First of all, I don’t know how you can possibly claim that we could detect ICBM’s on the ground. We couldn’t even find the SCUD launchers in the Gulf War, and those were just missiles on trucks. If the Iraqis went to the trouble of building underground bunkers with removable roofs, we simply couldn’t find the missiles.
The Iraqis are very good at this sort of thing. They managed to hide an entire chemical weapons program even when U.N. inspectors were going all over the place. They set up dummy labs, they build labs inside trucks and move them around, etc.
If they want to hide missiles, all they have to do is play a big shell game with semi trailers - moving empty ones and ones with missile parts around almost randomly. Then our satellites can’t figure out what’s going on. Then they can build a ‘factory’ with a retractable roof and hide a missile inside. Or build it into a bunker underneath a government building. There are lots of ways to hide them.
And everyone seems to take it on faith that it’s much easier to just smuggle a bomb into the U.S. That may have been the case, but it may not be in the future. You know, it’s not like the type of bomb the Iraqis would have would just fit in a suitcase. The most likely bomb they could build would probably weigh hundreds of pounds and have to be transported in a very large container. That pretty much means it would have to come in by ship. That’s something you can control if you need to.
And that’s the bottom line: You can control your borders, but you can’t control what other nations do inside theirs. If what they are doing is building rockets that can bypass your military, you might want a defense against that.
Never mind the missiles; how’s the National Box-Cutter Knife Defense Program going?
Sam, this subject has been explored thoroughly before, and I’m at a loss to see how this latest test changes anything. “Missile defense”, however you choose to define it, is still a solution in search of a problem, while most of us see the problem entirely differently. Nobody, least of all us aerospace engineers, doubts that some technologically-significant things can come out of this, but national anti-terrorism defense isn’t at heart a technological problem and can’t be addressed adequately by a technological program, no matter how willing we are to be seduced by one. Meanwhile, its continued existence reinforces a cowboyish view of the world and its problems, not a useful view.
As for the program itself, I’m not willing to accept any claims for “success” from sources within the program without looking at data they won’t release. Those same people have been called out for rigging tests to look good (IOW, fraud) enough times already that to accept such claims on their face, as you do, is inappropriate.
Yes, because it seems to me that ICBM’s aren’t the things that need countering. Nations possess ICBM’s and nations are vulnerable to MAD.
Small groups who hijack airplanes and crash them into buildings aren’t deterred by MAD, or much of anything else, and doubtless laugh at anti-missile defense.
The money could better be spent on studying the design of real anti-terrorism actions rather than the feel-good, CYA actions (like putting National Guard in airports) that we are pursuing at this time.
The problem with the “Missile Shield” is it doesn’t address the issue that it suppose to address.
ICBMs are hard to develop, a lot harder than intermediate range missiles. There are only a handful of countries that have them: the US, Russia, possibly China (who else?). Russia and China aren’t stupid enough to use them, not in the least that such a launch can be detected.
ICBMs are big suckers. It’s quite implausible for somebody to steal one, as opposed to a nuclear warhead.
Since ICBM launches can be detected, and nuclear warheads are small enough to be smuggled around by other means, what is the more likely approach a hypothetical attacker will take?
Since the MD cannot defend against these other means of attack, it’s rather pointless.
North Korea has a missile right now that can hit the west coast of the United States. Iran will have a missile capable of hitting Europe within 2-5 years, and a missile that can hit the U.S. within a decade or so.
Iraq has been purchasing missile technology from North Korea and apparently from Russia.
Sorry, I don’t buy that all of these countries are going to always be deterred by MAD. Iraq and North Korea are run by people who are probably insane. Iraq has been willing to give up billions of dollars in revenue and starve its people just to keep its weapons of mass destruction.
But you guys miss the point - even if they are deterred by MAD, these missiles will have a tremendous destabilizing effect. Because the mere threat of them means we have to let these rogue countries get away with pretty much whatever they want.
If Iraq comes to us and says, “Get out of Saudi Arabia NOW and stop supporting Israel NOW, or we’ll launch our missiles at you”, we need to be able to say, “If you do, you only have a 10% chance of getting your missile through, and either way we will destroy you.”
