Ronnie promised us that SDI would make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete". I think he didn't quite understand how hard that is.
Oh, I don't know; I'm pretty sure he did. You see, the whole idea of SDI was to start something very expensive that Just Might Work. That meant that the Soviets had to try to copy us, and the effort caused their rickety, barely-functional economy to collapse, bringing down the whole Soviet Union with it.
Riiight. And that's exactly what Ronnie was thinking about when he shoveled all that money to SDI. "Let's do this because we know the Russians can't possibly keep up and it will bankrupt them!"
The weapons are virtually undetectible until it's too late.
Yes, because launching a big freakin' rocket (big enough to put stuff in orbit) will go unnoticed.
You don't need a big freakin' rocket....the first successful ASAT was a missile launched from an F-15.
All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to Gaussian noise. -- James Martin
