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Obama To Decide On New Weapons
krou writes "Buried within the New Start treaty, which saw the decommissioning of nuclear warheads, was an interesting provision as a result of Russian demands: the US must 'decommission one nuclear missile for every one' of a new type of weapon called Prompt Global Strike 'fielded by the Pentagon.' The warhead, which is 'mounted on a long-range missile to start its journey,' would be 'capable of reaching any corner of the earth from the United States in under an hour. ... It would travel through the atmosphere at several times the speed of sound, generating so much heat that it would have to be shielded with special materials to avoid melting. ... But since the vehicle would remain within the atmosphere rather than going into space, it would be far more maneuverable than a ballistic missile, capable of avoiding the airspace of neutral countries, for example, or steering clear of hostile territory. Its designers note that it could fly straight up the middle of the Persian Gulf before making a sharp turn toward a target.' The new weapon is in line with Obama's plans 'to move towards less emphasis on nuclear weapons,' and rather focus on conventional ones. The idea is not new, having been first floated under the Bush administration, but was abandoned, mainly because 'Russian leaders complained that the technology could increase the risk of a nuclear war, because Russia would not know if the missiles carried nuclear warheads or conventional ones.'"
Man, you mention "Obama" and "weapons" and all the crazies come out to play.
If you realize that there are about 6 billion more people on the planet to replace whoever you kill, and you dont' belong to one of those "life is sacred" religions, I'd say it probably isn't a big deal at all, as long as you don't have to watch.
If you don't think people who start wars aren't bad, prey tell, who is?
That's quite the Machiavellian perspective you have there
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
But Bush was okay with invading an irrelevant backwater to get one man, even though he knew that would turn a 5-year war against a well-defined terrorist corpration into a 100-year war against a race and a religion.
For anyone with any knowledge of history, this is simply absurd.
Europe has been fighting against rampaging hordes of Muslims since that religion was started.
For the clue impaired, it bears repeating that many Muslim holy places are merely
stolen and re-badged from native religions. The idea that Islam needs any excuse
for global jihad is just willful ignorance or wishful thinking.
Shortly before the Afghan invasion, the Taliban rightly summed up the situation by blowing up a 3rd party "neutral" religious relic.
Fundies don't need to be a real threat. They will happily lie to their followers and manufacture threats. This also works for Xian fundies too.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I could have told you that on 9/12.
In fact I did tell people that, saying going to war is not the solution,
but at the time people were thinking like animals. All they could see was "red" and revenge.
How very astute of you.
I'm sorry to say, but it's not possible to prove something's validity through the failure of your opposition. Yes, it's a start, but as the history of rulers and political systems of the 20th century can attest, it's also a good way to bring a bitter end to things: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and many others said "their ways don't work, follow me" and there was even more suffering than under the previous rule.
The reality is that there are many other ways in which those wars could have been fought - indeed, there are many ways which many people wanted to see those wars fought which never occurred. The actual people who were "thinking like animals" wanted to carpet bomb their countries and utterly destroy them. Between them and your irrationally passive approach, we came up with what we got.
As for the 9/11 bombers, people seem to forget that it was diversity and open-minded political correctness which brought them here. We've known since the 1970s that their type (affluent Arabic Muslim men) are the stereotype for Islamic terrorism, yet we continued to let them in.
It's more complex than just "better locks"; significantly more so. I and most sane people would agree that is a necessary first step, but it's one step of many.
Proactively ruling out retributive attacks against enemies is just as, if not more, foolish than throwing an inappropriate level of force at a problem. But just because that level of force is ineffective does not mean that force was not the solution you were looking for.
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