|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Chuck Munson
||
|| dlawbailey wrote:
||
|| > Of course anti-nuke people (more dopey boomers) are
|| also idiots. We were
|| > safer under a heavily-armed nuclear standoff than we are now,
|| now that we've
|| > decided that war is consequence-free. And by the way, don't
|| talk to me how
|| > Gore would be better. Clinton sent rockets into downtown Khartoum,
|| > murdering people for no other reason than to distract us from Monica
|| > Lewinsky, and Gore was on board. At least these maniacs in Shrubya's
|| > administration don't make any bones about being vicious
|| whack-jobs. A Gore
|| > administration would be one long, continuous denial.
||
|| Sure, if you throw out that one tense week in 1963 and the hundreds of
|| false alarms that almost led to accidental nuclear exchanges.
||
|| << Chuck0 >>
I guess Cuba was bad for you guys but I was naturally relieved when they dismantled the nukes in Turkey as a result. The one that really made me an insomniac was the NATO preemptive strike policy and the Cruise-Pershing deployment in Europe. I have a very vivid memory of how hopeless things seemed back then so I'm not that worried about the current nuke tough talk. They're trying to resurrect batllefield nukes but in practice those are as useless as Carlyle's big bertha cannon. The US has ample conventional means for instantly wiping out massed enemy formations and battlefield nukes have too low a yield to take out entire theatres. Besides, who'd want to? As for deep penetration, the Pentagon is coming up with a new conventional humdinger practically every month. This nuke talk, like for star wars, is just hard sell for hugely expensive and totally ineffective weapons systems that benefit only the weapons-making dinosaurs. Re first use policy, you'll find that even in sim war games commanders overwhelmingly avoid it. Unfortunately, a marginal scenario is now conceivable where Russia and China are given advance notification by the US that it's going to nuke some peasants in a remote country but frankly, I don't think even Dubya with his (gently descending) approval ratings can afford the backlash.
Hakki