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From: jens@moscom.UUCP (Jens Fiederer)
Newsgroups: net.space,net.politics
Subject: Re: Aviation Week on Star Wars
Message-ID: <620@moscom.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 2-Jan-86 23:35:01 EST
Article-I.D.: moscom.620
Posted: Thu Jan  2 23:35:01 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 4-Jan-86 07:06:32 EST
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Putting cities at bottom priority seems sensible from the psychological
standpoint -- an enemy would prefer destroying our weapons and leaving
our cities productive (for him) to destroying our cities and leaving our
weapons vengeful.

What these charts suggest to me is a GRADUATED approach to SDI.  Assuming
economically feasible SDI defenses, one begins by using them to protect
our missiles (currently our main protections are SHEER NUMBER, one of
the less heartwarming aspects of the arms race, and variety (ICBM, bomber,
submarine), which is very vulnerable to the vagaries of progress in
such fields as submarine detection).  A 50% effective SDI protecting
our missiles would mean that we need 50% fewer missiles for "defensive"
purposes.

The inspirational dream is that we can implement the lower priority SDI
objectives, and obviate the need for nuclear missiles altogether.  Of
course, as powerful a system as SDI would have to be can hardly exist
without having some OFFENSIVE capabilities as well.

Azhrarn