Post #89,186
3/18/03 4:05:41 PM
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Why the US won't attack countries with nukes
It is too easy for the country that is going to be attacked to smuggle nukes out to deliver them to a target that the US cares about. If they think that the US is going to attack them immanently, there is no reason for them not to do this.
In the case of North Korea it may be possible for the country to drop bombs directly on a convenient target (Tokyo or Seattle).
Basically the modern version of Mutual Assured Destruction, where the amount of destruction needed by the smaller player is just enough pain that the superpower doesn't want to risk it.
If you think that this reasoning is wrong, then please explain why we aren't attacking North Korea.
Cheers,
Ben
"good ideas and bad code build communities, the other three combinations do not"
- [link|http://archives.real-time.com/pipermail/cocoon-devel/2000-October/003023.html|Stefano Mazzocchi]
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Post #89,189
3/18/03 4:09:31 PM
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Re: Why the US won't attack countries with nukes
Why isn't China blustering behind their longtime proxy?
Because they don't need to. They're going to kill us economically, as Khrushchev once promised.
-drl
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Post #89,190
3/18/03 4:17:17 PM
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Conventional Western Wisdom holds...
that by the time China is in a position to kill us economically, they will be us. At which point they won't bother because it would be bad for their own business.
I am not stating a position on this policy. Just that it is the policy assumption.
Cheers,
Ben
"good ideas and bad code build communities, the other three combinations do not"
- [link|http://archives.real-time.com/pipermail/cocoon-devel/2000-October/003023.html|Stefano Mazzocchi]
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Post #89,207
3/18/03 5:00:19 PM
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US current global strategy has China already contained ...
China Russia & Europe in order to grow or boom economically need two natural items - Water and Oil. Water to irrigate & grow food, Oil as the lifeblood of industry.
Water is not a problem for these countries (China gets too much in short bursts).
Oil: US has just engineered a stranglehold on 'Stans' oil (Oil rich region is the nth Stans, piping the oil thru Afghani-Stan avoids it having to pass into Russian controlled areas. US has a stranglehold on oil from the 'Americas' (ie Venezuela, etc:). US is withing weeks of securing a stranglehold on M.E. oil.
So in terms of superpower supremacy, any other budding superpower will really have to wrest control of a major source of oil, from the US. If super powers were to go to war, the one controlling the flow of oil has the best chance to choke of the industry & military of the challenger.
Economic WW2 (with US as incumbent & Europe led by France as challenger) looks like a hands down open mezzaire win to US.
As for China, as long as Taiwan is not integrated & Nth & Sth Korea split & Japan remains unmilitarized, US has many cards up her sleeve to use to destabilize China should that ever become neccesary. Also for China's boom to continue for any time, she *must* consume growing amounts of oil & like US does not have the needed reserves withing her own borders. With US having got control of the vast majority of oil, US can effectively control China's destinty to some significant degree (Hey China, you can grow but on our terms & only as long as you never try to usurp our world leadership).
As said once before, just watch National Geographic channel to see how we animals (ie Dog packs for QAD comparison), establish leadership and maintain it <g>.
Cheers Doug Marker
Spectres from our past: Beware the future when your children & theirs come after you for what you may have been willing to condone today - dsm 2003
Motivational: When performing activities, ask yourself if the person you most want to be would do, or say, it - dsm 2003
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Post #89,219
3/18/03 5:26:03 PM
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Digression -- Khrushchev
They're going to kill us economically, as Khrushchev once promised.
You would appear to be alluding to Khrushchev's famous "We will bury you" remark. This was widely reported in the American press at the time (1959) as though the Sovs had brigades of Stakhonovite shock troops, shovels at ready, poised to heap earth upon our helpless living forms. The truth, as you probably know, was tamer: Khrushchev in fact employed a Russian aphorism, considerably older than Marxism itself, the sense of which was "we will be there for your funeral," i.e., we will outlive you. It was rather a prediction of the outcome of the ideological pissing match in which his empire and ours were then engaged, and not a threat to entomb us before our time. As it turned out, of course, he got it bass-ackwards: the USSR was, to its vast surprise, the guest of honor rather than a satisfied onlooker when it came time to hold the obsequies, and a new era of American triumphalism was launched. (He said "Your grandchildren will live under communism." In fact, his son Sergei is now an American citizen. Then again, Eisenhower's granddaughter is married to one of the old USSR's senior rocket scientists. We may assume that both statesmen, forty years ago, would have found this state of affairs difficult to credit.)
Actually the Sovs were outproducing us late in their history in many of the indices (steel, concrete, traditional smokestack industries) K had in mind. Alas for Khrushchev and communism, the USA was already running in a different race by 1980.
As to China...they have lots of still-untapped potential there, and one of the few economies in the world presently firing on all cylinders. Of course, they also have a massive disenfranchised peasant population to whom the "New China" looks an awful lot like both the old ones. I suspect, though, that China will be a few decades addressing their internal issues before they undertake to eat our lunch.
cordially,
"Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist."
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Post #89,211
3/18/03 5:10:39 PM
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Using same logic, what about bio/chem weapons?
