🚀 go-pugleaf

dnh@mfltd.co.uk (Des Herriott) writes:

>Karni06@aol.com (Karni06) wrote:
>>
>>> >* Ended cold war with help of star-wars trump card.   FACT
>>> 
>>> Crap.  The USSR's economy fell apart.
>>
>>Because we escalated the arms race to the point where they couldn't put in
>>the resources to keep up. FACT. Even Gorby and the old line Commies
>>acknowledge that the prospect of Star Wars arms race scared the hell out
>>of them, because they knew they were going to be goners.

>That's an empty argument.  The USSR already had enough nukes to destroy
>the world many times over; "keeping up" wasn't even necessary, though
>neither the Soviet nor the American military seemed to understand that.

>And Star Wars had already been shown to be too ambitious a project to
>be viable - even a 99% success rate is pretty hopeless when you've got
>several thousand incoming nukes.

This is way, way off the subject of bit.listserv.catholic, but I can't
resist. The argument presented above demonstrates a clear lack of 
understanding of strategic thinking. In order to prevent an attack, you
merely have to destroy the attacker's nerve. Read accounts of pre-Civil
War battles, and you'll see many references to "making a demonstration".
A "demonstration" was something that looked like an active defense or
attack, but was not. It made the opposition lose nerve, think twice,
give in to the nagging fear of doubt that success in that direction was
possible. The Star Wars defense did not have to be 100% reliable to be
effective militarily, because military men understand how unreliable
things are in war. If it was only 50% reliable (a figure that everyone
agreed could be reached) it meant that the attacker couldn't be *certain*
the targets he wanted taken out would, in fact, be taken out.  

Besides which, everyone has always been on about disarmament. It seems
to me that if you can guarantee 50% of the incoming missiles are destroyed,
you've just managed a 50% unilateral disarmament process for the *OTHER*
side. 50% of their weapons are essentially scrap metal with a rocket 
attached. Not too many weapons treaties managed that level of disarmament.

>The U.S. had very little to do with the collapse of communism - it was
>much more a case of popular discontent with the whole economic shambles,
>and the improvement of information spread (I wonder how much effect the
>Internet & computer networks in general had?)

Yes. Well. All I can say is that the people in the Communist bloc tend
to disagree with you. The one thing I *can* guarantee is that computer
networks had nothing to do with it. You got to have them before they
can be useful. They didn't. SDI certainly had a much larger effect on the
collaps of communism than did computer networks.  

>-- 
>Des Herriott, Systems Programmer  | dnh@mfltd.co.uk
>Micro Focus, Newbury UK.          | +44 1635 565354

Steve
-- 
Steve Kellmeyer             kellmeye@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu
"It is a very great poverty to decide that a child must die 
that you may live as you wish"           --Mother Theresa