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otomik
i'm curious if the SDI anti-ballistic missile system (Star Wars) ever got off the ground in the shadowrun timeline. It seems like there's a few missile's in SR history that have been sent up yet never reached their target (Lone Eagle incident, North Korea). does it work, how does it work or how does it work in SR?

i'd also like to point to a favorite part of Reagan's speech where he introduces SDI. It's a very poignant speech but overshadowed by his speech on the Challenger disaster, the last lines of which come back to me upon his recent death.
'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God.'
QUOTE
If the Soviet Union will join with us in our effort to achieve major arms reduction we will have succeeded in stabilizing the nuclear balance. Nevertheless, it will still be necessary to rely on the specter of retaliation, on mutual threat. And that's a sad commentary on the human condition. Wouldn't it be better to save lives than to avenge them? Are we not capable of demonstrating our peaceful intentions by applying all our abilities and our ingenuity to achieving a truly lasting stability? I think we are. Indeed, we must.

After careful consultation with my advisers, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I believe there is a way. Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope. It is that we embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive. Let us turn to the very strengths in technology that spawned our great industrial base and that have given us the quality of life we enjoy today.

What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?

I know this is a formidable, technical task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of this century. Yet, current technology has attained a level of sophistication where it's reasonable for us to begin this effort. It will take years, probably decades of effort on many fronts. There will be failures and setbacks, just as there will be successes and breakthroughs. And as we proceed, we must remain constant in preserving the nuclear deterrent and maintaining a solid capability for flexible response. But isn't it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war? We know it is.

In the meantime, we will continue to pursue real reductions in nuclear arms, negotiating from a position of strength that can be ensured only by modernizing our strategic forces. At the same time, we must take steps to reduce the risk of a conventional military conflict escalating to nuclear war by improving our nonnuclear capabilities.

America does possess now the technologies to attain very significant improvements in the effectiveness of our conventional, nonnuclear forces. Proceeding boldly with these new technologies, we can significantly reduce any incentive that the Soviet Union may have to threaten attack against the United States or its allies.

As we pursue our goal of defensive technologies, we recognize that our allies rely upon our strategic offensive power to deter attacks against them. Their vital interests and ours are inextricably linked. Their safety and ours are one. And no change in technology can or will alter that reality. We must and shall continue to honor our commitments.

I clearly recognize that defensive systems have limitations and raise certain problems and ambiguities. If paired with offensive systems, they can be viewed as fostering an aggressive policy, and no one wants that. But with these considerations firmly in mind, I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.
http://www.townhall.com/hall_of_fame/reagan/speech/sdi.html
Person 404
Actually, a lot of nukes just fail to work in SR; I think it's less SDI than some unexplained (at least as far as I know) occurence, especially since it extends to the Cermak blast.
Abstruse
Manasphere screws with nuclear explosions?

Personally, I think this thread isn't much more than an attempt to bring back the off-topic post about Reagan's death by trying to force it into being on-topic. Hopefully, it'll get closed too. The man's dead. Whether he was a great man or a menace is up to your personal politics and no amount of debating will change the minds of those who feel otherwise. Frankly, though, the man was advanced in years with several medical conditions so it shouldn't be that big of a surprise he passed away. Morn him if you will, burn him in effigy if that's your perogative, just keep it off the boards so we can discuss Shadowrun.

The Abstruse One
toturi
Could have given him Gene Therapy and Leonisation.
Crusher Bob
Considering the fact that man portable lasers are available, ballistic weapons are probably on their way out in SR (ballistic missiles, conventioal aritllery, non-stealth aircraft). Nukes can still be delivered by tree hugging stealth missiles. Expect artillery to change to something similar. Aircraft will have to alos have all sorts of expensive stealth and EW gizmos to keep from being swept from the sky too (if UAV have not completly taken over this role by *now*).

Also, anti satellite weapons will be very well developed as well, so don't expect GPS to have coverage of the war zone... Interesting diplomatic problems here...