Yet we are about to attack a country with those... Even easier (at least equally) to sneak out of the country and inflict damage. Inquiring minds want to know. ;-)
Just a few thoughts,
Screamer
Living is easy with eyes closed
misunderstanding all you see,
it's getting hard to be someone but it all works out
it doesn't matter much to me
J. Lennon - Strawberry Fields Forever
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Post #89,218
3/18/03 5:25:05 PM
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I'd dispute that getting bio/chem weapons are easier to get
out. Bio weapons maybe, chem weapons no way. You need a lot of chem stuff to make an effective WMD; a few cups aren't going to do it, and handling it is always dangerous. Bio weapons can be small, but if you really want to go large you need quite a bit (anthraxing New York would require hundreds of pounds of the stuff if you wanted to really Get It Right). A nuke can be very small, and with adequate shielding very difficult to detect. Also, you can use a nuke as a football (well, only if you like broken toes maybe;) when it's not armed with no fear that you're going to bake yourself into the earth. That's definitely not true for chem/bio weapons.
It's even easier if you can infiltrate a medical equipment company that deals with radiology; they're allowed to transport radioactive material.
--\n-------------------------------------------------------------------\n* Jack Troughton jake at consultron.ca *\n* [link|http://consultron.ca|http://consultron.ca] [link|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca] *\n* Kingston Ontario Canada [link|news://news.consultron.ca|news://news.consultron.ca] *\n-------------------------------------------------------------------
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Post #89,220
3/18/03 5:27:23 PM
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Bio/Chem won't have the same impact as nukes.
Really, chem is hard to disperse over a large area and still be effective. You might get a subway car or two with chemical weapons, or maybe a block or two of people on their way home.
Bio's a little bit more insidous, but it's still counterable at some level via antibiotics, vaccines, and isolation of the infected populations.
Nukes, OTOH, leave a crater about a half-mile across, and one in a major city, well, let's just say the insurance underwriters wouldn't be too happy about that.
Not to mention the 1+ million people that got incinerated inside of 5 seconds. Nope, none of them are going to be much of anything any more, other than dust.
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music." -- Kristian Wilson, Nintendo, Inc, 1989
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Post #89,227
3/18/03 5:40:40 PM
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Basically agree with you and Jake except
our water supplies are extremely vulnerable to chem/bio. Wide dispersion, etc... and no need to transport arsenic and other "homegrown" chems. Just need to find an entry point a few hundred feet "south" of the water main coming from the water works...
OTOH, the premise that I was getting at, that countries with small nuclear arsenals would deter us, I believe speculative at best. My thinking is that we would want to go after countries with small arsenals before they developed large arsenals. :-) Of course, I'm sure I'm wrong...
Just a few thoughts,
Screamer
Living is easy with eyes closed
misunderstanding all you see,
it's getting hard to be someone but it all works out
it doesn't matter much to me
J. Lennon - Strawberry Fields Forever
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Post #89,242
3/18/03 6:06:22 PM
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Re: Basically agree with you and Jake except
our water supplies are extremely vulnerable to chem/bio. Wide dispersion, etc... and no need to transport arsenic and other "homegrown" chems. Just need to find an entry point a few hundred feet "south" of the water main coming from the water works... \r\n\r\n Well, homegrown chems would exclude the need to export the chemical weapons in question. Homegrown bio weapons (you can get anthrax from almost anywhere by going out and digging it up; you just need some knowledge) excludes the need to export biological agents too. \r\n\r\n In short, the real problem for the US is a domestic one, not an overseas one. \r\n\r\n OTOH, the premise that I was getting at, that countries with small nuclear arsenals would deter us, I believe speculative at best. My thinking is that we would want to go after countries with small arsenals before they developed large arsenals. :-) Of course, I'm sure I'm wrong... \r\n\r\n I'm not. However, Iran need not target the US to make the US think twice, they need only target the oil ports, pipelines, and capitals of allies... it's the destruction of Japan and S. Korea that N. Korea is holding over the US, not the destruction of the US itself. NB- their ICBM capability is as yet untested; they don't really have it yet. \r\n --\r\n-------------------------------------------------------------------\r\n* Jack Troughton jake at consultron.ca *\r\n* [link|http://consultron.ca|http://consultron.ca] [link|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca] *\r\n* Kingston Ontario Canada [link|news://news.consultron.ca|news://news.consultron.ca] *\r\n-------------------------------------------------------------------
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Post #89,241
3/18/03 6:06:07 PM
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'Immanent' - a Jungian typo ? ;-)
Of course you meant imminent
But immanent == inherent, operating within - we could run with. I believe it is immanent in the cabal of Fundamentalist crazies to indeed bring back The Domino Theory [see: Vietnam].
And 'Fundamentalist' may connote more than the usual One-True-God (Mine!) scenario, what with Wolfowitz, Rove and the other academics surrounding this dunce. These silver-tongued orators are easily capable of whispering sweet Power-filled encouragements into a Clean Mind (it's never been used much).
I 'trust' Woodward's assessment (on Charlie Rose, some months back) of the Crusader-mindset We All are now a part of. Dubya imagines he can fix the (world) starting with M.E., ignorant as he is of the Yugoslavia-style standoff of mutually despising tribes he is about to invade. Saddam's iron hand may have been the only termporary remedy for running this Euro-designed patchwork country.
Tar Baby just waiting for the suckers.
Balloon Going ^UP^
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