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From: masticol@paul.rutgers.edu.UUCP
Newsgroups: alt.cyberpunk,rec.arts.sf-lovers
Subject: Re: Future Police Speculations Needed
Message-ID: <1948@clash.rutgers.edu>
Date: Thu, 29-Oct-87 17:54:12 EST
Article-I.D.: clash.1948
Posted: Thu Oct 29 17:54:12 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 31-Oct-87 11:37:46 EST
References: <1463@haddock.ISC.COM> <1824@trex.rutgers.edu> <23473AE4@PSUVMA>
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 66
Xref: hoptoad alt.cyberpunk:130 rec.arts.sf-lovers:8234

In article <23473AE4@PSUVMA> AE4@PSUVMA.BITNET (Jon Acheson) writes:

> >The baddies may have anything up to fission bombs and
> >(genetic-engineered) viruses, and the police will realize this and act
> >accordingly. 

>      It's a nice thought, but I hardly think so.  For one thing, setting
> off a tacnuke in your own city is _stupid_ - fallout and excessive carnage
> are bad for business, and you're likely to scare the civilian government
> doing something rash, like declaring martial law.  Furthermore, you are
> going to have to operate in the neighborhood afterwards, and having to wear
> radiation/biowarfare armor wherever you go would be a genuine nuisance.

So who said anything about setting it off in your own city? Ever read 
_Friday_? In that scenario, big corporations ran the world, and if
you burned someone, one of your cities was next. Include organized
crime as a nonlegal corporate entity, and the same policy would apply.

However, just to prove that posession of atom bombs for use on one's
own city does make some kind of perverse sense, consider the
following:

Then as now, setting off an atom bomb in your own city or planet is a
terrorist tactic of last resort, to be used only if your mob is
threatened with extinction. Having this sort of counterthreat around
is a workable way to keep from being threatened with extinction. (If
you decide to kill me, I'll make sure you and everyone you ever met
are dead too.) The problem is it can backfire, and once you use it,
you're committed, so you'd better have someplace else to go.

>      What might be more likely would be for the evil slime to develop highly
> trained heavily-armed fast-strike squads.  These would be made up of special-
> ists, deploying heavy firepower, but able to be highly selective in their
> targets (picture a vulcan autocannon blasting out a drug lab from the back of a
> passing truck. Or a sniper taking out a limo with a rocket launcher, as in
> Gibson's _Count_Zero_.)  In short, the Mafia would go paramilitary, but would
> act like a surgeon, only cutting out the portions of the neighborhood which
> are bothering them, but trying to leave the rest of the city unharmed.

Vulcan cannon and rocket launchers are available right now from your
friendly neighborhood gunrunner. My guess is that the mob (I do _not_
specify which mob) is not using such toys because it has no need for
them. As far as elite mob troops, it's pretty hard to keep any kind of
discipline inside a criminal organization. Maybe they'd hire
mercenaries when they needed to go up against hardened targets.

One other point: the mob knows the value of soft-kill techniques
better than our military does. When they want to take something over,
they get inside and corrupt it. Then they own a going concern rather
than a gutted shell. Extreme violence is a negative-sum game, and the
mob, like business, plays to win. (Most of the time, anyway - feuds
can get in the way of good sense.)

> >Smart bullets and lasers will replace "dumb" handguns as weapons.
>      
>  "Smart Bullets"?  I might accept something the length of, say, a crossbow
> bolt having some sort of target-seeking capibility, and yes, I did see the
> movie "Runaway", but I canna' change the laws of physics, and I just don't
> see fitting all that circuitry, control jets and fuel inside of anything
> smaller than that.

And you can't make a computer that'll run more than a few hours,
because of the mean lifetime of the tubes. Technology advances
sometimes. Personally, I think that noninvasive interfacing of
electronics to the brain assumes a lot more than a steerable, guided
bullet does.