No - actually the DPRK has acquired nukes because they really do need them to exclude the possibility of an attack by US/NATO.
They are following the same "nuclear deterrence" strategy already used by other countries, and with considerable success! The nuclear strategy is the real reason that, uniquely among official designated enemy countries of the US (the "axis of evil"), they have not been blockaded, attacked or even threatened with attack, and have even cut some deals with the US through purely diplomatic channels. They didn't get this treatment by being less "evil" than the rest of the "axis of evil", but by having nukes.
Iraq, on the other hand, was attacked precisely because they did not have weapons of mass destruction; ironically, given the official black propaganda put out by the US government. But if Saddam had had nukes, would he have been attacked? Not a fucking chance.
Some people here say "Kim is mad" etc, but this is frankly bollocks. You believe what Fox "News" tells you? I've no doubt they think Kim eats babies for breakfast. He is certainly an intellectual challenge for Americans with a "bourgeois liberal" mindset to understand (of course), but he should not be dismissed as a nutter, nor should the military strategists of the DPRK be considered fools. They are well capable of seeing the military challenge that faces them, and they know that nukes will give them a guarantee of US non-aggression. With strategic nukes they will be able to reduce their conventional army and concentrate their productive forces once again on improving living standards, without any military risk.
Akhenaten's reign was a period of great turmoil. The old polytheistic religion and the associated political regime was overthrown and a populist monotheistic religion was established with a more centralised political authority in the hands of Akhenaten and his queen Nefertiti.
The whole political project ended in defeat, though, and their opponents ensured that the monuments of the period were systematically destroyed. Recently quite a lot of fragments of images and text have been collected (they were sometimes used as fill in later buildings) and reassembled. See The Akhenaten Temple Project.
I recommend to anyone interested in the story of Akhenaten, the short novel "Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth" by Najib Mahfuz, the famous Egyptian novelist and Nobel-prize winner.
Wasn't there something like 4000 deaths in a few weeks in Victorian-era England due to coal smoke and a bad inversion?
You're probably thinking of "Great Smog of London" which was actually in 1952! Not all that long ago really. 4000 people were killed during the smog event itself, but it's thought that about twice that number died from it even after the smog cleared; a total of 12k deaths. This event definitely spurred on regulation of air quality in Britain.
Also, would not the blimp be vulnerable to attack by another balloon?
A stealth balloon with minimal radar signature which could home in on such a thing and disable it could be built for a fraction of the cost of the spy blimp, I'm sure.
I also installed Easy-Peasy (despite the bogus name) a couple of days ago. It all worked. It is far better in every way than the horrible Xandros distro the eee shipped with.
So by using the lignin as a "plastic" we are in fact sequestering the carbon and preventing it from entering the atmosphere. Sounds good.
One slight problem.
The lignin is burned to provide fuel for the pulp making process, if we no longer can burn the lignin for energy we now have to add a new source of energy to the process. Like fossil fuel.
Or like solar, or like wind, or nuclear, or some other non-carbon based energy source.
Quite correct - someone please mod this up. The extra layer of abstraction you get by using CNAME records in your DNS really helps. A server's "real" name should not be the name of it's functional role.
It's not as effective as that. It's more like locking your garden gate, or (yes! a car analogy!) locking an open-top car.
would make people pretty nervous actually, because it effectively says "I can attack you with impunity".
Not to pick nits, but you contradict yourself here
No, I don't think so?
First I said that an ABM system is relatively ineffective against a surprise attack (which might be delivered in a truck). i.e. it's a poor defensive measure because it is a counter to a threat which is already adequately countered by MAD, and because it is no counter at all to a surprise terror attack delivered by non-ballistic means.
Secondly, I pointed out that the ABM shield is relatively effective as part of an aggression against a small state, since it would allow the US to attack e.g. Iran with a fair degree of impunity from an instant ballistic counter-attack. Of course, assuming that Iran had nukes, and that it was attacked by the US and chose to retaliate with nukes, it could still deliver its nukes by non-ballistic means (e.g. by smuggling), but if it had already come under attack from the US, this would have become a lot harder to organise.
I don't think there's a contradiction between those two statements, is there?
being able to shoot down a small number of missiles from a belligerent state is a capability that I believe all nations should have
Well, I do understand that. The reason I disagree, and think this capability is a dangerous thing, is that it would give the US, Russia, and other strong states, the ability to attack weaker states with impunity.
If I've understood you correctly, you do agree with that analysis - that the ABM enhances an aggressive capability vis-a-vis a weak state - but perhaps you simply think that enhancement is a good thing?
The next generation (Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, etc.) might not worry about self destruction, and you see this as a reason to continue the MAD idea???
No... you've misinterpreted my comment. The bit you quote left out some context.
