational. And
anyway, as 9/11 shows, people who *know* they are going to die are
still willing to accomplish their task. The fact that they didn't have a
WoMD isn't the point; it's to illustrate that such people *do* exist, so
you can easily see how one with a WoMD could exist in the future.
> A weaker state may initiate war with a stronger one, if it feels that
> the stronger will "settle" at some point on terms that are favorable -
> there are many cases of a stronger nation negotiating an end (or even
> accepting outright defeat) a war it could have won if cost were no
> object.
Yes, and they were wrong... with deadly consequence.
> But I know of no cases remotely similar to a nuclear attack on an urban
> area against a foe able to annhilate the attacker with a tiny fraction
> of its standing arsenal.
That's a straw man, because such a capability is a recent development.
You're sticking your head in the sand, basically saying since nothing else
in the past is like today, we can assume the best today and not prepare
for the worst.
> George Herbert is right though that the implausibility of a pre-planned
> attack does not rule out the possibility of blundering into nuclear war
> in a crisis.
Very much so, and it is just yet another of the many many reasins for
missile defense. As well as *other* defenses against *other* attack
forms.
> > In particular, such attacks seem to be directed against the United
> > States every two or three generations. Whether they are initiated
> > by heads of state or merely by defense ministers strikes me as rather
> > less important than the fact that they are made without warning and
> > with the most destructive weapons available to the attacking state.
>
> This last comment ("most destructive weapons available") is certainly
> untrue, as the absence of gas weapons being used in WWII demonstrates.
I'm not aware Japan had gas weapons, but you may have other data.
Choosing not to develop them is something we can't count on as a
defense.
Bruce
Carey Sublette
It is true that you didn't use the term "intentionally" - but I did to
bring out this very important assumption -- that the scenario requires
that an a attacker believe that they will escape retaliation.
George recommends that serious treatment of this subject requires study
of crisis management and deterrence, which I agree with, and would add
also the study of how conflicts actually are initiated.
As I outlined in my previous posting, conflict initiation usually
requires that the initiator have a theory they will manage the conflict
to their advantage.
In a conventional conflict this belief is often based on the idea that
they can make the conflict too costly for their opponent (relative to
the opponents interest) and cause him to settle, or quit the conflict.
There are many, many examples of this idea being proven correct to
render it plausible (the American Revolution and England, Vietnam and
France, Vietnam and the U.S., etc.). Failures in this reasoning occur
when the initiator does not correctly calculate the values and interests
of the opponent, or simply errs in judging his own power to inflict
unacceptable losses.
Another common mistake of conflict initiators is judging who its
opponents actually are. This is related to the previous mistake - it
involves mistaking whether an ally (formal or de facto) cares enough to
come to the aid of the nation that is attacked. The Iraqi invasion of
Kuwait is an example. Iraq correctly calculated that it could overwhelm
Kuwait, it didn't count on fighting the U.S.
My point here is that you need to take into account how fundamentally
different a nuclear ICBM attack on a U.S. urban target (the usual
justification scenario for NMD) is from any previous historical example.
Here the attacked nation incurs a tremendous conflict cost upfront - and
can inflict devastating retaliation in kind at basically no additional
cost. This is truly unprecendented in the history of warfare.
There are some rationales for NMD I can suggest based on this line of
reasoning. For example a nation might undertake *conventional*
aggression using a nuclear missile as a threat to prevent intervention,
or launch a nuclear attack on a non-nuclear U.S. ally using the threat
of a strike against the U.S. as a means of preventing retaliation. The
value of NMD in these cases is not so much that it would allow the U.S.
to intervene with impunity, it is that the existence of NMD would make
any of these scenarios less likely to occur. An ICBM is basically a
tool of psychological leverage - not a weapon of war. By the same token
NMD is a way of countering the leverage, and neutralizing the advantage
of the ICBM in international politics.
Carey Sublette
Jussi Jaatinen
willia...@earthlink.net wrote:
> That simplistic view excludes alot. How much economic benefit comes from drawing people
> through the education system into high tech jobs, for example, and what value do you put on
> serendipitous technology?
You think that taking money taxed from the population and giving it to
aerospace companies creates some kind of larger good? That the job
market doesn't do as good a job as the government in deciding what kind
of workers are needed in the economy?
> How does quality of life improve when an enemy can threaten a
> nuclear attack vs when that enemy cannot?
What about how much the quality of life has improved now that everyone
knows terrorists can strike anywhere and kill thousands without needing
nuclear weapons? Besides, BMD supposedly works against certain kinds of
very long-range missiles, not "nuclear attack". If Al-Qaeda gets a
warhead, then BMD can do presicely _nothing_ to prevent them from using
it in the US. Similarly most despots, "hierarchs" or whatever is the
satan of the day would probably prefer to use cheaper and more
convenient means to attack, than build a complex and expensive missile.
BMD is a warmed-up leftover project from the Cold War that certain
industrial circles in the US want to build because they stand to make a
lot of money from it. It has nothing to do with security or protecting
someone from attack.
> As we saw on 9/11, massive destruction and loss of life has costly, far reaching effects
I'm amazed that someone can actually use the 11.9. attacks to _defend_
BMD, when the most obvious point in the affair is that BMD can't prevent
a dozen-odd guys with bux cutters from throwing the US into disarray.
-JJ
Bruce Sterling Woodcock
"Jussi Jaatinen" <jussi.j...@kolumbus.fi> wrote in message news:3C824C63...@kolumbus.fi...
>
> BMD is a warmed-up leftover project from the Cold War that certain
> industrial circles in the US want to build because they stand to make a
> lot of money from it. It has nothing to do with security or protecting
> someone from attack.
Substitute any military program for BMD and you could make the same
accusation. But that's all it is. Unless you can support opposition to it
on logical grounds, then it really doesn't matter what reasons you think
may or may not account for its actual existence. The point is its utility.
>
> > As we saw on 9/11, massive destruction and loss of life has costly, far reaching effects
>
> I'm amazed that someone can actually use the 11.9. attacks to _defend_
> BMD, when the most obvious point in the affair is that BMD can't prevent
> a dozen-odd guys with bux cutters from throwing the US into disarray.
I'm amazed that someone can actually use this as an argument against
BMD, when the most obvious point in the affair is that we're spending
money to prevent the dozen-odd guys with box cutters, so it only makes
sense to spend money to prevent other attacks as well.
Bruce
Bruce Sterling Woodcock
"Carey Sublette" <care...@earthlink.net> wrote in message news:MPG.16ebe321b...@news.earthlink.net...
> My point here is that you need to take into account how fundamentally
> different a nuclear ICBM attack on a U.S. urban target (the usual
> justification scenario for NMD) is from any previous historical example.
> Here the attacked nation incurs a tremendous conflict cost upfront - and
> can inflict devastating retaliation in kind at basically no additional
> cost. This is truly unprecendented in the history of warfare.
It might be worth questioning the likelyhood of the retalitory
strike, however.
Let us suppose that Iraq managed to get one, and only one, ICBM
with nuclear warhead. They launch it and wipe out Dallas. Or even
Jerusalem.
At this point, we could easily take out Iraq via conventional forces
alone, kill Hussein, etc. Would we *really* go so far as to nuke
Baghdad in retaliation, solely for the tit for tat? One can easily see
the arguments against it... we can eliminate the threat without killing
all those civillians. Even the use of atomic weapons against Japan
was and still is debated. I think it's entirely reasonable to believe
that we could have a future President, whether you agree with them
or not, who would *not* retaliate via a nuclear option. Thus there
is even a scenario where Hussein could *reasonably believe* he
could get away with it, and escape into the wilderness like UBL.
Even if he is killed, his "people", his "city", etc. live on. But as I
said before, this really doesn't matter, since we can't count on them
being reasonable in the first place.
However, I think it's not very reasonable to think that there would
be a President who *wouldn't* use NMD to shoot down that
incoming ICBM.
Bruce
Phil Fraering
>OK, we may pedantically argue that perhaps Emperor Hirohito and Mullah
>Omar did not actually decide or even endorse the decision to attack in
>those two cases. Maybe it's just defense ministers of states who
>commit suicide by attacking overwhelmingly more powerful foes. But,
>in general, the number of such instances in history is not tiny, it
>is *huge*.
If you want an even better example of war between two nuclear
powers, I would suggest looking at India and Pakistan.
Phil
Tom Billings
> >To repeat what has been said on this newsgroup for many years:
> >
> >"Your model of why we build BMD is inaccurate".
>
> Of course. That was my point -- or did you miss that?
You were apparently utterly opaque.
> Let me
> try again.
>
> There are two families of justifications for NWD. One is absurd,
> while the other may very well make sense, or if it doesn't, it comes much
> closer to doing so. The weirdness I was commenting on is that NMD
> proponents seem to a man to prefer the preposterous justification to the
> reasonable one.
NO. We don't. You've simply taken the viewpoint of a
few people, and blown it up into a stereotype of all those
who, like myself, have supported BMD, and some like
myself, since 1961. The journalists may practice soundbite
analysis. Please don't be so silly as to believe we do.
> So yes, I do understand that you are not building
> on my model. Like I say, that's the point.
>
> The justification that makes sense, or almost, comes framed in
> traditional R/B terms, which means that it accepts that the chance
> that a given warhead will be intercepted is, in this life, less
> than one, perhaps considerably less. The goal it sets for itself
> is just to lower the odds that a random warhead will hit. The one
> that is preposterous to the point of absurdity assumes that the
> system is perfect and is generally perceived to be perfect.
No. The only large group of people to consistently speak
of perfection for BMD have been the opponents of BMD,
as a strawman for their purposes.
> > The reason to build BMD (far more than Clinton's crippled
> > NMD) is to allow us to defend other people's freedoms of action,
> > even when someone assaulting them has a nuclear-tipped ballistic
> > missile.
>
> This is what I mean. The idea that India and Pakistan (for instance)
> would feel free to attack each with conventional arms because both
> could be confident that if the other launched a missile the US
> system would be certain to snag it is so profoundly unrealistic I am
> at a loss to know where to begin.
That is not what I said. When we defend the industrial freedoms
of action needed to maintain the world-wide industrial networks
around the world, local hierarchs will threaten us and our allies
with whatever weapons they think are useful in getting us to
back down. BMD makes ballistic missiles far less useful as
a tool in such a situation, for those local hierarchs. It doesn't
allow anyone to believe in perfection of defenses.
> Nobody with any experience in the real
> world and any real responsibilities would ever rely on an enormously
> complicated, one of a kind system, whose only claim to
> functionality was surviving a course of military testing.
Except that they did so every day of every year of the Cold War.
Just not this system.
> The
> more a person understands about this problem, the less he will expect.
Good!
Then the next point is to gain the consensus to use the resources
to defend well enough that we can defend the interests of the
Republic in freedoms of action around the world. That's a lot
of resources, and will take a strong consensus to support their
expenditure.
> (For instance, do you have any glimmerings of intuition as to how
> hard just the security piece of this system is going to be to write?
> You think about that for a while.)
>
> More than likely nobody would expect it to work at all, but
> it is impossible for me to imagine a sane person's betting
> his country -- *his country* -- on the assumption that the US
> system will work always, every time, at a success rate of
> 1.0000000, etc.
Against small arsenals no one but Israel is betting their whole country.
The Israelis have already signed on for BMD.
> And if you can't promise perfection and make it credible, if
> you have a system that people think has some probability of
> failure, then you leave everyone with a huge incentive to
> build as many ICBMs as possible (so as to get as many
> through the system as possible).
This is utter drivel. If nearly none of the missiles a nation
launches can get through, then there is less incentive for
them to build the small numbers they can afford. They
have far fewer resources to devote to offensive systems,
or any others. They can't simply decide to produce more
missiles, because they don't have the resources to do it.
Perfection does not exist in the real world.
Any call for it is simply a smokescreen to suppress
BMD, however well it works.
> Even our friends would
> want to do that, because who knows how long we will be
> be their friends? (If you're responsible for a country's
> security you think this way.)
>
> > Those ballistic missiles, that the current BMD policy
> > would negate, are in small arsenals, and will not be able
> > to saturate the defenses we can afford,
>
> Again, this is magical thinking. In the real world all outcomes
> are statistical. You spend as much as you like -- there will
> always be a chance that a warhead will get through.
That is not a large problem. The point is to make it as
small a risk as we can, and decide whether that risk is
worth the candle in each conflict, at the time the conflict
happens. I believe we can make the risk small enough
that the number of times we are successfully threatened
will be crucially lower than without BMD.
> Always.
> Remember the guy who flew through the entire Soviet Air Defense
> System to land on Red Square? What were the odds he would get
> away with that? But he did.
Fred, you seem to be demanding a magical perfection, or no action.
The only thing BMD can do is to *reduce* risk, not eliminate it.
When we defend the REpublic and its interests we *must* take risks!
Yes, people will risk defending their country, since the consequences
of not doing so adequately, and allowing a totalitarian group into
power over it, are as bad or worse than any war is likely to be.
I can't tell whether you have any clear concept of defending
the Republic and its interests or not.
Regards,
Tom Billings
Andrew Case
>ac...@Glue.umd.edu (Andrew Case) wrote:
>
>> The number of cases where leaders
>> of states commit suicide by attacking overwhelmingly more powerful
>> foes is tiny. The onus is on those who would spend billions to
>> defend against a given risk to show that the danger warrants the
>> expense.
>
>Not for anyone who was paying attention on September 11.
I'll buy this if you can show me that Mullah Omar knew the attacks were
immanent and that the US response would result in his death. The 9/11
attacks bore no resemblance to a rogue state ballistic missile attack
other than the number of casualties. BMD is worth building, but not
because of 9/11 or because of some supposed suicidal leader.
Shardrukar
<sirb...@ix.netcom.com> writes:
>False. It's entirely adequate for *us*, and for the majority of
>the American people. It's not entirely adequate for *you*, but
>you have different priorities than we do.
>
In reality, however, this threat is minimal to non-existant. It is, however, an
effective
emotional appeal for those that have little or no understanding of the issues
involved.
If the majority of the population can be easily convinced that "alien
abduction" is a serious threat
that needs to be defended against militarily, I'm sure that you would have
politicians promoting
Alien defense schemes to gain this populations support, regardless of what the
true facts of the matter are.
Shardrukar
<hap...@pobox.com> writes:
> If you think that a life is worth $100,000,
>which is about what most people carry for life insurance, and the
>number of lives saved by a successful interception would be about
>a million, and a NWD system is likely to intercept one warhead
>over its system life you have your hundred billion $ right there.
This, of course, is another point of debate. What is the likelyhood that, in
the absence
of an NMD system, any other nation-state will launch a competent ICBM at a
non-interventionist US target, and, are there other methods of attrition that
can reduce
any percieved risk at least as effectively as an NMD system, in a less
expensive manner.
