311–320 of 397 posts
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Gorbachev's dead now and look who sits in his place. I'm not so sure such a treaty would still be respected anyway. As as for who sits in Reagan's place...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum All you need to know about making deals with Russia.
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Problems start when their complaints take the form of using their own deniable capability against U.S. satellites. I've a feeling our satellites are far more expensive and advanced than theirs. Nobody wants a space tit-for-tat that can escalate dramatically.
So, what solution do you have in mind, if China supplies military support to an adversary? Politely ask them to stop? Let them continue? Seems not so trivial to me, especially since everyone has satellites up there for this purpose, and there's a good chance China would do the same.
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Iran is 90 million people and a gigantic mass of land. Go read some history about what industrial quantity of ordinance was required to somewhat destroy European cities in the 40s. America does not have a bomber fleet capable of doing that in Iran, no matter the will. Strategic Bombing in WW2 is an unfathomable scale. The US, just the US not Britain (who had similar numbers on their own), dropped 1.4 million tons of…
Could ask Japan how that math changed - and that was with technology from 1944. A single Trident can (officially) carry 4-5 warheads, up to 476 KT each.
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Realistically pretty much anything in orbit is a viable space to space weapon (for related reasons all space propulsion is ITAR controlled) so it was never practical to ban them. Space to earth, maybe, but that isn't unless it hits vague 'WMD' categories, and I'm not sure space to ground is necessarily what the US is declaring here. I suspect whatever capability the US is referring to is far more "counter space" than…
A bullet travels at a relative speed of about 250 to 1250m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 600-16000 joules. Everything in low Earth orbit is moving at 7600m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 580,000 joules. Getting hit by something moving that fast is roughly equivalent to getting hit by a whole ammo case of bullets at the same speed. There is no armor that can protect you…
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> As long as warmongers are in control we will continue to live in danger and fear. Can you expand on your solution to world peace?
You need to get a critical mass of people to despise war so much that they are ready to have disadvantages themselves to make a war free world a reality. E.g. complete stop of trade with countries starting a war or supporting such a country. It happened before relatively successful with slavery and is partially happening with the death penalty. For me it seems like a very long way to go though.
Slavery and the death penalty are poor analogies, and not just because slavery was stopped through quite a bit of violence, and the death penalty/imprisonment exists as an alternative to vigilante justice only by virtue of the state's monopoly on violence.
"If everyone just ..." is always silly, but it's especially silly when it comes to the belief that order can be enforced through anything other than -- ultimately -- the threat of violence. Everyone will not "just".
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the commenter never implied that they don't but anyone familiar with how China positions itself knows that they always say things like: "our space stuff is 100% peaceful we dont have any military stuff there, the imperialist West is lying! we are never aggressive, we are only peaceful and defensive" and when someone else does something they always urge them to act according to international law and to not escalate
How many wars has China started in the last century?
And if China hadn’t stuck its dick into the Korean War, the whole peninsula would probably be as prosperous as the south.
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So, you're saying that this requires all people of the world get along and agree with anything that might cause war? That sounds like a reasonable plan! Thanks for the response.
Or a post resource scarcity society where everyone's rich enough to be able to make ethical decisions with very little actual cost.
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“Can’t” seems incorrect here. Plenty of people murder people. You can’t murder people and expect life to go on as usual. But the act itself doesn’t seem to be eliminated by legislation.
Is the bar for this conversation “zero instances ever”? Our laws are informed by our values. How can we possibly argue they aren’t an attempt at legislating ethics and morals?
Laws are informed by the interests (which may include morals) of the law-makers, and many people do base their morals in part on what laws exist, but most people believe that at least some laws are immoral, and some immoralities are legal.
Many law-makers want people to view illegalities as immoralities, but that's not how most humans operate.
>"We urge the US side to stop expanding its military capabilities and preparing for war in outer space," AFP quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying. I'm no geopolitics whiz but "we urge the USA to be unprepared for war" is a pretty comical statement to me.
Ya, that's a hilarious comment from the Chinese after they have literally tested their own anti-satellite weapons. But then their diplomats have never been short of chutzpah. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/chinas-anti-satellite-test
This can lead to "defensive" efforts that ultimately create disruptive, offensive weapons. It's not necessarily contradictory or hilarious, IMO.