Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 4.3bsd-beta 6/6/85; site ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Path: utzoo!decvax!decwrl!amdcad!lll-crg!ucdavis!ucbvax!arms-d From: ARMS-D-Request@MIT-MC.ARPA (Moderator) Newsgroups: mod.politics.arms-d Subject: Arms-Discussion Digest V6 #24 Message-ID: <8601160325.AA26998@ucbvax.berkeley.edu> Date: Wed, 15-Jan-86 22:05:00 EST Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8601160325.AA26998 Posted: Wed Jan 15 22:05:00 1986 Date-Received: Fri, 17-Jan-86 00:24:18 EST Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: ARMS-D%MIT-MC.ARPA@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU Organization: The ARPA Internet Lines: 199 Approved: arms-d@mit-mc.arpa Arms-Discussion Digest Wednesday, January 15, 1986 10:05PM Volume 6, Issue 24 Today's Topics: Space Invaders/Offensive Star Wars lasers Beyond War Missile Flight Test Ban "Star Wars" may unleash firestorms US-Soviet TV ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 15 Jan 86 18:34:22 EST From: Herb Lin Subject: Space Invaders/Offensive Star Wars lasers From: Paul Dietz I recall sending some notes to arms-d on the ground-attack capabilities of lasers some time ago. Indeed. I sent them. The only problem I see is the degradation of the beam(s) by the lower atmosphere. This can be avoided by attacking during quiet times (night, say) and by using multiple convergent beams against a single target. But then you don't get coherence, and the intensity goes linearly with the number of lasers, whereas if they are coherent, it goes with the square. The reference to nuclear winter is silly, however. I wouldn't push nuclear winter stuff, because it is the plume that is the primary driver for stuff getting into the upper atmosphere. Lasers won't do it at all. The most likely use for an orbital laser ground attack system would be pin-point strikes against enemy government, military centers and terrorist bases. I could see the government building such a weapon even if it is entirely useless against ICBMs. I agree such is possible; that is my fear. ------------------------------ Subject: Beyond War Date: 15 Jan 86 16:02:56 PST (Wed) From: foy@aero who should run the Falklands. Quantitative, perhaps, due to the greater potential for worldwide disaster -- although note that the UK is a nuclear power and Argentina probably will be soon -- but the fundamental problems seem awfully similar. Insights on solving one would presumably help to solve the other. (Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology) You are right! Thus seeing that the results of having a nuclear war are unacceptable to human civilization, learning how to settle the disputes between the US and the USSR without nuclear war can be used as a model for learning how to settle all disputes between nations. ------------------------------ Subject: Missile Flight Test Ban Date: 15 Jan 86 15:48:28 PST (Wed) From: foy@aero Lin discusses the merits of a Missile Flight Test Ban as a low cost way of creating enough uncertainty in a first strike that an agressor would not be willing to initiate one. I concur with his reasoning. It also has sthe merits that the Soviets have taken a step in that direction by having a moratorium on their nuclear tests. Perhaps if we weren't so devoted to SDI we could join in this moratorium and perhaps proceed from there to a Missile Flight Test Ban. ------------------------------ From: dual!epicen!jbuck@ucbvax.berkeley.edu Date: Wed, 15 Jan 86 17:17:44 pst Subject: "Star Wars" may unleash firestorms Submitted for your approval (or disapproval) - >From the Los Angeles Times, Jan. 11, 1986: LIVERMORE - Laser weapons being developed as part of President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, commonly known as "Star Wars", could more easily be used to incinerate enemy cities than to protect the United States against Soviet missles, according to an article in the current issue of a leading physics magazine and a separate study being circulated among government weapons scientists. Many SDI advocates hope lasers fired down from space stations or shot up from the earth and reflected off space-based mirrors onto targets below may one day be part of a defensive shield against enemy missles. But new analysis suggests that high-intensity laser light from such weapons also could be used effectively to unleash massive firestorms, possibly producing an environmental disaster similar to nuclear winter. The study, which was produced by R & D Associates, an influential defense think tank based in Los Angeles, cites data indicating that "in a matter of hours, a laser defense system powerful enough to cope with the ballistic missle threat can also destroy the enemy's major cities by fire. The attack would proceed city by city, the attack time for each city being only a matter of minutes. Not nuclear destruction, but Armageddon all the same." Lasers "have the potential of initiating massive urban fires and even of destroying the enemy's major cities by fire in a matter of hours," according to the article by Caroline L. Herzenberg, a government physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory. "Such mass fires might be expected to generate smoke in amounts comparable to the amounts generated in some major nuclear exchange scenarios," warns the article in the current issue of Physics and Society, a publication of the American Physical Society. That could cause "a climactic catastrophic disaster similar to nuclear winter," a reference to the disasterous lowering of the Earth's temperature many scientists believe would result from a nuclear war. The R & D study does not mention a nuclear winter but does stress that lasers are not intrinsically defensive weapons and can be used offensively to start massive fires. In an interview Friday, Herzenberg, the author of the physics magazine article, said that "all you need is to dump enough energy on something and if it's flammable it will go up. The free electron laser, the excimer laser, and the deuterium fluoride chemical laser (which are the subjects of current research) all can go through the atmosphere and cause fires." ... Theodore A. Postol, until recently adviser on nuclear weapons to the chief of Naval Operations and an expert on the implications of firestorms, said, "If you were attempting to set fires with an optical laser that was already sufficiently powerful to attack hardened ICBM boosters, there is no question that such a device could also be used to create mass fires of enormous scale and ferocity -- mass urban fires potentially larger and more intense than those created by the great incendiary raids on Hamburg and Dresden in World War II." -- Joe Buck ARPA: dual!epicen!jbuck@ucbvax.berkeley.edu UUCP: ...!ihnp4!pesnta!epicen!jbuck or ...!ucbvax!dual!epicen!jbuck ------------------------------ Date: 15 Jan 1986 19:33-EST From: Nicholas.Spies@H.CS.CMU.EDU Subject: US-Soviet TV It is completely unreasonable to expect that a US-Soviet TV link will itself prove anything. The power of TV (in other words, the focussed attention of a large population) is no less jealously guarded here than in the USSR. The difference is that here a tiny fraction of the population can afford to pay for TV time (on approval of TV channel owners) while in the USSR the Soviet government hogs it all. Even cable "access channels" are subject to many internal rules to prevent politically provocative or salacious messages from ever seeing the light of day. On both sides the result is heavily censored. The fact that we are probably as self-satisfied with our form of economic censorship as they must be with their political censorship proves nothing. In both cases there is a severe limiting of true public opinion with the object of not letting certain opinions grow in political importance through TV. This is one more indication that the mechanics of domestic politics in both the US and the USSR plays perhaps a greater role in the relations of these two nations than their explicit attitudes (as nations) towards one another. To me, it makes much more sense to discuss ways that may promote a favorable change in the public opinion of both the US and USSR populations to further the objective of mutual co-existance and increasing freedom without fear. To merely discuss ways to manipulate fear through weaponry is dangerously shortsighted. The fact that our citizens are able to let it "all hang out" should not be seen as a sign of weakness; if Russians are concerned at all about their individual freedom they would much more likely wonder at our ability to report shortcomings of our country than feeling smug about "being better". Planting this doubt is worth far more than the relatively small risk of "losing face" while doing so. A constant diet of TV programs from US==>USSR and USSR==>US would be very different, if only because so many hours is difficult if not impossible to completely stage. This might change many political assumptions much more cheaply than another round of the arms race. ------------------------------ End of Arms-Discussion Digest *****************************