Aucbvax.1444 fa.arms-d utzoo!duke!chico!harpo!mhtsa!ucbvax!REM@MIT-MC Fri May 29 00:56:26 1981 What is strength In the short term we indeed need to be able to destroy enough of Soviet weapons to assure we can still retaliate after a first strike, so that after such a strike there's time to negotiate instead of being forced to launch-on-warning. But MAD is a very dangerous way for the human species to attempt to survive in the long run. We must not just protect our weapons but protect our cities and industry. We must move towards genuine civil defense. We must furthermore destroy Soviet weapons BEFORE they explode ANYWHERE, and also develop a strategy where we don't plan to ever use our own weapons, because the explosion of such massive amounts of weapons even over unpopulated ocean or desert would destroy 30-70% of the ozone layer causing a factor of 5 or 10 increase in ultraviolet-B radiation striking the northern hemisphere (assuming weapons all exploded in the northern hemisphere) which would exterminate all human and other mammal and bird life from this hemisphere and make life almost unlivable even in the southern hemisphere. ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.