If they think that WE think we are protected, then they can’t make the threat. I’m surprised you guys can’t analyze these situations in a little more depth than “MAD will protect us”, or “They would be crazy to launch against us”. Nuclear strategy is a hell of a lot more complex than that. They don’t have to launch against us, they just have to hold the threat of being able to over our heads, and we lose significant power.
Why do you think countries like France and the UK became nuclear powers? There’s no ‘logical’ reason to do so if you think merely in terms of who would launch what, and where, in a nuclear war. But if you think in strategic terms of wanting to have a big hammer when sitting down at the negotiating table with the big boys, it starts to make all the sense in the world. Once a country is equipped with missiles and nukes, it’s playing in the big boys’ sandbox no matter how backwards it is. That’s what Iran and Iraq want, and that’s what we can’t allow until they become far more stable than they are today.
And that’s why those three countries are in an ‘axis of evil’, and why at least one of them is going to be invaded and overthrown in the near future…
I suspect that was also your opinion of the USSR leaders. And they were deterred, weren’t they?
Did the USSR “get away with pretty much whatever” they wanted?
The thing about hypotheticals is that the poser can make up an unanswerable scenario and say, “See?” Hypothetical situations are for formal, academic debates and moot courts.
But it isn’t more complex than a “fool proof” missile defense, I guess.
But they aren’t talking about building a missile defense. Their nuclear capability is for MAD.
I guess you have swallowed GW’s rhetoric hook, line and sinker.
I think that intelligence gathering has come a very long way in the ten years since the Gulf War, and if nuclear bombs were at issue I’m sure much more effort would be put into looking for them than was the case with the scuds. Also, the type of large ICBMs capable of hitting America from Iraq are not as mobile as scuds.
Smuggling a hundred-plus pound device into the US would be difficult, but far from impossible. However, if it could be brought onto a ship, unloading it wouldn’t even be necesary, New York and Los Angeles, among the largest and most important cities in the US, are both seaports. The bombs could be detonated before the ships have to unload. Stopping every ship offshore and searching it is the kind of thing that the government would tend to do only after the fact.
I’d like to see a citation for that, I haven’t heard anything about this, though I’ve read about the Iranian ICBM program.
In the first paragraph you say that Iraqi leaders are probably insane and wouldn’t be deterred by MAD.
In the second paragraph you say that Iraqui leaders would be deterred if only 10% of their missiles get through.
Which is it, are they so insane as to not be deterred by nuclear retaliation a la MAD, or are they sane enough to be deterred by the idea of nuclear retaliation? You can’t have it both ways.
Don’t put words in my mouth. No, that wasn’t my opinion of USSR leaders. They were evil, but as far as I know they were perfectly sane.
The same cannot be said for Kim Jong Il in NK or Saddam Hussein. Calling them insane is not exactly a news flash. Go read up on North Korea and see what I mean. Saddam has offered lots of evidence for his lunacy.
You’ll note I didn’t include Iran in the ‘insane’ category. The Mullahs in Iran are fanatics, but not insane as far as I know.
Well… a hell of a lot more than they would have without the bomb. Same goes for China. The U.S. had a hard time in Korea in large part because it had to walk a fine line due to the risk of Chinese involvement. The threat of the war going ‘nuclear’ prevented the U.S. from doing all kinds of things that would have helped end the war. The same thing happened in Vietnam.
What I said was that absent a credible deterrant, the U.S. would be forced into repeated episodes of brinksmanship. Just like what happened with the Cuban Missile Crisis. In other words, the U.S. would be in a situation where it would have to continually call their bluffs. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to have to relive the Cuban Missile Crisis every few years.
Which is why I didn’t call it ‘foolproof’. You’ve really got to stop setting up those straw men.
No, it means I can think for myself. I have been studying defense issues and nuclear strategy for 20 years. And comments like that last one add nothing to the debate. Save the cheap shots.
They are not mutually exclusive ideas. What Saddam will do with his back against the wall and no other options available is a lot different than what he will do at the negotiating table.
The point is that it’s a lot tougher to attempt nuclear blackmail if your intended victim has a credible defense. This is not new - it’s the fundamental basis behind MAD strategy. Saying it’s just, “we’ll kill you if you kill us” is too simplistic. During the cold war, the balance of power shifted back and forth as each side developed different weapons and defenses. That’s what the whole Cuban Missile crisis was about, for Pete’s sake. With missiles in Cuba, the Soviets would eliminate our early warning system. That in turn would allow them to make threats that we couldn’t counter.
