[ExI] The Doomsday Clock

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 3:22 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> Should North Korea fire an ICMB at the US, we will return fire before we
> even know what is the payload.  It might be an EMP, which detonates above
> THAAD range.  But they only get one shot.

That'd be no comfort to those of us who got nuked because Mr. Trump
heard THAAD shots were expensive and therefore declined to use it to
protect us who objected to his rule.

>>...LM (and those in the military looking forward to cushy jobs with LM, if
> not already on LM's payroll) sets up the tests.  That's like the tobacco
> industry setting up "scientific" studies to "prove" tobacco is harmless and
> nonaddictive.  The same sorts of biased experimental setups, measurement
> errors, and data fabrication are likely to occur...
>
> It would be more like the tobacco consumer community setting up studies to
> prove tobacco is harmless and nonaddictive.  Did they do it?

That's an imperfect analogy.  The military has a chain of command:
bribe whoever's in charge of the project, and he can give orders that
will be followed to everyone else.  This is not true of the tobacco
consumer community as a whole.

That said, there have been tobacco consumers who helped set up studies
to try to prove tobacco is harmless and nonaddictive.  In other words:
out of the many debunked tobacco-company-funded studies to this
effect, at least some have been conducted by people who smoke.

> Are you arguing that a THAAD cannot hit a non-cooperating target?

No, just that we can not have absolute confidence that it can hit a
non-cooperating target at this time.

> Why do
> you think that?

Because we can not trust the evidence to the contrary, as detailed in
my last email, and this is a tricky enough task that the reasonable
null case assumption is that it can not.