A world without nuclear weapons?

Spacefaring is a light aircraft, to ICBMs being a cruise missile?

How can you have the ability to get to orbit, and not have the ability to get to an intercontinental trajectory? Or how can you have a high enough precision and reliability to launch people or multi-million-dollar satellites, but not have the precision and reliability to have the relatively small chance of success that's sufficient for your adversaries to find it unacceptable to provoke you into launching?

It's true that North Korea doesn't really have nuclear weapons, but they did get to the point of testing one. It had a very low yield, but I think it was enough that it very probably wasn't just a conventional bomb set off to look like they were testing a nuke. In other words, they're close enough to having nuclear weapons that having the capacity to deliver them when and if they get them is something that the US isn't going to be happy with.

It matters what the top of the hierarchy of threats is. We're not going to deliberately provoke a massive attack on Japan and South Korea, except as a response to something almost as bad. But if you look a couple levels down the sequence of "or else" responses, they can't intimidate us nearly as effectively with the threat of a chemical attack on Japan as they could with the threat of completely annihilating multiple US cities.

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "ANTIcarrot" wrote: