Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (3734)	1/27/2001 9:26:52 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

the Reagan administration found an application they had to match or somehow defeat: ballistic missle defense. If they had really thought about it, they would have realized that BMD was actually quite irrelevant to the strategic equation. It would have prevented them from launching a first strike, but MAD was already doing that. It would have allowed us to threaten them with a first strike, but anyone even vaguely familiar with American politics would have known that any such threat, in anything but a full-scale war situation, would not be carried out. With a working BMD, we could overthrow their installed regimes and they would be impotent. Ballistic missiles would not in any event be relevant to the third-world shell game. We had a hard time overthrowing their puppet regimes, or directly resisting their attepts to overthrow ours. The American public would not accept direct deployment of American troops in such situations, and the idiocy of the Kirkpatrick doctrine stuck us with proxies that were corrupt, incompetent, and primed for defeat. But we were not about to use nukes in such a situation, and that was pretty obvious to all observers. There would have been no need for them to use them either. It would have been stupid for the Soviets to confront us in an open attack on Europe, or a move on the Middle East, or in a nuclear confrontation. That would have been playing to our strength. They were quite successful in maneuvering us into standing behind a bunch of tinpot dictators, that was the place to lean. Most bang for the buck. Fortunately for us, they weren't smart.