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

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (30614)	10/1/2001 3:53:05 PM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

God doesn't allow killing if you believe that part of the Bible - Read the 10 Commandments. I didn't write them, God did supposedly. He didn't make exceptions in that particular location, but lots of other places seems to contradict that opinion of His. To me, the whole Word of God thing is on thin ice, now to your other point. If it was that easy to stomp out pacifists, then Buddhism would be dead long ago. Why wouldn't the forces that took down communism (economic malfeasance) not end up destroying it anyway? 20 years before anyone had heard of Afghanistan (other than the source for some hashish), my brother had a very good teacher who had been to the USSR. He said that the Soviets would eventually have MAJOR problems with their Islamic citizens (at the time, they were in the Soviet Union). Prophetic? Not hardly. A better question is would the Soviets built up an arsenal if they weren't chasing the might of our own? Just because we won that game of chicken, doesn't mean that it couldn't have turned out VERY differently? Ever hear of "Launch on warning"? Refer to the highlighted section below. I'm a technogeek and would never trust my family to such a system. The hubris of the people relying on such unearned trust is unimaginable. gwu.edu One of President John F. Kennedy's last recorded statements about nuclear strategy occurred during a grim briefing by the National Security Council's secret Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC) in September 1963. Analyzing the consequences of U.S. and Soviet preemptive nuclear attacks, the NESC study introduced U.S. casualty figures---30 million--that were higher than Kennedy had ever heard before. With the devastating U.S. losses from Moscow's response to a U.S. preemptive strike, Kennedy observed that such an option was "not possible for us."6 ... Although some looked favorably at the prospects of a launch-on-warning capability, others raised the same doubts that President Bush and others have reprised more recently, the danger of a false warning that could produce a terrible cataclysm. The false warning problem has never been a hypothetical one. During the Cold War and after, both the United States and Russia received mistaken warnings of attack. One of the most alarming incidents took place during 1980 when National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski received a middle-of-the-night phone call reporting that warning systems indicated a Soviet all-out attack of 2,200 ICBMs. Just before he was about to call President Carter, who would have had about three to seven minutes to make a decision, Brzezinski learned that other warning systems showed that there was no attack; it was a false alarm. Someone had inserted a tape for a military exercise into a warning system computer. The warning systems were finally accurate, but the danger and possibility of error was never more evident.8a The history of the launch-on-warning capability is a complex one and the declassified record is sparse, no doubt because of the issue's great sensitivity. Precisely when launch-on-warning became a specific option in U.S. nuclear planning remains classified. The documents that follow shed light on the purposes that led to the launch-on-warning option as well as the doubts about its propriety that were raised from the beginning. They include the first declassified discussions of the possibility of launch-on-warning as well the first confirmation that a specialized launch-on-warning option entered into the Single Integrated Operational Plan, the U.S. nuclear war plan, in 1979.