From: John Clark (jonkc@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Mon Jun 12 2000 - 23:21:53 MDT
Everitt Mickey <evmick@pnv.net> Wrote:
>I've been lead to beleive that it has ALWAYS been an "arms race"
>between precisely defense vs offense.
That's true but the race is over now and offence won, 4 reasons why.
1) The target of an ICBM, large population centers, is stationary and
several thousand square miles in area; the target of an ABM is
moving at 12 thousand miles an hour and is several thousand
square feet in area. Advantage offence.
2) The target of an ABM is worth several million dollars, the target of an
ICBM is worth several trillion dollars. Advantage offence.
3) In a age of H bombs and massive overkill, a high failure rate in my
fleet of offensive ICBM's is perfectly acceptable. Your anti-missile
system must be virtually 100% effective or it's not worth building.
At the peak of the cold war each side had about 50,000 warheads,
even if you shoot down 99.9% (a ridiculously optimistic figure) that
means 50 H Bombs would explode over American cities. In a matter
of minutes far more people would die than in all our wars put together
and the country would no longer be a superpower, it would no longer
even be a country. Advantage offence.
4) Your astronomically complex defensive system can never be tested
in the real world conditions it's supposed to operate in to see if it really
does what you hope it will. It's as if you looked up the hardware
specifications of a computer in a book and then, never actually seeing
the machine, wrote an entire operating system for it and expect it to
work perfectly the very first time you ran it. On the other hand I can be
pretty confident that my offensive ICBM fleet will work as expected
because I can test the parts and coordination among the parts of the
system is not nearly as important as it is with your ABM. Advantage offence.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
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