Robin van Spaandonk wrote:
> >Even N. Korea > >abides by the partial test ban, and conducts only underground tests. There > >is something to be said for that. > > > ...enlightened self interest. ;) > Well, they never signed the treaty so technically they are not obligated. I don't see how they would have anything to lose by testing above ground. It is hard to imagine they would alienate the rest of the world any more than they have already. Perhaps China told them not to. China never signed the treaty either, but they abide by it. I recall a weird speech I think it was Reagan gave in which he said 'we will never sign thus and such a treaty' -- and the audience cheered, and then he added 'but we will abide by it completely' -- and the audience cheered again, just as loudly. It was surrealistic. If you intend to follow a treaty to the letter anyway, why not go ahead and ratify it? In the 1920s and 30s the Japanese militarists were worked up about the naval limitation treaties Japan entered into with the U.S., the U.K. France and Italy. These limited Japan's ship tonnage to a ratio smaller than the U.S. and the U.K. The militarists yelled that it was unfair and oppressive and so on, and went around trying to assassinate the leaders who signed the treaties. Adm. Yamamoto and others who had some knowledge of the world, and some common sense, remarked that the treaty was a gift from the U.S. to Japan, because the U.S. could easily out-build Japan to a far greater ratio than the treaty called for, and even if Japan could build all those ships to try to catch up it could not have manned them. When the war came, the U.S. out-built them by a tremendous margin. I thought about this yesterday while taking a tour of the USS Yorktown (CV-10). It is basically a pile of junk sitting in South Carolina. I was mainly interested in seeing the engine room, elevator machinery, and other guts of the ship -- the kinds of places my father worked as a young man, fireman first class. You can see that heavy machinery and high voltage electricity in the 1930s were as almost as advanced as they are today, but they required astounding levels of knowledge, skill, practice and lots of manpower to use. It took 3,000 people crammed into a small, non-airconditioned, hot steel box. There were ~20 pages of wiring and pipe diagrams showing damage control procedures covering various eventualities, depending on which part of the ship was hit. It looks like an integrated circuit diagram. I gather the officers and men more or less memorized large portions of this. - Jed
