Defense Spending

Good points, although I think we knew how inefficient the Soviets were and used our spending as a war strategy. See my nuke war post above on that. Nobody can defend everything we did in the Cold War. Certainly we made our fair share. But a lot of people got a lot for the money we spent, when we look at it in broad terms. I think Germany probably thinks our money was well spent.


BTW, as to McCarthyism, I was talking to a guy recently who mentioned some new research about the Soviet infiltration of the State Department in the post-war years. As it turns out, McCarty might be an example of "just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they are not after you." Anyone familiar with this research? I don't have a cite for it and would like to read some about it.

No doubt Soviet espionage was a real thing. One should always expect our enemies to be at their worst. But the harm caused by McCarthyism was horrific and beyond what we should have to endure in democratic society. McCarthy was not paranoid. He was a pathological liar and a demagogue. If he cared at all about Communists in government it was because he wanted more of them to drive his political crusade.


As for Soviet "infiltration" of the State Dept., while it would be unreasonable to expect that no people passed on info. to our enemies, paranoia more closely defines the situation than anything else. Who did more damage to our country: Alger Hiss or John Foster Dulles? Zero Mostel or John Rankin? Daniel Ellsburg or Henry Kissinger? I don't think it's a close call. Those who were paranoid about communism need to be held accountable for the tremendous harm they caused.


No one denies the importance of combatting Communism and Communist influence in the U.S. during the Cold War. It was the extent and the methods of that combat that were ill-advised.

The whole concept of the "Missile Defense System" boggles my mind. We're supposed to develop this system to prevent "rogue nations" from using ICBMs to hit the continental US.


Here's a brief bit of technical data about modern nuclear weapons. The actual warhead (includes the "physics package" the initiator, the spark plug, necessary tampers, foam buffers, nutron injectors and tritium reservoirs) for the typical modern nuclear weapon make up approximately 1/3 its overall length and approximately 1/4 its overall weight. Given that modern US nuclear devices are based on widely available technological foundations and engineering practices, it's reasonable to assume that the warheads posessed by the "Big-5" nuclear powers are similar in size.


In the current US active stockpile, the most common warhead is the W-80 and it's variants such as the W-83 and W-90. In it's typical form, it's intended to be the nuclear warhead for a number of different cruise missile systems such as the Tomahawk. The W-80-0 and the W-80-1 are the two warheads kept in the enduring stockpile. the -1 has a slightly lower yield which, since it's intended for the Air Launched version of the overall system, indicates that it has a slightly lower "boost" factor. Likely from the replacement of one or more tritium reserviors with internal guidance and safety systems. The -0 is intended for the Surface Launched Cruise Missile and has a yield adjustible between <5kt and variable between 170kt and 200kt. The first yield is most likely the unboosted primary of the system. The variability in the other yields comes from the addition of tritium boosting and the amount and injection rates of that tritium.


Okay, the boring part is out of the way. Here's the clincher. the W-80 in either of it's fielded versions is approximately 12 inches in diameter and 32 inches in length. It's a metal cylinder with a domed top and a flat bottom fitted into a slightly expanded flange. All of the warhead access is through the flanged panel at the flat end. It weighs 290 pounds. That's right friends and neighbors, a 200 kiloton nuclear bomb that will fit in the floorboard of any car on the road today. If you've got a really ballsy terrorist, it can be carried in a backpack.


Then we go to the really scarey bombs. My personal favorite is the MK-54. It's roughly oval, approximately 11 inches across the short diameter, approximately 18 inches across the long. About the size of a good watermelong. It it's current warehoused configuration, it weighs approximately 52 pounds. It's yield is adjustable between ten and twenty tons. Now, stop to consider that the bomb that McVeigh used in Oklahoma City was just over two tons, used an explosive approximately 1/3 as energetic as TNT and was less than 35% efficient. It generated approximately .5lbs TNT equivalent yield.(I know the numbers don't come out exactly right, there were some atmospheric and blast dynamic effects that made McVeigh's bomb have a bit more effect than it's total explosive yield would indicate." The MK-54 is approximately 40 times as powerful as the OKC bomb, Can fit in an oversized tool box, a backpack, a bowling bag, a typically sized salesman's sample case.


Okay, where's this going? We have a government who wants to spend trillions on a missile defense system to keep rogue nations from shooting ICBMs at us. Friends and neighbors, we can be able to develop a system that will have 100% reliability at shooting down even near shore detected, submarine launched missiles and it will generate very close to Zero in terms of expectation of reduction of our threat of nuclear terrorism or attack.


