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The Argument For a Hypersonic Missile Testing Ban
Lasrick writes Mark Gubrud has a fascinating piece arguing for the U.S. to lead the way in calling for a ban on the testing of hypersonic missiles, a technology that the U.S. has been developing for decades. China has also started testing these weapons, which proponents optimistically claim would not be used to deliver nuclear weapons. Russia, India, and a few other countries are also joining in the fray, so a ban on testing would stop an arms race in its tracks. The article discusses the two types of hypersonic technology, and whether that technology has civilian applications.
That's Ha Ha Hao.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
It is the kind of idiocy that makes the military industrial complex laugh and call you names.
There are good reasons to ban weapons - but not just because the weapon is good at killing people. To those in the military, effectiveness at killing people is a reason to BUILD the weapon, not ban it.
Chemical are banned not because they kill people, but because they are likely to kill civilians and your own soldiers as much as they kill the enemy. They also people and damage valuable land after you win.
A similar argument applies to biological weapons, land mines and nuclear weapons.
There is NOTHING in this article that would convince a soldier to ban the weapons. Instead, any military person, upon reading it will of course demand that we spend lots of money figuring out how to build hypersonic missiles.
If you dislike war, ban it. But you are probably not naive enough to try that. You would lose the argument because such an attempt has many many flaws. Well guess what - trying to ban weapon research because the weapon is too goo is just as naive.
WORST of all, your naive and foolish attempts make it much harder to ban the weapons we actually CAN ban - land mines, chemical and biological warfare.
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The argument is at heart "Don't develop these weapons because they will be good at killing people and I personally am not smart enough to come up with a civilan use that doesn't kill people".
It is the kind of idiocy that makes the military industrial complex laugh and call you names.
I think the big issue with these weapons is that they *will* become nuclear payload delivery systems, and as first-strike weapons they would be very hard if not impossible to stop (not that good defense industry $$ won't be spent trying). First-strike weaponry generally enables the crazy/unstable countries and their leaders to exert their will over the rest of the world, while not exactly providing much in terms of benefits to larger, more well nuclear established countries.
Banning this kind of testing isn't new - we did have a nuclear test ban for several decades [1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
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False.
Bans have worked well many times.
Yea, like Prohibition.. oh, wait, that was an abject failure... OK, then, drug prohibit... no, wait, that's a failure, too... maybe gun bans? No, no, people still kill each other with other weapons, so those don't work.
I guess what I'm saying here is, [citation needed]
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
That was PRECISELY what happened when Eisenhower signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union.
Because nothing works like wagging your finger and pretending something doesn't exist.
Those things have absolutely nothing in common with what we're talking about.
The only similar agreement was the nuclear test ban. When you test a nuclear bomb, it creates an earthquake that everyone can detect. A hypersonic shockwave is easily detectable by satellites.
The deterrent to breaking this treaty is that you would definitely get caught.
The 1958 treaty fell apart for a variety of reasons, The 1963 version was a success.
There's no ban on China (or anyone else) on building supercarriers.
There's a real sense in which hypersonic missiles are an alternative to nukes: bunker busting. To bust a deep bunker (think 10+ meters of concrete, itself deep underground) is no easy task. A nuke works, but nuke ground bursts are particularly nasty (airbursts have limited and contained fallout, ground bursts toss fallout high up into the atmosphere to spread with the wind). Get a kinetic weapon up to Mach 10 and that works too.
There were plans at one point to drop heavy penetrators (old 5" gun barrels from decommissioned battleships IIRC, very hard steel) from orbit if needed, but that was barely doable and quite expensive. Still, it shows the magnitude of the problem.
All the big players have signed "no nukes in space" treaties, of course, but you may be right that they have them anyhow, much to your point about secret testing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Incorrect. There are plenty of ways to take out an aircraft carrier. The most obvious and least defensible way is to torpedo it from a submarine. Other ways clearly exist. You can overwhelm it with a mass attack using aircraft, conventional cruise missiles, torpedo boats, etc. Once a carrier and its very limited escort screen use up their antiaircraft and antimissile ammunition, it is a sitting duck. You can strew mines in front of it. You want to give it a severe nightmare? Just consider what you could do moored in its pathetically poorly defended home base or forward base.
The X-15 was a manned rocket-propelled aircraft that hit mach 6.7 in 1964. If you ever see it in the National Air and Space Museum it's not nearly as big as you'd think - smaller than most fighter aircraft. Comparing it to a Saturn V is a huge exaggeration. If they're using RAM jets in missiles it's all about range and not about speed.
I never understood this. There's no need to "bust bunkers" You just need to collapse the entrance, problem solved.
Every entrance? Are you sure you got them all? You've never been inside and your recon tools only look so far under the surface. Are you still so sure?
I'm not on the side of war, but at the same time, there are times when a "hard target" has to be taken out, and having an option that isn't nuclear (or horribly poisonous like depleted uranium) is a good thing.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.