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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.
Untenable nuclear war strategies yield, as a byproduct, incredible technology with legitimate (and much more tenable) civilian use. I feel like our space and lazer technology has hit a rut, and something ludicrous like SDI could give it a much-needed jolt in the arm.
Unable to achieve 100% intercept rate with SDI was not a "big issue". It was hyped as a big issue by people wanting to discredit the effort, mostly by smart-ass journalists and other ivy-league "intellectual" types to mock Reagan and make him seem like an imbecile. Achieving even a 10% intercept rate would be materially useful and save millions of lives, 50% tens of millions, and 75% a few hundred million.
That's what they were mocking - a man trying to save American lives. In the end, he ended up more-or-less ending the threat of world destruction from the Cold war.
Brett
...China needs a relatively stable NK (that doesn't actually carry out stupid shit) in order to maintain a buffer.
This brings up a fun question:
A "buffer" against... what? Puny South Korea? A Japan that is too demographically old/rich/disinterested in China to bother invading? The Philippines? Mongolia?
Historically, I get it - post-WWII, fears of Japan and such were rather justified. But it's been what, 70 years and a metric shitload of geopolitical changes? Pretty sure the whole buffer idea is a bit, shall we say, outdated.
The main reason for the existance of NK was to break up Korea and prevent a unified Korea from being an economic powerhouse dominating North Asia.
People look at NK today and its a basket case. But if Korea hadn't been broken up and that unified Korea had been under an economic management such as developed in South Korea, the agricultural wealth of the south and the mineral wealth of the north would have resulted in a nation which would be able to challenge even China, would have dwarfed Japan and would have been seen by the Soviet Union as a threat to their Eastern maritimes. South Korea has been doing pretty well industrially, great shipbuilding and other heavy industries. But thats nothing compared to what Korea COULD have been.
Consequently it was in the interest of all the regional powers, including the USA, to ensure that Korea was broken up.
For the Chinese, NK isn't a buffer in the normal sense of the world; its a handicap they are imposing on Korea as a whole.
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