Obama signs defence bill calling for space-based missile systems | Hacker News Reader

Obama signs defence bill calling for space-based missile systems

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Franks, asked whether the country could afford it, replied: “What is national security worth? It’s priceless.”

So let's see, Congressman Franks, if you really believe that security is priceless. Do you wear a Kevlar vest at all times? Ride only in an armored Maybach? Keep a dozen bodyguards at your home? Line the walls of your house with depleted uranium? Scan every object entering your house with a T-wave explosives detector and a Geiger counter?

Of course not. Security is not "priceless"; it is subject to cost/benefit analysis like everything else. I can do no better at this point than to quote President Dwight Eisenhower:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. [0]

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. [1]

I think it's a safe bet that the big defense contractors like Lockheed Martin have been lobbying for a resumption of Star Wars ever since the Reagan years. Looks like they finally found a moment when we were all thinking about other things.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chance_for_Peace_speech

[1] http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ike.htm

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

When was the last time an American Presidential candidate ran on feeding the hungry and clothing the cold? Such sentiments are more likely to be derided these days as "socialist".

Well, there was Bernie :-)

Bernie was very pro war. He wouldn't have gotten as far in the primaries if he hadn't been. He talked about arming the Jordanians and adding to the conflict, not stopping it:

http://fightthefuture.org/articles/sanders-and-hillary-the-c...

If he had been elected, he'd be a puppet

>Of course not. Security is not "priceless"; it is subject to cost/benefit analysis like everything else

it's a figure of speech, just like how people say their loved ones are priceless.

Franks used it to dismiss the question of whether we can afford the proposed system. Figure of speech or not, it's influencing the debate, and I think it needs to be challenged.

An interesting move. One that incoming Trump administration would find politically hard to neuter, and which is likely aimed to deteriorate Russian defence first and foremost.

Russia is not economically and technologically positioned to meet the challenge, but would unavoidably have to try anyway.

Could be the "appropriate answer" to the hacking Obama hinted before.

With their recent plane accident it seems that they indeed have technological quality problems to address already. I don't really hate the Russian government, and I'm not fond of other ones, but large countries in a pride escalation around military always worry me.

Why would a nation like Russia or the US give in to total nuclear disarmament without a missle shield like this? A nuke free future is impossible without a shield like this available to all. All countries serious about disarment should be jointly contributing to this effort.

Advances in offensive capabilities are spurred by advanced in defensive capabilities, and vice versa (going back to the time when the 'offensive' weapons were rocks and sticks, and the 'defensive' options were woven plant material).

The response to this sort of system is not "Oh, well, guess we can pack up the nukes now", it's "We need to invest in a nuclear delivery system that is capable of defeating this system", and the cycle starts all over again.

"Dang, they've developed an 'antivirus' program. Pack it up boys, viruses are obsolete now!"

If you think that the development of a space based missile system will only be developed with "defense" in mind, I have a surplus of bridges that I'd like to unload at a reasonable price.

Please explain how this has any meaningful advantage over the current system of silos and submarines. The ability to launch a nuclear missile from a space platform would be much more expensive, limited in size, vulnerable to attack, and invite massive complaints about there being such a missile parked in space.

The threat of using it as a really sucky attack platform is not why there are objections to missile defense.

I think the reason it's considered destabilizing is that it promises the possibility that the US could launch a first strike against Russia and then defend itself against the inevitable counterattack. So even in a defensive configuration, it has ostensible offensive value.

Of course, the keywords here are "promises" and "ostensible". It will never work well enough that a rational person would depend on it. (Note, in particular, that it can never be fully tested, short of actual nuclear war.) But can we assume our leaders will always be rational?

It would have higher speeds and thus hard to intercept. This is going to lead to a new space weapons race, which is bad. US has no need for it as they have plenty of other good weapons anyway.

A space based system doesn't need to be nuclear. Enough mass brought down from orbit on a specific target can be devastating without explosives.

Imagine that instead of flying a drone over your enemy with a missile, you instead launch a steel rod from space directly into their vehicle. Same destruction, no drone to alert them, you can target anywhere on earth.

