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authored:

• _Hyperspace_
• _Visions_
• _Beyond Einstein_

• Superstrings
• Black Holes
• DNA
• Human Genome Project

first mention of Michio Kaku in Usenet:

From: Gernot Heiser (heiser@iis.UUCP)
Subject: Re: Nuclear weapons
Newsgroups: eunet.politics
Date: 1989-06-08 00:24:58 PST
 

In article <2171@etive.ed.ac.uk> djm@etive.ed.ac.uk (D Murphy) writes:

>I don't think that nuclear warfare was *ever*
>really considered possible - MAD caught on very quickly and even when the
>US had that capacity to nuke the Russians with no counterattack they didn't
>do it. Politicians might play perilously close with this idea (JFK during
>the Cuban missile crisis, for example), but ultimately I think that
>economics and politics deter wars...

I recommend some interesting reading:
"To win a nuclear war" by Michio Kaku & Daniel Axelrod, South End Press, Boston

They make a point that starting as early as 1945 the pentagon kept on producing plans on nuking the SU (n.b. without being attacked first). Nuclear blackmail was exercised by the US repeatedly (starting in '45 against the Russians when Truman was ignoring earlier agreements that would have granted the SU petrol rights in Iran) up to Nixons plans of nuking the Vietnamese. Apparently there were several occasions the the US military pressed hard for using nuclear weapons and it was finally the President's decision not to use them (the parliament was never asked).

The book also gives nice insight why the US has so many nuclear wapons (orders of magnitude more than required for "deterrence", and many that are of no use against a superpower, but quite useful against some small country).

Finally there is a good explanation for the military's graze about "star wars" - the "missing link to first strike capability" (quote from a general).

The scaring thing about this book is that it doesn't look at all as being made up - the bibliography is _very_ detailed and quite long.

Makes you kind of wonder what they are going to do once there is a real European Union (which would be much more powerful economically than the US).
--
Gernot Heiser                   Phone:       +41 1/256 23 48
Integrated Systems Laboratory   CSNET/ARPA:  heiser%iis.ethz.ch@relay.cs.net
ETH Zuerich                     UUCP (new):  heiser@iis.uucp
CH-8092 Zuerich, Switzerland    UUCP (old):  {uunet,mcvax,...}!iis!heiser

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