Tom the Terrorist, or his cousing Mustafa, Chang, Kim, Miguel, etc, doesn't need an ICBM. In fact, the money these nations have to spend to develop a viable missile system that can hit the US from either a submarine, surface ship or land base, is orders of magnitude greater than they need to simply build small bombs. Assume their engineering ability is only half that of the US folks like Los Alamos and Pantex. Assume the bomb will have to be the same size as the device built by South Africa during the late 70s. It was able to be fitted into an air droppable bomb case which makes it less than two feet in diameter, studies of the explosion after their test indicate the type and efficience of the device which gives a rough size for overall length and weight. give or take an inch or two, it was roughly 19 inches in diameter, 36 inches in length, weighed approximately 500 pounds. It also had the highest historical yield for the "gun type" nuclear weapon. In short, the technology is now were a moderately advanced industrial nation can build a bomb approximately the size of a 30 gallon water container. Build it to a level where they obtained a yield of between 255 and 275 kilotons out of a smaller nuclear core than was used in the Hiroshima bomb. 17 times the bang of Little Boy, 1/18 the weight and will fit in the trunk of the rental Hyundai you drive to the Port of Seattle where you pick it up from the shipping container full of scrap metal parts being shipped in by a scrap metal broker so you don't even have a realistic way of interpreting the source of the contents of the container.


We now have a very efficient, very safe, very easy to use nuclear weapon in our Hyundai and the odds of it being picked up by customs were outlandishly good and definitely gave us the pot odds to bet we're going to get it into the country.


Now, what exactly is this multi-trillion dollar anti-missile system going to do to prevent our illustrious terrorist crew from driving that Hyundai right up in front of the US Capitol Building the evening of the State of the Union Address and taking out our entire national leadership except for some knob from the President's Cabinet such as the Seceretary of Agriculture who's been scooted away so as to ensure succession of power? "Poof", no federal government.


More interested in a more "pure" terrorist attack? We drive south from Seattle to Los Angeles and wait for the highest air traffic rate in and out of both LAX and Orange County. The traffic rates are published by the FAA and the airlines so we'll know to within a quarter hour or so. Park it in the long term parking, set the timer. Hop our plane for TaiPei and hear the horrible news as we wake up the next morning to meet our PRC ally who's going to sneak us across the straight back to China. LAX is literally gone. All of the aircraft in a roughly 600 mile range lose their GPS, LORAN and most of their internal electronics. (Hint: Shielding them against lightning strikes isn't really in the same league as shielding them against the EMP from a 1/4 megaton nuke) In short, from San Francisco to Cabo san Lucas and from Vegas out into the Pacific, virtually every airborne aircraft either crashes from lost power, crashes on landing because of lost air traffic control or survives landing but is essentially irreperable. How many airlines are hubbed at LAX? How many banks have major financial centers in Los Angeles County?


The missile defense is an abolutely silly waste of time. Anyone who shoots a missile at us already knows that we'll see it launch, track it and know where it's going to land. Its flight characteristics, launch signature, flight profile changes and reentry profile will tell us exactly what kind, down to the production lot, missile it is. Before that missile is on the ground, the 82nd Airborne Division is going on alert, half of our aircraft are leaving the ground and the Navy is powering up to head to kick some missile launchers asses. Or, it comes in through the port of Longview, Washington and the first thing we know about there being a problem is when it and six if it's warhead brothers simultaneously take out the US Capitol, Manhattan Island, Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, Chicago and Honolulu.


We don't need a missile defense, we need to find the lost weapon grade fissiles and take them away from people who won't play with them nicely. Oh, but that would require increasing the budget in areas of intelligence collection and that doesn't provide any trillion dollar projects for the CongressDrones to get their pictures taken with.


Never mind, what was I thinking...

"Poof", no federal government.


Stop teasing me. You're making me weepy.


natedogg

"Who benefits most from increases in military spending?"


Investors and owners, primarily. The military and intelligence services help stabilize the international business environment by threatening foreign powers that might interfere, however indirectly, with the flow of commerce and conditions for favorable investment, and by propping up regimes that facilitate the process. There are also domestic advantages of having a significant portion of the economy under government control (building more tanks and planes during recessions) and in subsidizing high-tech R&D before spinning it off to the private sector for profit. There's also the old-fashioned graft of defense corporations and their representatives funding political campaigns, but that's more about the particulars of the process.


The American public pays for a disproportionately large military -- several times larger and infinitely more powerful than the combined military forces of all states it considers adversaries -- because it's disproportionately inclined to accept proclamations about foreign "threats," even ones so absurd that they're lampooned in "Doonesbury." They're also not privy to much discussion of questions like the one above because the same institutions that benefit from defense spending exert powerful influence over the mainstream media.


I read somewhere Austrians, during the height of the cold war and somewhat nestled at its crossroads, spent more money on their national opera than on their national defense. I suspose they piggybacked on NATO, but I suspect this had something to do with having a different experience with the benefits of military spending.

Can't disagree with you - Star Wars worked as a Cold War strategy, but I don't think it can stop the most likely attack. Perhaps no attacks.


Oh, and it sorta seems like you know what you're talking about.

Of course it is not. You must realize that George W.Bush, though a deserter, was installed as president by the inteeligence community in FLorida, and illegal Military ballots were part of it.


He is beholden to right wing extremists that percieve the supremacy of the miltary industrial complex. Anyone that fails to agree with them shall have problems.


A coup d'etat took place in Florida without firing a shot.

People who inform should not be surprised to find that their Karma bites them in the ass. You have a tax problem.