Re: shooting down a spy satellite
Here's why we're shooting it down... because China shot down one of our old weather satelites not too long ago. Why does that matter? Well ordinarily it wouldn't. In fact if it were Germany, or even Iran, it wouldn't. But we don't have a standing nuclear policy with those countries. We do with China, because if we ever have to go to war with China, if we fight it out on the ground, we'd lose 100,000 plus of our own soldiers to win (and we would still win, despite what people say, our high kill ratios make that possible, even against their million man army, which now has a little less than a million men. But the cost would be more than we would want bear). Instead, we would use our primary strike nuclear capabilities. Now of course there is one major problem that, and I'm sure you've already thought of it, but here it is in case you hadn't... If we nuke them, they will attempt to nuke us, because they also have primary strike capabilities (although they don't have secondary strike capabilities like we do, even in a best case scenario, it is likely that they could still launch up to 35 ICBM's after being hit). Now that would normally make it completely absurd to consider such a policy, right? Right. Enter SDI. Now those of you who think we spent 5 trillion dollars on SDI and got nothing for it, you can just sit this one out. In case you're too young or too old to know what SDI is, that's our missile defense system. Now since our SDI could easily handle shooting down all of their ICBM's (let alone the few they could launch after being struck, that makes the nuclear option viable again. Still paying attention?
Ok, now since our SDI relies on the use of satelites to track the ICBM's, if China has the ability to thwart our SDI capabilities by shooting down our satelites, then once again the nuclear option is off the table. Still with me? But, in order for China to shoot down one of our satelites, they had to use their own satelites to precisely track the satelite that they shot down. So there it is... we have to show that we have the capabilty to shoot down their satelites before they can disable our SDI which puts the nuclear option back on the table and assures that they won't pursue any type of war against the US.
... and you thought world politics was boring ...
SgtMaj