The same happened with weapons development. The Soviets would build a missile accurate enough to hit hardened silos. The Americans would then be in a position where a first strike could take out the retaliatory force. So then the U.S. built super-hardened sites that the new missiles couldn’t destroy. Then the Soviets would improve their accuracy. So the U.S. would build the MX on a racetrack so the Soviets wouldn’t know where it was. Etc.
At each development, the balance of power would subtly shift back and forth. When it favored the Soviets, they would take advantage of that to subtly intimidate the U.S. and press their advantage. The U.S. would overcome the problem, and turn the tables. This is how nuclear powers used to negotiate and jockey for position in the cold war.
I have NO desire to have to engage in that again, especially with an unstable madman who just might follow through on his threats.
Sorry, but I honestly have to admit that I cracked up when I read this sentence. So, maybe the solution is just to think that we’re protected without actually having to be protected? Unfortunately, I must admit that this is about the most rational argument I have heard for rushing ahead with deployment of missile defense! It certainly does get around the technical problems that actually prevent us from being protected any time in the near future. [And, in fact, it is not much different than the rationalization that I believe Rumsfeld gave at some point last year.]
I do in fact tend to agree that this sort of “freedom of action” thinking is what is behind the NMD deployment, given that it is hard to believe that they [the Bush Administration] don’t really know it is nowhere near the working stage yet. (Although a contributing factor might be just to try to set us on an irreversible course where we have no choice but to go the route of missile defense because we have abandoned all other things like the ABM treaty.)
So, should we change the topic of the debate from whether we should/can have a workable missile defense to whether it is a wise move to engage in some sort of “pretend” game where we pretend to believe that we have a workable defense in order to keep our adversaries believing that we might act as though we do if they try to blackmail us?
One problem I have, by the way, with this solution is it leaves important policy matters totally in the hands of the executive branch because in order to really pretend, you can’t let the American people in on the trick…and you can’t even let Congress in on it 'cause they’ll just leak it like a sieve. So, maybe, since the Bush team is so wise in ways that we are not, we should just leave this all in their wise, capable hands?
This is begining to feel like a Twilight Zone episode.
Oh, please. No one is playing ‘let’s pretend’ here. That’s why I keep emphasing CREDIBLE defense. It has to be credible. That pretty much means it has to work. No one is going to be fooled by a big deception.
Also, if you are going to call bluffs it’s important to be able to back it up. It’s not just that the enemy believes that they can’t hit us, but before we take a step that might cause the enemy to test our defense WE have to believe it.
Again, you can just look at the cold war. If you think just pretending is good enough, why didn’t the U.S. deploy a fake MX system rather than going to all the trouble to actually develop it? Why not just load some railroad cars with dummy missiles and drive them around?
Because it’s not credible, both to the Soviets and to ourselves. And if it ever leaked that the system was a fake, it would do immense damage to the REAL deterrant force because it would cause the Soviets to question everything.
No one’s playing games here. The U.S. isn’t spending tens of billions on a pretend defense system. It has to be a real, credible defense.
BTW, the goal of missile defense now is completely different than it was during the cold war. In some ways, the task is now easier. But in others, it’s much more difficult. For instance, in the Cold War even a 50% ‘kill’ rate would have been effective, because it would have protected the deterrent force. The original SDI was never intended to be an invulnerable blanket over the nation.
But now, we need the defense to be VERY reliable. On the order of 95% or more. But the job of intercepting the missile is much easier when dealing with rogue states because they simply don’t have the resources to develop effective counter-defense weapons and decoys. And also, instead of having to be able to hit 50% of 8000 missiles, we have to hit 95% of one or two. That allows us to set up a ‘staged’ defense. We can try to hit the missile in the boost phase, and if we miss it we can try to hit it in cruise, and if we miss again we can try to hit it with point defenses on the ground on the way in. If each of those attempts had a 50% chance of success, the whole system would have an 87.5% chance of killing the missile. On the other hand, if we had three stages that each had a 75% chance of killing missile, the overall success rate would be 98.4%. I think that is possible.