One of the primary points of contention, currently, is quantifying this risk.
The higher and more immediate that this risk is percieved to be, the more
advantagious it would be to expend substantial
capital to deploy even a partially effective systems as per your argument
above. If this risk, however, is very low, and really several decades or more
in the future, before it begins to materialize, then there are other methods of
attrition which very well may work as well, and successfully push the threat to
further remoteness.
As I have been called on my biases previously, I'm going to leave this post
at this point.
Shardrukar
<sirb...@ix.netcom.com> writes:
>Yes, that's why it's called a "straw man" argument, because no one
>is *making* that claim except opponents of missile defense.
>Rather, the claim is that we can take down a sufficient percentage
>of every missile that would be fired at it in a given scenario. For,
>say, North Korea, or China, the number of missiles you have to
>deal with is fairly low. For a rogue launch or a terrorist event
>(yes, terrorists can attack other ways too; tankers, blah blah blah),
>the number is likely to be as low as one.
>
Speaking of "straw-man", the likely number of deployed ICBMs targeting the US
from N. Korea
for the next couple of decades is 0, and from China, it depends upon US
actions, with a deployed
NMD (effective or not), the numbers will likely increase to at least several
hundred, with an
extension of current diplomatic and treaty negotiations and mere TMD systems,
but no coordinated
NMD system, it's impossible to say for certain, but they are unlikely to climb
over a handful. As for the "rogue" or "terrorist" ICBM events, these are
unlikely to ever approach one at the highest. One of the primary problems with
the currently proposed NMD systems, IMO, is the methodology it's proponents are
using, which undermine and lessen the ability (or out-right kill) of other
(proven over the last half century) anti-ICBM/nuclear weapons tactics. This
does increase the "need" for an NMD-type system, but, it also dramatically
increases the risk factors to serve (IMO) purely internal US political goals. A
multifaceted, complementary system which placed at least as much focus upon the
proven methods of deterrance and negotiation and gradually phased in a missile
interception system as it proves itself in testing is the best possible
approach to this problem
Fred Hapgood
>And, as I said, your perception is incorrect... the justification that you
>are assigning to proponents of NMD is not the preferred one.
Recently Tom Billings (does he qualify as a proponent?) wrote;
> The reason to build BMD (far more than Clinton's crippled
> NMD) is to allow us to defend other people's freedoms of action,
> even when someone assaulting them has a nuclear-tipped ballistic
> missile.
His picture here is of a couple of nations, like India and Pakistan,
each threatened by attack from the other. Billings' scenario is
that if the US had a system, then we could announce to the world
that Pakistan (or India) could do whatever they wanted because
we would protect India (or Pakistan) (or maybe even both) from
retribution (by missiles, anyway) from the other guy. This is
what he means by 'defending other people's freedoms (sic!)
of action'.
Let's go over this in detail. Suppose India wants to attack
Pakistan, but is constrained from doing so by Pakistan's missiles.
Suppose further the US allies with India, and announces that we
are going to extend the protection of our NMD system to that
country.
That announcement will only mean anything if India really does
feel protected. And how can it? Given that we are talking about
nuclear weapons even a small risk of penetration will be unacceptable,
and given the nature of the technological problems involved the
risks will always be anything but small. So India will continue
to feel as constrained by Pakistan's missiles as it was before
the US' announcement and the system will have accomplished nothing
(in Billings' terms).
The fact that we are dealing with weapons of such astonishing
destructiveness affects policy in two ways. It helps justify
NMD systems whose only objective is reduce casualties by ten
or twenty percent (because in this context 10 or 20% are very
large numbers). But by the same token you can never build
a system that people will feel they can rely on in any way,
because even a small risk of failure will be unacceptable.
A NMD can never change behavior because no one will ever
be able to count on it. For instance, it is unthinkable
that any country possessing a nuclear deterrent would abandon
it out of confidence that some NMD system -- again, a huge,
one-of-a-kind, enormously complicated, military system --
would protect it.
There may or may not be an argument for building a simple, modest,
NMD that promises just to crank down the casualty rate. But
that argument is the only one there is for missile defense. By
the nature of the animal there can be no argument based on changes
in strategic behavior.
And whatever you think, this list is full of posts by people making
exactly such arguments.
Fred
Fred Hapgod
GMW
> States every two or three generations
This happens because the US, as a democracry, presents itself as weak. From
the Kiaser to the Kremlin to Desert Storm leaders have allowed themselves to
be hypnotized by a loud, I hate myself and therfore my country" strain with
in the American political chorus. Throw into the mix a population fixed on
inventing the next big thing and the occassional Lyndon Johnson or Bill
Clinton and you have an image of a mindless contry waiting to fail.
Britian, France, and other democratic contries suffer the same fate, but
they get written off as hypercritcs, not weaklings.
Give it enough time and some chump eventually takes the bait, and we have a
war. Once started wars have a nasty habit of escalating beyond what
anythinks is possible. Imagine in the future some thrid world loser picking
a fight against the US expecting "Americka" to settle, but instead finds
himself losing. Knowing (because the newsgroups and media are filling up
with leftists try to "explain", "why they hate us" ) that a sudden upsurge
in US dead will break US resolve, the dictator decides to throw the dice one
last time by using a "dirty" bomb on the advancing US forces, or prehaps a
population center. Missile defense, however flawed, at both the theater and
strategic level would send a powerful message that this is a non starter
while serving as the last line of defense when it does happen.
Andrew Case
>I believe that a sufficiently robust reading of the political
>science examinations of crisis management and deterrence made
>in the last decade or so, starting with Jervis and working outwards,
>indicates that there is credible reason to believe that nations
>in general, and nuclear capable nations in particular, are not
>robustly capable of handling confrontations and crisies without
>occational escalations to wars and quite potentially nuclear wars.
I think you have a point, but I don't see it as a justification
for BMD. It seems like a good justification for adjusting the
way crises are handled, and for establishing a very clear set
of expectations about US responses to attack. The lesson I take
from 9/11 is not build NMD but rather don't ever run from a
fight. The history of US responses to terrorist outrages in the
past gave OBL every reason to believe that he could kill 3000+
people and suffer nothing more than a few cruise missile strikes.
The advantage of a strategy on these lines is that it's workable
against a more generalized set of threats than any single weapons
system. The flaw is that it demands politicians with backbones.
>Most wars in the last few decades were initiated by the eventual
>loser, and in many cases caused the initiators destruction
>as a government (if rarely as a nation).
But in all cases I can recall the loser expected something other
than his own destruction. Assured Destruction (note *not* Mutual)
is a powerful deterrent, though as you point out not a completely
reliable one.
>All of that said, I think that in the end I am forced to conclude
>that NMD is beneficial and should be built if it can be made to
>work reliably against moderate attacks. The odds of a small to
>moderate nuclear war breaking out are probably close to unity,
>as the world stands today, and the US cannot afford to be the
>victim of such an incident.
This is a reasonable position. I think the only point where we
may differ is in the probability of an attack directed at the US,
as opposed to our allies (with knock-on economic effects). As a
concrete example, a North Korean attack on the South is substantially
more likely than an attack on the US directly. This implies that
a BMD system is more likely to be useful if it's ship-based than
if it's based in the CONUS. Much of the current BMD debate centers
on a scenario in which some nutcake dictator on the other side of
the world fires off his limited arsenal at the CONUS, which I consider
to be sufficiently unlikely that I can't see justifying spending the
required billions on it. Much more likely is an attack with shorter
range missiles, possibly against US bases overseas, possibly against
an ally or trading partner. The ship-based approach has the advantage that
it both addresses the most likely scenario and provides an evolutionary
path towards a system capable of defending the CONUS.
Clearly my preferred route isn't going to be followed. The current
most likely course of action seems like it's going to address at least
some threats (can it function against, say a North Korean attack on
Japan? - I doubt it but I don't know for sure).
Tom Billings
> On Sat, 2 Mar 2002 19:00:57 -0800, "Bruce Sterling Woodcock"
>
> >And, as I said, your perception is incorrect... the justification that you
> >are assigning to proponents of NMD is not the preferred one.
>
> Recently Tom Billings (does he qualify as a proponent?) wrote;
>
> > The reason to build BMD (far more than Clinton's crippled
> > NMD) is to allow us to defend other people's freedoms of action,
> > even when someone assaulting them has a nuclear-tipped ballistic
> > missile.
>
> His picture here is of a couple of nations, like India and Pakistan,
> each threatened by attack from the other. Billings' scenario is
> that if the US had a system, then we could announce to the world
> that Pakistan (or India) could do whatever they wanted because
> we would protect India (or Pakistan) (or maybe even both) from
> retribution (by missiles, anyway) from the other guy. This is
> what he means by 'defending other people's freedoms (sic!)
> of action'.
I'm sorry Fred, but you ascribe an interpretation to my words
that are not correct. By freedoms of action I do not mean the
freedoms of governments to attack other people. I meant the
industrial freedoms of action needed to form and sustain the
world-wide industrial networks, which our industrial society
needs for its continued existence.
Defense of those freedoms of action is worth risking
the possibility of casualties in the Republic, because without
them the Republic would become a pale ghost of itself,
through dropping back into old agrarian cultural attitudes
towards freedoms of action and networks. BMD should
be there to limit the risk, strongly, and to make each increment
of investment in small nuclear ballistic missile arsenals
far less worthwhile.
Regards,
Tom Billings
George William Herbert
>George William Herbert <gher...@gw.retro.com> wrote:
>>I believe that a sufficiently robust reading of the political
>>science examinations of crisis management and deterrence made
>>in the last decade or so, starting with Jervis and working outwards,
>>indicates that there is credible reason to believe that nations
>>in general, and nuclear capable nations in particular, are not
>>robustly capable of handling confrontations and crisies without
>>occational escalations to wars and quite potentially nuclear wars.
>
>I think you have a point, but I don't see it as a justification
>for BMD. It seems like a good justification for adjusting the
>way crises are handled, and for establishing a very clear set
>of expectations about US responses to attack.
It is entirely possible that there are some situations in
which the perceptual inversion problem will cause there to
be no rational peaceful solution from at least one participant's
viewpoint, and which therefore guarantee escalation to violence.
The number of situations where that has been coupled with a
failure to recognize how seriously an opponent would take
the affront, in the "we'll respond to that by destroying your
{country/government}" sense, is nonzero. It hasn't happened
yet with a pair of nuclear armed nations, but there is no
reason to believe that it can't or won't. That's the problem;
the US, who have what's arguably by far the best educated and
deep thinking crisis managers, screw up regularly. Other nations
tend to be much more shallow and naive and not know about the
traps of crisis management, and therefore much more likely
than we are to fall into them. If we can't even guarantee
our *own* behaviour, which we reasonably and rationally can't,
then how can we assume anyone else's?
>The lesson I take
>from 9/11 is not build NMD but rather don't ever run from a
>fight. The history of US responses to terrorist outrages in the
>past gave OBL every reason to believe that he could kill 3000+
>people and suffer nothing more than a few cruise missile strikes.
>The advantage of a strategy on these lines is that it's workable
>against a more generalized set of threats than any single weapons
>system. The flaw is that it demands politicians with backbones.
These are all good things, and might optimistically double, quadruple,
perhaps even reduce the risk of a nuclear attack on the US by a factor
of up to 10. But the risk is still unacceptably high after that is
taken into account.
>>Most wars in the last few decades were initiated by the eventual
>>loser, and in many cases caused the initiators destruction
>>as a government (if rarely as a nation).
>
>But in all cases I can recall the loser expected something other
>than his own destruction. Assured Destruction (note *not* Mutual)
>is a powerful deterrent, though as you point out not a completely
>reliable one.
In all of those cases, the initial attacker rationalized that
they would be able to arrainge a termination of hostilities
with some lesser response than the worst case response.
The classic example is Japan in WW 2, who thought they would
lose a long war with the US, but thought for reasons obscure
and obtuse that the US would negotiate a peace after Japan had
taken the territory they thought they needed. They completely
misread how US resolve would solidify after an attack such
as Pearl Harbor and Japan's invading all its neighbors.
Iraq in Kuwait was another example; they rationalized that
the other nations in the Gulf, and the US, would either agree
or accept it as a fait accompli. They still essentially
believed that on the eve of the bombing campaign.
The Taliban were another example; they rationalized that no
foreign power could or would focus the sort of power on
Afghanistan needed to unseat them, after what happened
to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. They completely misread
how upset the US was and what our military capabilities were.
It is very easy for me to see a situation in which an opponent
convinces themselves that no, the US would not respond to a
particular nuclear attack with a massive retaliatory response.
They would be completely wrong, but there's no logical reason
to conclude that they can't convince themselves otherwise
any more than they can't convince themselves the US won't
intervene conventionally when provoked sufficiently.
I think that there is a higher risk of an attack on the US than
you do, for the reasons discussed. I believe that it is more
likely that there will be nuclear attacks among non-first-world
powers before there are directly against the US (say, as you
point out, North Korea vs South Korea, or Pakistan vs India).
But those could escalate or draw the US in. And we cannot discard
the notion that certain scenarios credibly could have the US
attacked directly. If I had to sum up the last 15 years worth
of crisis management, crisis national leader psychology, deterrence
study etc. in one sentence it would be "National Leaders behave Badly."
-george william herbert
gher...@retro.com
Jordan179
> The rogue state argument is inadequate justification for spending
> billions on NMD. The probability of a WoMD attack on the US by
> a state other than another superpower in a cold war MAD type
> scenario is incredibly small.
In a situation in which a Terrorist regime was going down anyway, why
WOULDN'T it launch any ICBM's it had? The leaders are going to die or
go to prison for the rest of their lives anyway, and it's not like
they care about the lives of their people.
> In all of history how many times
> has a state attacked another state knowing that the result is
> guaranteed total annihilation? I can think of only one (the
> war of the Triple Alliance) - no doubt there are at least a couple
> more, but it's clear that this scenario is incredibly unlikely.
You're assuming that the war starts with a "bolt from the blue." A
more likely scenario is:
1) Terrorist State attacks US with covert operation.
2) US figures out who attacked Terrorist State and attacks Terrorist
State.
3) Terrorist State begins to lose war.
4) Terrorist State, now desperate, makes nuclear threat or launches
nuclear attack.
> There are strong arguments in favor (notably the one Tom Billings
> advanced elsewhere in this thread), but the lone crazy dictator
> argument isn't one of them.
The dictator doesn't have to be "crazy." Merely ruthless, selfish, and
vindictive. And Terrorist leaders pretty much ALL are those.
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
Jordan179
> I believe that a sufficiently robust reading of the political
> science examinations of crisis management and deterrence made
> in the last decade or so, starting with Jervis and working outwards,
> indicates that there is credible reason to believe that nations
> in general, and nuclear capable nations in particular, are not
> robustly capable of handling confrontations and crisies without
> occational escalations to wars and quite potentially nuclear wars.
