MG9G%CMCCTF@sri-unix.UUCP (06/28/84)
Beg to differ. If ICBMs are replaced by cruise missiles, that doesn't necessarily rule out nuclear holocaust. Certainly, at the present time cruise missiles carry smaller warheads than ICBMs, but only because they are designed with a different purpose. So the ALCM or the Tomahawk can only carry a 5KT(Not sure if that's true-but it's good enough for the sake of argument) warhead, while a Minuteman III carries 3 1.5MT warheads. Picture, if you will, a cruise missile the size of an F-14, and tell me that it will have a smaller warhead. What so many people seem to ignore or rule out when postulating plans for various kinds of disarmament is that any time you find a way to stop a weapon, someone, somewhere, finds a new way to use it. If ICBMs become obsolete, cruise missiles will fill the gap. When the US, or the USSR, surrounds their coastline with Phalanx CIWS to shoot down the cruise missiles, sommeone will come up with something else. And so it goes... Deej (mg9g@cmu-cc-tf) --------
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (07/04/84)
> at the present time cruise missiles carry smaller warheads than ICBMs, but > only because they are designed with a different purpose. So the ALCM > or the Tomahawk can only carry a 5KT(Not sure if that's true-but it's > good enough for the sake of argument) warhead, while a Minuteman III > carries 3 1.5MT warheads. Picture, if you will, a cruise missile the > size of an F-14, and tell me that it will have a smaller warhead. You don't even need to go that far. Remember that a lousy little 13-kiloton bomb demolished Hiroshima. When the Oppenheimer committee recommended against US development of the hydrogen bomb, one of their reasons was that there was no real need for it: fission bombs were powerful enough to meet all valid military requirements. -- Henry (why no net.arms-d??) Spencer U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry