Don’t neglect the well known conservative impulse to get really good at winning the last war.
It’s a far easier path than trying to deal with the complexities of actual present day threats.
I’m sure Rumsfeld * et.al. * have thought this out as thoroughly as they have U.S. China policy, but that’s not saying much is it ?
Question… Okay, suppose it did work. Not that I think it would, but suppose it had a near 100% hit factor. What happens then? Are there hundreds or thousands of mid-air nuclear blasts? If so, where, over Canada or something?
Well, nuclear missiles don’t work that way. Blowing one up with a conventional misslie will virtually never trigger an atomic explosion. So:
The ICBMs form China would be destroyed way up high over the pacific somewhere and fall into the ocean.
The Russian nukes from Boomers at the north pole would be shot down and would fall onto Montreal.
The Russian Boomers off the coasts of New York and and Los Angeles would launch a massive and unstoppable nuclear attack against these cities from point blank range. Holocaust ensues, NMD not withstanding.
The North Korean decoy missile will be destroyed over the pacific. The smuggled North Korean nuclear warhead shipped anonymously through a third party to a front in America would blow up the Super Bowl.
The Libyan tanker containing a nuclear warhead will sail up the Potomac and blow up Washington D.C.
etc. etc. ad nauseum.
Forgive my hyperbole, but I think you guys get my point.
No, if the nuke goes off. that would be defined as failure.
The objective is to destroy the warhead so that it never explodes. If this were a TNT warhead, then blowing it up would only make an even bigger explosion in a different place. If biological, then you just cause dispersal somewhere else. Hit-to-kill for these weapons makes them explode rather than preventing them from exploding. But if you blow up a nuke, you don’t trigger it. Most nuke’s dont sympathetically detonate, I suppose one that did could be designed, but that would probably take a lot more plutonium and it would be quite a bit more dangerous to store.
So if missile defence stops a nuke, one of two things happen: The nuke lands on or near target, but it doesnt’ go off. It will still do SOME damage, and most likely break in to pieces. OR it is broken into pieces in mid-air.
You end up with fragments of plutonium (chunks or dust or vapour) raining down on the landscape below.
If you hit the missile early enough, then that happens over the territory of whoever fired it. If you hit on reentry, then the stuff hits the ocean or Canada or Mexico or some other parts of the US.
Now plutonium is a deadly poison in addition to being radioactive, so this is not a good thing, but it’s a whole lot better than having a nuke explode.
This is one reason why missile defense doesn’t work very well against biologicals. To stop them, you have to hit it REALLY REALLY HARD (i.e. vapourise the whole payload) or hit it before it leaves home.
If you hit a biological hard enough to destroy it, then you get collaterial damage, and if you don’t, then it does biological damage.
Nukes are sort of unique in that you can destroy them without setting them off.
tj
The workers at the defense factories ?
The large corporations that gave huge funds to the republicans ?
The universities that do the funded research ?
Yay, just what I always wanted to hear. If a nuclear missile shield ever does work, the plutonium dust will wipe out everyone in the Northern hemisphere.
As I said in Milo’s thread, it appears as though key members of Bush’s team have been sold on this NMD idea. I think the whole thing centers around Rumsfeld, who managed to convince Bush that this NMD thing is worth pursuing.
I don’t know why Rumsfeld is so sold on NMD – IIRC he was involved in SDI during Reagan’s terms, so maybe he has an ego thing.
It seems bizarre to me that with so many things to spend our money on, we want to throw $60 billion on a project which we have spent already $140 billion on with absolutely no results whatsoever.
What is more troubling to me, though, is how single-minded the administration appears to be in pursuing this goal. Every time Rumsfeld is in the news, or Bush makes a foreign policy shift, I see actions which would serve to make NMD more feasible and more attractive. Maybe I am turning into a conspiracy nut, but here are just a few things (apart from the NMD speeches Bush has made, etc.):
-Yesterday, Rumsfeld acted to put all control of spy satellites under one agency at the Pentagon. This move was seen to facilitate the placement of weapons in space.
-Our dealings with China have taken a completely different course since Bush came into office. While some of this may have been bad luck (with the spy plane incident), some of it appears to be directed by the administration. Notably, the change of opinion on Taiwan, redefining China as a strategic competitor versus strategic partner, and cutting all military ties with China seems to move to disengage China and encourage them to become our adversary.
-We have stopped encouraging South Korean negotiations with North Korea. Among other things, we have stopped negotiating for an end to the North Korean missile program.