Given the decision making speeds involved. i'd expect more systems to become AEGIS like, the human just turns a key the authorizes the system to fire, and it decides what to fire at, when, and how much...
Kanada Ten
QUOTE
2009 - Although denying responsibility for the launch, U.S. President Garrety informs Russian President Nikolai Chelenko of the targets of the multiple warheads. Garrety hopes to prevent a full scale retaliation by giving the Russians enough time to use semi-secret ballistic defenses to stop the missile. (Shadowrun Second Edition)

2009 - Shortly after being informed of the missile, President Chelenko tersely informs Garrety that the warheads have been stopped. A privately conducted stress analysis of Chelenko's voice later indicated only a 79% probability that he speaks the truth, but neither seismic nor space-based sensors record any nuclear explosions. (Shadowrun Second Edition)

I think the Japanese claim missile defense on the Korean attack, though that is doubted.
Kanada Ten
And looking at it deeper it seems they only have missile interceptors, more like today's missile defense proposals.

QUOTE
2009 - In Montana, U.S.A., after ten days of negotiations a Delta Team anti-terrorist group invades the silo. During the struggle, which results in the death of all the occupying SAIM members, a single Lone Eagle ICBM carrying four MIRVed five-megaton warheads is launched. The missile, which is targeted for the Russian Republic, ignores all auto-destruct signals. The military has no interceptors in position that can shoot the missile down either. (Shadowrun Second Edition)
Phaeton
Hah. Me and Arethusa just blame nukes screwing up in canon on the fact that the rules permit someone standing at ground zero to survive with a mere 1 box of L physical. nyahnyah.gif
Person 404
Wha? There are rules for nuke damage?
Phaeton
Nah. The only canon-ish rules are the default explosion rules. Basically it's just (reallyhighassnumber)D or so. But you could conceivably roll high enough to stage it down...
Person 404
And I'm sure the odds are about as high as all of the radiation/blast missing you by dint of quantum tunnelling...




(Yes, this is hyperbole.)
Kanada Ten
I'm pretty sure that Nukes do Naval Scale damage, don't you? Not to mention simply invoking the instant death rule. Frag, if a Stonebinder can kill one instantly with a spit to the head, I think a nuke need no rule to say so.
Kagetenshi
QUOTE (Phaeton)
Hah. Me and Arethusa just blame nukes screwing up in canon on the fact that the rules permit someone standing at ground zero to survive with a mere 1 box of L physical. nyahnyah.gif

Except they don't. Nuclear weapons would be DN easily, and as such I don't think it's possible to build a character who can stage it down to L.

~J
Sahandrian
QUOTE (Kagetenshi)
Except they don't. Nuclear weapons would be DN easily, and as such I don't think it's possible to build a character who can stage it down to L.

~J

The next munchkin challenge?
BitBasher
munchkins cannot do it. 36 boxes of damage base plus about 50,000 dice for staging at TN 4. On average you're taking 12,536 boxes of damage and need in the neighborhood of 25,000 and some change sucesses to survive it at a TN of 100,000 minus of course, your impact armor. smile.gif
otomik
so how often does this problem come up in your games? i mean what kind of campaign are you running where there are nuclear explosions and people soaking the damage?
Phaeton
QUOTE (otomik)
so how often does this problem come up in your games? i mean what kind of campaign are you running where there are nuclear explosions and people soaking the damage?

Oh, none right now. I was mainly just referring to a relatively ancient thread on here that started as a discussion on the Horrors and split into a nuke rules debate and something else...
Hasaku
QUOTE (BitBasher @ Jun 6 2004, 05:59 PM)
munchkins cannot do it. 36 boxes of damage base plus about 50,000 dice for staging at TN 4.

Of course, a munchkin would point out that Explosive Staging and Deadlier Overdamage are both optional rules, then proceed to survive by metabolic arrestor.
Kagetenshi
Unfortunately, even without Deadlier Over-Damage, naval damage still does more than 10 boxes, so unless the munchkin can scrounge twenty-six boxes of overflow, they're toast.

~J
Omega Skip
High body Troll phoenix shaman.
toturi
QUOTE (Kagetenshi)
Unfortunately, even without Deadlier Over-Damage, naval damage still does more than 10 boxes, so unless the munchkin can scrounge twenty-six boxes of overflow, they're toast.

~J

Simple, Immunity to Deadly Damage and Overflow.
GreatChicken
^ I didn't know you can be immune to 'forms of damage'.... eek.gif
Crusher Bob
A munchkins power can be so great that then can ignore whole sections, nay, chapters of the rule book. And if you strike their PCS down, the next version will be more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Phaeton
QUOTE (Crusher Bob)
A munchkins power can be so great that then can ignore whole sections, nay, chapters of the rule book. And if you strike their PCS down, the next version will be more powerful than you could possibly imagine.

