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

To: tejek who wrote (150586)	8/28/2002 4:48:13 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1585081

Tim, I said 3x. True but I said "even with nukes", and also that we didn't have enough to blow up the planet (meaning once). And I am unclear why you would exclude our nukes when these claims are made They should be separated from conventional weapons. Most of the money goes into conventional weapons and nukes have decreased in recent years not increased. (actually spending on conventional weapons has also gone down) If you are wondering why we have to buy more weapons then whether you realize it or not you are talking about conventional weapons. You could argue that since we have tons of nukes why do we need a powerful conventional army, but nukes are less flexible and less useful except as a deterrent, particularly a deterrent of WMD use (esp nukes) against us. If we are going to do things like Dessert Storm/Saber and the campaign in Afghanistan we need conventional weapons. If we really did have enough nukes to blow up the world three times and we got them and could maintain them for free we would still need a good sized defense budget for conventional weapons. Right.......our military strength kept bin Laden from attacking. Deterence doesn't work all the time, that doesn't mean its useless. If my car failed to start one morning I would not decide that cars are useless and that I should just walk. We're not talking homeowners insurance at a $100 per month. We are talking billions of dollars spent annually of which many millions are wasted needlessly. 1 - It is something less then $100 per month per person. 2 - The principle is the same even if you are dealing with a larger amount. If we wait until a specific need arises to create or build up our military then we might not have a strong military until after the need passes. Tim