>
> Most wars in the last few decades were initiated by the eventual
> loser, and in many cases caused the initiators destruction
> as a government (if rarely as a nation).
Look at World War II. EVERY Axis power, except Finland and Thailand,
suffered the violent overthrow of its regime at bayonet point by the
Allies and its replacement by a regime which proceded to promote the
exact opposite of its previous philosophies.
> There is also the perverse and extremely dangerous inversion
> of stabilizing versus destabilizing in perceptual response
> to an opponents actions once a crisis psychology sets in
> among a national leadership team. That effect alone can
> easily support a contention that a nuclear war is likely,
> if not inevitable, as the situation stands today (though
> perhaps less likely involving the US).
Absent NMD, there is also the temptation to pre-emptively strike, and
the fear that one must "use it or lose it." The former would
particularly be the case with the US, and the latter with the
Terrorist State, because Terrorist States would have small and
degradable arsenals.
> It is my firm opinion, having spent the last 5+ years researching
> this because I was uncomfortable with classical deterrence
> theory, that the NMD opponents tendency to believe in
> classical deterrence is dangerous and naive. There is good
> research and case study literature out there.
Classical deterrence worked well with the Russians and Chinese -- but
then, both are historically cautious cultures. The Islamics are
anything but cautious, and the North Koreans are stark raving mad.
> It is also fair to point out that the classical NMD proponent
> stance is also fairly badly mapped to the realities of crisis
> stability and management. A number of the destabilizing aspects
> of NMD its opponents fear are legitimate and should justifyably
> be examined and addressed at the appropriate level within US policy.
>
> There is also the aspect that nearly everyone wants to play down,
> that of avoiding coercion by other nuclear powers. The US was
> able to work with the Soviet Union to establish a reasonable
> set of groundrules and avoid us threatening each other for
> tactical purposes in crisies. The same may not be true for
> North Korea, China, or Iran.
>
> All of that said, I think that in the end I am forced to conclude
> that NMD is beneficial and should be built if it can be made to
> work reliably against moderate attacks. The odds of a small to
> moderate nuclear war breaking out are probably close to unity,
> as the world stands today, and the US cannot afford to be the
> victim of such an incident.
Literally -- even one hit on an American city would cause grievous
economic loss -- to say nothing of the loss of life.
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
Jordan179
> The degree to which anyone in the Taliban leadership was aware of the plotting
> for 9/11 is unknown, it appears the information was severely restricted
> even in the top echelons of al Qaeda.
They, however, suicidally stuck by al Qaeda even after 9/11.
> I dispute the claim that there are many cases in which states or regimes
> intentionally commit suicide. There are many cases in which wars are
> initiated by the side that eventually loses, but in few cases did the
> initiating state expect that to be the outcome.
>
> A weaker state may initiate war with a stronger one, if it feels that
> the stronger will "settle" at some point on terms that are favorable -
> there are many cases of a stronger nation negotiating an end (or even
> accepting outright defeat) a war it could have won if cost were no
> object.
Indeed, but a common mistake of totalitarians is to believe their own
propaganda and assume that liberal democracies are morally "weak" and
can be induced to surrender with a little frightfulness. You see this
mistake being made by the Central Powers in World War One, the Axis in
World War Two, the Arabs during the Cold War, and the New Axis today.
There is no particular reason to assume that this will be the LAST
time this mistake will recur.
> Japan believed something rather like this would come to pass in WWII.
>
> But I know of no cases remotely similar to a nuclear attack on an urban
> area against a foe able to annhilate the attacker with a tiny fraction
> of its standing arsenal.
9/11 was a case EXACTLY like that. In fact, the amount of energy
liberated by both plane crashes and fuel fires was on the order of a
tactical nuclear weapon. It just was released more SLOWLY, which is
why the damage was limited to the two buildings and the ones
immediately adjacent.
Note that the area of light damage stretched about a kilometer's
radius in all directions. Fortunately, most of that sphere was well
above street level, or a LOT of people on the ground would have died
or been maimed.
> It is important though for the certainty of devastating retaliation be
> abundantly clear, so that no prospective attacker can fool himself into
> beleiving otherwise. This one area where ambiguity does not serve
> anyone's interest.
Please note that we did NOT use nuclear weapons in response to 9/11.
> George Herbert is right though that the implausibility of a pre-planned
> attack does not rule out the possibility of blundering into nuclear war
> in a crisis.
I'd call it a fairly high probability, once the Terrorist States have
nuclear weapons.
> This last comment ("most destructive weapons available") is certainly
> untrue, as the absence of gas weapons being used in WWII demonstrates.
Gas wasn't really all that more destructive than conventional weapons,
H. G. Wells regardless.
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
Tamas Feher
>The reason to build BMD (far more than Clinton's crippled NMD)
>is to allow us to defend other people's freedoms of action, even
>when someone assaulting them has a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile.
The basic failure in this argument is that only the USA has used weapons of mass
destruction in war so far. Therefore you shall not expect the 6.02 billion
non-US population of Earth to believe that America wants BMD to protect THEM.
If you look at the situation realistically, USA and Israel remain the two most
dangerous countries on Earth, threatening all others with nukes. I just laugh,
when USA boast about Saddam's evilish nuke programme and its assumed russian
support. I mean the USA illegally gave 200-250 pcs of nukes to the Jews. As long
as Isreal has nukes, every arab / muslim country has a right to produce nukes in
self defence; because the US broke the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by
giving WMD to the Jews.
Free Mordechai Vanunu!
Sincerely: Tamas Feher.
Bruce Sterling Woodcock
"Tamas Feher" <eto...@freemail.hu> wrote in message news:a5vhpd$4f8$1...@athena.euroweb.hu...
> Regards,
>
> >The reason to build BMD (far more than Clinton's crippled NMD)
> >is to allow us to defend other people's freedoms of action, even
> >when someone assaulting them has a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile.
>
> The basic failure in this argument is that only the USA has used weapons of mass
> destruction in war so far. Therefore you shall not expect the 6.02 billion
> non-US population of Earth to believe that America wants BMD to protect THEM.
WoMD include chemical weapons, which were used by other nations
in WW1, and Iraq more recently.
But your point that we're the only ones who've used nuclear weapons so
far, but we're the only ones who HAD them at the time, and it was quite
a while ago.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter *what* those 6 billion think. If they don't like
it, tough. Have a missile defense is still your right to have if you want it, and
it is entirely moral.
> If you look at the situation realistically, USA and Israel remain the two most
> dangerous countries on Earth, threatening all others with nukes.
The difference being that the threats are threats that we'll use them to defend
ourselves. We're not using them to threaten offensively, or else Israel would
control the entire mideast by now.
> I just laugh,
> when USA boast about Saddam's evilish nuke programme and its assumed russian
> support. I mean the USA illegally gave 200-250 pcs of nukes to the Jews.
Nope.
> As long
> as Isreal has nukes, every arab / muslim country has a right to produce nukes in
> self defence; because the US broke the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by
> giving WMD to the Jews.
Warning, warning, anti-Semite detected!
Bruce
Carey Sublette
JSBass...@yahoo.com says...
> Carey Sublette <care...@earthlink.net> wrote in message news:<MPG.16eb60318...@news.earthlink.net>...
>
> > The degree to which anyone in the Taliban leadership was aware of the plotting
> > for 9/11 is unknown, it appears the information was severely restricted
> > even in the top echelons of al Qaeda.
>
> They, however, suicidally stuck by al Qaeda even after 9/11.
>
> > I dispute the claim that there are many cases in which states or regimes
> > intentionally commit suicide. There are many cases in which wars are
> > initiated by the side that eventually loses, but in few cases did the
> > initiating state expect that to be the outcome.
> >
> > A weaker state may initiate war with a stronger one, if it feels that
> > the stronger will "settle" at some point on terms that are favorable -
> > there are many cases of a stronger nation negotiating an end (or even
> > accepting outright defeat) a war it could have won if cost were no
> > object.
>
> Indeed, but a common mistake of totalitarians is to believe their own
> propaganda and assume that liberal democracies are morally "weak" and
> can be induced to surrender with a little frightfulness. You see this
> mistake being made by the Central Powers in World War One, the Axis in
> World War Two, the Arabs during the Cold War, and the New Axis today.
> There is no particular reason to assume that this will be the LAST
> time this mistake will recur.
There is some truth to your general thrust here - totalitarian states
usually do not appreciate the strengths of democracies - but the stark
nature of nuclear retaliation (they just hit a button and the Supreme
Leader's palace is vapor...) is quite remote from the idea of slugging
it out on the battlefield.
BTW, lumping bitterly hostile Iraq and Iran together as a "New Axis" is
a particularly poorly conceived bit of geopolitical thinking.
> > Japan believed something rather like this would come to pass in WWII.
> >
> > But I know of no cases remotely similar to a nuclear attack on an urban
> > area against a foe able to annhilate the attacker with a tiny fraction
> > of its standing arsenal.
>
> 9/11 was a case EXACTLY like that. In fact, the amount of energy
> liberated by both plane crashes and fuel fires was on the order of a
> tactical nuclear weapon. It just was released more SLOWLY, which is
> why the damage was limited to the two buildings and the ones
> immediately adjacent.
Yes, speed of release makes a big difference in damage effects - which
is why nuclear weapons remain uniquely destructive.
> Note that the area of light damage stretched about a kilometer's
> radius in all directions. Fortunately, most of that sphere was well
> above street level, or a LOT of people on the ground would have died
> or been maimed.
No it was definitely not exactly like that.
9/11 was the worst urban attack conducted without a major war being in
progress, but it is dramatically different from the ICBM attack
scenario.
The 9/11 attack was conducted under the belief that an obscure origin of
the attack (the lack of anyone claiming credit, the lack of unambiguous
targets representing the attacker, etc.) would prevent effective
retaliation. Remember - whether Bin Laden was responsible was a matter
of conjecture and dispute after the attack.
The origin of an ICBM is not subject to question.
Incidentally - the effect of the 9/11 attack was about a factor of 10
times less destructive than what a simple nuclear device is capable of,
and a factor of 100 times less destructive than a plausible
proliferating nation ICBM warhead could do on the same target area.
> > It is important though for the certainty of devastating retaliation be
> > abundantly clear, so that no prospective attacker can fool himself into
> > beleiving otherwise. This one area where ambiguity does not serve
> > anyone's interest.
>
> Please note that we did NOT use nuclear weapons in response to 9/11.
The U.S. didn't have anyone to attack with nuclear weapons. It wasn't
immediately clear who was responsible or where they might be found.
Remember a major aspect of U.S. operations in Afghanistan was looking
for evidence of responsibility.
What could the U.S. do with a nuclear weapon? Wipe out an Afghan city,
full mostly of people hostile to Taliban rule, and kill maybe 100 Al
Qaeda fighters in the bargain? Hitting remote Al Qaeda bases is a
possibility, but it makes looking for evidence and obtaining prisoners
for interrogation rather difficult.
This is very unlike an ICBM attack. It is similar to a covert nuclear
attack - but NMD systems are useless against that.
Incidentally, I did see a fair amount of discussion after 9/11 whether
this incident might pass the threshold for nuclear retaliation *if the
culprit was clear*.
> > George Herbert is right though that the implausibility of a pre-planned
> > attack does not rule out the possibility of blundering into nuclear war
> > in a crisis.
>
> I'd call it a fairly high probability, once the Terrorist States have
> nuclear weapons.
I'd like to see you make the case for "fairly high probability" in more
detail.
> > This last comment ("most destructive weapons available") is certainly
> > untrue, as the absence of gas weapons being used in WWII demonstrates.
>
> Gas wasn't really all that more destructive than conventional weapons,
> H. G. Wells regardless.
It was about a factor 5 times more destructive, in terms of the number
of casualties inflicted on the battlefield per munition used. If used
against an urban population the ratio would be even higher.
Carey Sublette
Andrew Case
>> The number of cases where leaders
>> of states commit suicide by attacking overwhelmingly more powerful
>> foes is tiny. The onus is on those who would spend billions to
>> defend against a given risk to show that the danger warrants the
>> expense.
>
>things could hurt us.
Showing how much such things could hurt us isn't enough.
The other necessary element is to show how probable it
is that such an outcome will come about. Integrating over all
of the ways in which BMD could prevent harm, weighted by the
individual probabilities of the specific event, BMD looks
worthwhile. Considering only the nutcase dictator requires
that this particular scenario be much more likely than history
suggests it to be. Nutcases are a dime a dozen. Self-destructive
nutcases canny enough to gain and hold power over a nation are
quite rare.
Kris Crockett
Blame the europeans, specifically the french. They provided the reactor. But
then, you're just trying to justify your hate, so go ahead and believe
whatever you want.
Andrew Case
>>I think you have a point, but I don't see it as a justification
>>for BMD. It seems like a good justification for adjusting the
>>way crises are handled, and for establishing a very clear set
>>of expectations about US responses to attack.
>
>It is entirely possible that there are some situations in
>which the perceptual inversion problem will cause there to
>be no rational peaceful solution from at least one participant's
>viewpoint, and which therefore guarantee escalation to violence.
I have a crude understanding of this issue, but you seem to
think it is much more serious than I understand it to be. Since
I generally respect your opinions I'm inclined to think I need
to do a bit more reading on the topic. Do you have a good reference
(i.e. one that's intelligible to a non-specialist but not
dumbed down)?
>The number of situations where that has been coupled with a
>failure to recognize how seriously an opponent would take
>the affront, in the "we'll respond to that by destroying your
>{country/government}" sense, is nonzero. It hasn't happened
>yet with a pair of nuclear armed nations, but there is no
>reason to believe that it can't or won't.
This is reasonable enough. A clear policy would help, but
may not be sufficient.
>It is very easy for me to see a situation in which an opponent
>convinces themselves that no, the US would not respond to a
>particular nuclear attack with a massive retaliatory response.
In fact what I suggest is not massive retaliation, at least
not nuclear retaliation. I suggest that the US make it clear
that nations attacking the US will suffer the destruction of
their government, the death of the leaders ordering the attacks,
and the installation of a government more to US liking - pretty
much what happened in Europe after WWII.
>They would be completely wrong, but there's no logical reason
>to conclude that they can't convince themselves otherwise
>any more than they can't convince themselves the US won't
>intervene conventionally when provoked sufficiently.
The US can substantially increase the level of irrationality
required to conclude that the US won't destroy attackers, simply
by setting clear precedents. OBL and the Taliban were in fact
quite justified in the belief that the US would not respond as
it did, based on extrapolation from past experience. The historical
record of US responses to the murder of US citizens is pretty
clear. OBL apparently didn't grasp the fact that there was a
discontinuity in US response associated with large numbers of civilians
being murdered on US soil as opposed to moderate numbers of military
personnel being murdered overseas.