It takes so much energy to bring a rod out of orbit. Not a good weapon.

Deorbiting something from low earth orbit takes a few hundred m/s of acceleration. That's roughly the same amount of acceleration an artillery projectile experiences. That's obviously not a trivial amount of energy, but it's not crazy.

I believe the advantage of this over ballistic missiles is that there would be no cruise phase, which I have read is the most vulnerable part of the missiles trajectory. Once it is in the falling phase they move too quickly to be taken out.

There is another far more terrible weapons system nobody is talking in public about. We should assume this 'space based missile' is a distraction from something so monstrous the public would lose its mind if its existence was confirmed.

In such a globalized world, where economics are so linked that many countries, including the US, couldn't survive without the others, this type of stuff just sends society backwards. Not like we don't have enough guns pointed at the world, why not spend an exorbitant amount of money to point an even bigger one. You may be able to get someone to listen to you by pointing a gun at them, but never their respect.

I think you would find very disturbing that 1900's people used just the same argument to "prove" that world war I wasn't possible and would never happen.

I don't think WWI is a case of "if only we had armed ourselves more and more, we could have stopped it sooner."

Here's the story from the LA Times:

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-missile-defense-signing-...

"One struck the word “limited” from language describing the mission of the country’s homeland missile defense system. The system is designed to thwart a small-scale attack by a non-superpower such as North Korea or Iran."

The real fear is that a small country will acquire missiles with nukes. It's really only a matter of time, a decade perhaps. The upside of technology advancing is that a private company will get to Mars. The downside is that a lot more countries will have the technology for military use.

The US military superiority over the rest of the world is exactly what allows the kind of globalized world you are talking about.

The same exact argument was made not too long before WW1 broke out.

The pointed guns are exactly what keeps the society global.

Historically untrue, globalisation halted during the interwar years, and that was very mutch a period of pointed guns. Of course, you typically point guns when you don't trust the ones you point at so it's no surprise there wasn't a lot of trade

Clearly pointed guns is what prevents wars. Please read more on WWI and WWII history: it was the murkiness and confusion about who has the biggest guns that lead to bloody conflict.

Wars don't happen when there's an obvioua military superiority at one of the sides. US's unipolar world has lead to unique peace in the world.

No, usually obvious millitary superiority leads to some general going "let's have a war, we'll win easily!" Or are you suggesting Saddam invaded Kuwait because he was unshure if they would invade first?

I assume op meant specifically nukes when they said guns

> Not like we don't have enough guns pointed at the world

We've gotten rid of most of the nuke stockpile, at least.

> why not spend an exorbitant amount of money to point an even bigger one

Huh? This is an intercept system, not a weapon.

> Huh? This is an intercept system, not a weapon.

The gun here is America's nukes. America currently can't really even think about using its nukes because of MAD. With a functioning nuclear defence system, America doesn't have to worry about MAD and can use its nukes without worrying about retribution, which makes them a bigger threat, hence a bigger weapon.

I think your point is valid, but I'd like to point out that the phrase "Mutually Assured Destruction" was never "Mutually Assured Annihilation". If Russia manages to land 1% of their nukes in the US, that can still count as the destruction of the US as a superpower, although most US people would survive. Rendering the MAD doctrine obsolete means providing at least 99.9% accuracy in the interception of the ballistic nukes. That still leaves the non-ballistic nukes as a threat, and maybe that's why the Russians are rumored to have created the Status-6 nuclear torpedo/drone of 100 MT TNT equivalent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_torpedo#Status-6

Why not use a bigger one? Because a tungsten rod that is "for defense" also has the force of a small nuclear bomb when it hits the ground. This was one of the proposed weapons for the previous Star Wars initiative.

> Leading defence scientists said the idea that a space-based system could provide security against nuclear attack is a fantasy

Does someone have more detail on this?

"The bomber will always get through". Against a big attack, all you can hope for is thinning out the incoming.

Against a small ICBM attack (from N. Korea, Pakistan, etc.) a missile defense could be effective. The US already has a few ground-based anti-ballistic missiles based at Vandenberg AFB, and some Navy ships have ABM capability.

