----- Original Message -----
From: "John D. Giorgis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Brin-L" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, August 30, 2001 9:53 PM
Subject: Re: ABM Treaty
> Besides, I love how you've nicely made this a damned-if-you-do,
> damned-if-you-don't scenario. So Doug, do you think that we should have
> withdrawn from the ABM Treaty 5 years ago now? Or do you think we should
> wait to withdraw from the ABM Treaty until we have much greater confidence
> in the technology?
>
We should wait until we have done the enormous amount of ground work we can
and must do without withdrawing from the treaty. The idea of having a
workable system by the end of Bush's first term is bad engineering.
Let me point out a parallel with my old company. Management would announce
that we already sold a service, and we needed tools in the ground in 6
months. A real engineering effort would take about 18-24 months. But, we
were told that the reality was that we needed it in 6 months, and we better
do it or else.
Well, with jobs on the line, people cobbled something together that would go
downhole in six months. I was in on some of the early meetings, and we were
not allowed to talk about whether the measurements would be any good: we
were supposed to be focused on the reality of the management timetable. So,
prototypes were built, and sorta worked downhole, and then a production
"pilot build" was launched. Over and over there were 6 month projects to
fix the problem. Now, after I'm gone from the company, 6 years later, its
still not working right. But, the people who first pushed it had succeeded
in dumping it off on other engineers who were fired for lack of progress.
Why am I telling this story now? Because that's exactly what the missile
defense by '04 feels like. There is an artificial political timetable, and
anything that can be cobbled together to meet it will go up. Production
runs have already been penciled in, when major technical problems have not
been solved, even on paper.
I'll agree that we are living in a different world than we lived in 30 years
ago. I have already posted that I accept the fact that this can be
sufficient grounds for withdrawing from the treaty. But, since the treaty
has been the cornerstone of a successful means of reducing the risk for
nuclear war over the last 30 years, a conservative prudent approach would be
to delay any unilateral pull out until the last possible moment, instead of
artificially pushing testing that will require a pull out way forward of the
natural progression of an engineering project. To give an analogy, its like
scheduling the first systems test before half of the components are designed
on paper.
>
> Actually, Bush is not pushing for a space-based laser system at all......
> but you haven't exactly won many points for accuracy in this message so
> far, so I'm not surprised.
>
Well, Star Wars had multiple components, of which spaced based lasers was
just one component. Brilliant pebbles was another, as well as ground based
interception of incoming missiles.
> >1. Defense industry welfare/maintenance of a healthy defense
> >industry - If we don't maintain the flow of money to these
> >companies, they will wither as we have seen them do over the last
> >decade.
> >
> >2. Maintenance of forward progress in defense technology (closely
> >related to 1.) If we don't continue to innovate, we will lose our edge.
> >
> >3. A missile defense system would be ineffective as proposed, but
> >if tipped with nuke warheads they might well be very effective.
> >Just the EMF (?) from a nuclear explosion would probably knock out
> >the guidance systems of ballistic missiles within many km. Nobody
> >can talk about this of course because practically everyone on the
> >planet would throw a fit if that's what we said we were going to do.
> >
> >Please note that the above are only guesses based on speculation.
>
> Yeah, and the sincere desire to protect millions of Americans and their
> cities from nuclear blackmail, nuclear annihilation, or both had
> absolutely, positively, nothing whatsoever to do with his position in the
> very least. In fact, I betcha that it will be a cold day in hell before
> Bush, or anyother greedy, mud-grubbing, sanctimonious right-wing
Republican
> ever cares at all that Americans might die from nuclear weapons in the
> hands of the sort of brutal, petty dictatorships that usually commit two
> human rights atrocities before eating breakfast each morning.
>
Actually, if you look at those arguments, they all argue for real defense
concerns. Its been years since we have upgraded our missiles, and it is
possible that the companies responsible for such work will fold, required an
expensive time consuming startup. Arguments 1 and 2 address the risks in
letting a portion of our defense industry wither away.
Argument 3 addresses the possibility of actually having a space intercept
system that might work. I'll have to think about it, but I'm guessing that
Doug's idea of an EMF pulse wouldn't work from as large a distance as one
might think. Most electronics that are at a distance can be shielded easily
with just steel. Mu metal, which isn't that hard to get, has much better
shielding properties, by orders of magnitude. Further, the trigger for the
bombs does not have to be very complicated electronics...once could see
variations that would include mostly mechanical trigger mechanisms for
exploding the bomb.
> I honestly don't know what is more disturbing, the arrogance of your
> cynical straw-man characterizations, or the fact that they keep getting
> reposted every other week.
>
> JDG
>
> P.S. Was this a flame? You betcha. But if people are going to accuse
> Bush, and by extension, people like me who agree with Bush, of having the
> above motivations for their beliefs - moreover including a secret plan to
> detonate nuclear bombs in the atmosphere so as to maximally spread
> radiation across the planet Earth - then I'm going to flame them.
John, lets assume that the spaced based nuclear intercept actually worked.
If it was a real attack, it would save millions of lives, at a cost of a
small risk of increased cancer for people around the world. Remember, a lot
of bombs were set off back in the late '50s and early '60s, and there was
not a massive increase in cancer.
Indeed, even at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the overwhelming majority of deaths
were from the blast, not from radiation. If we have a scenario of an attack
from a small country, the 20 or so space blasts would have minimal effect on
the health of the world. Also, IIRC, even during the years of the highest
intensity of nuclear testing, the exposure from the testing was a small
fraction of background for people worldwide.
Finally, let me get to the cynicism you object to. I recall two Republican
presidents selling anti-missile systems that had next to no chance of
working as advertised as good solid systems: Nixon and Reagan. I'll agree
that Reagan probably believed in Star Wars, but somebody who sold it had to
know better. It was an open secret in the scientific community that the way
to get money was to write some half baked "Star Wars" application in one's
proposal and money would come. I was told by people who's friends got a lot
of money "it doesn't even have to be plausible."
Now, we are told that it was the USSR that we were really lying to and that
threatening them with a US first strike capacity in the near future was just
a clever bluff. I'm willing to agree that spending a lot of money on
conventional defense during the '80s made sense: it would allow NATO to
defend Europe without having to use nuclear weapons, but I cannot see how a
threat of a future where the US had first strike capacity would improve
stability. Someone sold the US (and probably Reagan) a bill of goods with
Star Wars. I can't believe that Nixon didn't know any better with his ABM
system.
So, having unworkable systems sold to the US twice, why should people
believe that a crash program to get yet another system in place before the
research and engineering is done is really a serious effort this time?
Especially when one has access to the politics involved in government
aerospace contracts?
Now, having said that, I certainly would not wish to imply that all people
supporting Bush's proposal are just interested in giving money to defense
contractors. I would guess that many sincerely believe the position of the
supporters of the new Star Wars. Heck, I would even be willing to give GWB
the same leeway I gave Reagan on this. But, somebody in the administration
should know better.
I
> personally can't imagine a greater insult than to suggest that Bush,
> myself, or anybody else would willfully design a system that would risk
> such extreme ecological damage for no greater purpose than to pay off
> buddy-buddy defense contractors.
What extreme damage? Have you sat down and done the calculations on the
radiation released?
Dan M.
