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Last Peacekeeper Deactivated

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the no-more-big-stick-just-speak-softly dept.

Inthewire writes "The United States Air Force deactivated the last of 50 Peacekeeper missiles yesterday. The Peacekeeper was an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile capable of accurately placing a 300 Kt W-87 warhead on ten individual targets."

4 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. Nice timing... by kliklik · · Score: 3, Interesting

    since today is The International Day of Peace.

    --
    guru in training
  2. Gotta love that Ministry of Truth by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    "Peacekeeper". Right. War is peace indeed.

    1. Re:Gotta love that Ministry of Truth by maraist · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Don't blame it on dogma, blame it on human nature.

      I hate the phrase "Human nature". It's nature period. Dogs and even roaches have the same tactics that we commonly deamonize in our war-mongering leaders.

      If anything the only distinctly human elements are those that require at least 2 orders of abstraction. Namely the concepts of civil disobediance and "turning the other cheeck". This constitutes a direct passive aggressive response to an aggressive act. It's very hard to do, and the motiviations required to accomplish it are too complex for a 1'st order thinking creature like a dog. I'm defining 0'th order being directly stimulus reflexive, 1'st order being memory-based-pattern stimulus induced reaction. 2'nd order being able to apply memorized patterns to new contexts as a response. (The concept of abstraction)

      Very little in our daily lives require 2'nd order thinking. Most of it, in fact is mere directly learned association (1'st order thinking), so we're not that much higher evolved than the animal kingdom.

      --
      -Michael
  3. Re:In other news... by maraist · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Our new weapons are percise GPS guided small tactical missles.

    The problem is two fold:

    1) A weapon used is a useless weapon. If you have to use a weapon, it obvously is not a strong enough deterrent to a war.

    2) Targeted weapon systems rely on continuous communication back to home base. Yes there are backup systems (such as geographical pattern matching), but this is only on a subset of arsonal, and these systems are less reliable and easier to fool.

    While a terrorist group isn't a major strategic threat outside of their home environment, there are still rogue nations, most of which are within grasp of the power to knock out our GPS satellites one way or another.

    Once you knock out our eyes, then conventional warfare makes us no better suited than the 1950s (simple jammable radio-based communication).

    The key to being a super-power is a credible threat. A death-star, or a ready-to-string special forces that can take out any town over night.

    The more we bumble about w/ these wimpy targeted missiles that demonstrate what we are likely to use against rogue nations, they are better able to assess our weaknesses and weigh in the liklihood of successful resistance against us.

    --
    -Michael