Obi-Wan Kenobi was a munchkin? eek.gif
Omega Skip
No, seriously, a Phoenix shaman has an overflow monitor of [body x 2]. If you can jack up natural body to, say, 15 (Troll), then he could conceivable withstand 25 boxes of overflow damage and still hope to live. Maybe not enough to survive a nuke... but he could survive pretty much everything else. Especially if you give him the edge that increases the overflow monitor.
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. frown.gif
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.gif
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 wink.gif).

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
QUOTE (JaronK)
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.

And just a shade over sixty years ago, Fortress Europa was breached. During the Cold War this would have given us a brief advantage (and then caused World War III), but now there isn't anyone relying on the ability to missile us out of existence.

~J
cutter07
QUOTE
thus have had to put up with the crap Reagan did to my country


Gee like bluffing the CCCP from turning the US into a crater, strengthing our miltary (which Clinton undid), fixed the tax code for low-middle incomes, kept the oil trade flowing during the Iraq-Iran war, and practically striking the death blow to the Eastern Bloc? You mean all that "crap"? ohplease.gif

Even the democratic party knows better then to speak his name in vain.

QUOTE
We worked on SDI, and now the terrorists hijack airplanes.


And Kagestenshi you make a good point. But the terrorist attacks would stop if we were willing to go to the extremes they are. Launching an ICBM on Mecca during Ramadan would be 9/11 100 fold or more but I along with the rest of the world would be horrified. They have no problems killing unarmed civilians, even women and children while we try very hard to not. The problem is we have a social and moral conscience that the extremists don't. Its not that we don't have the means or the knowledge, only that we couldn't live with ourselves afterwards. Until we either stop pulling punchs or the enemy fights on our rules (doubtful) we're screwed.
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
QUOTE
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.
This is one of the things that really bothers me about Israel having the nuke (and those French Unilateralists for giving it to them) because it's not about nuclear parity/MAD, it's about "if we go down we're taking a lot of our enemies with us." It's a kind of deterent but it's much less assured destruction, and sometimes nations are very willing to take casualties (12 million russians dead in WWII).
Kagetenshi
QUOTE (cutter07)
Gee like bluffing the CCCP from turning the US into a crater


Like reversing the gains made during Detente and putting the fingers back on the red buttons again.

QUOTE (cutter07)
strengthing our miltary (which Clinton undid)


My vote goes to Clinton on this one. We've got better things to spend our money on. Fiscal responsibility, anyone?

QUOTE (cutter07)
fixed the tax code for low-middle incomes


And then raising taxes significantly because he squandered too much money (at least he realized it was necessary)

QUOTE (cutter07)
practically striking the death blow to the Eastern Bloc?


This one is actually true. He forced a massive spending war, and the CCCP went bankrupt trying to keep up with the reckless US military spending.

QUOTE (cutter07)
You mean all that "crap"?  ohplease.gif 

Even the democratic party knows better then to speak his name in vain.


Yes, all that crap. There is nothing to praise and little or nothing to respect.

QUOTE (cutter07)
Its not that we don't have the means or the knowledge, only that we couldn't live with ourselves afterwards.


Bullshit. It's because world public opinion actually matters to the US, being a nation that relies on trade and foreign relations. It's been demonstrated before that US forces have no problems killing unarmed civilians if given a chance to.

~J
Arethusa
QUOTE (Kagetenshi)
My vote goes to Clinton on this one. We've got better things to spend our money on. Fiscal responsibility, anyone?

Indeed. If you're going to drag out the Reagan love, cutter, it'd at least be good form to not myopically ignore, say, 2.6 fucking trillion dollars in national debt.

Not that I like Clinton. I acknowledge his solid economic policy and appreciate the balanced budget, but I think I hated almost everything else he did.

QUOTE (Kagetenshi)
This one is actually true. He forced a massive spending war, and the CCCP went bankrupt trying to keep up with the reckless US military spending.

I'd say this qualifies as something to respect.

QUOTE (Kagetenshi)
Bullshit. It's because world public opinion actually matters to the US, being a nation that relies on trade and foreign relations. It's been demonstrated before that US forces have no problems killing unarmed civilians if given a chance to.

That's absurd. I somehow doubt, were the US to become an isolationist state, that we'd suddenly have nothing to preclude us from war crimes or a little genocide (and don't say anythinga bout the UN; I think we all know that that's little more than a manifest joke). Beat the crap out of cutter all you like— just do it on reasonable terms.
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
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