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

To: Copperfield who wrote (122330)12/28/2003 9:34:17 AM
From: jttmab  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 281500
 
Maybe the best move is not to play

It would be if that were an option. But both sides have to agree to not play. And I don't see either side picking that option let alone both sides.

Inconceivably. Suppose the US decided to "not play". Wouldn't the game continue? You cannot not play.

Let's think about tic-tac-toe and global thermonuclear war....

Seemingly trivial, but a good logical thought. Let's drop down to Winning is not possible, only degrees of loss.

Is it even possible to control the degrees of loss? In tic-tac-toe there are a limited number of possibilities and well defined. In nuclear conflict, there are many possibilities, but bounded in some fashion, e.g., decimate Indonesia. In biological war, the degrees are unknown and unbounded in discrete steps or borders.

jttmab



To: Copperfield who wrote (122330)12/28/2003 9:41:16 AM
From: jttmab  Respond to of 281500
 
Addendum:

Afred Nobel thought that the world would come to peace when the cost of war was too high. He thought that his invention of dynamite would achieve world peace more likely than the efforts of the Nobel Peace Prize.

I'm not sure that he was totally wrong. Will we accept world peace when the price of war becomes to high? That's a TBD. WWI and WWII were not high enough. But he clearly grossly underestimated what cost of war was necessary.

jttmab


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