Again, treating a country like an adversary will ensure that they become one.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/03/07/korea.usa.meeting/index.html
It just seems to me that Rumsfeld and Bush are trying to reshape the world to make NMD not only an attractive option, but a crucial option. This is so dangerous on so many levels – we are basically forgoing strategy which basically kept the world from destroying itself for the last 50 years and replacing it with a pie-in-the-sky missile shield which most say will not work.
It seems to me that only two parties can benefit from this whole thing. As VarlosZ said above, the Republicans can sell down the whole NMD thing to the American people, who probably will eat this shit up. It is much harder to say that you don’t want to spend hundreds of billions on an unproven technology which in all likelihood will not make us safer than to tell someone that you are ensuring American Superiority by preventing any rogue nations from lobbing an ICBM.
The other people who will benefit are of course the defense contractors, who can basically spend untold billions on this project and not be expected to show any results.
Everyone else loses. The world population loses as this device is destabilizing. The American people lose as they now have a false sense of security (Dumbo’s magic feather, anyone?). We will have to break the ABM treaty to put this thing in place. We will have to alienate many of our allies and further alienate (instead of engage) many of the emerging countries in the world. It is 21st century American isolationism at a time when international communication and partnership is at a peak.
In George Will’s latest column (http://www.sacbee.com/voices/national/will/will_20010510.html), he says
To shed some light on my friend Varlosz’ “bomb physics”: He’s quite right. Some of you probably know this, others may not. I apologize if I appear presumptuous. In order to get a fissile run-away reaction, conventional high explosives need to be detonted simultaneously (I don’t know the time tolerances) such that the fissile material collapses upon itself, sustaining the reaction. (Hygrogen bombs work on much the same premise with the addition of a hygrogen core to be collapsed by the fissile explosion in much the same way the fissile material is collapsed by the conventional explosives.)
Getting the right timing is tricky; and is one of the main obstacles to nuke development. It follows that if you blow up the warhead by hitting it, the conventional explosives will detonate out of sequence resulting in negligible or no fission. The radioactive material would be scattered by the the high explosives. So, of course, the objective would be to intercept over the ocean or some uninhabited area where the material could diffuse harmlessly into the natural ambient radiation.
But, as has been noted, the concept in real terms has “problems” many of which are conceptual and unaddressable by closing a technological gap.
Just how much plutonium do you think they put into these missiles, anyway?!?
Really bad analogy!
We have most emphatically not stopped development work on SDI. What Bush and company are proposing is more like starting a national program of injecting folks with the AIDS vaccine NOW. Which vaccine? Surely we have a vaccine that will work after all the time and money we’ve spent!
I’m very disappointed by Will. He used to write good, thoughtful columns, but lately he has taken things to an absurd extreme, misrepresenting his opponents’ viewpoints as stupidity at a kindergarten level, then smacking down this strawman as if he’s made a profound argument.
Not sure, but I have not heard this mentioned as an issue, so my guess is that it is not one. As for the other issue of what happens to the nuclear warhead once it is hit: I think in the exoatmospheric phase, it will be destroyed and there is no concern of it going off. (Of course, the big problem there is actually hitting it!)
Things are apparently subtler in the boost phase. It is possible that a hit on the booster rocket could throw the warhead off-course but not so completely that it doesn’t land, say, in Oklahoma rather than Chicago. There is some debate about whether the warhead is likely to be rendered inoperative by the impact or not. Some think it might survive. Others, like Richard Garwin (who is as close to a straight-shooter as they come, having served on both the Rumsfeld Commission and the UCS Countermeasures Report) think the warhead would most likely be rendered inoperative…but I am not sure how confident of this he is.
I’ll take Cal Meacham’s word for it that George Will used to write good, thoughtful columns. Must have been before my time! My dad likes to point out that Will is the one who wrote a column praising a Nixon (I think) speech without revealing the fact that he [Will] had actually written much of it!
Some say its Regan; some say its Reagan;
Some say its Vegan; some say its Veagan;
Regan; Reagan;
Vegan; Veagan;
Let’s call the arms race off.
If memory serves, about 9 Kg is the minumum for fission. More for a bigger explosion, of course. (Possibly less if you can compress it a great deal?)
In any case, not a whole lot. Although it is highly toxic stuff, I really don’t know that the minium dose would be, but if you spread 9 Kg of anything over the whole US, then the dose would be incredibly small. I imagine this could be a problem only if a few grams landed in your backyard.
Also possible it’s never been mentioned becase we don’t really know much about how much damage an ABM system would do to the warhead, and thus in what form the Plutonium would rain down.
They never talk about the danger of a few tons of steel raining down either, and we know that if a large piece of the booster lands in the middle of a city, that would do quite a large amount of kinetic damage. One thing is certain, it will still be plutonium even if it burns up in reentry. It can’t be a good thing.
