From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Mon Jul 16 2001 - 15:14:33 MDT
John Clark wrote:
>
> Mike Lorrey <mlorrey@datamann.com> Wrote:
>
> >> ME:
> > > Nukes are dirt cheap, during the cold war there were about 100,000 on this small
> > > planet and there could be that many again or more if this idiotic star wars thing gets built.
>
> > Says who?
>
> Vladimir Putin. He vowed that if we build this thing he will remove the single warheads on
> his rockets and replace them with MIRV ones just like it was back in the bad old days.
> MIRV is a horrible invention, it makes missiles more deadly but it also makes them more
> vulnerable as they sit in their silos because the other side has MIRV too.
> This encourages both sides to hit first.
I don't know where you heard this, but both sides still use MIRVs.
>
> >If an H-bomb costs $10 million,
>
> Today H bombs are essentially free, the only expensive part is the U235 and Plutonium
> and that has already been made. You only need a few pounds to make a bomb and
> there are thousands of tons of that crap around.
Listen, one of the cheapest devices in the US arsenal is a Tomahawk, so
much so that they eat em like popcorn, and they still cost $750,000 with
conventional warheads. The 50-150kt nukes made for the Tomahawk cost
another $1-2 million a pop, and that is cheap compared to an ICBM nuke
that ranges from 200-500 kt and comes with its own IRV to ride in.
This is not even counting the cost of the missile itself, which will
most definitely cost you abuot $10 million, back in the early 1980's.
Today, it would be more like $40 million or more per missile.
>
> >Lets say an H bomb can cause $1 billion in damage,
>
> Don't be ridiculous, the explosion of 4 tons of fertilizer caused that much damage in the
> World Trade Center, your estimate is off by at least 4 orders of magnitude.
> Not to mention that in seconds one bomb could kill more Americans than have died
> in all its wars put together, far more.
So solly, John. Hurricane Andrew caused $26 billion in damage over the
entire state of Florida. A nuke concentrates its power in a much smaller
area, thus causing far less damage. A few locations like New York may be
high value targets, but I said 'on average' which takes into account
those warheads that have an equal chance of hitting East Cumquat, Iowa.
>
> >and a country has 10,000 of them,
>
> In the cold war both the USA and the USSR had between 50 and 60 thousand, each.
Uh, no, the US had about 20,000 and the Soviets had about 30,000, tops,
at the peak, before either side even thought about sittind down at a
table.
And all of this picking nits, John, is truly beside the point. If you
truly had an argument, you'd use the methodology I demonstrated with the
actual data.
Moreover, you'd also have to acknowledge that Mr. Putin and the Russians
are about the last people on earth who can afford to waste even a
billion bucks on this stuff unless they sign onto our program. Russian
just cannot afford to 'build us into the ground' like you are saying. At
its peak, the total Soviet military budget was actually less than $100
billion, which took up about half its economy. They are in even worse
shape today and can't afford to keep their soldiers fed. What makes you
think that Putin's bluster is anything but that?
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