How Quickly Will the Latest Arms Race Accelerate? 197
First time accepted submitter tranquilidad writes "Russia was concerned enough about the U.S. development of a Prompt Global Strike (PGS) capability in 2010 that they included restrictions in the New Start treaty (previously discussed on Slashdot). It now appears that China has entered the game with their 'Ultra-High Speed Missile Vehicle.' While some in the Russian press may question whether fears of the PGS are 'rational' it appears that the race is on to develop the fastest weapons delivery system. The hypersonic arms race is focused on 'precise targeting, very rapid delivery of weapons, and greater survivability against missile and space defenses' with delivery systems traveling between Mach 5 and Mach 10 after being launched from 'near space.'"
Pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
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America, the most powerful military force in the world, runs on butthurt. Without butthurt how would we play the victim of worldwide terrorism instead of...
the financier.
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We have three countries running on that. Don't forget that China wants its empire back and some revenge at Europe due to the Opium Wars and some avenging for Japan's occupation. Russia wants the USSR back where it had most of the world in an iron grip.
Of course, China is smart... once they get into space, they can just shoot metal rods from orbit... which land with so much kinetic energy that a nuke isn't necessary to level a city.
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Do you think the fear of being bombed at 2am is not a terror?
Wtf does this have to do with communism?
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Wtf does this have to do with communism?
Nothing, but he's replying to a parent that said the USA was the financier of terrorism.
The USA is not, Saudi Arabia is.
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Take your pick of definitions for terrorism. Unless it includes "people belonging to a religion I don't like" You'll find no shortage of examples funded by pretty much every major government in the world. And considering the number of extremist dictators the US has put and kept in power in order to maintain our interests in key regions, a whole lot of the terrorists resources are going to have ultimately originated with us.
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But these are intercontinental missiles.
Much of the R&D of these new designs can be used by the space agencies.
a Mach 10 missile that can launch from the US and hit any where in the world in minutes... Could mean a faster way to launch rockets into space and achieve faster space speeds, meaning you could take a year off from the trip to Mars.
R&D is a good thing, even if its intentions are not noble, but we expand our knowledge, and hopefully the good uses will outweigh the bad uses in time.
Re:Pointless (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, not really. Going fast is easy - it's going stably hypersonic that's hard, and that's only a relevant concept while inside an atmosphere, not in space. About the only weapon-oriented research that would be applicable to space travel are fuels with higher specific impulse, and point-defense systems that can vaporize incoming debris as easily as RPGs. And force-fields I suppose, but it seems like we're going to need to develop some completely new scientific principles before those become a viable research option.
The trip to Mars is slow not because the rockets aren't strong enough, but because the fuel is too heavy to carry the quantity you'd need to get to Mars quickly. And in general as the specific impulse (newton-seconds per kg) of a propulsion system increases, the absolute thrust (Newtons) tends to decrease, making the sort of propulsion systems you'd want for interplanetary transport utterly unsuitable for rapid-deployment missiles. Witness ion drives, the best propulsion system we have for interplanetary rocketry - for a given mass of drive and fuel they can accelerate to *much* higher speeds than chemical rockets, but it takes much longer to get there. That's a winning combination when you're talking about having to cover the millions or billions of miles between planets, but the Eart is only a few thousand miles around - interplanetary drives will barely even be getting warmed up in that time scale. Even a hundredfold increase in absolute thrust - enough to make the entire solar system readily accessible to manned exploration on a timescale of months, would still be insufficient to even get a rocket off the ground - .1G acceleration for weeks on end will get you to insane speeds, but only if you don't have ten times that force keeping you in place.
Moreover, the single biggest cost of surface-to-orbit rocketry, the one area where missile technology is more likely to be applicable, is in the cost of the rocket itself (>90% by some estimates), making reusable rockets the watchword of the day, a concept utterly inapplicable to a system designed to explode as violently as possible at it's destination. As for the potential of cheaper disposable tech, getting to orbital altitude and back down again takes only a few percentage of the amount of energy it takes to actually reach orbital velocity once at altitude - if powered by magical massless pixie dust the missile would still have to be over ten times larger to reach orbit, add the diminishing returns of real-world fuel and you're likely talking at least 20-50x larger. And that's just to deliver the same tiny warhead - thanks to those diminishing returns on fuel delivering a useful payload of 10x the mass is going to take considerably more than 10x the rocket. It's not impossible that we might make some missile-based advances in rocketry that will scale to orbital rockets 500x as large, but it's unlikely they'll hold a candle to the advances that 1/100th of the funding would have returned on actual surface-to-orbit rocketry research.
