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markomalley
Guest
Regardless of the technologies involved, defense is based upon reducing risk.
This includes remediating that which you intend to protect so that a threat cannot reach it or mitigation planning so that the impact that a threat will have if it does reach that which you intend to protect.
In the old days, remediation would be seen primarily with walls: the walls around a castle, the Great Wall of China, or Hadrian’s Wall in England. The Maginot line in France would be a more recent example. A more modern example would be the Strategic Defense Initiative, Patriot Missile Batteries, etc. A cyber example would be the firewall that you have on your home network.
In the old days, mitigation would be seen as the troops and walls that were behind the front line in case the forces broke through the wall. That is one reason why the French fell so quickly to Hitler: they had this belief that the Maginot line would be all that they needed and once the Germans blew beyond that, they didn’t have too much to back it up. You will see mitigation planning in action when you see an airfield where the hangars are dispersed, defense plants where the buildings seem to be located unusually far away from each other. You will also see it when you see a facility that has power lines coming in from different locations or a hospital with big generators. The antivirus you run on your computer and the backups that you do (you do backups, right?) are examples of mitigation planning you do at home.
It also involves the response if a threat actually acts against that which you wish to protect. A big part of that is deterrence. That’s where nukes come in. A threat agent who wants to launch a nuke against us needs to absolutely know that the consequence of those actions will be utterly unacceptable to that threat agent. As St Thomas Aquinas wrote (S.Th. II-II-108-3): “Vengeance is lawful and virtuous so far as it tends to the prevention of evil. Now some who are not influenced by motive of virtue are prevented from committing sin, through fear of losing those things which they love more than those they obtain by sinning, else fear would be no restraint to sin. Consequently vengeance for sin should be taken by depriving a man of what he loves most.”
Those who would want to unilaterally disarm the US are just as guilty of a vice as those who would have wanted the US to nuke Afghanistan for the sins of Al Qaeda. (S-Th-II-II-108-2 r3): “Two vices are opposed to vengeance: one by way of excess, namely, the sin of cruelty or brutality, which exceeds the measure in punishing: while the other is a vice by way of deficiency and consists in being remiss in punishing”
Don’t get me wrong: I am not a fan of nukes. They are indiscriminate and very, very messy. They provide a bad actor (including, theoretically, a bad actor in the US Government) the opportunity to do incredible damage without any kind of personal exposure to danger. I would like to see them rendered obsolete. I would like to see us have the ability to remediate this country so that a nuke couldn’t reach our shores; I would like to see mitigation planning so that if the remediation hypothetically failed, the consequent impact would be minimized, and the ability to respond to an attack swiftly and surely so that a threat agent who would attack us with a nuke would pay…with the risk to our forces minimized.
But as of now, we don’t.
Sadly, the peaceniks who would have us unilaterally take down our nukes have no interest in us developing the technology to protect our country and respond to threats in such a way to make nukes obsolete.