A lot of this stuff has never been explained to the public very well. For instance, the US actually deployed an ABM system once. (We and the Russians are each allowed 1 local system by the current ABM treaty. The Russions put theirs around Moscow, were it lives still AFAIK.)
We decided to protect NORAD, and deployed a system of NIKE missiles. The NIKE’s weren’t hit-to-kill though. They were nuclear tipped. The idea was that a nuclear blast in the vicinity of the incoming missile would destroy it without triggering it.
They actually deployed this system, but took it down a few months later when it was realized the the nuclear air-bursts of the NIKE missiles would destroy (or blind) their own targeting rader with EMP when it went off.
I’ve always wondered whether they built the thing knowing it wouldn’t work, or if they didn’t know about EMP when they designed the system.
Still they actually deployed a system that couldn’t work. And now Rummy wants to repeat that mistake in new and interesting ways. :rolleyes:
tj
I will for the record state that I find it puzzling the way Tejota and many others speak as if NMD were all Bush’s idea. True, Bush is very high on NMD, wisely or unwisely. But the Clinton administration has been forging ahead for years on the policy of implementing NMD interceptors. It was one of the few actual examples of bipartisanship from that administration; the Republican Congress and the Democratic administration both were completely sold on this (possibly foolish) idea.
Why have Bush and Clinton pursued this policy, in the face of many who say it is “a defense that doesn’t work against a threat that doesn’t exist?” I would think it is mostly a combination of items 2 and 4 from Tejota’s list. Neither Bush nor Clinton have any substantial engineering background, and there are ardent defenders of NMD’s feasibility. I think both, at the very least, have been thinking that it may work.
I find it particularly notable that, throughout the history of the program, many foreign leaders have also been convinced that an American missile shield might work. Otherwise, they would not have taken the damn thing so seriously. The Soviet Union, Germany, and China are three states that at one time or another have vigorously protested America’s working on a missile shield. Perhaps these countries have unrealistic assessments of our actual abilities; also, in China’s case the protest may be an excuse for expanding its own nuclear capability, while Germany may be more concerned that we will wreck our valuable economy than that we will actually deploy a shield. But I see no reason at all to doubt that when Gorbachev’s Soviet government protested SDI, it was because they thought it was an actual threat to their nuclear deterrent. If Gorbachev believed an American missile shield was feasible, I think it is very possible that Clinton and Bush believe it too.
But I also believe that both presidents have considered that, even if NMD fails to work, it will produce lots of happy corporations and lots of happily employed workers on federal money, while any ultimate failure and political fallout would probably occur well after their terms are over (a theory already vindicated in Clinton’s case). Pork barrel politics continues.
Just shorthand. For the record, I don’t believe that Bush has ideas. He has people for that sort of thing. In this case it’s probably Rumsfield/Cheney, but there isn’t any real way to know for sure who. Bush pretends he’s in charge, so I will argue as if it were true.
Not true. The Clinton administration did research. They had no deployment plans and stated that they would have no deployment plans until the technology had proven itself in a series of tests.
It failed most of those tests, even after the difficulty level was repeatedly dropped in the later tests to the point were it wasn’t a very rigourous test at all.
(Originally, the design was to distinguish the missile from a field of 9 decoys, later that was 2 decoys, and later just 1).
tj
From Thomas Friedman’s Op-Ed piece in today’s New York Times:
Danimal:
In a sense, I agree. Despite all of the conceptual and technical problems that have been pointed out at length by several people here (myself included), there is one thing that a truly effective large-scale missile defense program, deployed internationally, would be good for: preventing global thermonuclear war. On the other hand, a truly efective large-scale missile defense program deployed in only one country would make it relatively safe for that country to initiate global thermonuclear war. Whether or not the Soviets (or anyone else) thought that SDI was technically feasible is irrelevant; so long as they objected to any steps that might eventually lead to the development of a feasible NMD, which they did, their objection to SDI in particular is assured and hence says nothing about it’s feasibility.
Possibly so. Clinton isn’t a technology-oriented guy, but Gore is and seemed to have more involvement with these subjects.
My impression, though, was that Clinton and Gore didn’t actually have any real faith in the program, but went along with it to try to appease the hard right wing in Congress in return for their acquiescence on something else. It also perhaps was intended to buy him some peace from the ol’ military-industrial complex - I’ll go along with those who think corporate welfare is the largest driving force for this program.
There are, as always, wheels within wheels. Let’s go through this slowly without paying too much attention to where the idea of a NMD came from. For the purpose of discussion let us assume that an anti-ballistic missile system is feasible and will operate as intended to knock down a relatively few incoming ICBMs. If this is the case, what will be the probable consequences of implementing the NMD?
