On Tuesday, November 7, 2017 at 6:36:07 PM UTC-6, Mike Van Pelt wrote:   
   > In article <358f2299-603c-47a2-b617-b041e4004cb6@googlegroups.com>,   
    could this mean a MAD but on truly   
   > >space scale?   
   > >   
   > >You don't need the super-super-superweapons.   
   >    
   > Yeah... if you have relativistic speed spacecraft, nukes add nothing   
   > significant to the destructive power of just plain dumb rocks.   
      
   Actually, nukes offer two significant advantages over kinetic-kill attacks   
   from the attacker's POV.  The first is speed.  It takes time for an impactor   
   to strike, sometimes a very long time, unless there just so happens to be one   
   on just the right    
   trajectory that you can modify it to hit quickly.   
      
   If you have enough energy/delta-V, of course, you can accelerate the rock   
   across the star system easily and quickly...but if you have access to that   
   kind of energy, you don't need the rock at all.   
      
   Nukes can be positioned and used quickly, and they're compact, a single   
   spacecraft could have a hold packed with nukes, and enough blast power to   
   reduce whole global societies to barbarism or worse if there are no defenses   
   in place.   
      
   The other advantage is precision, nukes could be used with far greater   
   precision than rocks, maybe even leaving parts of the target in a useful state   
   for the attacker afterward, esp. if he can build 'clean' nukes.   
      
   My earlier point, though, was that the tech levels available to the advanced   
   nations of Earth _today_ would be enough for interplanetary-scale MAD, if you   
   added in FTL travel and a lack of practical defenses.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)