Does the US have any anti-nuclear technology which can deactivate or explode nuclear missiles before arriving to the US soil? If this technology exists, can it deactivate or explode nuclear missiles in the air in a safe distance to prevent any damage in the US?
If something like this does exist, it should be given to all countries. Sure would settle a lot of anxieties.
And who is going to pay for it?
As I recall the SALT II treaty banned any anti-ballistic-missile missiles, except for one small, experimental system each for The US & The USSR. Reagan’s SDI got around it because it wasn’t strictly speaking a missile system, but either a laser-based or high speed projectile (bullet) based system (it never made it anywhere near the deployment stage anyway). The point was that any such system detracted from the MAD parity (it made mutually assured destruction a little *less *likely, which at the time would have made full scale nuclear war a little *more *likely!)
There’s nothing ‘anti-nuclear’ about it though. It’s just anti-ballistic missile. Since the very first ones (the German’s V-2) the huge advantage of ballistic missiles is that past the very short launch phase they are essentially unstoppable and indefensible against.
I believe you’re thinking of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, which limited the US and USSR to two operational ABM sites. Reagan’s SDI didn’t count because it wasn’t an operational system: a conclusion based on the fact that SDI didn’t actually work.
The ABM Treaty was dissolved in 2001.
“You” are.
After all you are the single largest beneficiary by an order of magnitude.
We ain’t buying a pig in a poke since it’s not going to happen that you’d actually provide the security codes to anyone else.
You can retain the IP rights.
Known by many of its employees as “The Massively Dysfunctional Agency”, and not without reason; Your tax dollars hard at work by surveilling Internet porn. So far, since Reagan’s famous “Star Wars” speech thirty years ago, and through four different name changes, MDA has managed to field exactly one very limited strategic-level ballistic missile defense system–the Ground Based Mid-Course Defense (GMD) system–and it is arguable just how well tested and capable the system is against an actual threat, even the limited threat against a “rogue state” that is the avowed function of the system. Other multi-billion dollar programs like Airborne Laser (ABL), Brilliant Pebbles, and Kinetic Energy Interceptor (KEI) have fallen due to technical hurdles and poor requirements management. Others, such as orbiting lasers, particle beam platforms, and the like remain technically infeasible for the foreseeable future.
Ironically, the United States did have a highly capable and extemely well tested system forty years ago, for approximately four months: The Stanley R. Mickelson Safeguard Complex. However, this system used nuclear-armed interceptors (designed for enhanced neutron output to disable an incoming reentry vehicle) and was designed only for point/near-field defense of strategic facilities, i.e. a Minuteman ICBM complex. It would not have been feasible to deploy such as system to protect even major cities, much less the entire continental United States.
At first blush, this would seem to be true, and this was certainly the opinion that Reagan had. The reality is somewhat different; no real world system could provide perfect interception, and the reliability degrades as the number of simultaneous incoming threats increases. So, rather than provide better protection, it actually encourages both proliferation of existing delivery systems (to overwhelm the defense) and development of new modes of delivery (slip under the defense).
This also serves to destabilize the presumed deterrence between two parties with relative parity (often referred to as Assured Destruction, although the actual theory of AD has a more rigorous and unrealiziable set of requirements), so the result may be to make everyone more nervous. This is what the Soviets, who had long been attempting to develop effective missile interception and directed energy weapons with no success, were really afraid of with Reagan’s SDI proposal; that in order to compete (both with the United States, and between design bureaus within the Soviet Union) they would have to dramatically increase military spending over the already ruinous levels they were spending in the 'Seventies and early 'Eightes.
The only realistic defense against a nuclear attack is not to be at Ground Zero when the lamb shakes. Anything else gives you worse odds than any table in the casino.
Stranger
Wow, almost exactly ten years ago today we were discussing this very subject.
Apparently very little has changed since then in terms of functional capabilities for nuclear missile defense.
But, but, but, Jerry Pournelle still thinks it’s a good idea!