janc@uofm-cv.UUCP (09/10/83)
As a conscientious right-winger, I SUGGEST WE STOP SELLING GRAIN TO THE USSR. Any takers? Didn't think so... -be For what possible reason would you want to stop selling grain to the USSR? Who does that help? What good does it do? What are you trying to acheive? Not only do I advocate selling grain to the Soviets, I advocate selling them anything they want to buy. Sell them grain. Sell them computers. Sell them heat-seaking missiles. What do we lose by it? Somebody sold them the blue- prints ages ago. So what if they use our own weapons against us in the Big One? If it comes to that, we've lost the game anyway. Responding to hostility with hostility just breeds more hostility. Most of the problems we have with the Soviets arise from mutual distrust. All these endless posturings and gibbering threats are counterproductive, and it is not as impossible to stop as it looks. All we need is enough balls to break with the paranoid tradition that has developed here. Jan Wolter -- University of Michigan
mat@hou5d.UUCP (09/14/83)
With regard to WHAT WE SHOULD DO, a friend came up with the nucleus of an exellent idea. Take the grain scheduled for sale to the USSR. Sell it at a somewhat higher price (with SOME credit if need be) to a consortium of impoverished developing nations, with the understanding that they are to arrange a PROFITABLE sale to the USSR. In fact, why don't we ALWAYS do this? Good for our farmers, good for the developing nations, and the USSR gets the chance to spend some of its gold and other wealth on the third world in a form other than weapons. Remember, the USSR is the worlds biggest or second biggest producer of platinum. Think of what the US clean air requirements and the Pt-base catalytic converter must be doing for the Soviet economt. Even if we are not buying Russian Pt, we must be pushing the world price up. As to the fact that the USSR ``has all the blueprints'' of our missiles -- don't bet on it! Oh, they get them eventually, but 20 or 30 months lead time helps. And if you read the 9/12 Aviation Week and Space Technology, you will get a tremendous sense of the effectiveness of US intelligence, for all of the damage it has suffered. And you get a sense of the incompetency that can be fostered by a beaurocracy in which everyone is afraid of both superior and subordinates. Of course, when the chips are down and these individuals are more scared of failure or loss of their identity as a people than they are of their own organization, they can be both tremendously resourceful and Quixoticaly valient. All of which is to say: Don't overestimate the USSR, but don't underestimate it either. They have outdone us in propaganda for the last two decades, after all. Mark Terribile Duke of deNet