I was agreeing that it would be a worry if players in this game lost the wisdom to keep their fingers off the button.
But I wasn't asserting that it would be good to hang on to MAD despite the loss of that wisdom. On the contrary, I meant to imply that the abandonment of MAD might actually cause the loss of that wisdom - i.e. would induce protagonists to press the button.
While an effective missile shield is rather destabilizing to MAD, it's much like locking your house when you leave
It's not as effective as that. It's more like locking your garden gate, or (yes! a car analogy!) locking an open-top car.
... to protect against thieves, and I doubt you consider that to be an aggressive posture.
I don't think this is an adequate analogy either. Destructive missiles which might destroy your city are not really analogous to burglars who might steal stuff from your house while you're at work.
I think if you want to make an analogy which works at the level of individual persons, you need an analogy with crimes of violence. The USA developing a ballistic missile shield would be more like a very heavily armed person taking to driving around in a armoured personnel carrier. That's the kind of thing that would make people pretty nervous actually, because it effectively says "I can attack you with impunity".
* only USA protected * both Russia and USA protected * neither protected * only Russia protected
Obviously you're an American, which is why you consider it best if the USA is protected and Russia unprotected, but from other parts of the world the view is a bit different:-)
It seems to me that either scenario in which one side is protected and the other not is actually the WORST case, because this unbalanced situation is likely to lead to the protected side launching an attack.
From my point of view, the best case is the case least likely to lead to war, and that, I believe, is the case where neither side has a comprehensive defense.
Maybe the enemy doesn't build so many weapons. Maybe they see our defense system and decide they'd rather spend effort on their own defense system.
Maybe they are so in awe of your hugely expensive system of unknown effectiveness, that they decide to follow you down that path, deciding that they can quite easily outspend the USA. No... I don't think so. Much more likely, they will take much cheaper asymmetric measures. If you look into it you will find that in actual fact, the military strategists of your nation's opponents have already learnt that an asymmetric response is the way to go.
Maybe we succeed in ignoring the dummy warheads (BTW, good ones are NOT cheap), or we just pay the big $$$ to hit everything.
Dummy warheads don't have to be cheap in absolute terms - but they are far cheaper than (reliable) interceptors. They only have to look like real warheads, whereas interceptors have to actually work.
It might not be a winning strategy, but raising the white flag right from the start is certainly a losing strategy.
I'm not suggesting raising a white flag... I'm just amazed that people will back this strategy for what appears to be no better rationalisation than "at least we're doing something!". Putting a tinfoil hat over your head would also be doing something, and it would have the advantage of being much cheaper.
Much more sensible though would be to spend more of this limited financial resource on countering actual threats, not ICBMS.
We might ward off an attack from a strong enemy. We can build a damn large system if we wish.
You can build a large system if you chose, but it's not a winning strategy. Why not? Because the system is asymmetrical. Maybe you can build a system that could reliably intercept 10k warheads (though I seriously doubt it), but a hypothetical strong enemy can much more easily build a system that will launch 10k warheads along with 100k dummy warheads. Building a dummy warhead is cheap, building a missile interceptor is expensive. So if you try to play that game against a strong enemy, you will lose.
There are those who would argue, that military tech guarantees peace.
Of course, if your game has wackos instead of rational players, all bets are off.
Even when the Cold War started to heat up, the US and the USSR were wise enough to keep their fingers off the buttons.
I am not so sure if the Next Generation Nuclear Players will have this same wisdom.
This is why a missile defense is such a dangerously stupid idea.
The advantage of the old nuclear doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) lay in the fact that it was assured. There was no "risk" about it - if the US attacked the USSR then the US would also be devastated (and vice versa). With a missile defense on the other hand, there's less certainty, and hence greater risk.
Even if the shield is not actually very effective, there's still an increased possibility that the US could escape massive retaliation, and this can only cause the Pentagon to be more likely to take the risk. This is obviously bad for the population of "designated enemy countries" such as Iran, but it would also be a very bad idea for the population of the US, because it is a very high-risk strategy. Furthermore, since the military strategists of other countries know that a "missile shield" may make the Pentagon more trigger happy, they will naturally take steps to counter the perceived threat. In the face of this threat, it's actually rational for the USA's designated enemies to deploy nukes, develop ICBMs, with MIRVs, with lots of "dummy" warheads, etc, as well as to prepare asymmetric measures which completely side-step the missile shield.
it is a system to fend of retaliatory attacks from nations who are experiencing US military aggression already
True! The so-called "missile defense" system is in fact aggressive rather than defensive in posture. It is the shield you need to have in one hand while you club somebody with a weapon held in the other hand. It's useless to ward off attack from a strong enemy (unless you have launched a devastating surprise attack against them already), and it's useless against an sneak attack even from a weak enemy. Frankly the idea that Iran, DPRK, Venezuela, etc, would attack the US with ICBMs is simply ludicrous.
