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Best Missile Defense: MAD or Star Wars?
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Vogon Poet: [QB] A few things: 1. The USSR did not spend itself into oblivion trying to match the US's SDI development budget. The US themselves haven't really spent that much developing it. SDI's crucial contribution to the collapse of the USSR was that merely keeping up their side of the MAD threat was enough to bring them to the verge of bankruptcy. In the end, they could either attack before the US became invulnerable, or they could just give up. 2. I've noticed that it's ALWAYS the USSR or China who are assumed to be the ones who'll start a nuclear war, never America. Why? Both of them have/had far superior conventional forces (numbers-wise, anyway). These are/were socialist nations, they wanted conquest, introduction of the capitalists into the socialist paradise, resources. All we capitalists wanted was to sell them stuff. We were the ones saying "better dead than Red." And I don't know why I'm saying "we" anyway, the rest of NATO was never gonna have any say in the decision to go nuclear - no wonder a common feature in WWIII fiction is America's abandonment by her allies. . . 3. The only nuclear attack you're likely to suffer is a terrorist one. You gonna particle-beam Arab immigrants from orbit? Anyway. SDI is a pipe dream - to be able to accurately plot thousands of incoming targets with multiple vectors, velocities, orbits, then sort out which ones are dummies (and what do you do with them? A dummy baliistic missile is still going to make a hell of a bang when it hits; assign it a lower priority in the threat assessment/target schedule?), then match all interdiction resources with targets, then coordinate a successful rendezvous for each? And how are they going to sell this to the American people, given 100% coverage may not be possible for years, and priority protection is given to strategic targets (cities, military bases, areas which vote Republican and are rich)? [/QB][/QUOTE]
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