We all recognize that a NMD will have little effect on Russia’s ability to strike the US hard enough to leave the country a smoking heap of rubble. This is because Russia has enough operational ICBMs to simply overwhelm the NMD. We might be able to take out the first 20 or 30 incoming missiles but the 1500 following will get through and a fair number of those will explode on target. Thus, the NMD does not make us safer from Russian attack. But Russia cares very much whether or not the US repudiates the Anti- ballistic Missile Treaty. Why?
The answer to that question may be that Russia fears a change in China’s ICBM posture. China never bought into the Cold War strategy of mutually assured destruction that drove the American- Russian arms race. Rather, China contented itself with having only a handful of ICBMs. The latest thing I saw on this was that China has about 20 ICBMs and that they are targeted at both the US and Russia. It was China’s strategy to deter an attack by threatening any potential adversary with the destruction of only a few major cities rather than the whole country. The implementation of the NMD will offer the US some prospect of defeating a missile strike by China, but in also forces China to change from a small ICBM force strategy to a big force strategy in order to counter the NMD. If China can build and field 20 nuclear missiles it can build and field 2000. With the NMD in place China’s small missile force loses its credibility as a deterrent to an attack by the US. China with a large missile force is a much greater threat to Russia that a small force China. Thus the NMD does pose a threat to Russia, albeit by indirection.
Beyond China, as soon as China starts working on a large missile force its primary adversary in South Asia, India will feel threatened. We think that India already has nuclear weapons. India has the choice of submitting to nuclear blackmail by China or of building its own missile force to counter and deter the Chinese threat. Just as soon as India acts, Pakistan will follow. The consequence of this is a dangerous proliferation of nuclear missiles in South Asia.
The rational for the NMD has been that it will provide a defense against so-called Rogue States who might have a small ICBM capacity. The names most mentioned in this context have been North Korea, Iran and Iraq. So far as we know none of these nations now have nuclear weapons or the missiles to deliver them to the US. It is not inconceivable that some of them might develop that capacity in the future, however. The NMD could provide a defense against such missiles, but each of these states has a more immediate enemy than the US and is a dauntingly long distance from the US. If these nations develop a viable missile capability it is most likely going to be a short/medium range capability for use against South Korea or Japan in the case of North Korea, and against Israel in the case of Iraq and Iran, or against US facilities in a near by country. Those Rogue States however must have recognized that in the absence of an overwhelming force, the use of Nuclear weapons against the US or any of its client nations will draw an obliterating US response. There is little indication that any of the so-called Rogue States are bent on national suicide. Rather, every thing the Rouge States have done so far appears to have been calculated to avoid drawing the full force of a possible US response. In the case of these nations the NMD serves to defend against a largely imaginary threat.
This leaves the real threat to US security in the form of freelance terrorist groups, which may or may not have the tacit support of some country. It is these people who set off the bomb in the World Trade Center, at the African embassies and Oklahoma City. Clearly a NMD will do nothing to protect against truck bomb terrorism. It is equally clear that truck bomb terrorism is a much more viable threat than is Russia, China and the Rogue States.
Based on all this, it is my judgment that the only purposes served by the NMD are internal political and economic purposes that are not important enough to justify the expense involved.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Tejota *
**
Well, if you just mean that Clinton didn’t make a “final deployment decision,” you’re right. My understanding is Bush hasn’t either, since we still haven’t got a workable system, or anything even close to it.
But it is also my understanding that the Clinton policy was considerably more than just research, which is how you describe it in your post above. The Clinton administration intended to produce a deployable system and production capacity to field a specific number of interceptors by a specific date. To be more precise:
“The Clinton administration’s missile defense program costs about $2 bn annually and might allow the deployment of an initial capability (with 20 interceptors) by 2005. Costs may then rise to $5 billion annually for the years 2006-2010 as 80 more interceptors and other enhancements are added. Concerns about the system’s effectiveness and its impact on nuclear arms control leads some policymakers to seek to roll the program back to a research and development effort – at least for the time being. Others feel the near-term risk of new military competitors deploying nuclear- armed missiles capable of reaching the United States is too great. They would like to see the NMD program accelerated.” See here.
Obviously that schedule will not be met, but I did think that capacity was the administration’s objective.
Anyway, I still have yet to see evidence that any world leader, let alone Bush, believes NMD is unworkable. Supposing (as you asked us to do for this thread) that NMD is every bit as fantastic and impossible as its detractors say, one must still recall the power of political leaders to deceive themselves. The French went ahead and built the Maginot Line, and thought it would work, even though Germany had already come through Belgium once! So I still believe your theory 4 is correct, although I am quite willing to believe that 2 plays a role also.