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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (139521)	10/2/2001 9:07:30 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1580481

"We have to develop the technology." Uh huh. That we do. The point that Carl and his buds were trying to make is that the probability of developing what Reagan was talking about was pretty close to zero for the near future. The sad, sorry fact is all it takes is one perfectly placed nuke in an exo-atmospheric burst to bring the country to a complete halt. Since no one is perfect, three or so will do the job. Now the old Soviet Union could put literally thousands of warheads on an attack vector towards the US. With technologies that we are likely to see anytime in the future, we might, on a really good day, take out 90% of those warheads. Maybe less, maybe a little more. With math that even you can handle, you can see that there is more than the three warheads needed that will likely get through. Yeah, okay, we can make life miserable, if not impossible, for the originator of any such attack. But we are not going to survive either. The problem is that the same number of people on the globe are going to survive whether we build SDI or not, in the case of an all out nulcear attack. In a more limited attack, SDI might make a difference, but it hard to imagine a viable, limited attack scenario that uses ballistic missiles. Sure, you can imagine a bin Laden launching a single, or even half a dozen, nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles, but as recent events have proven, there are cheaper ways to achieve those ends. Yeah, North Korea or Libya could do the same, but that seems to be a rather brain dead way to commit national suicide. let's face it, SDI is nothing but a multi-billion dollar night light for the next several decades. If that is what you want, why should everybody else pay for it? Yes, the research should go on. If there is an actual, rational mission for it, then we can discuss it. But as long as it stays in the realm of "night light", forget it.