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Politics : Al Gore vs George Bush: the moderate's perspective -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (2120)	10/11/2000 1:42:47 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10042

a national missile defense is by definition a defensive system that threatens no one, and neither Russia nor China should be concerned about it unless they are planning to launch missiles or use them to intimidate. Hackett misses the point by a rather enormous margin here. The NMD program is not meant to prevent the launch of missiles or the use of missiles to intimidate. Both of these are already quite effectively prevented by the existing MAD doctrine, which assures that those foolish enough to launch missiles will in short order become toast, along with their entire countries. It's a system that sounds, well, mad, but it has proven very effective. The purpose of NMD, at least in the eyes of the rest of the world, is to remove the US from the MAD loop and strip other nuclear powers of their deterrent capability, thereby giving the US free reign to use its own nuclear capability to intimidate others. This naturally worries the Chinese in particular: the Russian deterrent force is large enough to overwhelm the NMD system now planned; the Chinese force is not. I'm not 100% against the NMD concept, but we have to acknowledge that it does destabilize one of the only effective equilibria the world has achieved in the last 50 years, and we do have to seriously consider the possible effects. For one thing, the system would be an engraved invitation to smuggle nuclear weapons into the US and deploy them as a deterrent-in-place, which would raise command-and-control challenges far greater than those we now face.