bernie (05/04/83)
I am strongly in favor of a truly *defensive* defense policy, if only to make "Department of Defense" less Orwellian. The technical obstables *can* be overcome, and fairly easily at that; the result would be an effective way of ensuring our safety in the event that the "unthinkable" (Ha!) happens. It's certainly a much more worthwhile way of spending the megabucks now going to 'defense'. --Bernie Roehl ...decvax!watmath!watarts!bernie
gps@ihu1e.UUCP (Greg Stephens) (11/23/83)
Some of the statements made by Bruce Giles may be misleading.
I don't know about theirs, but our missiles have no self destruct
capabilities. The fact is, when they leave the hole there is no
way of stopping them so one had better be certain of what is going
on.
A former TITAN II crew member (373 SMS)
Greg Stephensgiles@ucf-cs.UUCP (Bruce Giles) (11/26/83)
> I don't know about theirs, but our missiles have no self destruct > capabilities. The fact is, when they leave the hole there is no > way of stopping them so one had better be certain of what is going > on. We have no self-destruct capability on our missiles????? (ok -- pun unintentional) Quick, bring the smelling salts! Seriously, I knew we had fools in Washington, but I find that incredibly stupid. Yes, I know there is the risk of the enemy using our self- destruct code to destroy our missiles before they reach them, but compare the potential lose from losing some of our missiles to accidently starting a nuclear war. Besides, I am only concerned about accidental launches. So what if the self-destruct message takes (say) 5 minutes. If each missile had a different code, and they could not be addressed simultaneously we will still have an effective deterent. Of course, this makes my argument for an ABM system (High Frontier style, incidently) uncomfortably even more pertinent. (I know right now that I shall have nightmares tonight). Any more disquieting news out there? Bruce Giles decvax!ucf-cs!giles (UUCP) UCF, Dept of Math, Orlando Fl 32816 (Snail) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- P.S.: In the *Orlando Sentinel* today (26 November) there was a cartoon remarkably similar to my argument. It shows a flying saucer above a collection of jagged rocks in space, with two aliens speaking. The brunt of the dialog was that immediately after the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. actually stopped the arms race (spurred on by *The Day After* et nausea) Kaddafy blew up the world. Hopefully it is a syndicated cartoon; I only glanced at it. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------