>I think that there is a higher risk of an attack on the US than
>you do, for the reasons discussed.
Well, not being a hypothetical rogue state leader, I am amenable
to reason :) You make good points - I look forward to studying this
crisis management issue further.
Jussi Jaatinen
Bruce Sterling Woodcock wrote:
> > BMD is a warmed-up leftover project from the Cold War that certain
> > industrial circles in the US want to build because they stand to make a
> > lot of money from it. It has nothing to do with security or protecting
> > someone from attack.
> Substitute any military program for BMD and you could make the same
> accusation. But that's all it is. Unless you can support opposition to it
> on logical grounds, then it really doesn't matter what reasons you think
> may or may not account for its actual existence. The point is its utility.
I agree entirely that the point is utility, and also somewhat that many
"military programs" could be critisized on this ground. However, the
criticism of other programs would not be as poignant as in the case of
BMD.
> > I'm amazed that someone can actually use the 11.9. attacks to _defend_
> > BMD, when the most obvious point in the affair is that BMD can't prevent
> > a dozen-odd guys with bux cutters from throwing the US into disarray.
> I'm amazed that someone can actually use this as an argument against
> BMD, when the most obvious point in the affair is that we're spending
> money to prevent the dozen-odd guys with box cutters, so it only makes
> sense to spend money to prevent other attacks as well.
So you don't think that it would be logical to address primarily the
kinds of attacks that either have happened in the past of could
conceivably happen in the future?
Flag-waving over BMD/11.9 connotations is (IMO) the cheapest form of
pseudopatriotism that doesn't really even bother to veil the primary
motivation, greed. Sure, people are stupid. But are they really _that_
stupid?
-JJ
Tamas Feher
>Ultimately, it doesn't matter *what* those 6 billion think.
This is the only significant sentence in your reply. The USA doesn't care a damn
abouth rest of the planet.
>Have a missile defense is still your right to have if you want it,
>and it is entirely moral.
Obviously China and Saddam and the Russians will want an ABM-shield for
themselves if the USA builds one, but then the same person (you) would come
forward crying "Bastard commies build missile shield to create safe first-strike
capability!" That's how long your opinion about "it's your right to have ABM"
lasts.
>>I mean the USA illegally gave 200-250 pcs of nukes to the Jews.
> Nope.
Who gave them, the Santa Claus?
Sincerely: Tamas Feher.
Bruce Sterling Woodcock
"Andrew Case" <ac...@Glue.umd.edu> wrote in message news:a5vvuj$5...@poynting.umd.edu...
> Bruce Sterling Woodcock <sirb...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> [I wrote:]
> >> The number of cases where leaders
> >> of states commit suicide by attacking overwhelmingly more powerful
> >> foes is tiny. The onus is on those who would spend billions to
> >> defend against a given risk to show that the danger warrants the
> >> expense.
> >
> >Yes, and the onus has been met, by showing how much such
> >things could hurt us.
>
> Showing how much such things could hurt us isn't enough.
> The other necessary element is to show how probable it
> is that such an outcome will come about.
Read the hypothetical... the risk was already given.
> Integrating over all
> of the ways in which BMD could prevent harm, weighted by the
> individual probabilities of the specific event, BMD looks
> worthwhile.
That's been done.
> Considering only the nutcase dictator requires
> that this particular scenario be much more likely than history
> suggests it to be. Nutcases are a dime a dozen. Self-destructive
> nutcases canny enough to gain and hold power over a nation are
> quite rare.
They don't need to gain and hold power over a nation.
Also, only one can be sufficient give the damage they can reek.
Bruce
Bruce Sterling Woodcock
"Jussi Jaatinen" <jussi.j...@kolumbus.fi> wrote in message news:3C8395F4...@kolumbus.fi...
>
>
> Bruce Sterling Woodcock wrote:
>
> > > BMD is a warmed-up leftover project from the Cold War that certain
> > > industrial circles in the US want to build because they stand to make a
> > > lot of money from it. It has nothing to do with security or protecting
> > > someone from attack.
> > Substitute any military program for BMD and you could make the same
> > accusation. But that's all it is. Unless you can support opposition to it
> > on logical grounds, then it really doesn't matter what reasons you think
> > may or may not account for its actual existence. The point is its utility.
>
> I agree entirely that the point is utility, and also somewhat that many
> "military programs" could be critisized on this ground. However, the
> criticism of other programs would not be as poignant as in the case of
> BMD.
>
> > > I'm amazed that someone can actually use the 11.9. attacks to _defend_
> > > BMD, when the most obvious point in the affair is that BMD can't prevent
> > > a dozen-odd guys with bux cutters from throwing the US into disarray.
> > I'm amazed that someone can actually use this as an argument against
> > BMD, when the most obvious point in the affair is that we're spending
> > money to prevent the dozen-odd guys with box cutters, so it only makes
> > sense to spend money to prevent other attacks as well.
>
> So you don't think that it would be logical to address primarily the
> kinds of attacks that either have happened in the past of could
> conceivably happen in the future?
They are already being addressed. I think it is illogical not to address
other kinds of potential attacks simply because they haven't happened
yet.
> Flag-waving over BMD/11.9 connotations is (IMO) the cheapest form of
> pseudopatriotism that doesn't really even bother to veil the primary
> motivation, greed. Sure, people are stupid. But are they really _that_
> stupid?
Since you pre-suppose only the worst motives of the supporters and only
the best motives of the opponents, your conclusion is skewed.
Bruce
Edward Wright
>>> The number of cases where leaders
>>> of states commit suicide by attacking overwhelmingly more powerful
>>> foes is tiny. The onus is on those who would spend billions to
>>> defend against a given risk to show that the danger warrants the
>>> expense.
>>
>>Not for anyone who was paying attention on September 11.
>
> I'll buy this if you can show me that Mullah Omar knew the attacks were
> immanent and that the US response would result in his death.
Strawman. Launching an ICBM merely requires pushing a button. The
button doesn't care whether the person pushing it is rational or not.
Jordan179
> There is some truth to your general thrust here - totalitarian states
> usually do not appreciate the strengths of democracies - but the stark
> nature of nuclear retaliation (they just hit a button and the Supreme
> Leader's palace is vapor...) is quite remote from the idea of slugging
> it out on the battlefield.
Since 1945, no democracy has ever used nuclear weapons. So it's quite
possible that the totalitarians of today may doubt our resolve.
> BTW, lumping bitterly hostile Iraq and Iran together as a "New Axis" is
> a particularly poorly conceived bit of geopolitical thinking.
They are currently more hostile to us than they are to each other.
> The 9/11 attack was conducted under the belief that an obscure origin of
> the attack (the lack of anyone claiming credit, the lack of unambiguous
> targets representing the attacker, etc.) would prevent effective
> retaliation. Remember - whether Bin Laden was responsible was a matter
> of conjecture and dispute after the attack.
Not for very long, unless you're talking about the loonies who were
blaming the CIA and the Mossad. We publically identified Bin Laden as
the chief culprit within a day or two of the attack.
> The origin of an ICBM is not subject to question.
The origin of a SLCM or SSBM might be, however.
> Incidentally - the effect of the 9/11 attack was about a factor of 10
> times less destructive than what a simple nuclear device is capable of,
> and a factor of 100 times less destructive than a plausible
> proliferating nation ICBM warhead could do on the same target area.
I know.
> The U.S. didn't have anyone to attack with nuclear weapons. It wasn't
> immediately clear who was responsible or where they might be found.
We did know who was responsible, and roughly where they might be
found, within a matter of days after the attack, however. In
particular, we knew which STATE (Afghanistan) was responsible, within
a DAY after the attack.
> Remember a major aspect of U.S. operations in Afghanistan was looking
> for evidence of responsibility.
>
> What could the U.S. do with a nuclear weapon? Wipe out an Afghan city,
> full mostly of people hostile to Taliban rule, and kill maybe 100 Al
> Qaeda fighters in the bargain? Hitting remote Al Qaeda bases is a
> possibility, but it makes looking for evidence and obtaining prisoners
> for interrogation rather difficult.
We could have used it against any Taliban or Al Qaeda base or
fortress. Also, you are (wrongly) implying that our only enemy was Al
Qaeda -- it was also the Taliban, which at the time ruled the country.
And there WERE (and are) cities and towns in Afghanistan which mostly
sympathize with the Terrorists.
> This is very unlike an ICBM attack. It is similar to a covert nuclear
> attack - but NMD systems are useless against that.
>
> Incidentally, I did see a fair amount of discussion after 9/11 whether
> this incident might pass the threshold for nuclear retaliation *if the
> culprit was clear*.
??? - The "culprit was clear" within a day or two after the attack.
After that, only the nut fringe was arguing that it WASN'T Al Qaeda
and the Taliban. The US GOVERNMENT was certainly clear on the source
of the attack.
> > I'd call it a fairly high probability, once the Terrorist States have
> > nuclear weapons.
>
> I'd like to see you make the case for "fairly high probability" in more
> detail.
Iran is ruled by psychotic delusionaries has committed numerous
unprovoked acts of war against the United States and Israel. Iraq is
led by a megalomaniac and has a history of screaming and leaping on
more powerful or equally powerful enemies. North Korea is ruled by a
certifiable psychopath and has a history of waging aggressive warfare.
WHat "more detail" do you want?
> It was about a factor 5 times more destructive, in terms of the number
> of casualties inflicted on the battlefield per munition used. If used
> against an urban population the ratio would be even higher.
Depends on the degree of preparation of the victims. The problems with
gas are (1) gas masks alone protect against most of its effects, (2)
especially if the targets are under cover. And most WWII gas was
breath agent, not skin agent.
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
George William Herbert
>George William Herbert <gher...@gw.retro.com> wrote:
>>Andrew Case <ac...@Glue.umd.edu> wrote:
>>>I think you have a point, but I don't see it as a justification
>>>for BMD. It seems like a good justification for adjusting the
>>>way crises are handled, and for establishing a very clear set
>>>of expectations about US responses to attack.
>>
>>It is entirely possible that there are some situations in
>>which the perceptual inversion problem will cause there to
>>be no rational peaceful solution from at least one participant's
>>viewpoint, and which therefore guarantee escalation to violence.
>
>I have a crude understanding of this issue, but you seem to
>think it is much more serious than I understand it to be. Since
>I generally respect your opinions I'm inclined to think I need
>to do a bit more reading on the topic. Do you have a good reference
>(i.e. one that's intelligible to a non-specialist but not
>dumbed down)?
If you have to read one book... start with the one edited
by Jervis, "Psychology and Deterrence". It's a bunch of
political science writers writing political science
analysies, but none of it went over my head despite me
being an engineer by training ;-)
>>The number of situations where that has been coupled with a
>>failure to recognize how seriously an opponent would take
>>the affront, in the "we'll respond to that by destroying your
>>{country/government}" sense, is nonzero. It hasn't happened
>>yet with a pair of nuclear armed nations, but there is no
>>reason to believe that it can't or won't.
>
>This is reasonable enough. A clear policy would help, but
>may not be sufficient.
>
>>It is very easy for me to see a situation in which an opponent
>>convinces themselves that no, the US would not respond to a
>>particular nuclear attack with a massive retaliatory response.
>
>In fact what I suggest is not massive retaliation, at least
>not nuclear retaliation. I suggest that the US make it clear
>that nations attacking the US will suffer the destruction of
>their government, the death of the leaders ordering the attacks,
>and the installation of a government more to US liking - pretty
>much what happened in Europe after WWII.
Even with a clear US policy, it's still possible for the
opponent to think that they can or will be an exception.
To be *sure*, we have to convince everyone, every time,
that it's going to be our response. Even if the US
immediately started aggressively publicizing that policy,
you have to wonder if the first opponent in a crisis
with each newly elected president would wonder if they
are as serious as their predecessors. We have noticed
serious issues with some opponents reading political
tea leaves of newly elected US presidents as if they
were other third world dictators to be bullied, rather
than the leaders of a strong constitutional republic
with significant policy and technical advisory
infrastructure to assist them.
>>They would be completely wrong, but there's no logical reason
>>to conclude that they can't convince themselves otherwise
>>any more than they can't convince themselves the US won't
>>intervene conventionally when provoked sufficiently.
>
>The US can substantially increase the level of irrationality
>required to conclude that the US won't destroy attackers, simply
>by setting clear precedents. OBL and the Taliban were in fact
>quite justified in the belief that the US would not respond as
>it did, based on extrapolation from past experience. The historical
>record of US responses to the murder of US citizens is pretty
>clear. OBL apparently didn't grasp the fact that there was a
>discontinuity in US response associated with large numbers of civilians
>being murdered on US soil as opposed to moderate numbers of military
>personnel being murdered overseas.
>
>>I think that there is a higher risk of an attack on the US than
>>you do, for the reasons discussed.
>
>Well, not being a hypothetical rogue state leader, I am amenable
>to reason :) You make good points - I look forward to studying this
>crisis management issue further.
Start with "Psychology and Deterrence", and then perhaps the newer
books on the management of the Cuban Missile Crisis on both sides,
other books by Jervis and the coauthors of the sections of P&D.
-george william herbert
gher...@retro.com
Tom Billings
> Regards,
>
> >Ultimately, it doesn't matter *what* those 6 billion think.
>
> This is the only significant sentence in your reply. The USA doesn't care a damn
> abouth rest of the planet.
That must be why the foreign aid budget is so high.
Of course, only the academics and their friends in
the State Department care very much for what the
elites of many societies think, but that's another topic.
There are many things to care for in caring about
the rest of the world. Only the most dangerous
agrarian oligarchies warrant our attention to their
fantasies justifying them continuing in power.
> >Have a missile defense is still your right to have if you want it,
> >and it is entirely moral.
>
> Obviously China and Saddam and the Russians will want an ABM-shield for
> themselves if the USA builds one,
Excellent! This is precisely what Republican
Presidents since Reagan have been calling for!
> but then the same person (you) would come
> forward crying "Bastard commies build missile shield to create safe first-strike
> capability!" That's how long your opinion about "it's your right to have ABM"
> lasts.
You obviously haven't paid attention to what the US
has said on the issue, except perhaps when Clinton was in office?
> >>I mean the USA illegally gave 200-250 pcs of nukes to the Jews.
> > Nope.
>
> Who gave them, the Santa Claus?
The Israelis built them, with their own physicists.
I've already noted this to you privately. They
have all the technical capacity to build them.
Regards,
Tom Billings
zolota
Tom Billings <it...@teleport.com> wrote in message
news:3C854550...@teleport.com...
> Tamas Feher wrote:
>
> > Regards,
> >
> > >Ultimately, it doesn't matter *what* those 6 billion think.
> >
> > This is the only significant sentence in your reply. The USA doesn't
care a damn
> > abouth rest of the planet.
>
> That must be why the foreign aid budget is so high.
> Of course, only the academics and their friends in
> the State Department care very much for what the
> elites of many societies think, but that's another topic.
> There are many things to care for in caring about
> the rest of the world. Only the most dangerous
> agrarian oligarchies warrant our attention to their
> fantasies justifying them continuing in power.
I've never understood why Americans think that the US has a large foriegn
aid budget. It may be higher in cash value, but is barely twice that of
Britain or five times that of Canada. with their much smaller economies.
Percentage wise it is the lowest of the developed world at 0.10% of GDP vs
0.24% for the UK and 0.28% for Canada (1999 figures). Only two others, Italy
and Ireland, are below 0.20%, the 23 country average is around 0.30%, and
Denmark is 1.01%. For a graphical representation see:
http://www.ssb.no/uhjelpoecd_en/main.html
If these statistics are wrong I would appreciate knowing how.
While Bush is increasing the US aid budget for '03, it is really only less
than 0.5% of the federal budget. See:
http://www.usaid.gov/press/releases/2002/fs2003budget.html
Zolota
Rand Simberg
<zol...@shaw.ca> made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a way
as to indicate that:
>I've never understood why Americans think that the US has a large foriegn
>aid budget. It may be higher in cash value, but is barely twice that of
>Britain or five times that of Canada. with their much smaller economies.
"Foreign aid" is misleading. Yes, the official "foreign aid" budget
may be smaller per capita than for some other countries, but most
"foreign aid" is wasted anyway, since it's just handouts to foreign
governments who steal or waste it.
Of much more value is the money that the US contributes through such
services as GPS, or weather satellites, or crop surveillance, or a
myriad of other things that much of the developing world gets for
nothing, but is much more valuable to them than money that just goes
through the fingers of the kleptocrats, filling offshore bank
accounts.
--
simberg.interglobal.org * 310 372-7963 (CA) 307 739-1296 (Jackson Hole)
interglobal space lines * 307 733-1715 (Fax) http://www.interglobal.org
"Extraordinary launch vehicles require extraordinary markets..."
Replace first . with @ and throw out the "@trash." to email me.
Here's my email address for autospammers: postm...@fbi.gov
Carey Sublette
>
> > There is some truth to your general thrust here - totalitarian states
> > usually do not appreciate the strengths of democracies - but the stark
> > nature of nuclear retaliation (they just hit a button and the Supreme
> > Leader's palace is vapor...) is quite remote from the idea of slugging
> > it out on the battlefield.
>
> Since 1945, no democracy has ever used nuclear weapons. So it's quite
> possible that the totalitarians of today may doubt our resolve.
>
> > BTW, lumping bitterly hostile Iraq and Iran together as a "New Axis" is
> > a particularly poorly conceived bit of geopolitical thinking.
>
> They are currently more hostile to us than they are to each other.
Iraq vs the US - almost certainly. Iran vs the US almost certainly not.
Remember, Iran supported US intervention in Afghanistan.
Regardless of any ill feeling toward the US, they are in no sense
allied. Hussein's brutality towards domestic Shi'ites and Iran is keenly
remembered in the latter country.
> > The 9/11 attack was conducted under the belief that an obscure origin of
> > the attack (the lack of anyone claiming credit, the lack of unambiguous
> > targets representing the attacker, etc.) would prevent effective
> > retaliation. Remember - whether Bin Laden was responsible was a matter
> > of conjecture and dispute after the attack.
>
> Not for very long, unless you're talking about the loonies who were
> blaming the CIA and the Mossad. We publically identified Bin Laden as
> the chief culprit within a day or two of the attack.
Yes - and the U.S. was guessing. Bin Laden was the most likely suspect,
but there was no smoking gun.
> > The origin of an ICBM is not subject to question.
>
> The origin of a SLCM or SSBM might be, however.
If we wish to wander into increasingly absurd premises (technical
obstacles are worse than the ICBM, by and large). BTW - the NMD would be
useless against the former and likely useless against the latter.
> > Incidentally - the effect of the 9/11 attack was about a factor of 10
> > times less destructive than what a simple nuclear device is capable of,
> > and a factor of 100 times less destructive than a plausible
> > proliferating nation ICBM warhead could do on the same target area.
>
> I know.
>
> > The U.S. didn't have anyone to attack with nuclear weapons. It wasn't
> > immediately clear who was responsible or where they might be found.
>
> We did know who was responsible, and roughly where they might be
> found, within a matter of days after the attack, however. In
> particular, we knew which STATE (Afghanistan) was responsible, within
> a DAY after the attack.
Again no, the U.S. was postulating a very plausible, even probable but
still hypothetical case. A nuclear attack would be impossible to justify
out without a very public smoking gun.
> > Remember a major aspect of U.S. operations in Afghanistan was looking
> > for evidence of responsibility.
> >
> > What could the U.S. do with a nuclear weapon? Wipe out an Afghan city,
> > full mostly of people hostile to Taliban rule, and kill maybe 100 Al
> > Qaeda fighters in the bargain? Hitting remote Al Qaeda bases is a
> > possibility, but it makes looking for evidence and obtaining prisoners
> > for interrogation rather difficult.
>
> We could have used it against any Taliban or Al Qaeda base or
> fortress. Also, you are (wrongly) implying that our only enemy was Al
> Qaeda -- it was also the Taliban, which at the time ruled the country.
> And there WERE (and are) cities and towns in Afghanistan which mostly
> sympathize with the Terrorists.
Again - it does not appear that the Taliban even knew of the attack
until after the fact.
You are suggesting we massacre Kandaharis because they are Pushtuns, the
ethnic base of the Taliban?
A state capable of deploying an ICBM would necessarily be
infrastructure-rich (not a land of "ten dollar tents"), particulary high
value 'prestige targets', major facilities, and military bases.
Consider Iraq. An ICBM launch from there could be met with retaliation
against presidential palaces (probably with sub-kiloton low yield option
warheads), presidential bunkers, Republican Guard bases, military
plants, "research" facilities. Such a strike would liquidate most of the
structures the Hussein relies on to stay in power, and uses to threaten
neighbors and the U.S. - everything that he holds dear. Civilian
casualties would be substantial, higher than the U.S. would normally
inflcit in a war, but nothing remotely as brutal as liquidating ethnic
groups wholesale for the crime of sharing ethnicity and being generally
supportive - the option you seem to suggest as a plausible strategy in
Afghanistan.
While eliminating the Taliban as a force was necessary to remove Al
Qaeda - they don't figure in the deterrence equation since they didn't
launch the attack.
> > This is very unlike an ICBM attack. It is similar to a covert nuclear
> > attack - but NMD systems are useless against that.
> >
> > Incidentally, I did see a fair amount of discussion after 9/11 whether
> > this incident might pass the threshold for nuclear retaliation *if the
> > culprit was clear*.
>
> ??? - The "culprit was clear" within a day or two after the attack.
> After that, only the nut fringe was arguing that it WASN'T Al Qaeda
> and the Taliban. The US GOVERNMENT was certainly clear on the source
> of the attack.
Clear enough to launch a nuclear barrage? No. The U.S. did not not have
definite evidence, just a plausible case.
It might have turned out that the attack was organized outside of
Afghanistan - not by Bin Laden himself but by a supporter and fellow
traveller. If so, getting rid of Bin Laden in Afghanistan would still
make sense (just as pursuing Al Qaeda sympathizers in Somalia or the
Philipines or Aceh does now). Launching nuclear weapons against a nation
with no direct involvement would not.
This very different from having an ICBM launch point at (say) an Iraqi
military base.
> > > I'd call it a fairly high probability, once the Terrorist States have
> > > nuclear weapons.
> >
> > I'd like to see you make the case for "fairly high probability" in more
> > detail.
>
> Iran is ruled by psychotic delusionaries has committed numerous
> unprovoked acts of war against the United States and Israel. Iraq is
> led by a megalomaniac and has a history of screaming and leaping on
> more powerful or equally powerful enemies. North Korea is ruled by a
> certifiable psychopath and has a history of waging aggressive warfare.
> WHat "more detail" do you want?
Sorry - this doesn't cut it. You're simply spouting venom. This is the
old vacuous "crazy state" rhetoric.
Hussein has no record of 'leaping on more powerful enemies' - he
attacked the lightweight state of Kuwait, not the U.S. (And no one would
have rated Iran as equally powerful on the eve of the attack. Its
abiltiy to eventually stalemate, and then push back Iraq has a lot to do
with Iraqi incompetence. Incompetent leadship and training can screw up
almost anything.)
There is no basis for calling the rulers of Iran "psychotic".
Kim Il Song is a "certifiable psychopath"? Not if "certifiable" and
"psychopath" have their normal English meanings.
I don't like the rulers of any of these states either. But it is
important to still apply research and reason, and actually understand
their behavior.
> > It was about a factor 5 times more destructive, in terms of the number
> > of casualties inflicted on the battlefield per munition used. If used
> > against an urban population the ratio would be even higher.
> Depends on the degree of preparation of the victims. The problems with
> gas are (1) gas masks alone protect against most of its effects, (2)
> especially if the targets are under cover. And most WWII gas was
> breath agent, not skin agent.
Um - no. The most effective war gas in WWI, in terms of the number of
casualties inflicted on the battlefield per munition used, was mustard
gas - a skin agent. It is largely because gas masks did not protect
against its casualty effect that it was the most effective. Tonnage-
wise, it was also the number one agent stockpiled in the Japanese,
Allied, and for that matter the German, arsenals.
But the lethal respiratory agent phosgene, was also more effective than
high-explosive shell on the battlefield, even though masks offered
complete protection. This was due to a) failure of mask discipline; and
b) the fact that the agent has no immediate effect to signal its
presence.
Carey
John Schilling
>In article <a5sh0d$ftt$1...@spock.usc.edu>, schi...@spock.usc.edu says...
>> Carey Sublette <care...@earthlink.net> writes:
>> >In article <a5s97l$e4b$1...@spock.usc.edu>, schi...@spock.usc.edu says...
>> >> ac...@Glue.umd.edu (Andrew Case) writes:
>> >> >Bruce Sterling Woodcock <sirb...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>> >> >>"Andrew Case" <ac...@Glue.umd.edu> wrote:
>> >> >>> The rogue state argument is inadequate justification for spending
>> >> >>> billions on NMD.
>> >> >>False. It's entirely adequate for *us*, and for the majority of
>> >> >>the American people. It's not entirely adequate for *you*, but
>> >> >>you have different priorities than we do.
>> >> >It's a boogeyman. The fact that large numbers of people buy it
>> >> >doesn't make it reasonable. The number of cases where leaders
>> >> >of states commit suicide by attacking overwhelmingly more powerful
>> >> >foes is tiny.
>> >> 12/7/1941
>> >> 9/11/2001
>> >> OK, we may pedantically argue that perhaps Emperor Hirohito and Mullah
>> >> Omar did not actually decide or even endorse the decision to attack in
>> >> those two cases. Maybe it's just defense ministers of states who
>> >> commit suicide by attacking overwhelmingly more powerful foes. But,
>> >> in general, the number of such instances in history is not tiny, it
>> >> is *huge*.
>> >The degree to which anyone in the Taliban leadership was aware of the
>> >plotting
>> >for 9/11 is unknown, it appears the information was severely restricted
>> >even in the top echelons of al Qaeda.
>> >I dispute the claim that there are many cases in which states or regimes
>> >intentionally commit suicide.
>> So would I, but neither I nor Dr. Case used the term, "intentionally".
>> Nations which embark upon courses of action which will in fact surely
>> result in their destruction, usually harbor the misguided belief that
>> they will survive the experience and the intent of enjoying some great
>> victory. Why they do this is an interesting subject in its own right,
>> but the fact remains that they frequently do.
>It is true that you didn't use the term "intentionally" - but I did to
>bring out this very important assumption -- that the scenario requires
>that an a attacker believe that they will escape retaliation.
Or, alternately, that they will suffer the same retaliation regardless.
Though that usually comes into play after the war has started, when the
issue is escalation. But nuclear attacks usually involve one of each,
a decision to start a war and a decision to escalate.
>In a conventional conflict this belief is often based on the idea that
>they can make the conflict too costly for their opponent (relative to
>the opponents interest) and cause him to settle, or quit the conflict.
[examples]
>Another common mistake of conflict initiators is judging who its
>opponents actually are. This is related to the previous mistake - it
>involves mistaking whether an ally (formal or de facto) cares enough to
>come to the aid of the nation that is attacked.
[ditto]
>My point here is that you need to take into account how fundamentally
>different a nuclear ICBM attack on a U.S. urban target (the usual
>justification scenario for NMD) is from any previous historical example.
>Here the attacked nation incurs a tremendous conflict cost upfront - and
>can inflict devastating retaliation in kind at basically no additional
>cost. This is truly unprecendented in the history of warfare.
But not absolutely true. "Nuclear attack" covers a broad range, from
tactical strikes against deployed military forces all the way up to
mass city-busting. It is possible, even for a nation with a very
modest ICBM force, to launch a limited nuclear attack while holding
back the capability for a massive strike. The attacked nation would
thus stand to lose a great deal more than it already has, cities
instead of soldiers, if it engages in more than limited retaliation.
And the attacking nation might thus believe it could survive the
exchange.
They might also be wrong, of course, but as mentioned above that is
an extremely common sort of mistake.
>There are some rationales for NMD I can suggest based on this line of
>reasoning. For example a nation might undertake *conventional*
>aggression using a nuclear missile as a threat to prevent intervention,
>or launch a nuclear attack on a non-nuclear U.S. ally using the threat
>of a strike against the U.S. as a means of preventing retaliation. The
>value of NMD in these cases is not so much that it would allow the U.S.
>to intervene with impunity, it is that the existence of NMD would make
>any of these scenarios less likely to occur.
It is important to note that these scenarios, though described in terms
of enemy nations using nuclear missiles as threats, involves a real
possibility of nuclear missiles being fired. If an enemy nation
believes that the threat of nuclear attack will prevent the United
States from blocking their regional war of conquest, and is wrong,
they will find themselves at war with the United States.
They will of course lose. So while they may not have originally planned
to use nuclear weapons, they also did not originally plan to lose and thus
the original plan is out the window. The new plan will be made in haste,
confusion, fear, and desperation. Possibly despair. Decisions made by
people who think they have nothing to lose.
For that matter, it is not necessarily irrational for someone to back
themselves into a corner, *deliberately* placing themselves in a position
where they will die if they do not prevail, precisely because that makes
their most extreme threats entirely credible.
Either way, the bottom line is that leaders and governments frequently
do not survive the military defeat of their nations. And suicide is not
irrational for the doomed. So if we ever expect to defeat an enemy, we
must be prepared for suicidal actions at the end.
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*schi...@spock.usc.edu * for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *
John Schilling
>BMD is a warmed-up leftover project from the Cold War that certain
>industrial circles in the US want to build because they stand to make a
>lot of money from it. It has nothing to do with security or protecting
>someone from attack.
Love those unsubstantiated accusations of villainy.
>I'm amazed that someone can actually use the 11.9. attacks to _defend_
>BMD, when the most obvious point in the affair is that BMD can't prevent
>a dozen-odd guys with bux cutters from throwing the US into disarray.
1: A dozen-odd guys with box cutters did not throw the US into disarray.
They had very nearly the opposite effect. A dozen Enron executives
with shady accountants, now *that* will throw the US into disarray.
2: The dozen-odd guys with box cutters were the *last* group to attack
the United States. There is an ancient military tradition of preparing
to defend against the last attack, to fight the last war. You apparently
subscribe to this tradition. We don't.
3: The apparent *intent* of the dozen-odd guys with box cutters, was to
provoke a war between the United States and United Islam. This failed,
but it was not doomed to fail and is not sure to fail next time. Islam
is armed with nuclear missiles. Not presently intercontinental, but
that also may not be the case next time.
Kris Crockett
"zolota" <zol...@shaw.ca> wrote in message
news:J%Yg8.15491$eb.10...@news3.calgary.shaw.ca...
> I've never understood why Americans think that the US has a large foriegn
> aid budget. It may be higher in cash value, but is barely twice that of
> Britain or five times that of Canada. with their much smaller economies.
> Percentage wise it is the lowest of the developed world at 0.10% of GDP vs
> 0.24% for the UK and 0.28% for Canada (1999 figures). Only two others,
Italy
> and Ireland, are below 0.20%, the 23 country average is around 0.30%, and
> Denmark is 1.01%. For a graphical representation see:
>
> http://www.ssb.no/uhjelpoecd_en/main.html
>
> If these statistics are wrong I would appreciate knowing how.
>
Because we're still capitalist, not socialist. Do you really think there's a
significant difference between .1% and .3%?
Tom Billings
> Tom Billings <it...@teleport.com> wrote in message
> news:3C854550...@teleport.com...
> > Tamas Feher wrote:
> >
> > > Regards,
> > >
> > > >Ultimately, it doesn't matter *what* those 6 billion think.
> > >
> > > This is the only significant sentence in your reply. The USA doesn't
> care a damn
> > > abouth rest of the planet.
> >
> > That must be why the foreign aid budget is so high.
> > Of course, only the academics and their friends in
> > the State Department care very much for what the
> > elites of many societies think, but that's another topic.
> > There are many things to care for in caring about
> > the rest of the world. Only the most dangerous
> > agrarian oligarchies warrant our attention to their
> > fantasies justifying them continuing in power.
>
> I've never understood why Americans think that the US has a large foriegn
> aid budget. It may be higher in cash value, but is barely twice that of
> Britain or five times that of Canada. with their much smaller economies.
It is still larger.
> Percentage wise it is the lowest of the developed world at 0.10% of GDP vs
> 0.24% for the UK and 0.28% for Canada (1999 figures). Only two others, Italy
> and Ireland, are below 0.20%, the 23 country average is around 0.30%, and
> Denmark is 1.01%. For a graphical representation see:
>
> http://www.ssb.no/uhjelpoecd_en/main.html
>
> If these statistics are wrong I would appreciate knowing how.
>
> While Bush is increasing the US aid budget for '03, it is really only less
> than 0.5% of the federal budget. See:
>
> http://www.usaid.gov/press/releases/2002/fs2003budget.html
The answer is quite simple.
Many US citizens do *not* view foreign aid as a moral
imperative, any more than they view government aid to
one portion of our own society, at the expense of another,
as such an imperative. The fact that our economy is larger
does not morally obligate us to send more resources to
foreign hierarchs. You seem to be basing the idea of foreign
aid on the same redistributive ideas that have shaped so-called
"progressive" taxation on incomes. Many of us simply do
not share those ideas.
You earned it. It's yours.
You didn't earn it, then you must hope for charity.
It is notable that private charitable giving has started
to grow again, now that many no longer assume that
"Uncle Sugar will take care of it." As the recession
is left behind, this trend should continue to grow. Of
course, then foreign hierarchs might have to go to these
private charities, hat in hand, and they may think that
beneath their dignity.
Fine. Then private paths of donation can be used, and
the corrupt hierarchs cut out of the distribution entirely.
Remember that many US citizens, who would willingly
donate to good causes ,will have nothing to do with
many of the governments who are the larger targets
of government aid.
Regards,
Tom Billings
John Schilling
>George William Herbert <gher...@gw.retro.com> wrote:
>may not be sufficient.
>>It is very easy for me to see a situation in which an opponent
>>convinces themselves that no, the US would not respond to a
>>particular nuclear attack with a massive retaliatory response.
>In fact what I suggest is not massive retaliation, at least
>not nuclear retaliation. I suggest that the US make it clear
>that nations attacking the US will suffer the destruction of
>their government, the death of the leaders ordering the attacks,
>and the installation of a government more to US liking - pretty
>much what happened in Europe after WWII.
First off, what you are suggesting *is* massive retaliation. It
doesn't matter if it is accomplished by one sniper with one bullet;
the destruction of a government and the death of its leader(s) is,
*to that government and those leaders*, the most massive and extreme
form of retaliation possible. The bit where we flatten a dozen of
their cities with megaton bombs is the lesser retaliation. That one,
the government and its leaders might hope to ride out in a deep bunker
or hidden retreat, to survive and rule the ruins.
OK, granted, there are governments and heads of state that would take
the bullet for their nation/people. Those aren't the ones we are most
worried about.
Second, you suggest we "make it clear" that this will happen. How
do you propose we do this? Yes, we can have the president get up on
a podium and say, "Read my lips: No Nuking Texas!", or maybe, "I will
not have appeasement relations with that nation!"
There are no words that will get the job done, because they all come
out the moving lips of a politician. Which doesn't make them a lie,
necessarily, but it does give hope to anyone who wants to *believe*
they are a lie. This would include just about anyone who contemplates
launching a nuclear attack on the United States.
Making things truly clear, in international politics and diplomacy, is
a Hard Problem. Probably harder than making a reliable NMD system.
Jussi Jaatinen
Bruce Sterling Woodcock wrote:
> > So you don't think that it would be logical to address primarily the
> > kinds of attacks that either have happened in the past of could
> > conceivably happen in the future?
> They are already being addressed. I think it is illogical not to address
> other kinds of potential attacks simply because they haven't happened
> yet.
Alright, so why not address the alien invasion that could, in principle,
also happen any day now? Odd that Bush's advisers choose to address the
threat that is most expensive (and hence profitable) to address. Odd
also that Bush's campaign financiers are the very same people who stand
to profit from it. And it's also odd that people actually _believe_ that
this is a worthwhile pursuit. I reckon it has something to do with the
American mindset, which is difficult to understand from without.
> > Flag-waving over BMD/11.9 connotations is (IMO) the cheapest form of
> > pseudopatriotism that doesn't really even bother to veil the primary
> > motivation, greed. Sure, people are stupid. But are they really _that_
> > stupid?
> Since you pre-suppose only the worst motives of the supporters and only
> the best motives of the opponents, your conclusion is skewed.
I do not realize that I would pre-suppose such. Have you, for that
matter, ever met an expensive military project you didn't like?
-JJ
Jussi Jaatinen
John Schilling wrote:
> >BMD is a warmed-up leftover project from the Cold War that certain
> >industrial circles in the US want to build because they stand to make a
> >lot of money from it. It has nothing to do with security or protecting
> >someone from attack.
> Love those unsubstantiated accusations of villainy.
Come again? Where did I point to something unsubstantiated or
villainous? I said that the people who hold power want to make money. If
you consider that villainy then by all means, but it is certainly not
unsubstantiated.
> 1: A dozen-odd guys with box cutters did not throw the US into disarray.
> They had very nearly the opposite effect.
You must watch a different set of news - NYSE closed (and in steep fall
when opened) for several days, all air traffic stranded on the ground,
thousands dead, the government huddled in bunkers, White House
evacuated, the Pentagon on fire for 3 days... The budget falls into the
red etc.
> 2: The dozen-odd guys with box cutters were the *last* group to attack
> the United States. There is an ancient military tradition of preparing
> to defend against the last attack, to fight the last war. You apparently
> subscribe to this tradition. We don't.
They are also the group most likely to attack you again, with rather
similar means. That is, without ICBMs. These guys live in caves.
> 3: The apparent *intent* of the dozen-odd guys with box cutters, was to
> provoke a war between the United States and United Islam. This failed,
> but it was not doomed to fail and is not sure to fail next time.
Their stated intent was to strike at the US because they felt the US had
been unfair to them and the Palestinians. Most likely, their intent was
also to provoke a military reaction, which would make increase the
manpower and resources available to them as extremist views become more
prevalent in the US and the islamic world. In Pakistan today, a whopping
5% hold a positive view of the US. However, Pakistan will not fire an
ICBM at the US. If they want to hurt the US, they'll do it in a cleverer
way that won't entail massive retaliation.
-JJ
Andrew Case
>ac...@Glue.umd.edu (Andrew Case) writes:
>>In fact what I suggest is not massive retaliation, at least
>>not nuclear retaliation. I suggest that the US make it clear
>>that nations attacking the US will suffer the destruction of
>>their government, the death of the leaders ordering the attacks,
>>and the installation of a government more to US liking - pretty
>>much what happened in Europe after WWII.
>
>First off, what you are suggesting *is* massive retaliation. It
>doesn't matter if it is accomplished by one sniper with one bullet;
>the destruction of a government and the death of its leader(s) is,
>*to that government and those leaders*, the most massive and extreme
>form of retaliation possible.
If you want to put it in those terms, yes, it is massive retaliation.
Massive as viewed through the eyes of the offender, which is exactly
where we want it to seem massive.
>Second, you suggest we "make it clear" that this will happen. How
>do you propose we do this?
When lesser attacks happen we don't just shrug them off with a few
missiles. If Reagan had gone after the Beirut Embassy bombers with
the kind of relentless vindictiveness shown by Israel towards the
Olympic terrorists it would have sent a very clear message. Same
various incidents since. Perhaps the most egregious example of
failure to extract a severe penalty for attacks on US interests
was in Somalia, where the mastermind got exactly what he wanted
and US enemies received a very clear signal about US resolve.
>There are no words that will get the job done, because they all come
>out the moving lips of a politician.
Ayup. Deeds. Every attack treated as serious, every murderer tracked
down and killed. It doesn't stop all the lesser attacks, but it does
send a very clear message to those contemplating larger attacks. Nobody
is under any illusion about what happens when you attack Isreal, for
instance. Doesn't stop the suicide bombers, but it's likely that it
stayed Saddam's hand during the Gulf war.
>Making things truly clear, in international politics and diplomacy, is
>a Hard Problem. Probably harder than making a reliable NMD system.
No question about that. My preferred path is both. My fear is we get
the appearance of both and the substance of neither.
Rand Simberg
Jaatinen <jussi.j...@kolumbus.fi> made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:
>Come again? Where did I point to something unsubstantiated or
>villainous? I said that the people who hold power want to make money. If
>you consider that villainy then by all means, but it is certainly not
>unsubstantiated.
You are implying that they want to make money by committing fraud on
the American taxpayer. That sounds villainous enough to me.
>Their stated intent was to strike at the US because they felt the US had
>been unfair to them and the Palestinians.
They don't give a rats ass about the Palestinians--no Saudi does.
That's just the excuse they trotted out after the fact.
Christopher M. Jones
> When lesser attacks happen we don't just shrug them off with a few
> missiles. If Reagan had gone after the Beirut Embassy bombers with
> the kind of relentless vindictiveness shown by Israel towards the
> Olympic terrorists it would have sent a very clear message. Same
> various incidents since. Perhaps the most egregious example of
> failure to extract a severe penalty for attacks on US interests
> was in Somalia, where the mastermind got exactly what he wanted
> and US enemies received a very clear signal about US resolve.
Ahhh, so what you are saying is that if we would only
pursue our enemies with greater vindictiveness and
relentless tenacity we could one day hope to enjoy the
level of safety and security of Israel?
Well garsh, sign me up for some of that vindictiveness
straight away!
--
ZGORNK!
Rand Simberg
ac...@Glue.umd.edu (Andrew Case) made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:
>When lesser attacks happen we don't just shrug them off with a few
>missiles. If Reagan had gone after the Beirut Embassy bombers with
>the kind of relentless vindictiveness shown by Israel towards the
>Olympic terrorists it would have sent a very clear message. Same
>various incidents since. Perhaps the most egregious example of
>failure to extract a severe penalty for attacks on US interests
>was in Somalia, where the mastermind got exactly what he wanted
>and US enemies received a very clear signal about US resolve.
Yes, but of course, it goes back farther than that. If Carter had
responded more forcefully in the Iran hostage crisis, we may have lost
some or all of the hostages, but the Beirut Embassy event might not
have even occurred, and it might have saved a lot of lives down the
line, including on September 11.
Jordan179
> destruction in war so far.
Untrue. Only the USA has used NUCLEAR weapons in war so far. Chemical
weapons have been used by America, Britain, France, Germany, Italy,
and Russia; biological weapons have arguably been used by numerous
peoples especially in pre-industrial warfare.
> Therefore you shall not expect the 6.02 billion
> non-US population of Earth to believe that America wants BMD to protect THEM.
We are not polling the population of Earth as a whole to develop our
own defense budget, nor does our government exist to serve the Earth
as a whole. We are polling our OWN population, which is who the
American government exists to serve.
> If you look at the situation realistically, USA and Israel remain the two most
> dangerous countries on Earth, threatening all others with nukes.
Why only the US and Israel? What about Britain, France, China, India,
and Pakistan, all of which are also nuclear powers?
>I just laugh,
> when USA boast about Saddam's evilish nuke programme and its assumed russian
> support. I mean the USA illegally gave 200-250 pcs of nukes to the Jews.
???
First of all, "the Jews" doesn't mean the same thing as "Israel."
Judaism is a religion; Israel is a nation-state; not all Jews are
Israelis and not all Israelis are Jews.
Secondly, we never "gave" the Israelis "200-250 nukes" (or, AFAIK, ANY
nukes) -- Israel has its own nuclear weapons program and built its 100
or so nukes itself.
>As long
> as Isreal has nukes, every arab / muslim country has a right to produce nukes in
> self defence; because the US broke the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by
> giving WMD to the Jews.
You're living in an interesting world. Who was first on the Moon in
your timeline?
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
Jordan179
> What about how much the quality of life has improved now that everyone
> knows terrorists can strike anywhere and kill thousands without needing
> nuclear weapons?
