Ronald Reagan, SDI and Shadowrun Options

[Phaeton]

I once tried making a troll Phoenix physmage with jacked-up body, a shield spell of some sort, and high pain tolerance once. I ran out of karma and NSRCG crashed before I could finish, though. :(

[Kanada Ten]

I have absolutely no problem with a Phoenix shaman surviving a nuclear blast. Of course, she will be toxic afterwards and thus not a player character anymore. :alien:

[Omega Skip]

Hooo... Me likes... "Dark Phoenix", anyone?

[k1tsune]

So.. Could a dragon survive a nuke blast?

-Alex

[Kagetenshi]

Unlikely. A dragon could probably prevent the nuke from going off under certain circumstances, but Great Dragons have been taken down before.

~J

[CircuitBoyBlue]

Whatever. Doesn't sound to "great" to me...

Actually, I'd have to agree with that. But then again, in my games, there's always been a greatly diminished importance placed on Greater Dragons, I guess. We've always cringed at the canon timeline when it does things like say one of them has been elected president of the UCAS, and have thus always ignored just about anything dragon-related that we didn't come up with ourselves (we've come up with one thing dragon-related). While we've always viewed even "lesser" dragons as being too bad-ass for the characters to ever have a hope against, that's not to say that we viewed even Greater dragons as having a shot in hell of surviving something like a nuclear blast.

[nezumi]

To stay relatively on topic... (I apologize for any problems in the timeline, I was mighty young when all this was going on)

When I heard the news over the weekend that Reagan died, one of my first thoughts was about cyberpunk. Reagan contributed almost as much towards shadowrun as Gibson did; he contributed towards the environment that cyberpunk could grow in. It was under him that Russia was the biggest threat to us, that it began to look like Japan could buy up the U.S., that corporations grew to the huge, power hungry mosters they are now, that the US heard the first hints of the biggest plague the US would have to face in decades (AIDS), that people realized America is not alone in the world and maybe just maybe, might not meet the new century as a world leader.

Reagan is as much a part of shadowrun as any human president in the game. He turned power over to the corporations to fight far off enemies, and he revealed to us our enemies aren't always who we think they are. I still have t-shirts with Mickey Mouse shaking hands with the Russian bear. But our friendly Mickey Mouse belonged to a breed of corporations that would increase their pollution output many times over and increase the prices us consumers were paying in the name of "fair competition". Japan, who we had crushed into nothing not thirty years ago, was making enough money to start buying up American war bonds and pieces of downtown Los Angeles, and there was nothing we could do to stop their growth.

Reagan represented an age very different from now, and significantly more common to the age we pretend to live in. Perhaps he doesn't have much to do with canon and rules, but he certainly had something to do with the world. I would have been surprised, perhaps even put off, if Dumpshock didn't at least recognize his passing.

[Kagetenshi]

I disagree that corps became more powerhungry under Reagan. Gilded age, anyone?

~J

[Black Isis]

Another note - nukes don't just do explosive damage either. There's the heat wave, the concussive blast, the radiation....even if you munchkin it you'll die from ONE of those (which is one of the asides DP9 makes in Silhouette when talking about munchkins who think they can survive a nuke ;)).

And while I think corporations probably didn't have much of an attitude change under Reagan, his administration was responsible for a lot of deregulation that encouraged some of the corporate bloodbaths -- especially the airline industry, for instance. This is definitely part of the environment that fostered stuff like Neuromancer.

[Entropy Kid]

Before the evils of deregulation, people weren't allowed to own telephones. They rented phones from "The Phone Company." Innovations were held back even though the technology existed and consumers had no choice.

[to state my bias clearly- I'm from the U.S. and had the capitalism=good mainstream upbringing]
IMO-
"Deregulation" seems to be used like some buzz word to incorporate all the problems of capitalism. Deregulation by itself isn't a problem.

In industries that carry some responsibility for public safety- like meat packing and transportation - it makes sense for a governing body to keep a close watch. That doesn't necessarily mean the government should endorse monopolies and decide who can own those businesses.