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How long would it take to get to Mars if one could snag the 'go fast' required quantity of fuel out of space as one went?
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Ah %$#@!, after carefully doing the math and typing out all the details and I accidentally hit the back button. The high points were:
It depends entirely on the acceleration of your engine. A Hellfire missile hits about 10Gs peak acceleration, if our magic rocket could keep that up indefinitely (and avoid liquifying it's occupants), then it would take only about 13 hours to reach Mars, assuming we spent the second half of the trip slowing down again so we don't arrive as a post-impact fine mist. Doing so t
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Ah, thanks. That really puts it in perspective!
So it sounds like (assuming some magical energy source) about 1200kwh per kg would be a decent compromise, 3-4 weeks in transit being not so onerous. Even 54 days in cramped but modern comfort doesn't sound bad compared to back-when ocean crossings.
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Almost, but things don't scale linearly.
Basically for a given voyage energy requirements scale linearly with acceleration (Energy = mass * acceleration * distance)
while travel time scales with the inverse square root of acceleration. ( time = 2 * sqrt(distance) / sqrt(acceleration)
rearranging the second we can get
. acceleration = 4*distance / time^2
which we can combine with the first to get the time-versus-energy equation
. Energy = mass * [ 4*distance / time^2 ] * distance
or
. Energy = 4 * mass * distanc
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Ah, okay, I see... so it's feasible enough, if only there's some reason to GO there.
I'm wondering what might be on Mars that has enough value to propel someone to do it. (Now that we don't have the Cold War driving it.)
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No I didn't say that.
Get off you Pot Smoking Democrats are always right and republicans are always wrong close mindedness.
The previous Space exploration was a direct cause from WWII rocketry, mostly used to try to bomb the US.
Computers made were used to calculate projectile trajectories.
GPS was used to track and guide troops.
The Internet/Arpanet was used as a network that could withstand a nuclear attack.
Then we have Jet aircraft...
A ton of stuff that we use daily is from original military application.
The m
Re:Pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, every nation building new nuclear weapons could maybe scrap the idea and work on space exploration, fusion power, renewable food production, anagathics, or a hundred other good ideas that might actually be of some use instead of a one-time "End it all in case of national butthurt" button.
Probably 97% of humans agree with you. The problem we all face is the persistent 3% that does not.
Re:Pointless (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, 97% of readers (including me) agree but when actually in the decision making seat it's different. What I mean is that defending what we already have is more important than advancement. We always work hard to protect what we have. A good example of this is insurance. We buy insurance on the most ridiculous things because we fear losing in the end. The reality is that statistically you probably would come out a winner if you didn't buy insurance or extended warranties. It's just what we do.
My 2 cents.
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No. 97% of the humans you talk to on a regular basis agree with the parent post. Millions and millions of people who vote do not. The members of Congress who oppose funds for space exploration and fusion power get reelected by those people.
Bye bye, aircraft carriers (Score:2)
work on space exploration, fusion power, renewable food production,
You know what's even worse than working on developing weapon systems? Working on 90 years old weapon systems.
Aircraft carriers were state of the art during WWII, today they are as obsolete as the USS Arizona was in 1941.
What's the point is spending hundreds of billions of dollars in building sitting ducks that can be taken out by a single hypersonic missile?
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The Gerald R Ford construction cost was 12.8 billion.
While it would be a sitting duck in nuclear war between superpowers it wouldn't matter, because everything else would die too.
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Hmmm....when did the Taliban or Saddam take out any U.S. aircraft carriers? Someone is not forwarding me the memos and I'm getting fairly pissed about it.
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Just remember the H.M.S. Sheffield [wikipedia.org]. Big boats are indeed sitting ducks, they don't move fast enough to evade an incoming missile / torpedo and are unable to shoot them down. They can't run and they can't hide.
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Aircraft carriers can project power and control airspace. Hypersonic missiles can't.
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What's the point is spending hundreds of billions of dollars in building sitting ducks that can be taken out by a single hypersonic missile?