The timetable for deployment I think has more to do with external risks than by the administration’s optimism about the technology. By 2004, Iraq could conceivably have nuclear weapons, and Iran could have a missile capable of hitting Europe. And North Korea already has a missile that can hit the U.S.
I think the administration’s thinking is something like, “When that happens, having even a 20% chance of hitting an incoming missile is better than having nothing at all.”
Sam, well okay, but why do I get the feeling you are doing a “bait and switch” all the time on this issue? Either you are arguing the point of whether we should be doing research to the end of eventually deploying a missile defense if it gets good enough, in which case you are arguing a question that, while interesting, is essentially academic at the moment since continuing research on missile defense gets pretty much bipartisan support in Congress.
Or you are arguing that Bush and Co. are right in abandoning the ABM treaty and rushing ahead with deployment in which case you are not arguing for any sort of credible deterrent and we have a very different argument: Should we deploy a missile defense that has a near-zero chance of working just to get something out there? (There’s probably higher probability that the missile itself will fail than that it will be shot down by a system put in place in 2004.) And, of course, in that case you have to weigh the benefit of improving our security by a miniscule amount against the ways in which our security might be decreased by the reaction of our adversaries to such a deployment…not to mention the issue of whether we ought to be spending lots of money and effort on this sort of thing when the money could be better used to do things that might really increase our security or educate our people or whatever.
By the way, the problem is that we ain’t talking rocket science on the side of the offense here. I think a country that has managed to develop a missile (which is, of course, rocket science) is likely to be able to manage to come up with some sort of mylar balloons and a primative inflation system. See the UCS countermeasure report at http://www.ucsusa.org/releases/4-11-00.html
Sure they are. Your argument that Saddam would back off if he thought that only 10% of the missiles would get through argues for his sanity and in addition is just MAD with a few billion dollars added on for SMD.
Let me correct my phrasing. Every reasonable and necessary defense, not every possible defense. Numerically, and in terms of total destructive power, the most credible threat to our country’s well-being is missiles. Every power that matters has a large number of missiles. Yes, it’s possible that we could be hit by a single smuggled weapon, but we have already seen (for example) Saddam’s affection for missiles, and I think if he had a missile capable of hitting the U.S. he would use it at his first opportunity. Deterrents didn’t mean anything to him when he went to war against us, even knowing that he’d be destroyed. And given that, I’d like to see even a marginally effective missile defense system.
Here, we just disagree. I don’t really have an argument to counter you past my bully analogy, I just don’t agree.
I didn’t put words in your mouth. I told you what I suspected based on this and other things you have written. You claim that you don’t think the USSR leaders were insane. Your denial has to be accepted, at least provisionally.
How do you know what the USSR and China would have done without the bomb? Do you have ESP or is this another of your hypothetical flights of fancy.
What kinds of things are you claiming would have helped win the war? Do mean the use of nuclear weapons? Do you think we should have an NMD so we can use nuclear weapons at will?
But if we’re going to count on NMD to protect us from retaliation when we use nukes, as you seem to think to be a good thing as witnessed above, then I’ve got to assume you think it will unquestionably protect us from retaliation. If it didn’t do that what would “winning” the war with Korea be worth? San Francisco, Seattle, Denver?
As to the “strawmen.” Your main aruments in favor of NMD seem to consists of hypothetical scenarios involving what the USSR and China “would have done if …” and hypothetical threats made by Saddam about ending our support for Israel. Those are major league strawmen in my opinion.
I guess this means that you thought of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as so dangerous that they should be attacked before GW said so.
I think there are better ways to spend money on defense against the type of threat that is now extant. You don’t think so. I’m willing to leave it at that. One or two successfull test shots may or may not mean technological feasibility. That doesn’t equate to strategic value.
I don’t intend to continue to debate about contrived hypotheticals. Especially so since no one who has the authority to make the decisions about such things is listening to either one of us.
Whatever. I describe my knowledge of how nuclear deterrance works, and you want to write it all off as ‘contrived hypotheticals’. I hope you notice that the entire field of nuclear strategy consists of ‘contrived hypotheticals’, since we actually haven’t had a nuclear war.
But that’s fine. You don’t have an answer to my comments, so you attack me and dismiss the whole debate. And then cap it off by saying that you won’t talk about this any more because you and I don’t actually have influence over policy.
Damn Straight!