It's getting too easy to build a nuclear weapon. The technology is over 70 years old, after all.

If it worked, Russia would never let us deploy it. Almost any defense proposal is itself vulnerable to nuclear attack.

Space is too large, distances are too great. There is no suitable laser right now. Besides that, if you are garanteed to neutralize your enemy's arsenal, you force him to attack first while he can avoid his own total destruction.

> There is no suitable laser right now

This is a fine argument against this concept. But the article frames the scientists as saying it's not just unfeasible now but generally impossible. That's what I'm struggling with.

Solar-pumped laser[1] is powerful enough, but it has problems with overheating. Overheating can be solved by fueling a satellite with a coolant. Rockets are cheaper now, so it is possible.

Ukrainian scientists has patents on that laser, and Ukraine granted $300K to build a test system in Uzbekistan in 2004, but then project was shut down.

[1] https://www.greenoptimistic.com/uzbekistan-solar-furnace-las...

latest from the nobel peace prize winner...

Building new weapons isn't antiparallel to peace efforts, but at least orthogonal. One can make the case that "mutually assured destruction" helped prevent violent conflicts during the Cold War, which also helped spur STEM funding in the US and other countries.

Obama didn't ask for a nobel peace prize, AFAIK.

Jean-Paul Sartre, and Le Duc Tho declined the Nobel, Obama could as well if he did not believe in the purpose of the peace prize.

I have 7 words for anyone who wishes to down vote: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Syria

Yemen and Somalia is effed into stone age by all the drone attacks which is only creating more of so called "terrorists" in a country 11000kms away. Which is terrorism? Killing many innocents on a daily basis by a country or people there trying to defend their country against external aggression? All those innocents being killed is plain wrong.

I feel like anger right now in the US is misdirected. Everyone hates Trump and doesn't notice the current guy who assistances American citizens with drones with no oversight, or who has continued all the spying things.

I wrote a post on why the election, from a statistical perspective, doesn't matter (as far as policy goes):

http://fightthefuture.org/videos/does-voting-make-a-differen...

I agree with your entire comment though. All those countries current state is the direct result of US intervention. Americans have trouble believing that, but none of those revolutions are organic.

Unfortunately, this comment and others like it, will get flagged, because this is hacker news. I agree with it to some extent because I don't like politics when I want to look up tech news, but at the same time there is a whole slew of opinions we don't here on HN, that you do see on less than great news aggregation sites like Slashdot.

Sartre was an independent, free spirited academic. Le Duc Tho was a revolutionary. Obama is a career politician who was just elected president. Why do you think he would or should have turned it down?

I agree that he had no obligation to turn it down, but I really don't follow your argument as to why Sartre or Le Did Tho did. Can you elaborate?

They did so mostly because they considered themselves academically/intellectually above the Nobel Prize and prizes in general. I'm not a mind reader.

I was wondering what end game of the "election hacking" narrative was, seems to be as pedestrian as a kickback to Lockheed et al. At least this most recent "intelligence" from our friends at the CIA will hopefully wont end up with 110 thousand dead like Iraq.

The Bush administration misrepresented the intelligence provided by the CIA

https://news.vice.com/article/the-cia-just-declassified-the-...

Examples of CW use by Iraq include the following from the Final Report. (These are selected uses only. Numerous other smaller scale CW attacks occurred.) Use in the Iran–Iraq War, 1983–1988

    August 1983: Haij Umran – Mustard, fewer than 100 Iranian/Kurdish casualties
    October–November 1983: Panjwin – Mustard, 3,000 Iranian/Kurdish casualties
    February–March 1984: Majnoon Island – Mustard, 2,500 Iranian casualties
    March 1984: al-Basrah – Tabun, 50–100 Iranian casualties
    March 1985: Hawizah Marsh – Mustard and Tabun, 3,000 Iranian casualties
    February 1986: al-Faw – Mustard and Tabun, 8,000 to 10,000 Iranian casualties
    December 1986: Um ar-Rasas – Mustard, 1,000s Iranian casualties
    April 1987: al-Basrah – Mustard and Tabun, 5,000 Iranian casualties
    October 1987: Sumar/Mehran – Mustard and nerve agent, 3,000 Iranian casualties
    March 1988: Halabjah and Kurdish area – Mustard and nerve agent, 1,000s Kurdish/Iranian casualties
    April 1988: al-Faw – Mustard and nerve agent, 1,000s Iranian casualties
    May 1988: Fish Lake – Mustard and nerve agent, 100s or 1,000s Iranian casualties
    June 1988: Majnoon Island – Mustard and nerve agent, 100s or 1,000s Iranian casualties
    July 1988: South-central border – Mustard and nerve agent, 100s or 1,000s Iranian casualties