Because the people you target with carriers don't have hypersonic missiles. The people with hypersonic missiles get threatened with MAD.
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2) As long as Russia has nukes you do NOT want to use nukes. You do not want to even look like you are launching ICBMs. So what are your options if you want to attack another country?
So for a country that wishes to "project power" aka attack other countries, aircraft carriers are a requirement.
They are stupid for defense. Plenty of other things are better bang for buck for def
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Even if true, how many nations out there have hypersonic cruise missiles?
This whole mentality of "it's obsolete because one of our potential enemies has something to counter it" is very much obsolete itself. Militaries of many countries these days are actually adopting new prop-driven assault aircraft based off WW2-era designs, because they are effective enough against Taliban and the like, can operate from very rough airstrips, and are cheap and easy to maintain. Are they obsolete? Not really, since they'r
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In nearly all 'unrestricted' exercises among allies (meaning the submarine's capabilities and tactics were not nerfed a priori) the submarines almost always get many hits with almost no sub losses or detection.
They don't talk about this in public much, but it's true. Modern torpedoes have excellent guidance and are very hard to detect. They can be launched dozens of kilometers away, and the submarine has half an hour to an h
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I tend to doubt the nuclear detonation angle - maybe some extra neutrons irradiating the crew before they drown, but I'd be interested in anything reputable you have to point me at.
However, no question that a torpedo hit on a ship either sinks it, or at least makes it irrelevant to the battle. Carriers can't launch aircraft loaded with bombs if they're dead in the water, or underwater. Maybe they'll get off lightly-loaded aircraft for patrols, or helicopters to go chase the sub.
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Correction, the Chinese Communist Party, after sitting out WWII and letting Chiang Kai-Shek and his army do the fighting, is using WWII for nationalist fervor because the Party has no good reason to exist and the Party members know it....unless you count living like a leach on the Chinese people and funneling profits for state-owned companies into their pockets and accepting any and all graft in support of their continual protection rackets.
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Hey, sounds like they've got a lot in common with the US and EU governments! Why are we worried about fighting again?
Oh right, the best part about being king is crushing any other leaches that might challenge your position and then taking their stuff as spoils of war.
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Or, every nation building new nuclear weapons could maybe scrap the idea and work on space exploration, fusion power, renewable food production, anagathics, or a hundred other good ideas that might actually be of some use instead of a one-time "End it all in case of national butthurt" button.
Great idea, then my country with our nuclear weapons can come it and steal your advancements.
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Of course your conveniently forgetting the largest period of relative peace the world has ever known came about because of nuclear weapons hanging over peoples heads. I'm fairly certain the cost of another world war would pretty quickly outweigh the costs of nuclear arms.
Let's not forget that tens of millions were killed in world wars before nuclear weapons were around and countless millions that have been slaughtered with conventional arms. I know it kills your hyperbole, but reality is like that.
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Yes [wikipedia.org], there [wikipedia.org] has [wikipedia.org] been [wikipedia.org] complete [wikipedia.org] peace [wikipedia.org] since [wikipedia.org] the [wikipedia.org] two [wikipedia.org] atomic [wikipedia.org] bombs [wikipedia.org] were [wikipedia.org] dropped [wikipedia.org] on [wikipedia.org] Japan [wikipedia.org].
That's not even all of them, I just got tired of pasting links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States#1950.E2.80.93present [wikipedia.org]
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It sort of makes sense if by "relative peace" GP meant "we didn't have another world war with a death toll in tens of millions".
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If I were less lazy I'd take the numbers from this page and make a graph of people dying from warfare over time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll [wikipedia.org]
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Well, scrolling down that list, it seems that the least bloody conflicts also tend to be the more recent ones, with the notable exception of WW1, WW2, and various civil wars (usually in to-become-communist states) around that same time period.
Re:Pointless (Score:4, Informative)
Forget it.
Boys like to compete with each other by comparing dick sizes. This is just the grown up version of it. Big boys playing with their big dicks of mass destruction.
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But those are useful and don't kill people (well, F1 kills one from time to time, but they know their risks).
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Reality interferes... (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
The reality is that the US and west never stopped waging the Cold War. We broke the understanding with Russia and pushed NATO eastward, even incorporating parts of the former USSR into NATO.
