Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Re: well....

Raising an argument to the point of absurdity is a poor debate tactic

As in Pre-emption....ok, so why not bomb Pakistan right now (don't they have the nuclear bomb?

This is a poor tactic commonly used in for things like the debate private firearms ownership. It's commonly expressed with off the wall statements like, "Well, if you believe individuals should be allowed to own firearms, why not nuclear weapons? Hmmm?" It almost always signifies that person has lost the ability to address the issues directly and is resorting to the absurd.

The simple answer to your question is that Pakistan has shown no overt signs that it intends to attack us, so why would we bomb them? If we saw they were planning to attack us with nuclear weapons, I'm reasonably sure we would bomb them. As New Yorkers like to ask, "You got a problem with that?"

You asked what exactly are weapons of mass detruction? [sic] Biological weapons? They don't destroy, they kill randomly and not completely, but leave plenty of time for retaliation.

Weapons of mass destruction are defined as chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons intended to inflict massive and indiscriminate casualties. The "destruction" refers to human life, not necessarily to property. Otherwise, we could argue that a neutron bomb isn't a weapon of mass destruction because it kills people with little blast effects.

As for Saddam, he has a proven history of not only developing weapons of mass destruction, primarily chemical weapons, but of using them. Before he kicked out the weapons inspectors in 1998, there was evidence he was rebuilding his weapons programs.

Some people seem to have accepted the Hollywood version about what spy satellites can do, as portrayed in that absurd movie, "Enemy of the State." Contrary to what the movie shows, we don't have hundreds of spy satellites up there that can be instantly retargeted to track individual cars. The reality is that we only have a handful of those photoreconnaissance satellites up there and they are low flyers, meaning they pass over an area in a few minutes and are then gone with no additional coverage for hours. I've seen imagery from some of those satellites and it was very impressive. However, they can't see through walls and their orbits are predictable so it's easy to know when to hide your activities. The reality is that in a country the size of Iraq or Afghanistan, it's not that hard to hide stuff from spy satellites.

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