Rand Simberg wrote:
So? Do you really fantasize that they wouldn't do this if we hadn't
withdrawn from ABM? And do you really imagine that the Soviets were,
or Russians are, punctilious about treaties in general?


http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Why_...nse_999.htm l
The Russians are having a hard time figuring out why ABMs are to be put
in Poland to defend the U.S. against missile attack from Iran or North
Korea, in much the same way we would think it odd if Russia started
deploying ABMs in Mexico or Canada to defend Moscow from Chinese missile
attack.
What makes it so pointless is that 10 ABMs in Poland are worthless
against a North Korean attack and so would only be of any possible use
against a Iranian attack that overflew Europe on the way to the U.S..
Iran would realize an attack by that few missiles would be suicidal, so
that doesn't make sense either, so what's the point of all this?
Simple; the point of all this is to act like real assholes and see if we
can **** off the Russians, and rub their little red noses in it.
With luck they'll start a new cold war, and then we can spend uncounted
more hundreds of billions defending ourselves against them.
In the spirit of the treaty, the Russians are abiding by the means to
withdraw from it:
http://www.fas.org/nuke/control/inf/text/inf.htm
"Article XV

1. This Treaty shall be of unlimited duration.

2. Each Party shall, in exercising its national sovereignty, have the
right to withdraw from this Treaty if it decides that extraordinary
events related to the subject matter of this Treaty have jeopardized its
supreme interests. It shall give notice of its decision to withdraw to
the other Party six months prior to withdrawal from this Treaty. Such
notice shall include a statement of the extraordinary events the
notifying Party regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests."
Having a foreign country deploying missiles on your border would
probably be considered an extraordinary event that jeopardized your
supreme interests, as the Cuban Missile Crisis showed.
So they are now going to have some fun at our expense, I imagine.
Our ABMs are designed to intercept ballistic missiles, so I imagine
they'll get working on hypersonic cruise missiles now.
If they can fake us out by pretending to have some super technology that
we must counter, they can bankrupt us the way we did them with Star
Wars, which would be quite ironic really.

Pat