Then we tore up the ABM treaty and put anti-missile bases in Eastern Europe claiming we were doing that because of Iran. The Russians didn't find that laughable claim one bit funny and understood that the west was seeking to negate their nuclear deterrence.
NATO has been used offensively both inside and outside of Europe and shows that it has nothing to do with "defense".
We portrayed a rag-tag group of Muslim fundamentalists as some sort of existential threat to the US and west, but now the US gov't has made a "pivot" and is portraying China as militarily aggressive because they are squabbling over some worthless islets with their neighbors. It's clear that China is the focus of a new Cold War.
It's clear the US is in search of a "new enemy" because that's what keeps Americans distracted from how much we waste on our military and our continuing economic decline.
"Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy." -- Ambassador to the USSR and US State Dept. strategist George F. Kennan.
Re:Reality interferes... (Score:4, Interesting)
True about NATO expanding after the fall of the Soviet Union. However it is also true that every nation which entered NATO practically begged for it. They had their taste of Warsaw Pact life and wanted their best chance of avoiding a repeat. So what do you do when newly freed people ask to join your alliance -- tell them they are shit out of luck and first targets in Putin's next attempt to rebuild the USSR? The answer is probably, 'yes' from a cold, self interested view of the original NATO members, but it doesn't seem quite right.
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However it is also true that every nation which entered NATO practically begged for it.
I think it's important to remember some of the skulduggery that we did in Europe -- for decades. Remember, we essentially bought elections in France and Italy in the late 40s to prevent communists from being elected into power; we beamed divisive ethnic propaganda into Yugoslavia for decades. Hell, even as late as the 1980s we had our CIA work with European rightists to conduct flat-out terrorist actions against our own NATO allies in a strategy of tension [wikipedia.org] designed to push western European gov'ts to the pol
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South Ossetia is a part of Georgia as Kosovo is a part of Serbia.
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When the Soviet Union sank, the US military-industrial establishment declined in size significantly. The Russian one of course collapsed but is coming back, of course to a lower level than before.
"Then we tore up the ABM treaty and put anti-missile bases in Eastern Europe claiming we were doing that because of Iran. The Russians didn't find that laughable claim one bit funny and understood that the west was seeking to negate their nuclear deterrence."
In truth that position is actually laughable. The anti-m
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The anti-missile bases and technology are quantitatively and qualitatively utterly inadequate to make a flyspeck of a difference. Russia knows this.
They likely do. But as we've wasted well over $100 billion on our so-called "Star Wars" anti-ballistic missile system over the years, and even more money on the anti-missile systems we're developing with/for Israel, I'd bet the Russians fear the day that we finally get it working.
Consider that after the breakup of the USSR, Russia has engineered and deployed substantial new nuclear weapons and delivery systems. The US has not.
I think this is misleading. Of course Russia has developed new ICBMs. First, this ignores what may or may not have been in the developmental pipeline. But more importantly, it ignores that we did unilaterally break the ABM treaty a
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Now now, those islets are hardly worthless - so long as we control them China is nicely bottled up and we don't have to deal with them as equals in the global theatre of war - if they can't get their weapons away from their borders without us seeing and intervening before they get anywhere threatening then the weapons aren't actually worth much. Give China an unrestricted sea border and in a few decades if their military begins to compete with our own they will be every bit as dangerous as we are. They're
See the larger picture: U.S. government corruption (Score:3)
The U.S. government has engaged in violence each year for more than 100 years, to make a profit for a few. Anyone desiring more information about that can, for example, read these highly rated books:
Overthrow: America's century of regime change from Hawaii to Iraq [amazon.com]
by Stephen Kinzer
The brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, [amazon.com]
answer -- not the USA (Score:5, Insightful)
"Go ahead and ask your friendly neighborhood Chinese exchange student about whose nation should be humiliated in the next 20 years" -- if by that you mean, which nation do the Chinese still resent the most, which nation has killed the most Chinese people ever, and which nation the Chinese government is most using as a bogeyman to whip up nationalistic fervor? -- that would be Japan. By the way, if the US ever pulls out of the western Pacific or looks like it is going to, Japan will field nuclear weapons within in six months, followed almost simultaneously by S. Korea, and maybe Taiwan.
