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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.
I'm here all week :-)
You don't know what "bankrupt" means. It refers to liquidity; you are bankrupt when you can no longer meet your current obligations, which the US government has never been close to.
You also seem to be of the delusion that the US spends a lot of money on public assistance. It spends very little. For what we paid for the Iraq war (not including nation building expenses) we could fund US public assistance programs at the current levels for 219 years.
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It would be amazing if either of you pointed to a source.....
I guess facts can't be used in political conversation.
I guess you haven't seen one of the televised debates lately.
That's why Bill went to Monica.
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.
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I guess you haven't seen one of the televised debates lately.
You mean those reality tv shows?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Except your wrong
Nevermind that public assistance isn't only an expense, it also boosts the economy and eases the burden on hospitals because people can afford to eat and heat their homes so they don't get sick.
The Iraq war tally will easily reach 6 trillion plus we have a ton of Veterans we aren't taking care of which is costing more and more money to deal with. But by all means, let's keep making more veterans, put more people needlessly into harms way to accomplish what?
Weapons got us into this mess, if we hadn't armed people during Iran Contra there would be a hell of a lot less weapons in the area and if we hadn't toppled the democratically elected Iran the whole region would be a lot more stable.
I have no idea why Reagan is held up as some kind of standard for Presidents. From what I can tell he united Germany, that was about it from what he did that was good. I'm sure there is more but trickle down economics started with him which was horrible, he helped solve Childhood hunger but then cut taxes so we couldn't afford it anymore. He removed our ability to deduct credit card interest rates on taxes. I would say he probably started the battle with the middle class.
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.