A Little Like a Toy Gun

The story is common enough that the Google search " toy gun killed police" brings 1, 340,000 hits from all parts of the country, from the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, from Dallas and from Pomona. Details vary but the essentials are always the same. Somebody, a child, a criminal, brandishes a gun, the police open fire and later discover the gun was a toy. Oops.
You see the police can't always tell at a distance or in the dark or in a hurry that what looks like a deadly weapon is really something else.

Now the Pentagon wants to raise the stakes in this deadly game. The risks in the toy gun game are pretty much limited to the kid or the perp with the toy gun. Now the generals want to spread the risk. To everybody.

The brass hats want to modify our deadliest nuclear missiles to carry conventional (instead of nuclear) weapons for possible use against, oh say, Iran or North Korea. Sounds like a step in the right direction until the experts point out that the Russians will not be able to tell whether the launch they detect is nuclear and aimed at them or conventional and aimed at somebody else. The toy gun problem

Add to that the problem that they will have just fifteen minutes to make up their minds. And their satellites aren't as good as ours. And their whole system is badly deteriorated.

If all of this additional risk makes sense to you, please send SecDef Rumsfeld an encouraging word and, by all means,

Stay Naked
jd