ARMS-D-Request@MIT-MC.ARPA (Moderator) (11/15/85)
Arms-Discussion Digest Thursday, November 14, 1985 5:53PM
Volume 5, Issue 20
Today's Topics:
Historical A-bombs
Re: Triad Deterrent and Interservice Rivalry
Nuclear Winter & Missile Basing
Acronyms again
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Date: Thu, 14 Nov 85 11:25:22 EST
From: dual!islenet!bob at ucbvax.berkeley.edu@MIT-MC.ARPA
Subject: Historical A-bombs
About the Pacific islands being inhabited or not, most of them were and
still are. The "higher" the island (the taller any mountains), the more
rain they tend to get, and the larger the population. Amount of fresh
water is usually the main factor limiting an island's population.
Successive waves of immigration over the last 1,000 years or so across
Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia reached virtually every island in the
Pacific. Generally, only the smallest, flattest and most barren islands
lack a local population.
People on the various islands were extensively employed by the Japanese --
building fortifications if nothing else during WWII.
Thus, the largest, most extensively defended islands (the best targets)
tended to have the largest populations (often outnumbering the Japanese
soldiers by quite a bit).
Whether this would have inhibited U.S. use of nuclear weapons during
the Pacific campaign is anybody's guess now.
However, if the U.S. had possessed such weapons at the time of the Billy
Mitchell raid, they just might have been used then.
On the other hand, had the Japanese possessed a nuclear capability at the
beginning of the war, they might well have used them here in Hawaii as part
of the attack on Pearl Harbor ...
Bob Cunningham {dual|vortex|ihnp4}!islenet!bob
Hawaii Institute of Geophysics, University of Hawaii
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Date: Thu, 14 Nov 85 17:01 EST
From: Jong@HIS-BILLERICA-MULTICS.ARPA
Subject: Re: Triad Deterrent and Interservice Rivalry
The diversity of the Triad isn't the problem; it's the size of
the legs. If only one service had been given nuclear weapons in
1945-50, we wouldn't have so many warheads now. Dwyer's point (I
think) is that the competition for more and better weapons was
interservice rivalry more than threat response.
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Date: Thu, 14 Nov 85 17:15:19 EST
From: vax135!cornell!kevin at lasspvax.tn.cornell.edu (Kevin Saunders)@MIT-MC.ARPA
Subject: Nuclear Winter & Missile Basing
[]
I'd like to raise the question of whether nuclear winter (and
to some extent, counterforce targeting) makes the basing of ICBM's within
cities a rational strategy. Besides making your civilians
"hostages" to this kind of aggression (in much the same way as
the US forces in Europe were considered as a "trip wire" in the 50's),
an attempt at a disarming first strike would be much more likely to
cause global calamity, inducing "rational aggressors" to look to
more profitable enterprises.
Alternatives to cities would include forests, coal mines, and
other areas containing natural resources which would burn and
produce soot after bombing.
Such a tactic would have some problems with security and expense,
but the expenses would certainly be orders of magnitude lower than
the cost of SDI, particularly when the cost of countering the inevitable
response to SDI is considered.
Sincerely,
Kevin Eric Saunders
kevin%lasspvax.tn.edu.cornell@cu-arpa
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Date: 14 Nov 1985 14:02:35 PST
Subject: Acronyms again
From: David Booth <DBOOTH@USC-ISIB.ARPA>
From: Jeffrey S. Gruszynski <jsg@AEROSPACE.ARPA>
Subject: Re: VMOS instead of krytrons
". . . My comment about SF . . . ."
". . . SEU could be prevented . . . ."
Please avoid acronyms that are not accepted into common usage.
If you must use one, define it first.
Last I knew, "SF" meant "San Francisco".
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End of Arms-Discussion Digest
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