Monday, June 14, 2004

Dr. Strangeglove visits Venus

As you might guess, I am not a fan of missle defense systems. My main reasons are that they're costly and inexpensively thwarted, and that humanity won't profit from another arms race. That might even be a bumper sticker, "Human race, not Arms Race".

Discarding all of that, I found myself wondering what a best-case scenario for a missle defense system would look like. If someone launched a nuclear-tipped weapon and our missle-defense system shot it down. What then?

Wouldn't the kill vehicle cause the nuclear bomb to detonate someplace, probably in the upper atmosphere? Wouldn't that lead to, at best, widespread radioactive contamination and the disabling of the world's satellite systems, and at worst nuclear winter?

Allowing my mind to wander further I found myself wondering if we should try to bring about nuclear winter on, say, Venus. It is a planet that suffers from run-away global warming and whose surface is hot enough to melt lead. If we could cool it down perhaps we would see lakes and life-forms appear?

With further wandering I realized that all you need to wreak havoc (or deter havoc) is a big enough pile of junk strapped to a guidance system. We all know a meteor strike would be devastating, so why should a man-made meteor be any less so? Hell an RV camper from space might even be able to more effectively bunker-bust than a low-yield nuclear weapon, and velocity and momentum work free.

[Insert maniacal laughter here]

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Foot Quotes

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"

Charles Darwin