Slashdot Mirror
No - actually the DPRK has acquired nukes because they really do need them to exclude the possibility of an attack by US/NATO.
They are following the same "nuclear deterrence" strategy already used by other countries, and with considerable success! The nuclear strategy is the real reason that, uniquely among official designated enemy countries of the US (the "axis of evil"), they have not been blockaded, attacked or even threatened with attack, and have even cut some deals with the US through purely diplomatic channels. They didn't get this treatment by being less "evil" than the rest of the "axis of evil", but by having nukes.
Iraq, on the other hand, was attacked precisely because they did not have weapons of mass destruction; ironically, given the official black propaganda put out by the US government. But if Saddam had had nukes, would he have been attacked? Not a fucking chance.
Some people here say "Kim is mad" etc, but this is frankly bollocks. You believe what Fox "News" tells you? I've no doubt they think Kim eats babies for breakfast. He is certainly an intellectual challenge for Americans with a "bourgeois liberal" mindset to understand (of course), but he should not be dismissed as a nutter, nor should the military strategists of the DPRK be considered fools. They are well capable of seeing the military challenge that faces them, and they know that nukes will give them a guarantee of US non-aggression. With strategic nukes they will be able to reduce their conventional army and concentrate their productive forces once again on improving living standards, without any military risk.
Akhenaten's reign was a period of great turmoil. The old polytheistic religion and the associated political regime was overthrown and a populist monotheistic religion was established with a more centralised political authority in the hands of Akhenaten and his queen Nefertiti.
The whole political project ended in defeat, though, and their opponents ensured that the monuments of the period were systematically destroyed. Recently quite a lot of fragments of images and text have been collected (they were sometimes used as fill in later buildings) and reassembled. See The Akhenaten Temple Project.
I recommend to anyone interested in the story of Akhenaten, the short novel "Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth" by Najib Mahfuz, the famous Egyptian novelist and Nobel-prize winner.
Actually, Harvard mandated Open Access in 2008.
Dirty communists!
You're probably thinking of "Great Smog of London" which was actually in 1952! Not all that long ago really.
4000 people were killed during the smog event itself, but it's thought that about twice that number died from it even after the smog cleared; a total of 12k deaths.
This event definitely spurred on regulation of air quality in Britain.
Saurischian
Also, would not the blimp be vulnerable to attack by another balloon?
A stealth balloon with minimal radar signature which could home in on such a thing and disable it could be built for a fraction of the cost of the spy blimp, I'm sure.
Please mod parent informative. I certainly had never heard of them.
25kW is about 33.5 horsepower; a bit over a million foot-pounds per minute. About a quarter of a furlong-cwt per hr, more or less.
Curse you, AC; that brought on a nasty coughing fit
Good point. I don't think many cameras run Linux, but if they did, I would expect them to be next.
I also installed Easy-Peasy (despite the bogus name) a couple of days ago. It all worked. It is far better in every way than the horrible Xandros distro the eee shipped with.
The keyboard is still too small though.
Yep, a stimulus package "of its own" is correct.
Americans are to be stimulated to:
Hurrah!
You can do a left turn with an ion thruster. It's just that you have a very, very, wide turning circle.
Or like solar, or like wind, or nuclear, or some other non-carbon based energy source.
Quite correct - someone please mod this up. The extra layer of abstraction you get by using CNAME records in your DNS really helps. A server's "real" name should not be the name of it's functional role.
I tried to watch it, in all honesty; I really tried, but I had to stop watching half way through ... it was just too awful to bear.
No, I don't think so?
First I said that an ABM system is relatively ineffective against a surprise attack (which might be delivered in a truck). i.e. it's a poor defensive measure because it is a counter to a threat which is already adequately countered by MAD, and because it is no counter at all to a surprise terror attack delivered by non-ballistic means.
Secondly, I pointed out that the ABM shield is relatively effective as part of an aggression against a small state, since it would allow the US to attack e.g. Iran with a fair degree of impunity from an instant ballistic counter-attack. Of course, assuming that Iran had nukes, and that it was attacked by the US and chose to retaliate with nukes, it could still deliver its nukes by non-ballistic means (e.g. by smuggling), but if it had already come under attack from the US, this would have become a lot harder to organise.
I don't think there's a contradiction between those two statements, is there?
Well, I do understand that. The reason I disagree, and think this capability is a dangerous thing, is that it would give the US, Russia, and other strong states, the ability to attack weaker states with impunity.
If I've understood you correctly, you do agree with that analysis - that the ABM enhances an aggressive capability vis-a-vis a weak state - but perhaps you simply think that enhancement is a good thing?