In industries with high barriers of entry, it makes sense that only the wealthiest companies succeed. It also makes sense that once ownership regulations are relaxed or removed that a company (and its executives) will do whatever will most benefits itself. Concentration of ownership is (somewhat) paradoxically the result of deregulation. I'm guessing that's what you meant by "corporate bloodbaths" since it doesn't promote promote the free market ideals that makes letting business people do their own thing sound good.

It seems pretty obvious after the fact, so anyone wanting the market to be "free" is naive to think deregulation alone benefits "normal" people. At the same time, having a heavily regulated economy can't honestly promise a much better scenario.

In the context of SR it takes a lot of deus ex machina to get the Big Eight. Even in more "realistic" cyberpunk settings, the ascendency of megacorps is a long chain of events, and just because an event happens doesn't mean a given attendant event is guaranteed.

[otomik]

i kind of liked the concept of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation in Aliens, similar to cattlebarons.

my understanding of nuclear weapons was that they have complex mechanisms that start the chain reaction and aren't likely to go off when intercepted, it's not a conventional explosive after all. there has been cases where planes carrying nuclear weapons were destroyed and they didn't go off.
http://washingtontimes.com/national/200403...02901-8830r.htm

[cutter07]

SDI program was never false, it just wasn't possible with the processing power at the time. But there was another system near Reagan's hopes was THAAD, though it was still just a concept by the time he made the speech. Theatre High Altitude Area Defense which we know now as TMD/NMD was tested around 2000 and is still in the works today.

http://lmms.external.lmco.com/photos/defen...haad/thaad.html

[CircuitBoyBlue]

Just to state my bias, I'm an American, and thus have had to put up with the crap Reagan did to my country. Missile defense is crap. Even if we could get it to work, which is not actually such a BIG leap, and even if we weren't guaranteed to waste billions on it beyond actual costs due to defense industry largesse, which IS about a leap as large as they get, it would still be a bad idea. The people proposing such a thing are Reaganites, they believe in the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction staving off full-out nuclear war. So introducing missile defense is basically saying that you want to destroy that balance, as long as we're the ones murdering everyone else (can't be self-defense, they couldn't hit us, remember?). There are only two ways out of this conundrum. You're either suggesting that MAD didn't work, and the US shouldn't have been building up its nuclear arsenal all those years, or you're suggesting that once we have a missile shield, we won't need nuclear weapons anymore, and we can get rid of our arsenal unilaterally.

Missile defense is not a worthy endeavor. We should embark on social security defense, or maybe education defense. God knows they could use some of the ungodly amounts of money that get wasted on military defense contract skim-jobs.

[Arethusa]

You know, if you're going to drag out the Reagan hate, it'd at least be good form to acknowledge his dislike of nuclear weapons.

Anyway, what the hell does this have to do with Shadowrun?

[CircuitBoyBlue]

I put up with a lot of liberal hate in these forums that isn't qualified with sympathetic remarks about liberals. I see no reason why "good form" is suddenly different on the other end of the spectrum, especially as I'm not entirely convinced Reagan actually DID dislike nuclear weapons; only that he disliked SOVIET nuclear weapons.

Though I DO agree, this has little to do with shadowrun. But as long as political topics are getting thrown out, it would be irresponsible for me to remain quiet while such an abhorrent figure is idolized.

[JaronK]

Considering Missile defense is far from perfect, we would still need nuclear weapons as a threat. Of course, a smart enemy would just smuggle the nuke in and blow it up from in country.

The real problem with SDI, and I suppose this does apply to Shadowrun in that it's military theory, is that no "giant wall" defense has ever worked, to my knowledge. The Chinese made the great wall, and the mongols bribed the gaurds and went over it. The French built the Majino line (terrible spelling there, I know) and the Germans went through Belgium. We worked on SDI, and now the terrorists hijack airplanes. The truth is that it's just too easy to bypass a "giant wall" defense... you can look at it, analyze it, and figure out how to get past it, because it's sitting right there and your opponent's cards are on the table to begin with.

