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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dennis O'Bell who wrote (96512)	4/27/2003 10:29:13 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

>>Nearly every one of these kinds of regimes is so rotten at the core, so corrupt that the likelihood of real enough scientific talent flourishing in order to do damage to the rest of the world is almost zero.<< I agree with you.

To: Dennis O'Bell who wrote (96512)	4/27/2003 12:57:30 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Cold comfort, but still. Though they can steal enough to succeed anyway, as the Soviets did with their atomic program. Considering how desperate Saddam was for success, for the Iraqi scientists not to have succeeded further does speak of at least a passive sabotage, I think. I remember asking my father when I was young, "Those experiments that Dr. Mengele did using human twins as guineau pigs, did he find out anything?", and my father replied, "No, the same ideology that told him he could use young children as experimental subjects also prevented from making any real discoveries." And today I still think that's likely to be right in 99.9% of all such cases. The fruit tastes of the tree.

To: Dennis O'Bell who wrote (96512)	4/27/2003 6:27:33 PM
From: epsteinbd	Respond to of 281500

NK is rotten all right, but their missiles still appear to be flying, and selling.

To: Dennis O'Bell who wrote (96512)	4/27/2003 9:40:35 PM
From: BigBull	Respond to of 281500

"I've often wondered if this is the only thing that has saved the human race in modern times." Me too. Then again, I think we just got lucky and made the right choices at the right time, and by the skin of our teeth. Hitler's racial theories led him to reject "Jewish Physics", thank God. Still, he did retain Werner von Braun and a whole slew of incredibly creative and competant aeronautics engineers which gave him the V2 and the Messerschmidt jet fighter. That fighter would have ruled the skies had it gone into large scale production. Fortunately, the Allies were far enough along in defeating him that he ran out of time. Whew! Likewise, the USSR, as imcompetent as it was, still managed to develop a bioweapons manufacturing capability on a vast industrial scale. Reading Judith Miller's "Germs" book on this subject really stunned me. She described large industrial production facilities supported by small cities of totally committed folks devoted to R&D and production that cranked out Anthrax and Botulinem by the ton. The R&D people were working on really cutting edge recombinant technigues that were yielding "Super Germs" that were frightening in their killing potential. Miller says that the Soviets considered their bioweapons program to be the Soviet version of the "Manhatten Project," and these guys did know how to "weaponize." Imo we got really lucky that the Soviets were so lousy at everything else, that containment worked, and that that system collapsed when it did. That system too - ran out of time. Whew! Again, we got lucky with Saddam. If you believe Hamza and others (hell, even Saadi admitted it) Saddam got this close to having a working nuke. Our luck was that Saddam launched his invasion of Kuwait before he got he enriched uranium. We don't exactly know how good or bad the regimes bioweapons program was or how he intended to use it's fruits but that point is now mute as Saddam too has run out of time. Whew! I guess one could say that in the case of Hitler - we "pre-empted" him. Still not in time to save 6 million Jews and countless others who perished under cover of his massive military might. "Containment" worked in the case of the Soviet Union because (among other reasons) there were just enough folks around who opposed the system and held firm together against it. As Ken Pollack pointed out, in encyclopedic detail, containment failed against Saddam leaving pre-emption as the only viable alternative. We are now in the process of determining what policies are most appropriate for the last remaining tyrannies who have love affairs with WMD's. Let's hope that it is not WE that run out of time, that we pick the right policies, and that we stay "LUCKY."