Be nice!
What parallels the possible Chinese acts against US satellites is their aquisition of a major stake in the (under development) European Union sponsored Galileo system. One would then expect that no definite measures can occur until Galileo is operational; from all that I hear (not a lot, admittedly) is that the Chinese are the only members that don't treat construction of the system as a nine to five job.
America will always pay a price when it balks in the face of the enemy.
We have lots of nukes for a reason. They're not sitting there for no reason...are they?
As long as our enemies have reason to doubt our resolve, they will have leverage.
IMHO, we should use the tools God has given us NOW...before it's too late and our liberty goes up in a swirl of Sino-islamist smoke!
All those fantastic marvels of technology stored in top-secret facilites are doing nothing to stop the march to oppression where they currently sit.
I'm afraid...if we wait much longer...it'll be too late...if it ain't already.
Whoa... al-Ozarka, please, please, PLEASE tell me you're joking.
You are, right?
I can't actually believe that someone would propose using nuclear weapons to bring down that evil, oppressive Red regime in China. There's no way you're serious.
And the "Sino-islamist" part? That's just over the top. That's when I knew this must be a joke.
Laugh, then.
Thank God we have a Military-Industrial-Leviathan-Complex, to automatically counter this sort of move.
As AO points out (perhaps a bit colorfully) nukes are a tool. A very powerful tool, but only a tool. When the term 'nuke' gets used to refer also to objectives or moral judgments or strategies, things can get cloudy in a hurry.
An analogy:
Saying "time to use the chainsaw" begs a host of questions about how much to trust the person using the chainsaw, how many trees need to be cut down, whether a hand saw would be more discriminating, what one proposes to replace the trees with, how quickly they would grow back, what danger the tree poses, whether it is moral to cut down trees at all, and why one is seeking to cut down trees in the first place.
If the answer is that a professional arborist is going to cut down ONE tree that is leaning dangerously over a glass-enclosed porch housing a day care center, then the question is very different from an avowed anti-Semite with a hockey mask and a bottle of tequila running around Brooklyn with a chainsaw hacking down a dozen pedestrians for every sidewalk sapling he also takes out.
To inject a little geopolitical reality into the discussion, it has been the decades long policy of all US administrations that if somebody were to take out our military satellites, there would be a nuclear response. Every military on the planet knows this and understands the consequences. No GPS satellites, no Beijing, period. Even Carter's administration had this as policy. I don't ever see this policy changing no matter who gets in the White House.
Commenting by HaloScan