Have you noticed that the Terrorists have not launched a single
successful repeat of 9/11? Our intelligence, counter-intelligence, and
police forces have so far intercepted several such attempts.
Now, if the Terrorists had nuclear ICBM's, how many of them could we
have intercepted, right now?
> Besides, BMD supposedly works against certain kinds of
> very long-range missiles, not "nuclear attack".
Actually, many components of a BMD system would also work against
short-range ballistic missiles, and some even against cruise missiles
or airplanes.
> If Al-Qaeda gets a
> warhead, then BMD can do presicely _nothing_ to prevent them from using
> it in the US.
It can prevent them from delivering it by ICBM.
> Similarly most despots, "hierarchs" or whatever is the
> satan of the day would probably prefer to use cheaper and more
> convenient means to attack, than build a complex and expensive missile.
What you are neglecting to take into account is that the "cheaper and
more convenient means to attack" is also readily interceptible.
ICBM's, absent BMD, are not interceptible at all. You are also
ignoring that, in reality, the Terrorist States have been investing
LOTS of money into ballistic missile delivery systems, for precisely
that reason.
> BMD is a warmed-up leftover project from the Cold War that certain
> industrial circles in the US want to build because they stand to make a
> lot of money from it. It has nothing to do with security or protecting
> someone from attack.
So, you are certain that nobody will ever attack American or Allied
forces or cities again with ballistic missiles? (even though such was
done as recently as 11 years ago?) And that, if they do, BMD's won't
be able to stop such attacks?
> > As we saw on 9/11, massive destruction and loss of life has costly, far reaching effects
>
> I'm amazed that someone can actually use the 11.9. attacks to _defend_
> BMD, when the most obvious point in the affair is that BMD can't prevent
> a dozen-odd guys with bux cutters from throwing the US into disarray.
Indeed it can't.
Now, can added airport security prevent a nuclear ICBM attack?
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
Jordan179
> If we wish to wander into increasingly absurd premises (technical
> obstacles are worse than the ICBM, by and large).
Why is the premise "absurd?" WE have _both_ types of weapons, and
physics works the same for all players. Furthermore, ALL Terrorist
States save for the Sudan (which is mostly landlocked) have naval
SSM's, which are the obvious precursor weapon to SLCM's (the
difference is that the SLCM needs better guidance, particularly in the
field of terrain avoidance) and most have submarines, which is the
obvious precursor to SSBN technology (incidentally, a ballistic
missile submarine does not NECESSARILY have to be nuclear-powered; the
Soviets deployed some SSB's at one stage).
> BTW - the NMD would be
> useless against the former and likely useless against the latter.
Some elements of a NMD (particularly space-based tracking and
interception systems) could also be used against cruise missiles.
SSBM's are essentially just SRBM's or IRBM's launched from submarines,
and while the interception task would be harder owing to possible
surprise as to launch point and a shorter flight time than an ICBM, I
don't see why it would probably be impossible.
<snippage>
> Sorry - this doesn't cut it. You're simply spouting venom. This is the
> old vacuous "crazy state" rhetoric.
>
> Hussein has no record of 'leaping on more powerful enemies' - he
> attacked the lightweight state of Kuwait, not the U.S.
He failed to back down when America made her intention to intervene
obvious.
>(And no one would
> have rated Iran as equally powerful on the eve of the attack. Its
> abiltiy to eventually stalemate, and then push back Iraq has a lot to do
> with Iraqi incompetence. Incompetent leadship and training can screw up
> almost anything.)
>
> There is no basis for calling the rulers of Iran "psychotic".
They are trying to lead a global jihad of Islamic world conquest. They
obviously have some very serious delusions about the nature of
reality.
> Kim Il Song is a "certifiable psychopath"? Not if "certifiable" and
> "psychopath" have their normal English meanings.
He has committed acts of war to satisfy personal lusts. Literally --
he kidnapped and repeatedly raped a South Korean actress, in a
cross-border raid, at one point.
> I don't like the rulers of any of these states either. But it is
> important to still apply research and reason, and actually understand
> their behavior.
They're crazy and evil, and need to be put down. They can be expected
to resist this necessary process with all the force at their disposal
-- including nuclear weapons, if available. They don't give a damn
about the lives of their own people, and from their POV, if they die
they might as well take as many enemies as possible with them.
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
Jordan179
> Or, alternately, that they will suffer the same retaliation regardless.
> Though that usually comes into play after the war has started, when the
> issue is escalation. But nuclear attacks usually involve one of each,
> a decision to start a war and a decision to escalate.
For instance, what happens if a Terrorist State, which launched a
terrorist attack in the expectation that it would not be blamed for
it, finds the attack traced back to them and now finds itself at war
with America? (This is what happened to Afghanistan).
If the Terrorist State has nuclear ICBM's, there is a strong
temptation on the part of the Terrorist dictator to use his weapons,
and as soon as possible. Every day he does not launch the ICBM's is a
day America may find and destroy them, and if he loses the war (as he
almost certainly will) he is personally dead or a prisoner for life,
anyway. So why NOT use them, from his POV?
Furthermore, if he can make the threat, maybe we'll back off. If we do
back off, something VERY bad has happened -- he's successfully
"deterred" us. If we don't back off, then something almost as bad may
happen -- we may take nuclear hits.
> >Another common mistake of conflict initiators is judging who its
> >opponents actually are. This is related to the previous mistake - it
> >involves mistaking whether an ally (formal or de facto) cares enough to
> >come to the aid of the nation that is attacked.
Germany vs. Poland, 1939. North Korea vs. South Korea, 1950. North
Vietnam vs. South Vietnam, 1964. Iraq vs. Kuwait, 1990.
> But not absolutely true. "Nuclear attack" covers a broad range, from
> tactical strikes against deployed military forces all the way up to
> mass city-busting. It is possible, even for a nation with a very
> modest ICBM force, to launch a limited nuclear attack while holding
> back the capability for a massive strike. The attacked nation would
> thus stand to lose a great deal more than it already has, cities
> instead of soldiers, if it engages in more than limited retaliation.
> And the attacking nation might thus believe it could survive the
> exchange.
>
> They might also be wrong, of course, but as mentioned above that is
> an extremely common sort of mistake.
... and one embodied in both _World War III_ and _Red Storm Rising_,
both of whose authors had IMO a touching but mistaken faith in the
ability or desire of political leaders to restrain war fevers.
> It is important to note that these scenarios, though described in terms
> of enemy nations using nuclear missiles as threats, involves a real
> possibility of nuclear missiles being fired. If an enemy nation
> believes that the threat of nuclear attack will prevent the United
> States from blocking their regional war of conquest, and is wrong,
> they will find themselves at war with the United States.
Example (substituting the then-fearedthreat of strategic conventional
bombardment) ... Germany trying to deter Britain and France over
Poland in 1939.
> They will of course lose. So while they may not have originally planned
> to use nuclear weapons, they also did not originally plan to lose and thus
> the original plan is out the window. The new plan will be made in haste,
> confusion, fear, and desperation. Possibly despair. Decisions made by
> people who think they have nothing to lose.
Example ... the situation that the Third Reich found itself in in the
winter of 1941-42 when the Soviet Union did NOT collapse on schedule
(this was when they switched from Jewish exile to the Final Solution).
> For that matter, it is not necessarily irrational for someone to back
> themselves into a corner, *deliberately* placing themselves in a position
> where they will die if they do not prevail, precisely because that makes
> their most extreme threats entirely credible.
Example: Japan 1941.
> Either way, the bottom line is that leaders and governments frequently
> do not survive the military defeat of their nations. And suicide is not
> irrational for the doomed. So if we ever expect to defeat an enemy, we
> must be prepared for suicidal actions at the end.
Example: Hitler's orders regarding German assets and personnel in the
spring of 1945.
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
Jorge R. Frank
news:3cb64572....@nntp.ix.netcom.com:
> On Wed, 06 Mar 2002 00:00:13 +0200, in a place far, far away, Jussi
> Jaatinen <jussi.j...@kolumbus.fi> made the phosphor on my monitor
> glow in such a way as to indicate that:
>
>>Their stated intent was to strike at the US because they felt the US had
>>been unfair to them and the Palestinians.
>
> They don't give a rats ass about the Palestinians--no Saudi does.
> That's just the excuse they trotted out after the fact.
Indeed. Most of the hijackers were Saudis, the rest Egyptian. Bin Laden's
rhetoric for the ten years prior to 9/11 was against the US occupation of
Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia during Desert Storm. He never mentioned
the Palestinians until after 9/11. It was such an obvious propaganda ploy,
I'm surprised anyone was stupid enough to fall for it. Unfortunately, Mr.
Jaatinen is not the only one.
--
JRF
Reply-to address spam-proofed - to reply by E-mail,
check "Organization" (I am not assimilated) and
think one step ahead of IBM.
Jordan179
> Yes, but of course, it goes back farther than that. If Carter had
> responded more forcefully in the Iran hostage crisis, we may have lost
> some or all of the hostages, but the Beirut Embassy event might not
> have even occurred, and it might have saved a lot of lives down the
> line, including on September 11.
Exactly. Carter THOUGHT he was being "humane" by holding the lives of
the Americans interned by Iran paramount, but by letting the Iranian
threat to commit war crimes against them dictate our policy, he
encouraged our future enemies to attempt such terrorist tactics. And
in the end, it cost a LOT more than a few hundred American lives.
In fact, we haven't seen the end yet. The chances are that tens of
thousands of Americans, and literally millions of natives of Terrorist
States, will die before this is all over.
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
Jordan179
No.
America, unlike Israel, is not restrained by any more powerful patron
with its own interests in mind. America is not limited to mere
retaliation -- we can choose to conquer our foes and replace their
regimes.
If we unleashed Israel in a similar fashion, there would be peace in
the Mideast now.
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
Christopher M. Jones
> "Christopher M. Jones" <spic...@muso-ken.com> wrote in message
news:<sEbh8.6495$aP6.7528@rwcrnsc54>...
> > pursue our enemies with greater vindictiveness and
> > relentless tenacity we could one day hope to enjoy the
> > level of safety and security of Israel?
>
> No.
>
> America, unlike Israel, is not restrained by any more powerful patron
> with its own interests in mind. America is not limited to mere
> retaliation -- we can choose to conquer our foes and replace their
> regimes.
>
> If we unleashed Israel in a similar fashion, there would be peace in
> the Mideast now.
Ahhh, so you are saying that Israel's activities have been
"restrained"? Perhaps compared to a thermonuclear exchange
or all-out war Israel's actions have been somewhat
"restrained" in recent times, but I don't call that a whole
lot of restraint.
Machiavelli was wrong. You don't stay on top through fear.
You stay on top through having the strength, courage, and
convictions to be able to utterly destroy your enemies and
turn them into your friends and allies.
--
I like my coffee black and my garage door equipped with bone-crushing power!
Jordan179
> John Schilling wrote:
> > 1: A dozen-odd guys with box cutters did not throw the US into disarray.
> > They had very nearly the opposite effect.
>
> You must watch a different set of news - NYSE closed (and in steep fall
> when opened) for several days, all air traffic stranded on the ground,
> thousands dead, the government huddled in bunkers, White House
> evacuated, the Pentagon on fire for 3 days... The budget falls into the
> red etc.
There was a short panic. This hardly counted as throwing "the US" into
disarray. The US is a pretty big place.
> > 2: The dozen-odd guys with box cutters were the *last* group to attack
> > the United States. There is an ancient military tradition of preparing
> > to defend against the last attack, to fight the last war. You apparently
> > subscribe to this tradition. We don't.
>
> They are also the group most likely to attack you again, with rather
> similar means. That is, without ICBMs. These guys live in caves.
Of the three named powers in the Terrorist Axis, all have SRBM's, Iran
may have atomic warheads, and North Korea has both IRBM's and atomic
warheads. They are not THAT far from getting nuclear ICBM's.
> > 3: The apparent *intent* of the dozen-odd guys with box cutters, was to
> > provoke a war between the United States and United Islam. This failed,
> > but it was not doomed to fail and is not sure to fail next time.
>
> Their stated intent was to strike at the US because they felt the US had
> been unfair to them and the Palestinians.
??? - In what alternate world? Their stated intent was to strike at
the US for "desecrating the holy land" of Arabia!
> Most likely, their intent was
> also to provoke a military reaction, which would make increase the
> manpower and resources available to them as extremist views become more
> prevalent in the US and the islamic world.
They did provoke a military reaction -- and the Islamic world
responded by distancing itself from Al Qaeda. Oopsie :-)
> In Pakistan today, a whopping
> 5% hold a positive view of the US. However, Pakistan will not fire an
> ICBM at the US.
Pakistan at present has no ICBM's.
They do, however, have both nuclear warheads AND IRBM's, and are thus
even CLOSER to nuclear ICBM technology than the North Koreans.
> If they want to hurt the US, they'll do it in a cleverer
> way that won't entail massive retaliation.
Ooh, they'll use MAGIC!
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
Jordan179
> Bruce Sterling Woodcock wrote:
>
> > > So you don't think that it would be logical to address primarily the
> > > kinds of attacks that either have happened in the past of could
> > > conceivably happen in the future?
> > They are already being addressed. I think it is illogical not to address
> > other kinds of potential attacks simply because they haven't happened
> > yet.
>
> Alright, so why not address the alien invasion that could, in principle,
> also happen any day now?
Because we know of no such threat. We do, however, know that ALL THREE
of the major Terrorist Axis powers have or are close to developing
both atomic weapons AND long-range missiles.
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
Leonard Robinson
the Israeli got it in 1962, IIRR.
Who signed off on it?
John F. Kennedy, President of the USA.
Konrad Adenaeur, Bundeskanzler, FRG.
HM the Queen (through the PM at the time).
Charles de Gaulle, President of the 5th French Republic.
--
-----------------------------------------------------
Leonard C Robinson
"The Historian Remembers, and speculates on what might have been."
Leonard Robinson
By your name, you sound Finnish. The Finn Govt, IIRR, built The Mannerheim
Line as a means of defending against Soviet aggression when Russia became
USSR 1918. The only way that the Sov Govt was able to overcome The
Mannerheim Line in both 1940 and 1944 was massive, overwhelming strength
against it.
I remember reading about "Brave Little Finland" in anti-Soviet literature.
The Finns survived; the Sov Govt did not. The USSR died, 25th December 1990
AD,
unknelled, unshriven, unloved, & unmourned, without bell, book, or candle to
speed it to the Ashcan of History.
Nahum 1 refers.
Tamas Feher
>The Israelis built them, with their own physicists.
>I've already noted this to you privately. They
>have all the technical capacity to build them.
This is ridiculous. Nukes are not about physics. It's all about industry.
