From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Thu Dec 02 1999 - 16:19:15 MST
Mirco Romanato writes:
> Real wars are not fought with every possible tool.
> ^^^^^^
> In real, modern, war there are limits.
In "normal" wars yes, but there is a runaway effect once one side
starts to lose. Military conflicts between nuclear powers will either
result in both parties backing off (damn likely, huh?), or escalating
into total war, especially considering the race condition of having to
destroy enemy's launch capabilities first. Deterrence has worked so
far (for less than a half century), but this is not a natural law. The
longer the time span elapsed under above boundary conditions, the
higher the probability of the checks and balances to become skewed and
eventuall fail. See the aftermath of the breakdown of the Soviet
Union, the revival of nuclear umbrella plans on the part of U.S. and
Russia and the advent of nuclear neopowers, especially China. The same
applies to biological weapons, only more so.
> Only an insane and stupid man (or group of men) will trepass them; because
> gain will overwelmed by loss.
There isn't exactly a lack of insane and/or stupid humans around. The
technical ability is, if anything, negatively corellated with social
skills. Geekdom is rife with borderline personality deficit cases. I
might be a highly competent nuke designer, but this doesn't mean I'm
the perfect man to marshal its use. The opposite, if anything.
> And insane and stupid man don't rule on organizated structures.
A couple decades downstream all you need is a single moderately
wealthy person with a garage setup to wreak global havoc. It is thus
of utmost priority to develop and deploy infrastructure for population
and environmental screening against molecular weapons of mass
destruction as well as capabilities for large-scale rapid
manufacturing and deployment of countermeasures against them. Of
course, such an infrastructure has the usual janusian properties of
being the perfect weapon, so arms race threats loom large again. Am I
having fun yet?
> The real problem are little groups of fanatics.
Hopefully, they will be incompetent fanatics.
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