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Politics : Homeland Security -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Snowshoe who wrote (414)	11/11/2001 6:21:53 PM
From: RocketMan	Respond to of 827

Well, I don't feel good having to live with a nuclear retaliatory doctrine, but it has kept us safe, as safe as one can be when there is enough nuclear material in the world to destroy it many times over. I think back at the Cuban Missile crisis, when I didn't know if I would wake up the next day, but Kruschev was deterred, and he removed his nukes from Cuba. If we would have just tried to defend ourselves from attack, which we had no ability to do (as we have none today), those missiles would have remained there. And if Castro had had his way, they would have been used. You asked about Jewish extemists, or let's say any other terrorist group setting off a nuke as a way of provoking our response. That's an excellent point, and our nuclear retaliatory doctrine has always required a determination of who attacked us. We can do this with missile firings (which undermines the rationale for a leaky missile defense), but a terrorist nuke poses an entirely different problem. From a homeland defense situation, we would have to come up with ways to identify the group who set off the nuke. Even though our intel agencies leave a lot of room for criticism, I would hope we can at least differentiate between a Bin Laden type of attack and that from any other group. To begin with, we already know Al Qaeda has the express interest, finances, and people to carry out the attack. They have as much as said so. There is absolutely no evidence of a Jewish or any other terrorist group having that interest, so if I can deter Bin Laden from nuking NY I'll do it, and take my chances on other terrorist groups for now. When the day comes that there are multiple terrorist groups with capabilities, and no way of determining the source of an attack, we will have to rethink our strategy. But if we can deter these guys for, say, 15, 20, 30 years, think about what we could do in that time to rid the world of nuclear weapons, or at least control all such material. This should be the goal of all civilized peoples, but for the time being we need to deter their use. P.S. I agree with your other thoughts, decentralize the economy, take out hussein, etc.