[ExI] The Doomsday Clock

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 3:46 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:



> ​> ​
> John you grossly underestimate the capabilities of the military sir.
> Perhaps you heard of last week’s successful launch of SBIRS?  An excellent
> product it is indeed, built by a fine company:
>
>
>
> http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/sbirs.html
>

​Something like that might be effective if North Korea fired just one ICBM
at the USA, but it will never work against a massive attack because as you
say in another post it's very expensive. That shouldn't be surprising, it's
harder to shoot a bullet with a bullet than it is to just fire a bullet. If
it takes a dollar to shoot down a nickel's worth of hardware the enemy can
just outspend you, especially because your defence has to be virtually
perfect or it's not worth doing, if only 1% of the many thousands of
 warheads gets through we're toast.

And if North Korea wants to send a package from Pyongyang to Washington, a
package containing a H-bomb for example, sticking it on top of a ICBM would
be one way of delivering it, but there are other ways, like UPS. And unlike
a ICBM if UPS was used it wouldn't have an obvious return address on it,
it's just that one day Washington would be there and the next day it
wouldn't. No warning no nothing, just boom.


> ​> ​
> SBIRS prevents a flock of geese from triggering World War 3.
>
>
​There are lots of unpleasant wake up calls the POTUS could get a 3am: "
Mr. President there has been a coup in Pakistan and factions linked to ISIS
now have control of the country's nuclear arsenal, what do you want us to
do?". And
Trump could receive a potentially apocalyptic ​3am phone call that doesn't
directly involve nukes. North Korea has
​thousands​
 of
​long range 170mm​
 guns dug in and aimed south; in
​less than ​
2 hours they could send a million artillery shells into downtown Seoul, a
city of
​24​
 million people. It would be by far the greatest bloodbath since World War
2. I'm not sure what the USA should do in a situation like that, but I do
know I'd rather have Obama receive that 3am phone call than Trump.

John K Clark



>
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