Focused on rapid delivery (Score:5, Insightful)
Rapid delivery of lots of money into giant contracting company's pockets.
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Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
You need some way of draining excess capital and manpower if you want to stay on top of your population.
Military industrial complex (Score:4, Interesting)
In the USA that would, without question be true.
Remember, President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned the U.S. about the "military–industrial complex" in his farewell address. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_complex [wikipedia.org]
And, just as he foretold, it has come to pass.
The internal economic situation in China however, is different. I do much work in China and have a lot of close friends there. Several are actually pretty high up in the PRC Army. There is certainly corruption, but it is a different kind. This is more of the bribes kind which is common in the east.
As I heard from my friends, regarding new weapons, someone will think of something that they want and say to such and such department...build this thing now and do not fail to build it.
There is a strange mix of capitalistic and communistic economic policies at play and so it is hard to gauge cost overruns like in the west. In any case, weapons development is not about filling the pockets of your brother in-law but about fulfilling the request from the military. Now, if you are in charge of the project, that is not to say your brother in-law does not now have a good chance to fill his pockets.
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Not really, nukes are cheap, and an armada of these weapons would be cheap as well. The expensive part of the U.S. military is the personnel. Large companies cannot exist on DoD dime, they are too big. The smaller ones won't be developing these kinds of weapons. The U.S. military structure passed you by about 30 years ago.
What the fuck is wrong with people? (Score:3)
Collective insanity? Is there no defense for that?
Re:What the fuck is wrong with people? (Score:4, Insightful)
Insanity -> mad -> M.A.D. -> mutually assured destruction. There's definitely a connection here.
It's not like this should be news to anybody. Humans have been throwing rocks at each other for thousands of generations. We've just gotten better at it lately.
When Vermont Attacks (Score:4, Interesting)
Who here believes that Vermont would maintain a huge hypersonic nuclear missile delivery system?
The danger to human society is these huge nation-states. The only rational thing to do is to reduce the size of these states to the point where they don't pose such risks. Yeah, that's a hard planet-wide challenge, and we have a few of them to contend with, but articles like these show that there's still far too much effort going into the wrong projects.
It might take more courage to make these required changes than currently exists within humanity.
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Then we could have hundreds of little wars, like we had in the Middle Ages and Wars of Religion - think of the fun if Vermont and New Hampshire went to war, while California was busy conquering Oregon, And New York trying to annex Jersey.
Extend that all over the world, and we could have great fun adding to the history books...
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Then we could have hundreds of little wars, like we had in the Middle Ages and Wars of Religion - think of the fun if Vermont and New Hampshire went to war, while California was busy conquering Oregon, And New York trying to annex Jersey.
Yes, just look at all the little wars going on all over Europe - why Switzerland is massing its forces on the border of Liechtenstein as we speak!
Seriously, though, the only reasons nations go to war are economic calamity or power-aspirations of the government. The more s
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And how exactly are you going to enforce that? Even assuming you could wave a magic wand in the air and make it happen tomorrow, as soon as a few of those small states realize that they can gang up and steamroll over others together, you basically have your large empire back.
Indeed, what you describe has existed historically in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, and elsewhere in similar circumstances. And, in all cases, those small states were eventually unified into something bigger. Heck, all the
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Do you think Vermont could go to the moon or build the LHC?
For every terrible action a large nation could do that small ones can't, there are strides of progress that large nations can make that small ones can't.
No, and that's OK, because we don't always need nation states to do great things.
Since the Vermonters won't be sending their wealth in to the military industrial complex to build ever-faster planet-destroying weapons, they'll have more of that wealth to invest in ways they see fit. Some of them wil
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North Korea and Iran are both relatively small nation states capable and interested in building this type of missile system. North Korea would like to end its stalemate with South Korea whether the US was there or not. In Iran's case it is to attack a country some distance away with which it shares no borders.
The model works well here too - break each of them up into smaller units until they no longer present a threat.
Both groups of people would be much better off without 'their' States.
This generation is spoiled. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody remembers the cold war, except the old fogies. I'm an old fogie now, I guess.
Look kids - every day there are thousands of nuclear missiles aimed at cities in an uneasy truce to ensure that our governments maintain control. It's easy to pretend power doesn't matter, but let's be clear: Power is everything, and the power of the western world is enforced under threat of nuclear annihilation if we're messed with.
