Good analysis Joe, that I'm sure that will be educational to many. A few replies...
First, we can probably agree that Trump doesn't actually believe in anything other than Trump. He's not a policy person. I see the American Iron Dome idea as being just a recycled version of his border wall scam, a very simplistic idea to fire up his simple minded base, purely a political tactic and nothing more.
What seems missing from Trump's proposal and your analysis is the following.....
None of this matters. Even if an American Iron Dome was technically possible and affordable, it wouldn't accomplish anything.
About 11 million shipping containers enter the US via our ports every year, and about another 11 million enter via land. Only a tiny fraction of these millions of shipping containers are inspected by any method.
Point being, if ICBMs were made obsolete, our enemies have plenty of other options for delivering nukes to America.
Let's keep going.
Nukes don't matter. If all the nuclear weapons on Earth were to magically vanish, along with all knowledge about them, what would happen next is that the great powers would take all the money they'd previously spent on nukes and reinvest it in other mass destruction tools like cyber war, biological weapons etc. In no time at all, we'd be right back in the same existential situation we are today.
So what then? Two possibilities:
1) Should we conclude that the modern world is simply too stupid to survive, we could turn our attention to the larger context kinds of issues that religions attempt to address. As example, we typically assume that death is the worst possible outcome for an individual or society, but there is actually no way to prove that, and at least some evidence like near death experiences argue to the contrary.
2) If we still have hope this civilization can be saved from itself, what would be required in this case would be to discard all the "realistic and reasonable" ideas that have consistently failed to end the threat from nukes for 75 years. We should be asking, what is "realistic and reasonable" about ideas, methods and perspectives that have never worked??? A key problem here is that those we look to as being expert on such matters can't afford to discard that which their expert status is built upon.
The bottom line may be that while we insist on developing revolutionary technologies, we decline to do the revolutionary thinking that such technologies require.
Thanks for injecting sanity into the discussion Joe. Excellent piece. I hope people actually read and understand it. (from an HDL expat, one of "Emmerman's guys")
Good analysis Joe, that I'm sure that will be educational to many. A few replies...
First, we can probably agree that Trump doesn't actually believe in anything other than Trump. He's not a policy person. I see the American Iron Dome idea as being just a recycled version of his border wall scam, a very simplistic idea to fire up his simple minded base, purely a political tactic and nothing more.
What seems missing from Trump's proposal and your analysis is the following.....
None of this matters. Even if an American Iron Dome was technically possible and affordable, it wouldn't accomplish anything.
About 11 million shipping containers enter the US via our ports every year, and about another 11 million enter via land. Only a tiny fraction of these millions of shipping containers are inspected by any method.
https://shippingcontainerlab.com/percentage-of-shipping-containers-are-inspected/
https://www.tsi-mag.com/seeing-the-unseeable-todays-cargo-screening/
https://blog.coleintl.com/blog/survival-guide-for-shipping-container-inspections-in-the-u.s
Point being, if ICBMs were made obsolete, our enemies have plenty of other options for delivering nukes to America.
Let's keep going.
Nukes don't matter. If all the nuclear weapons on Earth were to magically vanish, along with all knowledge about them, what would happen next is that the great powers would take all the money they'd previously spent on nukes and reinvest it in other mass destruction tools like cyber war, biological weapons etc. In no time at all, we'd be right back in the same existential situation we are today.
So what then? Two possibilities:
1) Should we conclude that the modern world is simply too stupid to survive, we could turn our attention to the larger context kinds of issues that religions attempt to address. As example, we typically assume that death is the worst possible outcome for an individual or society, but there is actually no way to prove that, and at least some evidence like near death experiences argue to the contrary.
2) If we still have hope this civilization can be saved from itself, what would be required in this case would be to discard all the "realistic and reasonable" ideas that have consistently failed to end the threat from nukes for 75 years. We should be asking, what is "realistic and reasonable" about ideas, methods and perspectives that have never worked??? A key problem here is that those we look to as being expert on such matters can't afford to discard that which their expert status is built upon.
The bottom line may be that while we insist on developing revolutionary technologies, we decline to do the revolutionary thinking that such technologies require.
Thanks for injecting sanity into the discussion Joe. Excellent piece. I hope people actually read and understand it. (from an HDL expat, one of "Emmerman's guys")