APOCALYPTIC CHICKEN:
In the classic American high-school hot-rod game of "chicken," two cars race at each other full speed down the center stripe of the highway. Whoever turns aside first to avert head-on collision, loses. Nuclear confrontation among China, the United States, and Russia is a slow-motion form of "Apocalyptic Chicken." For example, if the Russians tell the United States to stay out of Chechnya or the Chinese threaten "general war" in asserting that Taiwan is part of China, as has happened, they are, expressed or implied, threatening nuclear missile attack against the United States if the United States crosses a certain political/military line. This is because Russia and China have nothing to threaten the US with militarily except nuclear missiles.
Without nuclear missiles, China, Russia and the rest of the world would be completely at the military mercy of the United States, which now enjoys overwhelming non-nuclear military superiority on Earth, while maintaining a launch-ready nuclear missile strike force capable of annihilating any nation anywhere. Without nuclear weapons capable of striking cities in the United States, China and Russia couldn't play apocalyptic chicken with the US. They would be the hot-rodder whose car suddenly disappears, leaving him in the middle of the road with the opponent's car bearing down on him. (This must be how Russia and China feel when the United States violates the 1972 Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty by relentlessly pushing forward with a National Missile Defense system.)
Any one of these three nuclear powers probably could launch enough nuclear-tipped missiles to destroy one or more cities of any opposing nation, even after sustaining a nuclear first-strike. The United States and Russia have so many nuclear missiles that for decades their nuclear weapons balance has been based on Mutually Assured Destruction: both parties having second-strike nuclear capability to annihilate the other. The Chinese, with a limited and unknown number of well-concealed intercontinental nuclear missiles, figure that their possible ability to take out Moscow or Washington after a first-strike is enough to deter a nuclear aggressor and give them a credible nuclear first-strike force useful in nuclear confrontation.
Note two salient features of both hot-rod and apocalyptic chicken: First, if carried to its conclusion, nuclear confrontation is suicidal. Therefore, it is always intended to be terminated before actual use of nuclear weapons. Second, like passengers strapped in the hot-rodder's car, the populations and whole environments of Russia, the United States, and China are hostages in the nuclear confrontation. If, by some wild desperation or tragic miscalculation, all bluffs are called, and the nations careen into nuclear weapons collision, we are all targets.
--John Lewallen is a nuclear weapons strategy researcher and writer, <www.NuclearPress. com>, whose website offers current nuclear weapons information.
Space is the Place
"Some people don't want to hear this, and it sure isn't in vogue, but--absolutely--we're going to fight in space. We're going to fight from space and we're going to fight into space. . . . We will engage terrestrial targets someday--ships, airplanes, land targets-from space." -Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Space Command, Joseph W. Ashy, in Aviation Week and Space Technology, August 9, 1996
"With regard to space dominance, we have it, we like it, and we're going to keep it." --Keith Hall, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space, speaking to the National Space Club, 1997
"In the next two decades, new technologies will allow the fielding of space-based weapons of devastating effectiveness to be used to deliver energy and mass as force projection in tactical and strategic conflict. . . .These advances will enable lasers with reasonable mass and cost to effect very many kills." -United States Air Force, "New World Vistas: Air and Space Power for the 21st Century," 1996
"A space blockade would effectively ring the planet with barbed wire, making the whole world our security zone. Errant countries would be punished from the sky, with American troops entering the fray only to conduct mop-up operations." -San Jose Mercury News, August 2, 1992
--From David McGowan's Derailing Democracy, available from Common Courage Press <commoncouragepress.com/mcgowan_derailing.html>