Are you nuts?! The very creation of missile defense systems is a roaring threat to the value of our western nuclear deterrent against that of Russia and the Chinese Republic. As long as our mutual destruction is assured there is no reason to worry about wars to come.
Hmmm last checked I was quite sane actually. That aside, if you understand the missile defense system as it works today, we are not the only ones who will have them in the years to come, most advanced nations will build them. Eventually the number of ABM rockets will outnumber the maximum quantity of warheads that could come in and/or the technology will advance such that ground-based X-ray or chemical lasers can melt them all in the sky. Advance further some years and no ICBM will be able to get through - we are not very far off now as we have the technology, just not the economics to make it real yet. It will likely be much Less than 100 years before ICBMs will be an outmoded technology and the economists will be happy to disconnect them when that time comes.
Why do we need a missile defense system? The current situation is fine, the cold war was even better, when the enemies of the world were devided in two, rather than the masses of factions that exist today, and, in various cases, are equiping themselves with the skills to build nuclear bombs and deliver them secretly and independently.
Because people fear nuclear war, and as long as that fear remains, there will be Americans willing to spend money on the hopes that it wont ever come true. Look at Japan today - as a Gen X or Y person, who could imagine that they would ever want to Exterminate us?! But they did, and they tried. Yet today I count many of my Japanese friends as "best friends", and I can't imagine how that war ever started. My point here is that you can't predict today who the enemy of tomorrow will be, and nor can you predict the kinds of technology that will be developed (or not developed) in the years to come. ABM is Insurance by any other name, and last time I checked, Americans like to have as much insurance as we can afford. It really comes down to the human factors like that in the end.
These are things to worry about, we should insure that nobody else in the world will ever, at any time, aquire the blueprints for a nuclear weapon, as it would be the end of world stability. That is our primary concern.
Do you _really_ believe that the plans for nuclear bombs can be kept secret? Look at the Pakistani scientist who sold the plans to N. Korea and still thinks it was a good idea. Who will be the next to cross that line? We can't say, but we would be fools to "assume" it wont happen again. The only smart strategy in the end is to assume that Eventually, most states will have them and we will need a way to defend against them (large and small). Against a world which we cannot predict, ABM is damn good insurance IMHO. Russia and China are both doing the same, China even shot one of its own satellites out of orbit last year to prove the point. Its not just the USA, ALL powerful nations will boast ABM to the maximum extent that they have political will and money to buy.
The precense of multiple thousands of nuclear weapons in our arsenal, is essential to leave the unpredictable balance from the platform of international toleration intact. What do you think would happen if the rate of nuclear weapons drops below the point of total mutually assured annihilation, or when defense grids are erected, capable of disarming incoming nuclear attacks? It would be end of the serenity that has reigned over the global relations for the last sixtyfive years.
Here we have Some agreement, but your forgetting about the fact that all those thousands of bombs are Very old now, and many of them are well past their service life. The US Congress _has been unable_ to pass the necessary legislation to modernize our weapons, and Los Alamos has been screaming and warning about it for well over a decade now. Russia definitely can't keep up their arsenal, Medvedev himself said exactly this during the recent Start II negotiations - and was part of the reason why both countries were willing to make such a Huge cut in ICBMs - they cost too much. So yeah, the days of multi-thousand nuclear bombs as a deterrent are numbered - regardless of the consequences. Read up on it all at http://www.stratfor.com/ if you want a free source that can teach alot about these things.
There would no longer be a reason detering nations from attacking each other with conventional weapons, world wars would erupt again as easy as they did from upon the first one. Do you really believe the fairly tale that the ceased fire between the superpowers was a result of appal at the massacre of World War II? Or a flash of compassionate altru?st extremism for mankind? Hell no, what in the sole history of the human race testifies of men's willingness to lower the weapons? Not one single occasion does come up in my mind. The only thing that keeps humans from annihilating each other completely is that their weapons in order to do so have grown so powerfull that they no longer offer a viable argument for world war. If this barrier were to fall, than world war's III and IV would come as quickly as tomorrow's sunrise, with many more to follow.
What I believe is that the future is a scary, un-predictable place that will be rife with local (smaller) wars and probably some big ones - but I cannot predict the future. All I can do now is follow the geopolitics of the world as closely as possible, and try to gain some level of understanding about what's going on. I've studied nuclear war in my past and my father is a scientist in the field - so I've learned a few things about the real from the hype, and I firmly believe that the era of the ICBM is coming to a close as a weapon of war between super powers. It will remain our club to the rest of the world to keep the middle and lesser powers from attacking us ever again, but I think the nature of the weapons will change enormously. One no longer needs Nukes to kill mass populations and terrorize nations.
Actually in my "madness", I think the worst weapon of war is Money. It is used as sword and shield, and is so nebulous that super powers can barely detect when it is being used as a mass weapon of war. But it is, and I think it will be the cause of many troubles ahead.
» Sun Mar 06, 2011 9:17 am 
Lets continue having some fun...
