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From: ech@spuxll.UUCP (Ned Horvath)
Newsgroups: net.space
Subject: Re: High Frontier, nuclear terrorism, and other fun things
Message-ID: <488@spuxll.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 6-Jun-84 02:18:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: spuxll.488
Posted: Wed Jun  6 02:18:32 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 7-Jun-84 07:08:54 EDT
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HF anti-ICBM defenses are destabilizing only if they are effective!

How's that again?

Take an extreme example.  Stipulate that The Bad Guys have developed an
anti-missile defense that is 100% effective.  They are now in the process
of deploying, and will have sufficient capacity to take out The Good Guys
entire missile force in, say, two years.

Meantime, the Good Guys have the technology too...but the deployment is a
year behind the Bad Guys (it took a little while to steal it).

OK, Mr. Chief Good Guy.  In two years the Bad Guys are going to have, for one
glorious year, a first strike.  The best you can hope for is that they will
offer you generous terms of surrender.  The Cold War is over, and the only
choice you have is to surrender later or push the big red one while you still
can.  And the longer you wait the worse the imbalance...

The above is, of course, a fantasy.  By contrast, any anti-ICBM of high
effectiveness BUT LOW CAPACITY is a highly stabilizing device: an accidental
launch, or the isolated act of a madman, can be dealt with without "city
swapping" and similar lesser-of-the-two-insanities methods.

A true defender-of-man would give the damn thing, and a $10 Billion a year
budget, to the Swiss to build as many as they want, with the proviso that
they only use 'em on the guy who shoots first.  (I mention the Swiss
because they only make money when EVERYBODY survives, and they know it.
Give me enlightened greed any day, it is something I trust.)

Giving an anti-ICBM to a true neutral is a nice idea, since you can build
down offensive weapons unilaterally as the umbrella opens.  Hah, another
fantasy.

The bottom line on all this is that the worst thing you can do is overplay
your hand; if the other side THINKS you are about to have a first strike,
they may just take you with them.

In the meantime, an attempt to build the needed technology is good news for
we who make our living building neat widgets, and the end result is likely to
be more stabilizing than not (enough senior scientists have pronounced the
project infeasible to suggest, as a fine-tuning on Clarke's dictum, that
it is at least going to be HARD, which falls under scenario 2, not 1).

=Ned=