Ted Cruz Proposes Reviving SDI To Counter N. Korean Nuclear Threat (blastingnews.com)

MarkWhittington writes: One of the more substantive issues that was discussed during the Republican presidential debate in Detroit concerned the latest threat to come out of North Korea. That country's mad, bad, and dangerous to know leader Kim Jong-Un has ordered his nuclear arsenal prepared and is firing missiles in the vicinity of Japan. The United States and South Korea have started military maneuvers, partly as a result of North Korea's actions. Discussions on deploying the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system in South Korea have also become urgent. Sen Ted Cruz, R-Texas would go one step further. He proposed reviving the idea of space-based missile defenses that were part of the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative.

Comments

And by that he means

[JeffOwl]

Spending a bunch of money and making it look like we are making great progress in missile defense so that NK bankrupts itself trying to counter the counter measures? Aren't they already basically bankrupt?

Re:And by that he means

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't they already basically bankrupt?
 
Yes, the US is bankrupt. 19 trillion in the hole in wasted tax breaks, welfare and wars.

Oh, you mean the North Koreans? Yeah, them too.

Re: And by that he means

[FictionPimp]

It would be amazing if either of you pointed to a source.....

I guess facts can't be used in political conversation.

Re: And by that he means

[Bartles]

Hell, when Democrats passed Obama's stimulus bill, it was about as costly as the Iraq war up to that point. Money only means something to the left, when it's not spent directly benefitting them.

Re: And by that he means

[hey!]

My source is the federal budget. My figures are actually a little bit off, in that the TANF program (the successor to the old AFDC welfare program) has a budget of 17 billion, not the 10 billion I was estimating, but it's still miniscule.

Re:And by that he means

[hey!]

Well, if you're talking about Social Security, you also have to include the fact that it also brings in revenue. Yes, eliminating Social Security would reduce the deficit, but not by the amount we spend on it, and it would have no effect whatsoever on our liquidity.

And "Social Security" is not "welfare".

Re:And by that he means

[AlterEager]

Wow. Re-write history much? I'm not going to argue that going in to Iraq wasn't a mistake -- it was. But that's based on hindsight.

You are re-writing history. Many people said it was a mistake before the war. Hindsight wad not needed.

Re: And by that he means

[shaitand]

You are aware that social security is a retirement plan and medicare is the medical plan that goes alongside it and that participants get distributions based on how much they contributed? It isn't welfare.

Medicaid, that is welfare. Food stamps are welfare. I'm not saying it is welfare I'm opposed to, I actually want to go to my grave having supported making the world a better place. Having grown up the child of a single mother who needed both of those things and having received medical care only because of them as a child they no doubt contributed greatly to me being where I am today.

Are there losers and deadbeats on the programs? Sure there are, most of them, but then that is true of most of those holding large wall street power accounts as well. All the red tape thrown up trying to prevent abuse and minimize these programs costs more in administrative overhead than the abuse itself creating a self-fulfilling prophecy on the inefficiency of government.

If you want to reduce the cost of these programs stop fighting the public option and start fighting to cut the costs and complexity of bringing medical devices and drugs on to the market that keeps the large scale healthcare industry entrenched and raises the barrier to entry.

Re: And by that he means

[dinfinity]

Please explain how this is not an example of the broken window fallacy

Please explain how more sick people is better than or equivalent to fewer sick people, with regard to the economy, even taking into account the cost of the financial aid.

Additionally, I'd like to reiterate an oft forgotten point. Poor people are great at putting their money to work for the economy. Give a poor person money and you can guarantee that it will be spent almost instantly, locally and generally on something that we consider part of the real and essential economy (yes, some of them buy drugs, but on average it goes to food, clothes, transport and other necessities). They sure as hell aren't going to put the money in a bank in the Cayman islands or import Russian caviar.

LiHEAP for instance would parcel out assistance based not on degree-days or income, but on funding levels.

Anecdotes, my friend. Do you have any argumentation towards why a federal government cannot efficiently do this on a fundamental level?

the poor will move where they have a chance.

The only place poor people can easily move to is the street. And that is exactly what happens in places like the US. Americans coming to our 'socialist' country always (with great surprise) ask us where all our homeless people are. The number of homeless people, let alone the many people obviously on the brink of being so, I saw when I recently visited the US was disheartening and morally disgusting.

"But our country is different!'
True, many Americans have a very Darwinistic view of how a society should work (which is ironic, given how few people 'believe' in biological evolution). They fail to see that even though it feels really unfair, it is objectively better to spend money to have 'moochers' sitting at home than to leave them to fuck up their lives and those of friends and strangers around them by roaming the streets, committing crime and seeking refuge in terrible drugs. And that doesn't even take into account the (economic!) benefits to society when poor people actually use the aid to grow and become tax-paying members of society.

I will readily admit that even in our 'socalist paradise' the exact same lack of insight is all too present, but as always: everything is bigger in America.

Re: And by that he means

[hey!]

Well yes, there's always confounding factors as I noted. But I think the argument that welfare automatically makes people dependent on government handouts isn't supported by the data. That it may make some people dependent I don't doubt, but if the effect were as powerful as commonly suggested then you wouldn't see so many people lifting themselves out of poverty during the heydey of the welfare state.

Might actually make some sense now

[JoshuaZ]

This actually makes a bit more sense than it did in the 1980s. The technology has improved but more importantly this will be only defending against a small number of missiles. One of the big issues was that it wasn't feasible to scale up a system that could defend against a massive number of advanced missiles with good countermeasures and decoys from the USSR or China. But this would only need to defend against a very small number of missiles without sophisticated countermeasures. Probably not worth the cost but it at least makes more sense than it did in the 1980s.

Re:Might actually make some sense now

[hey!]