Even if you are Einstein + von Neumann + Teller you are not going to make a bomb
in the garage. Producing nukes requires:
-factories, where 5-axis numeric controlled lathes and other precision tooling
are ample
-huge amounts of electricity to distillate heavy water and spin isotope
separators
-giantic high-security plants to house the above facilities and nuclear reactors
-an army of trained people to men these
-access to uranium ore and huge amounts of freshwater
US people always boast about the extent of "Project Manhattan", being the
largest venture of man. How could Israel do the same?
It was the USA and to a lesser extent France, who gave nukes to Israel.
All in all, you should not point fingers at nuclear satans of Iraq / Iran /
N.Korea before you disarm the jewish state of WMD.
Free Mordechai Vanunu!
Sincerely: Tamas Feher.
Jussi Jaatinen
Jordan179 wrote:
> Because we know of no such threat. We do, however, know that ALL THREE
> of the major Terrorist Axis powers have or are close to developing
> both atomic weapons AND long-range missiles.
"Terrorist Axis"?
The mere existence of warheads and missiles doesn't yet mean there is a
relevant threat of them being launched. I'd worry more if they were
building warheads but _not_ missiles, since then they might be looking
to deliver the warheads in a clandestine (i.e. no counterattack) manner.
France and India have warheads and long-range missiles, yet people
understand they're for deterrence. The problem here is that you very,
very much _want_ to see a threat to legitimize ABM.
-JJ
Jussi Jaatinen
"Jorge R. Frank" wrote:
> > They don't give a rats ass about the Palestinians--no Saudi does.
> > That's just the excuse they trotted out after the fact.
> Indeed. Most of the hijackers were Saudis, the rest Egyptian. Bin Laden's
> rhetoric for the ten years prior to 9/11 was against the US occupation of
> Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia during Desert Storm. He never mentioned
> the Palestinians until after 9/11. It was such an obvious propaganda ploy,
> I'm surprised anyone was stupid enough to fall for it. Unfortunately, Mr.
> Jaatinen is not the only one.
US's partiality toward Israel is one of the major driving factors that
cause people to give money to islamic extremists. The holy sites are
another obvious factor (and one I also mentioned in my original
posting).
-JJ
Rand Simberg
Jaatinen <jussi.j...@kolumbus.fi> made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:
>US's partiality toward Israel is one of the major driving factors that
>cause people to give money to islamic extremists. The holy sites are
>another obvious factor (and one I also mentioned in my original
>posting).
That's because they hate Israel, and Jews, not because they give a
damn about the Palestinians.
Jussi Jaatinen
Jordan179 wrote:
> There was a short panic. This hardly counted as throwing "the US" into
> disarray. The US is a pretty big place.
Ok, so how long does a panic need to last so you'll call it "disarray"
:)
> Of the three named powers in the Terrorist Axis, all have SRBM's, Iran
> may have atomic warheads, and North Korea has both IRBM's and atomic
> warheads. They are not THAT far from getting nuclear ICBM's.
If you also add Britain to the "Terrorist Axis" then they already have
MIRVed SLBMs! Get that ABM system up pronto mister! The basic problem
with the ABM thesis here is that the argument just doesn't hold water.
If they have a few warheads, they'll charter a bizjet and fly it in.
That way they can swat 3 flies with one blow: nuke the US, save the ICBM
cash and build another 10+ palaces, and escape the retaliatory strike.
Of course, there is ZERO evidence that these state actors have any
motivation whatsoever to nuke the US to begin with. There is all the
evidence that they want their nukes for the same reason everyone else
has wanted them - to keep themselves safe and deter attack.
> They did provoke a military reaction -- and the Islamic world
> responded by distancing itself from Al Qaeda. Oopsie :-)
The official islamic world found that convenient, with the rick
countries getting all upset all of a sudden. I'd be very surprised,
however, if al-Qaeda's fund-raising and recruitment didn't experience a
huge boost.
-JJ
Rand Simberg
Jaatinen <jussi.j...@kolumbus.fi> made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:
>The official islamic world found that convenient, with the rick
>countries getting all upset all of a sudden. I'd be very surprised,
>however, if al-Qaeda's fund-raising and recruitment didn't experience a
>huge boost.
Prepare to be surprised. In fact, you apparently haven't been paying
attention--support for Al Qaeda and bin Laden in Pakistan has
plummeted since the overthrow of the Taliban. Many there are angry at
the mullahs and madrassas that sent their boys into Afghanistan to be
slaughtered for no purpose. bin Laden tee shirts are going for
cut-rate prices on the streets of Peshawar.
Andrew Case
[attribution?]
>>The Israelis built them, with their own physicists.
>>I've already noted this to you privately. They
>>have all the technical capacity to build them.
>Even if you are Einstein + von Neumann + Teller you are not going to make a bomb
>in the garage. Producing nukes requires:
>-factories, where 5-axis numeric controlled lathes and other precision tooling
>are ample
No CNC machines were used in the Manhattan project. Note also that the
South African bomb was manufactured with non-CNC lathes & mills. It takes
skilled machinists, but there's nothing that requires CNC in a basic
bomb.
>-huge amounts of electricity to distillate heavy water and spin isotope
>separators
Like at Pelindaba?
http://www.isis-online.org/publications/southafrica/pelindaba_image.html
Or Dimona?
>-access to uranium ore and huge amounts of freshwater
Uranium from South Africa, for instance? Or diverted from 'peaceful'
reactors?
>US people always boast about the extent of "Project Manhattan", being the
>largest venture of man.
Only the dumb ones make that boast. The Manhattan project was big, but
it was doing something for the very first time, so there was a lot of
learning along the way. There were genuine worries that it might not
work at all. Once the concept is demonstrated, things get simpler and
cheaper immediately, even for people without inside knowledge.
>It was the USA and to a lesser extent France, who gave nukes to Israel.
Reactors, yes. Weapons, no. Isreal has lots of scientists, and compelling
reasons to seek nuclear weapons. They didn't need US help.
John Schilling
>John Schilling <schi...@spock.usc.edu> wrote:
>>ac...@Glue.umd.edu (Andrew Case) writes:
>>Second, you suggest we "make it clear" that this will happen. How
>>do you propose we do this?
>When lesser attacks happen we don't just shrug them off with a few
>missiles. If Reagan had gone after the Beirut Embassy bombers with
>the kind of relentless vindictiveness shown by Israel towards the
>Olympic terrorists it would have sent a very clear message.
No, the message would not have been clear. None of the people the
Israelis killed after Munich were heads of state, and we can count
Arafat as a sort of head of state in this context. If I read you
correctly, none of the people you suggest we should have killed
after Beirut are heads of state.
There is a well-established tradition in war and diplomacy that one
may always kill soldiers and even generals but never heads of state.
A policy of retaliating for "minor", conventional acts of terrorism
by killing the soldies immediately responsible, is quite consistent
with this traditional interpretation. It is *also* consistent with
your proposed new policy, but it doesn't make it *clear* which one
is in effect.
We respond to a car bombing by killing a dozen terrorist bombers, a couple
of cell leaders, and an operational commander. Ideally the ones what did
the bombing, and planned it and ordered it. Is our policy for responding
to a WMD terror attack to kill lots more low-level terrorists in proportion
to the increased magnitude of the attack, or is it to kill people higher
up the chain of command in proportion to the increased magnitude of the
attack? And is the policy the same for acts of war by the armed forces
of legitimate, recognized sovereign nations? Not clear from the evidence
available, and the natural optimisim of the aggressor will incline him to
the interpretation most favorable to him.
Until we actually, deliberately kill two or three heads of state in
response to attacks on the United States, it will not be clear that
this is our policy.
>>There are no words that will get the job done, because they all come
>>out the moving lips of a politician.
>Ayup. Deeds. Every attack treated as serious, every murderer tracked
>down and killed. It doesn't stop all the lesser attacks, but it does
>send a very clear message to those contemplating larger attacks. Nobody
>is under any illusion about what happens when you attack Isreal, for
>instance.
Right. It is quite clear that if you have even the pseudo-head-of-state
status of an Arafat, you can have your subordinates kill Israelis by the
hundreds and live to tell the tale. With the debatable legitimacy and
sovereignty of the Iranian theocracy, you don't even suffer the lesser
retaliations Arafat has recieved.
I suspect very strongly, of course, that an actual nuclear attack on
Israel would result in a nearly genocidal nuclear response. But that
has more to do with understanding Zionism, and understanding that Israel
is in such a precarious position that even one nuke puts them right on
the edge of nothing-left-to-lose territory, than with their past dealings
with mundane terrorists.
>>Making things truly clear, in international politics and diplomacy, is
>>a Hard Problem. Probably harder than making a reliable NMD system.
>No question about that. My preferred path is both. My fear is we get
>the appearance of both and the substance of neither.
Yep.
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*schi...@spock.usc.edu * for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *
Jordan179
> US people always boast about the extent of "Project Manhattan", being the
> largest venture of man. How could Israel do the same?
Invent the atomic bomb?
She coudln't ... and didn't.
Develop her own atomic bomb AFTER it had already been invented by
someone else?
She could, and did. Just as Britain, France, Russia, China, India, and
Pakistan have done so.
> It was the USA and to a lesser extent France, who gave nukes to Israel.
>
> All in all, you should not point fingers at nuclear satans of Iraq / Iran /
> N.Korea before you disarm the jewish state of WMD.
Iraq, Iran, and North Korea are aggressor states with histories of
starting unprovoked wars.
Israel isn't.
Hence, we're far more worried about Iraq, Iran, and North Korea than
we are about Israel.
Sincerely YOurs,
Jordan
Christopher P. Winter
wrote (in part):
>
>All in all, you should not point fingers at nuclear satans of Iraq / Iran /
>N.Korea before you disarm the jewish state of WMD.
>
If and when Israel starts behaving like the other three nations
you mention, I am sure the world will impose punitive measures to get
it to stop.
Now, however, while Israel's track record is not lily-white, it is
far from being the same kind of threat. (Except to those who have
sworn to destroy it.)
Jordan179
> Jordan179 wrote:
>
> > There was a short panic. This hardly counted as throwing "the US" into
> > disarray. The US is a pretty big place.
>
> Ok, so how long does a panic need to last so you'll call it "disarray"
> :)
Longer than a few days, and broader in scope than merely causing a
stock market downturn and grounding air travel for the period.
> > Of the three named powers in the Terrorist Axis, all have SRBM's, Iran
> > may have atomic warheads, and North Korea has both IRBM's and atomic
> > warheads. They are not THAT far from getting nuclear ICBM's.
>
> If you also add Britain to the "Terrorist Axis" then they already have
> MIRVed SLBMs! Get that ABM system up pronto mister!
Indeed, but Britain isn't hostile to the United States of America, nor
does she support international terrorism. Are you trying to claim that
the mention of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea was essentially arbitrary,
such that Britain meets the criteria equally well? If so, your claim
founders on the rocks of reality.
> The basic problem
> with the ABM thesis here is that the argument just doesn't hold water.
> If they have a few warheads, they'll charter a bizjet and fly it in.
And the airport of origin fails to notice the loading of a nuclear
warhead onto the business jet because ... ?
(note that if the airport of origin is IN a Terrorist State, we
probably aren't letting their airplanes fly to our country!)
> That way they can swat 3 flies with one blow: nuke the US, save the ICBM
> cash and build another 10+ palaces, and escape the retaliatory strike.
You're assuming that we'd never figure out where the attack came from.
> Of course, there is ZERO evidence that these state actors have any
> motivation whatsoever to nuke the US to begin with.
Right. In fact, they're putting lots of money into developing nuclear
missiles because ... um ... ?
> There is all the
> evidence that they want their nukes for the same reason everyone else
> has wanted them - to keep themselves safe and deter attack.
"Deter attack" includes deterring just wars brought on themselves by
their own terrorist attacks on the West, so, whether or not they
INTEND to nuke the US, their own aggressive policies would soon put
them in a position where this would be exactly the threat that they
would wind up making. Given that, it is wise for us to invest in NMD
to neutralize said threat.
> > They did provoke a military reaction -- and the Islamic world
> > responded by distancing itself from Al Qaeda. Oopsie :-)
>
> The official islamic world found that convenient, with the rick
> countries getting all upset all of a sudden. I'd be very surprised,
> however, if al-Qaeda's fund-raising and recruitment didn't experience a
> huge boost.
In net terms, I suspect it experienced a huge drop, since he lost a
LOT of money and personnel in the Afghan War.
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
Jorge R. Frank
>
>
> "Jorge R. Frank" wrote:
>
>> > They don't give a rats ass about the Palestinians--no Saudi does.
>> > That's just the excuse they trotted out after the fact.
>> Indeed. Most of the hijackers were Saudis, the rest Egyptian. Bin
>> Laden's rhetoric for the ten years prior to 9/11 was against the US
>> occupation of Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia during Desert Storm.
>> He never mentioned the Palestinians until after 9/11. It was such
>> an obvious propaganda ploy, I'm surprised anyone was stupid enough to
>> fall for it. Unfortunately, Mr. Jaatinen is not the only one.
>
> US's partiality toward Israel is one of the major driving factors that
> cause people to give money to islamic extremists.
Irrelevant in this case, since bin Laden was independently wealthy, and his
organization effectively self-financed.
> The holy sites are
> another obvious factor (and one I also mentioned in my original
> posting).
Which one? I searched the entire thread in Giganews and Google, and found
no such mention by you. Perhaps you used a pseudonym?
Carey Sublette
> ac...@Glue.umd.edu (Andrew Case) writes:
>
> >John Schilling <schi...@spock.usc.edu> wrote:
> >>ac...@Glue.umd.edu (Andrew Case) writes:
>
> >>Second, you suggest we "make it clear" that this will happen. How
> >>do you propose we do this?
>
> >When lesser attacks happen we don't just shrug them off with a few
> >missiles. If Reagan had gone after the Beirut Embassy bombers with
> >the kind of relentless vindictiveness shown by Israel towards the
> >Olympic terrorists it would have sent a very clear message.
>
> No, the message would not have been clear. None of the people the
> Israelis killed after Munich were heads of state, and we can count
> Arafat as a sort of head of state in this context. If I read you
> correctly, none of the people you suggest we should have killed
> after Beirut are heads of state.
>
> There is a well-established tradition in war and diplomacy that one
> may always kill soldiers and even generals but never heads of state.
> A policy of retaliating for "minor", conventional acts of terrorism
> by killing the soldies immediately responsible, is quite consistent
> with this traditional interpretation. It is *also* consistent with
> your proposed new policy, but it doesn't make it *clear* which one
> is in effect.
I will point out that the FB-111 attack on Libya in the early 1980s, ostensibly in retalation for a German disco bombing (a minor terrorist attack), appeared to have been an attempt to assassinate Muammar Qaddafi, since his private residence was bombed (killing an adopted daughter).
Carey Sublette