That's never going to change, and it's better to accept it and deal with it than pretend China and the USA and Russia will one day magically extinguish Prometheus' flames.
I hope they enjoyed the time not worrying about the bomb. As global energy resources (OIL) get tight, you'll see more of this type of thing starting up until the war is on again.
How'd that line go? Oh yeah. Judgement Day is inevitable.
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Nuclear weapons are what ended WWII.
Oil production hasn't even peaked yet. Why are you already talking about a decline?
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We are all going to die (well, the planet) in a nuclear holocaust when the Sun ages.
Why do anything, ever?
Because it's fun. Certain things our out of our control, but they should be in the back of our minds. Schools have done a poor job reminding students all those missiles are there, ready to kill Billions with the turn of a key.
I'm a fun guy at parties. Honest.
Why? Natural resources. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yay, another Cold War! (Score:2)
Yay, another Cold War! Now we can rebuild our economy!
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Yay, another Cold War! Now we can rebuild our economy!
Let's borrow money from the Russians to do it with, they're the only suckers who we haven't borrowed 2 trillion dollars from, yet.
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missed chances (Score:4, Funny)
Poor 3dfx, "hypersonic GLIDE vehicle" would have been a much better name than Voodoo 3.
Taiwan (Score:2)
The 3rd Straight of Taiwan crisis put a giant butthurt on China.
I would say a LARGE part of their military build has to do with preventing any such humiliation like that from happening again.
Think of what people in the US would be doing if something like that happened off the shores of North America.
This is a very bad idea (Score:3)
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/near-launching-of-russian-nukes [history.com]
Now what if everyone has the new fast weapons which cut your decision time from minutes to seconds?
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Re:When will it come to a screeching halt? (Score:5, Insightful)
It was Einstein...
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
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"I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth — rocks!" -Albert Einstein
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WWIII was fought with proxies. The Soviet Union lost.
WWIV appears to be being fought with printing presses and currency pegs, so far.
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You're using a very loose definition of war. War is different from competition. In competition the goal is to dominate. In war the goal is to destroy.
Re:Arms Race? What a maroon. (Score:5, Insightful)
America, with dozens of aircraft carriers and thousands of jet fighters and bombers, is extremely well prepared to fight WWII.
Just about seventy years too late.
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To be fair, America did a fairly good job the first time around.
Two kinds of loser talk (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the 90s a business student told me we needed free trade with China because they would become more powerful than us. That's one kind of loser talk.
The other kind of loser talk is from the parent. It's hubris.
Overestimating an opponent (note, not an enemy, an opponent) and underestimating are both bad IMHO.
If I had to lose sleep over one thing about our military, it'd be aircraft carriers in a naval battle with China. Giant siting ducks. They've been the backbone of the navy for decades now. Just think about that. That's an awful long time for opponents to think about strategies against it.
We shouldn't be beating our chest and bragging. We should be figuring out what to do if carriers become sitting ducks under some new weapons system. WW2 proved the carrier. WW3 might disprove it.
We should also take a page from their book--the Art of War, and try to prevent opponents from becoming enemies. We've been doing a pretty sucky job of that lately.
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> with China because they would become more powerful than us. That's one kind of loser talk.
Right... because magic pixies will fly in to stop the country with 4x the population and a rapidly modernizing infrastructure from ever catching up with us.
Forgive me if I err on the side of assuming that a country that has the benefit of a much larger population and the ability to learn from our example is going to develop even faster than we have, and that in the absence of outside interference they will inevita
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They might have competed well on their own; but did we really have to help them by making it hard for factory workers to find good jobs, and easy for those same workers to find bad jobs and get NINJA loans so they could buy stuff from China?
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Yes, the Chinese environmental situation is atrocious - but they're advancing much faster per unit of atrociousness than we did. They've seen the price that we paid, and are paying it in spades while simultaneously planning for the after-party (something which never happened here).
And hey, If I'm a jockey on a horse I know can't maintain the lead, then I'd have to be pretty stupid to bet on myself wouldn't I?
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If this is a serious question, then the answer is pretty straight forward and already one we are working on.
The rise of the Carrier, wasn't so much about the Carrier per se, but about the ability for a Carrier+Planes to project firepower in ways Battleships couldn't (and couldn't protect against).
