Deterrence, MAD and Overkill

[Dave Newkirk]

Deterrence only works as long as our weapons are as good as theirs.
If we suddenly stop working on ours without a similar halt on Soviet
research, our defence will slowly erode away. This is also the reason
we maintain a larger number of weapons than expected: we must be able
to reply to a first strike which knocks out many of our missiles, or
the other side might consider doing just that!

If we can not come to an agreement with the USSR to halt development of
new nuclear weapons and reduce the existing stockpile (and it doesn't
look too likely), we can try a different defence. A simple satellite
network carrying cheap interceptor rockets could greatly reduce the
number of missiles that get through. More advanced systems could
decrease that number even further. This can be destabilizing, but
it may be the only way out of the MAD plan.

Dave Newkirk, ihnp4!ihuxl!dcn

P.S. Whatever happened to "Give me liberty or give me death!" (:-)

[sme...@ihuxt.uucp]

On the subject of a simple satelite system carrying cheap interceptor
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Naperville, Il
Lines: 20

rockets to reduce the number of missiles that get through:

destabilizing? you bet!

Would a nation as paranoid as the USSR, which shoots down civilian
passenger planes, just sit there and let the USA put up a system that
renders their nuclear arsenal ineffective? No, they would build
anti-satelite weapons to shoot it down, they would build *more*
missiles to assure that enough would get through, and they would have to
build their own defensive system, forcing us to have more nukes so that
they couldn't launch a first strike and knock out our retaliatory
strike. So the net effect would be to escalate the arms race, and
increase the risk of war.
Unless, of course, we could have an agreement with the USSR that we
would both have a defensive system without taking steps to counter them.
But this means we would have to trust eachother anyway, so we might as
well just agree on arms reduction in the first place.

Steve Meier
ihnp4!ihuxt!smeier

[Henry Spencer]

There is a fairly simple way to eliminate much of the destabilizing
effect of workable anti-missile defences, with the additional bonus
of solving the problem of where the funding comes from. Pay for the
defense systems by scrapping 95% of the offensive nuclear arsenal.
The defensive systems will not become operational instantaneously,
but over a lengthy period; the same period can be used for gradually
scrapping offensive weapons.
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry