On Thursday, March 23, 2000 9:44 PM Michael S. Lorrey retroman@turbont.net
wrote:
> Its funny that people like you are the ones who say that Mutual Assured
> Destruction is insane, when its the same exact principle. MAD assumes
> that
> neither party can be trusted, and only the external threat of instant
> annihilation is what keeps both parties in check. The MAD strategy
> relied
> completely on the idea that both sides had to keep as total a level of
> surveillance on the others activities as possible.
But did MAD work? Angelo Codevilla, in _Informing Statecraft_ (see
http://mars.superlink.net/neptune/IP1_Know.html), tells of how a lot of
evidence came up in the 1980s and early 1990s that the Soviets, in fact,
were preparing for an all out nuclear war. Whether this was paranoia on
their part or the planning stages of a first strike remains to be seen.
That the Soviets also continued a military buildup -- in both conventional
and nuclear forces -- seems to support the latter.
It's also notable that the Soviets mainly targeted, from what we know now,
military and industrial centers -- not population centers. (Granted, they
often overlap, but the fact that they targetted when they did overlap sort
of means they might have been really planning for a first strike.)
And MAD, as a US policy -- not a Soviet one, was only in place for about two
decades. Not enough of a sample in my mind to say it work or not.
I'm not about to join the John Birch Society hre, just pointing out some
things I read.
> An honorable person needs no external consequences. A society that
> relies
> only on external consequences has acknowledged that men are nothing but
> savages and have no honor or rights.
Honor does not pay the rent. Anyway, if one looks at honor as the desire to
be moral, and if one doesn't accept the kind of Platonic morality Michael
hints at, but the more worldly, Aristotelean or Objectivist one I tend
toward, then the goal of morality is successful life -- not to be honorable
in spite of what will be, but to be honorable in hopes of what will be.
Cheers!
Daniel Ust
http://mars.superlink.net/neptune/
"I like the dreams of all night sex parties better than Jefferson's." --
Anon.
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