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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.'"
FTFA: The idea is not new: President George W. Bush and his staff promoted the technology, imagining that this new generation of conventional weapons would replace nuclear warheads on submarines. In face-to-face meetings with President Bush, 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. Mr. Bush and his aides concluded that the Russians were right. Partly as a result, the idea “really hadn’t gone anywhere in the Bush administration,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who has served both presidents, said recently on ABC’s “This Week.” But he added that it was “embraced by the new administration.”
First time I've seen something like this, where Obama is more hawkish on a military matter than Bush ? Man that seems wierd...
The US does not want to build nuclear weapons that can only be used defensively (for political reasons), and therefore which act primarily as a deterrent. It wants to build weapons that can be used now.
The US does not only want other countries to be scared to attack the US; it wants other countries to be scared not to do what the US wants them to, as the US may attack tomorrow.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Russia really needs to be put at ease about nuclear attack. We simply aren't going to do it. We develop advanced weaponry, but for all intents and purposes, these weapons are just stockpiled, never to be used.
Agreeing to decommission existing missiles is an easy agreeable point. We don't need them anymore. Realistically, there isn't a country in the world that America is politically ready to bomb back to the stone ages. We just like having this stuff because it makes us feel better.
This type of concern isn't new, either. Russia was worried that Reagan's Star Wars missile defense shield would allow America to attack with impunity, but we never had good reason to bomb anyone, much less Russia.
My sincere hope is that Obama can navigate these treacherous waters. It's really his first true test of foreign policy on a global scale. If he can soothe the Russians here, he'll have made huge progress that future generations will reap the benefits of for decades.
This idea is bad on many levels.
1. It looks like a nuclear ballistic missile launch. Every time you fire one, you're risking nuclear war. Russia, China, and any other enemy will see the launch and has to make a very quick decision on what to do. Chances are, it probably wont' be misidentified as a nuclear first strike. Do you really want to take that risk though??? If you have to notify them first, the entire quick strike goes out the window and the entire point of the technology is lost.
2. It's fucking expensive. Having a 1 time use ballistic missile is going to cost 100s of millions to a billion dollars a shot. That figure doesn't even count the R&D money for the program. To allow for quick strike capability, they have to be manned at all times, and ready to fire, so the ongoing "maintenance costs" on it are very high. This is going to be an insanely expensive system.
3. Why? Who are you realistically going to strike with it. Anywhere in the middle east, North Korea, and most of Europe is currently within fighter range and can be hit in relatively short time from conventional fighter/bombers.
>>>Our efforts to blow stuff up in Iraq and Afghanistan have only worsened our image in the Middle East and created even more rabid terrorists
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.
If you're going to risk billions of dollars and millions of lives, you don't do it for just 1 or 2 criminals. That's just ridiculous and totally disproportionate. Plus all it did was create a lot of orphaned children who will grow-up and want to kill Americans & Europeans. The problem is now worse, not better.
A wiser course would be to mirror what we do in our own homes. Get better locks to keep out criminals. i.e. Close the borders, in order to prevent another Bin Laden from sneaking through, unless they first had permission (visa).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Only capabilities matter.
If the US can nuke Russia, Russia has to plan for the possibility that the US will nuke Russia. If the US launches missiles that could be aimed at Russia, and that could have nuclear payloads, Russia has to assume that they are and they do. Because they're fucked if they assume good faith and are wrong.
Better never to launch such a missile and best not to have them at all.
It's amazing how many political problems become trivial if you have an air force and killing civilians en masse doesn't bother you...
Where's the problem?
Assuming you're not kidding, there are two major problems with this approach. The first is a matter of morality: "bomb your enemies from orbit until their land is clear of any buildings, population, dogs, pine cones, or ants" may be a lot of fun in a game, but in real life it's mass murder on a scale that not even the most bloody-minded conquerors in history have ever attempted, and that is really not a contest any sane nation wants to win.
Okay, let's assume that the morality of it doesn't bother you (and it probably doesn't, although I suspect if you were ever confronted close-up with the results of such an action, your opinion would change.) The second problem is practical. Could we do what you propose to Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Iran? Maybe we could ... but we are not the only country in the world with the capacity to do such a thing, and be assured, the rest of the world will take notice. We get too close to the borders of Russia or China with such a campaign (BTW, take a look at a map and notice just how far west China's borders go) and we are pretty much guaranteeing an all-out nuclear exchange of the sort everyone was more than halfway expecting all through the Cold War. You may be too young to remember what living under the nuclear hammer was like, and just how high the level of mutual paranoia was. Me, I was stationed in Europe when the Wall came down; trust me, we don't want to go back there.
And Russia and China aren't the only major powers we'd have to worry about if we started down that road. Japan, the UK, Germany, India, France ... they're all pretty friendly to us these days. That would change in a heartbeat if the US turned into a latter-day version of Genghis Khan's Mongolia. And all of them either have nuclear stockpiles or the ability to produce them quickly, along with delivery systems. The US, or any other country that tried this approach, would quickly find itself isolated in a hostile world full of countries just itching to scorch its cities to the ground, and willing to take the risk of receiving the same treatment in return.
The US is unquestionably stronger militarily than any other country, but we aren't stronger than everybody, and this is a good thing. There will never be another Alexander, another Caesar, another Genghis Khan, another Napoleon, another Hitler, and this is also a good thing. The rest of the world will not allow it, and for the first time in human history, the concept of "the rest of the world" makes a difference in the thinking of those who would follow in the bloody footsteps of emperors. Not because the human race is any wiser or more moral than it used to be, but because there is no other choice.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
It's so easy. All we have to do is give up our remaining freedom (because it would require a police state to protect us from this form of terrorism), and problem solved. I think we've been making a bit of a mistake in Afghanistan, in that we haven't done a good job of laying out why we're there (that is, keeping it from being a place where our enemies plan and train against us), and haven't closed down the enemy's sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan. But I don't think it's reasonable to treat this as something we can just wall off. That was true before WWII. It's not true now.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
I beg to differ. While it may have hurt relations a little, the fundamental problem between the US and the parts of the world filled with fundamentalist terrorist-happy Muslims is that the US is friends with Israel. That's the elephant in the room, the root cause of 9/11 (did you listen to a thing that those guys actually said?) and, honestly, I think the problem won't go away until someone nukes Israel (though I admit conventional warfare could do it too). And that's a tragedy, by the way.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Also, Rome wasn't a world power. They were a European and west Asian power, the Han Chinese didn't have to make treaties with Rome, the Roman's couldn't project power to South Africa or the Americas.
The Aztecs in 1400 didn't care one bit about what the Eastern Roman Empire was doing.
Is there a place on Earth that the Americans, Chinese, French, Russians or British can't affect?
Which is basically what I've been saying locally for about a decade. The people we're having the most trouble with internationally don't just hate The West, they hate ANYONE that doesn't actively join their crusade. It's not enough to leave them alone, if you don't actively assist them in their genocidal goals you're going to be considered a target.
Basically extremist islam right now is pretty much the same problem with US right now, "You're with us, or you're against us."
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Well, nowadays we consider it good style to hold people responsible to their words and actions, not those of their forefather. What point are you trying to make by criticizing his quite rational stance on grounds of his ancestry? Besides, while the settlement of the Americas undoubtedly was accompanied by a genocide, it hardly was a total war on the scale the GP proposed by making a political argument from a game.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Very good and well-thought out post. However, there is one point I disagree with:
There will never be another Alexander, another Caesar, another Genghis Khan, another Napoleon, another Hitler, and this is also a good thing.
You can never say never. While the world has become a much smaller place thanks to technology, that does not mean some future person won't attempt (and succeed) in utilizing that technology. In addition, the real challenge is to get people to follow you - if you can build up people, everything else just falls into your hands. (For example, look at Hitler. In any "normal" environment, that would not have happened. But the people of Germany were discontent and he played to that and, as such, received FAR more power than he ever would have otherwise.)
Just because there is a continuum does not mean that we cannot figure out a reasonable point to draw the ethical line. Your premises are (1) that engineers are involved in building stuff and (2) that stuff can hurt people. Your premises are valid. The logic you use to make your argument is not.
You might use the same style of argument to say that, when hitting babies, it is too hard to draw a line because some people are ok with it and some people are not and that there is a continuum of softly holding them to beating them to a pulp.
Still, you could in fact be right that engineers are without responsibility for how their products are used, but this is not clear from the logic you employed.
As a student of war, I cannot agree more: even as a participant of these recent hostilities, I recognize, and have been taught, that the purpose of war IS NOT revenge (or retaliation). War occurs in many forms, but the one's involving "killing people and breaking things" tend to get folks all (rightfully so) upset.
War is a way to get somebody (a leader/and its people) to do something they refuse to do otherwise.
ps: let's please stop getting all sniffy about war hurting civilians, it hurts pretty much everybody.
jp
While I don't work on weapons themselves, I do work on systems used in conjunction with weapons used in war.
My belief: advanced sensors, radars, targeting, intelligence, etc saves more lives than it costs. If the military has a cost-effective way to ensure when they fire a weapon that they are killing enemy combatants and not civilians, and before the enemy can get a shot off, it's a good situation for all but our enemies. It's good for civilians who have a reduced fear of accidentally being bombed or shot. It's good for our servicemen (of which I have 2 cousins and several friends) who can rest more easily knowing that they no longer need to walk a razors edge between killing innocents and waiting to be fired upon first.
At the end of the day, I can't stop a war. I can make that war safer for our troops and civilians around the world, though, so you can bet your ass that's what I'm going to do.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
and it's hardly a unique situation. With the exception of the people involved in each first migration, every piece of land on the planet was colonized in the same way by waves of people slaughtering the previous inhabitants. The people we often call natives, weren't.
Unless your job is designing large shapeless soft foam objects, you're always going to risk someone using your creation to hurt someone else, and at each point along the continuum from plastic bag designer to nuclear weapon designer, at least a few people are going to say they're not comfortable with doing that, and at least a few people are going to say they are.
Oh please, weapons are built with the purpose of hurting, or forcing someone do something you want (under threat of hurting him). Cars and garbage bags have many other uses besides killing.
Speaking as a person who is in favor of gun control legislation, I use guns as tools for protecting my workshop from having holes punched in it by woodpeckers. (Stupid woodpeckers. I build them birdhouses, but they'd rather cut holes in the siding.) In a similar way, peace through strength, or "if we don't have a weapons system, they'll roll in and take us over", has clearly been an effective tactic for North Korea. As such, I believe it's incorrect to say that weapons are built with the purpose of hurting people. They can be built with the purpose of preventing people from getting hurt by ensuring that nobody on either side dares use them.
And, seeing as cars have killed roughly 1000 times more people than nuclear bombs in the last 100 years, I don't think it actually matters what the *purpose* of a tool is. What matters is how it is used.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I think the largest contributing factor to Hitler's rise to power and world war 2, was the Allies' actions after world war 1. The Treaty of Versailles pretty much placed all blame for WW1 on Germany, neutered them politically, and ordered them to pay 132 billion marks in war reparations. this contributed to hyperinflation in the 20s, and the cost of living skyrocketed. It's not really surprising that the people got pissed off. ironically, most of this was in order to prevent Germany starting another war.
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