Use at Halabja, 1988 Main articles: Halabja poison gas attack and Sardasht, West Azerbaijan

On March 16, 1988, the Halabja massacre occurred. The Iraqi army hit residential areas with sarin gas and the roads leading out of the city with mustard gas the day after. Most of the victims died within minutes after the bombing and those who survived and tried to leave the city the following day were injured when they passed contaminated roads. Civilians in residential areas in western Iran such as Noodsheh, Ghaleji, and Marivan were bombarded with nerve gas as well. The efforts of local health care centers played a significant role in decreasing the number of mortalities.

Use in Southern Iraq against the Popular Uprising, 1991

    March 1991: an-Najaf - Karbala area — Nerve agent & CS, Shi’a casualties not known.

Bay of Pigs, Iranian Contras, School of the Americas .. the 1973 coupé in Chile alone killed 11,000. I'm pretty sure the US/CIA has killed way more civilians than Iraq could even hope to claim under Saddam. That list is no justification for invasion and war.

It's look like you follows utilitarian philosophy[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism

Chemical weapon or not doesn't matter. US has committed plenty of war crimes and have killed millions, most of them not even an immediate or future threat to US.

What exactly does a list of attacks that happened 10-20 years before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 have to do with anything?

I had small conversation with man from Iraq. AFAIK, they blame West for supplying Iraq (and others) with chemical fabrics and reagents. I.e. they blame West for CW they gave to Iraq, which then used as excuse to attack Iraq. It's common to East countries to see Europe and North America countries as single government. In fact, double-use fabrics were made by Germany, while USA is tried to stop that.

Out of USA and Russia, nobody believes in CIA error, because CW is used frequently in the region and CW fabrics were at ready. These facts are hard to deny.

I wish you had said that in the same post with your list of attacks. You're right, no one denies that Saddam was a creation of the United States, whether or not the chemical weapons came from us originally. We deal enough munitions internationally that if we didn't sell them to Saddam directly it would only have been an oversight. I'm still not quite following what you're saying though -- what double-use fabrics are you talking about? And what CIA error?

I'm reading Germany is supplying arms and training to Kurdish anti-ISIL fighters, what do you think about that?

Seems like it would be pretty simple to hold a press conference to clarify those incorrect assertions. If you follow the logic of that narrative you also have to assume Hillary Clinton[0] and a large segment of the democratic establishment was in on it[1], or worse yet failed to even read the report. Then you have to ask if the executive branch has misinterpreted intelligence before and the CIA is unwilling to correct them why would you think this new intelligence has any validity?

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkS9y5t0tR0

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Resolution#Passage

>Seems like it would be pretty simple to hold a press conference to clarify those incorrect assertions

The CIA hold a press conference and disclose top secret information?

>Then you have to ask if the executive branch has misinterpreted intelligence before and the CIA is unwilling to correct them why would you think this new intelligence has any validity?

Correct it how?

>The CIA hold a press conference and disclose top secret information?

If the elected officials fail the serve the public then yes, they don't have to actually release any top secret data but only have to say "Bush has this wrong, we didn't make the claims he says we have been making"

>Then you have to ask if the executive branch has misinterpreted intelligence before and the CIA is unwilling to correct them why would you think this new intelligence has any validity?

Instead of sending emails saying "this is correct"[0], say the opposite.

[0]http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/16/politics/john-brennan-cia-dona...

What happened to no militarization of space?

Just a bit of a spoiler -- It doesn't get really good until IV ;)

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