The next generation (Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, etc.) might not worry about self destruction, and you see this as a reason to continue the MAD idea???
No ... you've misinterpreted my comment. The bit you quote left out some context.
I was agreeing that it would be a worry if players in this game lost the wisdom to keep their fingers off the button.
But I wasn't asserting that it would be good to hang on to MAD despite the loss of that wisdom. On the contrary, I meant to imply that the abandonment of MAD might actually cause the loss of that wisdom - i.e. would induce protagonists to press the button.
While an effective missile shield is rather destabilizing to MAD, it's much like locking your house when you leave
It's not as effective as that. It's more like locking your garden gate, or (yes! a car analogy!) locking an open-top car.
... to protect against thieves, and I doubt you consider that to be an aggressive posture.
I don't think this is an adequate analogy either. Destructive missiles which might destroy your city are not really analogous to burglars who might steal stuff from your house while you're at work.
I think if you want to make an analogy which works at the level of individual persons, you need an analogy with crimes of violence. The USA developing a ballistic missile shield would be more like a very heavily armed person taking to driving around in a armoured personnel carrier. That's the kind of thing that would make people pretty nervous actually, because it effectively says "I can attack you with impunity".
From best to worst:
* only USA protected
* both Russia and USA protected
* neither protected
* only Russia protected
Obviously you're an American, which is why you consider it best if the USA is protected and Russia unprotected, but from other parts of the world the view is a bit different :-)
It seems to me that either scenario in which one side is protected and the other not is actually the WORST case, because this unbalanced situation is likely to lead to the protected side launching an attack.
From my point of view, the best case is the case least likely to lead to war, and that, I believe, is the case where neither side has a comprehensive defense.
Maybe the enemy doesn't build so many weapons. Maybe they see our defense system and decide they'd rather spend effort on their own defense system.
Maybe they are so in awe of your hugely expensive system of unknown effectiveness, that they decide to follow you down that path, deciding that they can quite easily outspend the USA. No ... I don't think so. Much more likely, they will take much cheaper asymmetric measures. If you look into it you will find that in actual fact, the military strategists of your nation's opponents have already learnt that an asymmetric response is the way to go.
Maybe we succeed in ignoring the dummy warheads (BTW, good ones are NOT cheap), or we just pay the big $$$ to hit everything.
Dummy warheads don't have to be cheap in absolute terms - but they are far cheaper than (reliable) interceptors. They only have to look like real warheads, whereas interceptors have to actually work.
It might not be a winning strategy, but raising the white flag right from the start is certainly a losing strategy.
I'm not suggesting raising a white flag ... I'm just amazed that people will back this strategy for what appears to be no better rationalisation than "at least we're doing something!". Putting a tinfoil hat over your head would also be doing something, and it would have the advantage of being much cheaper.
Much more sensible though would be to spend more of this limited financial resource on countering actual threats, not ICBMS.
You can build a large system if you chose, but it's not a winning strategy. Why not? Because the system is asymmetrical. Maybe you can build a system that could reliably intercept 10k warheads (though I seriously doubt it), but a hypothetical strong enemy can much more easily build a system that will launch 10k warheads along with 100k dummy warheads. Building a dummy warhead is cheap, building a missile interceptor is expensive. So if you try to play that game against a strong enemy, you will lose.
This is why a missile defense is such a dangerously stupid idea.
The advantage of the old nuclear doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) lay in the fact that it was assured. There was no "risk" about it - if the US attacked the USSR then the US would also be devastated (and vice versa). With a missile defense on the other hand, there's less certainty, and hence greater risk.
Even if the shield is not actually very effective, there's still an increased possibility that the US could escape massive retaliation, and this can only cause the Pentagon to be more likely to take the risk. This is obviously bad for the population of "designated enemy countries" such as Iran, but it would also be a very bad idea for the population of the US, because it is a very high-risk strategy. Furthermore, since the military strategists of other countries know that a "missile shield" may make the Pentagon more trigger happy, they will naturally take steps to counter the perceived threat. In the face of this threat, it's actually rational for the USA's designated enemies to deploy nukes, develop ICBMs, with MIRVs, with lots of "dummy" warheads, etc, as well as to prepare asymmetric measures which completely side-step the missile shield.
True! The so-called "missile defense" system is in fact aggressive rather than defensive in posture. It is the shield you need to have in one hand while you club somebody with a weapon held in the other hand. It's useless to ward off attack from a strong enemy (unless you have launched a devastating surprise attack against them already), and it's useless against an sneak attack even from a weak enemy. Frankly the idea that Iran, DPRK, Venezuela, etc, would attack the US with ICBMs is simply ludicrous.