Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site spar.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!akgua!gatech!ut-sally!pyramid!decwrl!spar!baba
From: baba@spar.UUCP (Baba ROM DOS)
Newsgroups: net.space,net.politics
Subject: Re: Aviation Week on Star Wars
Message-ID: <762@spar.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 10-Jan-86 19:05:44 EST
Article-I.D.: spar.762
Posted: Fri Jan 10 19:05:44 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 13-Jan-86 01:07:50 EST
References: <1289@ames.UUCP> <772@petrus.UUCP> <1149@lll-crg.ARpA> <386@pedsgd.UUCP> <19@nike.UUCP>
Distribution: net
Organization: The Institute of Impure Science
Lines: 46
Xref: watmath net.space:5179 net.politics:12912

> Al, you seem to think that nuclear war is to be avoided at any cost.
> Clearly, if this were the case, we wouldn't be pursuing current
> defense goals.  The fact is, we in the US would prefer to
> start a nuclear war than to relinquish our national sovereignty.
> 
> 					Milo

It may well be true (though I am nowhere near so confident of it as you
seem to be) that a nuclear war of the sort we could have today would not
be the end of the world, merely a crippling mutilation of all parties
involved, with a little collateral poisoning of non-participants. It
seems to me that this is a transient state of affairs.

Technology has and will continue to improve man's ability both to build
and to destroy.  The means of destruction are and will continue to become
more varied and subtle.  Countermeasures will be ever harder to put in
place before they themselves are obsoleted.  An incredibly well conceived
and executed BMD system, deployed in secrecy that would probably require
a police state, might break the deadlock for a time, but that would be a
very temporary situation, hardly worth the cost unless one plans to get a
quick payoff by launching a surprise first strike.  A nuclear bomb is a
relatively small, rugged device, and there are many, many ways of putting
one in a specified place at a specified time.  Any given delivery system
can be countered, but there will be no *general* defense against nuclear
weapons until we find a way to locally interdict the processes of particle
physics.

And nuclear bombs are by no means the only possible weapons of mass
destruction.  Just the cheapest.

Mutual assured destruction is not just a policy that can be repudiated.
It is a state of affairs that will become progressively less escapable.
We will either learn to live with it, or not at all.

The problem is that the existence of a stalemate at the upper limit
of confrontation does not magically make the conflict between two
opposing systems go away.

The conflicts between the US and the USSR are not likely to be direct
threats to one another's *sovereignty* (for the reasons above), but
to one another's *interests*.  To the extent that a nuclear exchange
is taken seriously as a fallback position, and we fail to find means
to defend our interests short of starting a nuclear war and effectively
ending the game, we are inviting disaster.

			 Baba, back but briefly from the grave