Carriers themselves though, exist only as bases for planes.
Planes are expensive, trained pilots are even more expensive. Pilots are also "fleshy meat bags" that limit performance on planes.
Flash forward to now. D
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Carriers might be the backbone of the navy, but the backbone of the Western world are the SLBMs in the launch tubes of our nuclear submarines. We need to develop hypersonic SLBMs, because "they" most certainly will.
There is such a thing as non-hypersonic SLBMs? I don't mean those 1950s things where you basically surfaced and constructed a missile base on the deck.
Any long-range ballistic missile has to be hypersonic, or it wouldn't be long-range (or ballistic).
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They are not that far behind if you focus on their military objectives of excluding the American navy which currently provides the security umbrella for South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, etc.
I am not the only person who sees parallels between China / America and Germany / Britton during the dreadnought arms race that preceded WWI.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-German_naval_arms_race [wikipedia.org]
'we won' isn't hubris (Score:2)
Parent has it. China is obviously very important, but fearing the 'rise' of China as some global dragon is insane and stupid.
We have plenty of reasons to 'fear' what's happening in China. China is a beast of pollution and bad "face"...the people of China are as good as any people anywhere, but their government has ruined at least an entire generation with the one child policy & done irrevocable damage to their environment.
It's kind of crass for an American to say "we won" but its true. This is the inter
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How can we have won it all if we are facing a new problem with a whole new paradigm? How can we foster democracy in China? And what is predatory capitalism and how are we doing it? Is it anything worse then what China is doing in Africa today?
China is coming into its own and they want a military that corresponds to being an international heavyweight. However, there is a fine line between confidence and arrogance, and I personally think China today has a prickly pride and is acting like a bully.
Or to put it
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Spoken like a true Roman!
I mean Grek!
Sorry, American!
And this too shall pass...
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China as a military threat is so far behind us, it's really not worth discussing. They are just trying to show off for their nationalist population.
The fact is even if they did catch up, we would still wipe the floor with them and any other potential threat. We own the world, there is no country on Earth that can stop us.
Unless you shoot yourself in the foot, like most past Empires...
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Indeed. All surface ships are vulnerable to modern non-improvised weapons.
Naturally the Chinese surface Navy has no answer to being sunk by B-2's. In a significant conflict China could successfully deter/eliminate US surface fleet a significant distance, and the US could deter/eliminate Chinese surface fleet at any distance.
Aircraft, missiles and subs win.
Re:We're all fucked anyway because nukes (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, for most individual peons like you or me, I don't think that's technically correct. For us, the only warning we're likely to get is the flash of light that burns out our retinas moments before the fireball burns us to ash. The time between the "warning" and our actual annihilation probably isn't affected all that much by these faster payload delivery systems.
Personally, I'm going to save my complaints for the day when they announce that they are working on warheads that explode more quickly, as that's something that could affect me personally. The loss of a few ms of reaction time might make the difference between being able to say "Oh shit..." vs only being able to say "Oh sh...". I find that in times of distress, being able to successfully complete a curse can make a big difference in one's well-being and piece of mind...
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Actually, only a few lucky-duckies at ground zero are going to have that kind of experience.
Most people will die, in a nuclear war, of starvation and radiation sickness (and complications) after wards.
Many will die of direct or indirect consequences from the blast and heat. But far more will die from the consequences of loss of our modern industrial infrastructure and support systems.
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All of this stuff is budgeted by Congress.
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Heh, maybe Hollywood could manufacture some good fake aliens we'd stand a chance against to rally public sentiment, but I really, *really* hope we are extremely cautious about directing any serious hostilities against actual aliens, even if hostile. They just might take it personally, and even if their technology isn't substantially more advanced than ours (and the odds approach zero on that one) if they have the resources to propel even a mid-sized SUV between stars on a reasonable timescale then planetar
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So ... you care a lot?
Because otherwise you probably couldn't care less.
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Russia is actually heavily urbanized, and the population is mostly clustered in the European part of it. All those vast empty territories are, well, empty. If Moscow and other major cities get nuked, the effect on Russia would be just as devastating as on US. In both cases, the minuscule remainder of the population could certainly feed off the land "without gasoline, pesticides etc". Yes, the yields would be much less, but so would be the number of hungry mouths to feed.