Re: eeyore and tigger

From: John Clark (jonkc@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Mon Jun 12 2000 - 23:21:53 MDT


Everitt Mickey <evmick@pnv.net> Wrote:

>I've been lead to beleive that it has ALWAYS been an "arms race"
>between precisely defense vs offense.

That's true but the race is over now and offence won, 4 reasons why.

1) The target of an ICBM, large population centers, is stationary and
     several thousand square miles in area; the target of an ABM is
     moving at 12 thousand miles an hour and is several thousand
     square feet in area. Advantage offence.

2) The target of an ABM is worth several million dollars, the target of an
     ICBM is worth several trillion dollars. Advantage offence.

3) In a age of H bombs and massive overkill, a high failure rate in my
    fleet of offensive ICBM's is perfectly acceptable. Your anti-missile
    system must be virtually 100% effective or it's not worth building.
    At the peak of the cold war each side had about 50,000 warheads,
    even if you shoot down 99.9% (a ridiculously optimistic figure) that
    means 50 H Bombs would explode over American cities. In a matter
    of minutes far more people would die than in all our wars put together
    and the country would no longer be a superpower, it would no longer
    even be a country. Advantage offence.

4) Your astronomically complex defensive system can never be tested
     in the real world conditions it's supposed to operate in to see if it really
     does what you hope it will. It's as if you looked up the hardware
     specifications of a computer in a book and then, never actually seeing
     the machine, wrote an entire operating system for it and expect it to
     work perfectly the very first time you ran it. On the other hand I can be
     pretty confident that my offensive ICBM fleet will work as expected
     because I can test the parts and coordination among the parts of the
     system is not nearly as important as it is with your ABM. Advantage offence.

                          John K Clark jonkc@att.net



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