LibArc Blogs

I'm abit annoyed at this article, so just let me rant.
This is mostly based off a single Haaretz article.

The article lays out the sorry state of CD in Israel. I'm not treating it as the holy gospel but two things scream out.
One is the Israeli attitude of "Israel cannot absorb a nuclear, biological or chemical strike. The conclusion was obvious. Israel will have to launch a preemptive strike."
This is a very nice assumption and I agree with it, but this does not absolve the goverment of working to protect civilians from possible attack. Civil Defense has side benefits everywhere, at the very least basic education. Even if we increase the protection factor of Civvies by just a few orders of magnitude, this can protect say...Netanya from a strike on nearby bases. Or the same for Jerusalem. This is ignoring the basic requirment of a country to defend it's citizens!
Second is the approach towards defense as a factor in calculation. Defense in Israel seems to be treated (going by published stuff only) as an afterthought, an "oh right, we can be attacked." And not as something serious to lay out plans for. Part of this comes back to the quote above, that Israel cannot sustain a real attack. But does that matter? Don't we have a basic obligation to not assume we're infalliable and we might take a hit? Conventional wise, we do that.
Why not do the same for chemical? That's a solveable problem right now. It would take abit of money and actually trusting people to use gas masks properly but it can work.
Biological is a differant issue but if we actually have Biowar we're all going to hell in a very fast car.

Nuclear is a whole differant kettle, we have working ABM and I'm willing to atleast partially trust it's numbers. But do we want to put everything in this assumption of "it'll either never happen, or ABM will do it's job"? Expanding PF for civvies is a childs play for an actual goverment.

That's it, comments are welcome.