Well, how close you get to 100% matters, and the amount it matters depends on the scale of the threat you're dealing with.

Suppose you are 90% effective. That's well worth it when you're talking about an adversary with the capability of striking you with ten, or even a hundred warheads, especially if they're small and unreliable. Russia currently has 1800 deployed warheads, with a stockpile of some 8500. But let's say conservatively in a period of high tensions the Soviets have a thousand warhead targeted at the US. 90% effective would mean we get hit with about 100 warheads, which in the Soviet era ICBMs were in the 3-5 MT range, or 200x to 300x the yield of the Hiroshima bomb. Two or three, or even a half dozen such warheads would be survivable for a certain value of "survive", but a hundred would mean a highly probable total collapse of our society.

Now at the risk of sounding like a scare-quotes-intellectual, you really ought to consider how the opponent in this game will perceive and react to your missile defense system. If a hypothetical missile defense system is 100% effective or very close to it, it's game over; your enemy's missile arsenal is just useless junk. But if we're talking 90% effective, we're talking about a system which cannot stop the enemy arsenal from destroying us, provided that arsenal is intact.

So if you are a defense planner in the Kremlin, what is your assessment of this situation? That the Americans are stupid? Or that they intend to whittle down your arsenal with a first nuclear strike and then whittle down the survivors with the missile defense system? And if you are in a tense situation with the Americans, how does this affect your decision making? Do you use your arsenal early or risk losing it later?

So yes, those of us "intellectuals" with the handicap of being educated do rather think how close a missile defense system gets to 100% matters quite a bit. How close it has to be varies by situation of course. A 10% effectiveness rate would be materially useful against North Korea; it would have been merely destabilizing against the Soviets.

Re:Might actually make some sense now

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you understand how many bombs and missiles Russia had during the Cold War. In 1988, Russia had ~45,000 nuclear devices, spread across ICBMs, submarine launched missiles, bomber dropped bombs, etc. Many of them were MIRV designs, which had up to 14 active warheads (and possibly dozens of decoy warheads) in them, all of which were substantially more powerful than the Hiroshima nuke.

In a full scale nuclear war, most of those would be launched. If you took out 99% of them, that would still be 450+ nuclear detonations substantially more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima. If civilian population centers are the main targets, and they managed to hit each of the 450 largest cities in the U.S., that's a detonation in every city from Scranton, PA up, covering a huge percentage of the population with direct explosive effects, and the suburbs of these cities would all be within the range of lethal radioactive fallout.

And that's before we get into the nuclear winter issues. The models for a nuclear winter that could devastate global food production (a drop of several degrees Celsius) only require about 50 Hiroshima sized detonations in a "small", regional exchange. If 450 U.S. cities burned to the ground, and a similar number of Russian targets, it would cause a decades long ice age. And that's with 99% success rates shooting down missiles. With a 75% success rate? You're dead. Live in a bunker in the middle of nowhere? Better have enough canned food to last a few hundred years, and seed stores for your great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren to plant.

Sure, it's better than the whole planet's surface being nuked directly. But it just encourages your enemy to build even more nukes (you'll notice, the Russians hit peak missiles at the end of Reagan's term in office) to get through the defenses. Which raises the risk of a malfunction leading to a missile launch, or one of the many missiles getting lost (or stolen, or sold for profit to terrorists). If either side had wanted to destroy the world, they could have, and SDI (particularly 1980s tech SDI) was never going to change that.

Crazy Cruz

[OzPeter]

A small government conservative proposing pork barrel politics to counter a non-realistic threat in order to seem like he is the big man on the international stage solely for the purpose of getting elected.

As has been mentioned a lot of times before Kim thrives on crazy threats, and China needs a relatively stable NK (that doesn't actually carry out stupid shit) in order to maintain a buffer.

Re:We should do it

[Anonymous Coward]

Although I share your sentiment about the ludicrosity of SDI, I would like to debunk the myth of massive civilian benefit from defense spending. Money purposefully invested in civilian research programs (antibiotics, medical imaging, public health strategies providing healthcare for all Americans if I might be parochial, roads, bridges, trains, and space and lasers as you say, etc.) would have a much LARGER impact than hoping for trickle-down technology from Halliburton, after they enrich themselves.

Re:Technology continues its rapid advance

[Ol Olsoc]

Meanwhile, more and more unstable third world dictatorships and Islamic theocracies are either on the path to developing or already having nuclear weapons.

This is what happens when you won't get along with your neighbors. Trotskyist Neocon Nirvana.

Anyhow, thanks for revealing your fearful nature.

I support missile defense because I trust American engineers far more than third world lunatics.

They've all been replaced with H1-B visa holders from India. Make certain you trust them.

The original Star Wars was a feelgood pork project. A new version would be much the same. The problem of course is that you have to kill the missile early in the boost phase of operation. That phase doesn't last long, and if you go detonating your enemy's missile over another country, you almost certainly make yourself another enemy. If it makes it to your airspace to be detonated, you still have a failure what with EMP and radioactive snowflakes and all. How are people going to access their facebook? Ooops, sorry, cheap shot.

Are we any better now? Electronics certainly is, but there still isn't much time to react. And in a country where everything is considered "too expensive" any more, And the political situation abroad, I don't think planting the equivalent of ABM's right against the borders of our enemies - which in your case, appears to be everyone - will happen.

These considerations are't even political - they are some physics issues, which in the past have proven remarkably resilient to votes on whether they were true or not.

Riding the corpse of Zombie Reagan

[Beavertank]

I know the GOP is the party of pimping out Zombie Reagan, and they're favorite past-time is cherry picking things about the man to back up what they want to do now, but reviving Star Wars? Really? They're not even trying to pretend they didn't jump the shark now.