With that said, I believe there's something to be said for military development that advances science. If you build a lot of tanks, and those tanks don't get used, you've just burned though a lot of resources with little long term benefit. If, however, you build a small number of tanks, but advance the science of making them a great deal in the process, even if the tanks don't get used you will still get new developments in materials research, balistics, computers, etc, which provides a long standing benefit. SDI has this advantage... it helped advance science. While I understand the concerns of the "don't militarize space" movement, I feel that militarization is often the greatest driving force behind science, and without the military, we may not get back into space for a very long time.

What I don't like is the fact that we have, what is it, 6,000 nuclear weapons? That's completely excessive, and useless in the long run. It's a short term benefit (marginally increased security, though I doubt 6,000 is a better deterant than 1,000) with little long term application. C'est la vie.

JaronK

[Siege]

Is it a perfect defense by any means? No.

Did just the concept scare the Soviet Union into re-considering a political and military viewpoint? Yes.

As long as both had nuke and were capable of uniform annihilation, both were more or less with the status quo. As soon as the Soviet power might have been diminished, they became nervous.

Never mind the fact that SDI never saw the light of day beyond some trial applications and the fact that even a limited thermonuclear exchange will have global ramifications.

-Siege

[Omega Skip]

My cousin (the archetypical physics major) once told me a very interesting way how the missile shields that are currently under developement could be rendered almost useless. I believe he got his inspiration mostly from "Metal Gear : Solid", but the numbers he showed me were pretty scary... Basically, what he was saying was that ICBMs are solid fuel rockets, and that current missile shield systems try to lock on to the missile's heat signature and maneuver the kill vehicle on a collision course. He told me was that if there was no heat signature, there'd be nothing for such a system to lock on to. Right now there's nothing that could just fling an ICBM across the Pacific or the Atlantic or any other considerable distance, but with maybe ten to twenty years of research and materials engineering, a magnetic rail accelerator (more commonly known as a railgun) could conceivably produce enough energy to throw a nuclear warhead far enough to come close to the ranges of modern ICBMs.
Like I said, he then continued to tell me all sorts of things about how difficult it is to build an actual railgun (energy sources, materials for the rails, accidental welding, etc), let alone one powerful enough for this kind of action. But consider this: Germany is developing the Transrapid, a magnetic rail train using a very similar technology, one that could conceivably be converted for military use. Germany doesn't have nuclear capability, but China does. And Germany has exported Transrapid technology to China, where there's already a magnetic rail train commuting in Shanghai, I think.

That was the point where I told him that in twenty years, they'll have very good optical targeting systems and therefore won't need heat signatures, that his whole railgun idea is just conspiracy theorist BS, and that I didn't believe any of it. But still, it would be an interesting background for a Shadowrun.

[Kagetenshi]

[cutter07]

[Entropy Kid]

The last arguments I remember hearing for missile defense had nothing to do with Russia, China, or any of the larger developed(ing) countries. It was about stopping an attack made by governments run by crazies (I'm guessing that meant North Korea) or counties with "nothing to lose," whatever that means.

In SR, there's definitely the tech to stop an ICBM, whether it be lasers, rail guns, ANDREWS, whatever. People have already cited the timeline. Other than the Great Ghost Dance, nuclear weapons still seem to be the most effective weapon for causing (physical) damage (even though they rarely work). There's also the potential use of "coldbringers" or whatever that thing in The Dark Knight Returns was called. --it was a nuclear weapon launched in an ICBM that was designed to cause trouble via EMP. Although that's another argument in the SR world. I've accepted the EMP immunity of SR electronics based entirely on that entry in the timeline (and I know it only mentions "optical chip").

It might actually make sense for a megacorp to have a defense against nuclear attack, at least for their most important sites; or it might not. Does Corporate Shadowfiles - Download - Security Handbook say anything about it?

[otomik]

[Kagetenshi]

[Arethusa]

[Kagetenshi]

True. I exaggerated. While things like the My Lai massacre have happened, they've never won popular support.

However, amongst certain groups in the US, the recent prisoner abuse revelations have been far from unwelcome… thankfully not any large number, but it's still somewhat chilling.

Speaking of which, did we ever find out what Dunkelzahn's proposed economic policy was?

~J