The Glade 4.0

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

Yeah right...

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The Dude abides.

Sheer idiocy.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

and obama soft ball lobs the national defense issue right to the republicans.

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

He probably just doubled the risk of a significant biological or chemical attack worldwide.

This idea of putting the nuclear genie back in the bottle is pure fantasy.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Haven't they been targeted at oceans for *years*... and isn't that pretty meaningless as it doesn't take much to repoint them?

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Holy shitsnacks!

He means if there were an accidental launch for the first time in 60 years, not that they're targeted there for the first time in 60 years. There has never been an accidental launch by anyone, although there have been a few tests that had unexpectedly high yields.

Targeting is pretty meaningless for anything other than safety though. It takes only a few seconds to a few minutes to type in new targets.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

This sounds as if it were taken directly from the milspec playbook.

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In time, this too shall pass.

I was thinking of Castle Bravo, specifically, although I don't think it was the only one.. just the most spectacular.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Isn't this basically declaring that we can't use nuclear weapons to retaliate against a terrorist nuclear attack since that doesn't involve a nation violating the NPT?

It's a little hard to say since he doesn't seem to be addressing non-state organizations. Really, none of it matters since they leave themselves an out of revising it whenever they damn well please.

As a practial matter, however, I have a feeling Obama would be hard-pressed to retaliate against a major Russian or Chinese nuclear attack, much less a terrorist one. I'm sure he'd weasel out of it with moralizations about "innocent deaths" despite the fact that any worthwhile nuclear attack would not only cause a ton of ours, failure to retaliate would basically amount to condoning future such attacks causing even more deaths.

This entire policy is moral cowardice dressed up in the clothing of the moral high ground.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I don't personally have a problem with anything contained in the paraphrased versions I have read, except the comment about not continuing development of nuclear weapons, if for no other reason that development also generally includes such factors as safety, long term viability, etc.

Of course, with all the success our orbital seismic weapon has been having in testing...

Oh, I have lots of issues with this situation, namely the fact that the Russians aren't going to comply.

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Perhaps I am missing something... what does that have to do with anything?

From what I understand, what Gates discussed yesterday was a shift to a more moderate policy on the use of nuclear weapons as a retaliatory strike. As it pertain strictly to that issue, I think its a good plan, though it means next to nothing in the grand scheme of things.

I am concerned about the freezing of development.

However, the START treaty is not related, except at the topic level, to this nuclear use policy.

Ladas:

Nah, Gates was talking about START all day yesterday. He made some troubling comments.

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I will have to do some reading on the START treaty. I haven't really been following that.

Ok, what am I missing in the new START treaty?

This is what I have been able to find (couldn't find an actually copy of the treaty draft).

1) Limits functional warheads to 1,550.
2) Limits deployed and reserve delivery systems to 800
3) Limits deployed delivery systems to 700
4) Annual exchange of missile telemetry
5) 18 annual inspections (this one is dubious without more information, but appears to be a continuation of the previous program)
6) Non-binding agreement about US missile defense system deployment (this one doesn't make a lot of sense from the little I read... Moscow insisted on a binding agreement limiting deployment, Obama agreed to a non-binding...)

Except for #5, I don't see a huge concern, other than the overriding concern with all treaties... will both sides actually perform as they agreed. In this case, I'm not sure it really matters much.

I'm not sure what troubling comments Khross is referring to, but the problem with any of these treaties is simply that equal numbers and equal restrictions are not necessarily equal.

Russian missiles, especially SLBMs tend to be less accurate than U.S. systems. This gives Russia an advantage when we start limiting numbers of warheads; when you limit the number of warheads and number of delivery systems it takes away our technology advantage in accuracy. With limited numbers of warheads, no missile will come anywhere close to its capacity in MIRVs. However there is no limit on the yield of the warheads, so the one or two that remain can be much larger. This overcomes an accuracy disadvantage because a larger warhead can knock out a missile silo within a larger circular error.

Second, Russia has avoided doing much int he way of ballistic missile defense research; although it maintains the Gorgon ABMs around Moscow, these are not continental defense in the way that the U.S. system is. Instead, Russia has focused on continuing to develop newer and better ICBMs and SLBMsand a new class of ballistic missile submarine, the Borei. This is largely for financial reasons; ballistic missiles are mature technology that just needs incremental improvements, while ABM systems are still largeyl in their infancy due to the idiotic ABM treaty.

In other words, the proopsed treaty is inherently favorable to Russia if it limits ABM systems in a significant way. If it does not, then its more or less equal because we can continue refurbishing our older ICBMs and SLBMs and submarines, accepting less older systems and smaller yields and putting ABM defenses in their place.

Any arms limitation treaty all the way back to the Washington and London Naval Treaties has attempted to draw false equivalences based on reltively artificial classifications (what exactly does a "delivery system" mean in this treaty? What is a "deployed" system? These questions harken back to disputes over ship tonnage measured loaded or empty) that the public generally does not grasp, and cannot be expected to grasp because of the technical details.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

As I no longer trust Barry to tell the truth about anything, I'm not worried about this proclamation. He will adapt it to whatever he feels needs to be done when the time comes, or if he is obliterated in the first strike, his successor will void it and wage the war.

I think he isn't expecting any nation to attack us in any manner we can't stop, shrug off or effectively retaliate without nuclear weapons.

Then again, he's a fool, we know that now. At least he left the option open for returning nuclear strike with nuclear strike.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones