My cynical answer; it’s to funnel money to the manufacturers of the missle defense system.
I think it rather belongs in this one. Whether a missile defense system can be made to work or not is not irrelevant to political issues surrounding its deployment.
Here’s The Nation’s take on the whole issue:
Technology will advance to the point where missiles can intercept thousands of current technology MIRVs traveling thousands of miles an hour miles above the surface of the Earth, but our smart bombs today can’t even hit all their immobile targets now. We aren’t talking Scuds here, and don’t believe technology won’t advance for our enemy to the point where they can’t get though this net. It just reads like The Butter Battle Book.
There’s a line I like; “In the eternal battle between warhead and armor, warhead always wins”.
We could…you know…mutually destroy the atomic weapons.
When Reagan spoke of using laser beams to destroy Soviet missiles, Gorbachev replied they would coat their missiles with mirrors.
Scientific America did a long story showing what a waste the missile shield is. Every advance can be thwarted with simple measures. It needs distance to work even theoretically. If it is close to the launcher it is less effective. It has made little progress that isn’t faked . A big waste of money that will send possible enemies into building newer missiles. Just another way to feed the Military Industrial Complex.
Which just serves to highlight the deficiencies in technical knowledge and understanding of basic science by both leaders. There are some fundamental problems with firing a high energy laser through dozens of miles of atmosphere that may never be resolved, and if you could, plating a reflective surface on the outside of a rocket body (or polishing the metal body, or rotating the booster, or whatever) is not going to sufficiently disperse or redirect the attending thermal shock that will cause the case to rupture and the booster to blow apart. Of all of the programs under the Strategic Defense Inititive (colloqually known as “Star Wars” from Reagan’s famous 1983 speech), not a single one of the directed energy weapon projects ever demonstrated technical feasibility, and most were so highly speculative that they served to develop little more than conceptual artwork and vague technical think-tank studies.
Regarding missile interceptors, while the capability is not totally out of the range of technical feasibility, there are still some very significant problems. The United States actually deployed a tested and effective strategic missile defense system, the Safeguard ABM site at the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex near Grand Forks. This was a much reduced scope version of the original Nike Zeus/Nike X program that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara opposed on the basis that it would not provide effective protection for the civiliain population against a large scale attack. McNamara eventually (and by all reports reluctantly) agreed to deploy the scaled-down “thin” defense system against a limited attack launched from a second tier aggressor, typically identified as China. It’s unclear what beef the insular China would have with the United States that would prompt a suicidal nuclear strike, but it was really just a political justication for a decade and a half and billions of dollars spent on an unneeded capability. In Catch-22 terms, the Pentagon bought the entire stock of Egyptian cotton and was trying to figure out a way to make it pallatable to the public.
The ultimately deployed Safeguard system wasn’t designed to protect people, cities, or even industrial capability, but rather to protect the adjacent Minuteman ICBM complex against a surprise attack long enough to launch a return salvo. At this it may have been effective (though studies clearly indicated that the system could be readily overwhelmed by only a modest increase in incoming RVs and/or countermeasure systems) but was totally unnecessary; by the time it was deployed the United States had both effective early launch detection systems and a robust communication architecture that would very likely defeat any attempt at a disarming surprise attack. Indeed, this is the scenerio the solid rocket Minuteman system was designed to counteract; one could communicate launch orders and fire off the missiles within a few score of seconds, so protecting the launch complex is not just a bit like closing the doors after the horses have escaped. And this was done at a cost to make even an oil executive choke; somewhere comfortably above $25B in today’s dollars. (Our SLBM systems also provided a stealthy, sea-based response even if ground-based systems could be undermined.)
The current system, the Ground Based Midcourse Defense has never had a full-up realistic system test despite having been deployed in two sites and declared at full operational capacity over two years ago. Even assuming that the interceptor works as advertised it has a very limited capablity to deal with mulitiple incoming threats and the still-hobbled control and integration systems have no demonstrated capability to discriminate between real threats and decoys or countermeasures. Deploying it in a site in Poland or the Czech Republic is not going to make the system any more robust.
This isn’t to say that it can’t be made an effective system, but this would take more time, resources, and a willingness to admit deficiencies so that you could resolve them. There’s no indication that anyone is willing to lay out the kind of money to go through a full development and test cycle in order to obtain the kind of reliability and debugging required to have confidence in this system. And unless you have a system that not only you are fully assured of, but that your opponents view as unbeatable, it only stimulates those opponents to build more missiles and countermeasures to overwhelm your system, resulting in a cycle of progressive arms development and deployment that is costly to everyone involved and serves only to increase the likelyhood of use before the opposing side can effectively counter the threat. Strategically, it’s a game theory problem without an equilibrium; there’s no point, from a strictly military point of view, to stop building more systems. Assured Destruction, or (Mutually Assured Destruction as it is often known due to the amusing acronym) is also an unstable strategy for similar reasons; adding an imperfect defense system just exacerbates the poles about which the system destabilizes.
Now, we’ve received no small amount of benefit from technological developments resulting from strategic ICBM and ABM systems, including the powerful microcomputer sitting in front of you and the robust global network it is connected to. But current systems are largely about pulling existing technology off the shelf, giving it a new coat of paint, and proclaiming that it is somehow more effective than it was thirty years ago back when it was decided to be not worth the price then. There’s little to come out of this aside from political jockeying and goading (and being goaded by) Russia as part of a repositioning of American interests in the long-neglected Eastern Europe. It has almost nothing to do with Iran, which is at least a couple of decades away from being any kind of threat to the United States (at least, insofar as ICBMs are concerned) or North Korea, which is a threat only in the febrile imagination of Kim Yong Il.
Stranger
I understand why our society is set up in this way, but I think it needs some tweaking. It seems this would all be much more efficient if we just cut the investment in half and tell these companies not to actually waste time building anything. Thus, they rake in almost pure profit and are paid off, then we could give the rest of the money to some project that actually helps our nation and doesn’t harm our standing in the world, like schools, solar energy research, college loans, paying off the deficit, or something that isn’t a complete boondoggle.
That great bleeding heart, Eisenhower, said…
Imagine if a presidential candidate said that today! Oh wait, they have, and we know what happens to them…
In addition to the technical problems with missile defense and the general issue that the advantage tends to be with the offense, which can employ relatively simple countermeasures against various defenses, there is also the issue that this defends against the least likely threat.
I.e., if a terrorist group or rogue nation has a nuclear weapon, why are they going to send it with a missile…which requires considerable technical capabilities and, worse yet, gives us a “return address” so we know where to launch our ICBMs. Much better to smuggle the weapon into the country or a boat into one of our harbors. Of course, this smuggling is probably even easier for attacking Europe than it is for the U.S. because of its direct land connections to many of the rogue countries in question.
“We recognize the imperative need for this development, yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” – Eisenhower’s final address
If that isn’t the perfect example of a Cassandra complex I don’t know what is.
More like “If you buy an attack hamster, chain it to a post in your neighbours yard, and install a panic button in my ex-wife’s house, I’ll aim a loaded mortar at her entire city block, just like I have done every day for the last forty years.”
The whole situation is a complete load of crap from beginning to end. Aside from the fact that the proposed system is of probably of no threat to anything except the US taxpayer, that even if it did work it could be saturated with a handful of russian MIRVs, and that they still have a perfectly adequate SLBM force that this thing wouldn’t even see, the Russian ‘threat’ is laughable. Instead of having their missiles targeted somewhere else (like China or the US), with the ability to retarget at Europe in a few minutes, they’ll be targeted at Europe with the ability to retarget to China or the US in a few minutes.
Big deal. Putin could nuke into ash before, and now he can nuke me into ash five minutes faster. I’m hyperventilating, I tell you. Quick, quick, let’s all kowtow to His Most Imperial Tsarist Majesty Putin so we can go back to the good old days. :rolleyes:
I don’t know why everyone didn’t just shrug and go “Yeah, sure. They’re your missiles, point them where you like if it makes you feel all manly”.
If nukes are outlawed, only outlaws will have nukes!
Or something like that . . .
several points
One) The idea of a “STARWARS” type defense system can never work against a huge power with multiple launch capacity from many points (including submarines)… But it just might work against a rogue nation with only a handfull (relatively speaking) of ICBMs
Two) As far as I can tell, no one has adressed the issue of the results of a succesful “STARWARS” type initiative. these include exploded radioactive debris both falling down onto European and glbal areas, plus the “polution” of high orbitals with fast moving extra deadly (radioactive) debris
Three) Assume a succesful “STARWARS” program is built “somewhere”… wow, we can hit any missile, mirv’ed or not, and knock it down so that it does little harm… So, a rusty Liberian registered tanker pulls into New York Harbour, another into Seattle, , Another into LA… all carrying nukes…
sad regards
FML
Okay, let’s clarify a few things.
First, employing ‘simple’ countermeasures on an ICBM is not easy, because nothing on an ICBM is easy. North Korea has failed with numerous launches to even get one where they want it to go. If the North Koreans or the Iranians launch a missile at the U.S., it’s like to be a very crude weapon. Forget MIRV warheads - they’ll be lucky to build a bomb small enough to lift with their launchers, without an equivalent number of dummy warheads being attached.
Second, there have been plenty of successful tests. The people who claim the tests are ‘phony’ because the missiles are made extra-visible, or because some other risk is mitigated simply don’t understand how you carry out engineering field tests. You control for as many variables as you can, and you test one thing at a time. If you’re testing the missile to see if it can home in on an object it has detected, you make sure the thing can detect the object by making the target more visible. That’s not ‘phony’ or cheating. It’s just engineering.
And what’s with all the defeatism here? Aren’t you the guys who want to keep ploughing money into fusion research? Alternative energy research? How would you respond to someone who said, “It’ll never work, so don’t bother trying”? You seem awfully selective in which technologies you want to write off as impossible.
Finally, you just don’t understand the value of a missile defense system. The value of the system in today’s world is that it throws uncertainty into the plans of the enemy. The most likely threat the U.S. is going to face from Iran is not a sudden rain of missiles - it’s nuclear blackmail. The day they have the bomb, the demands start. If you have no shield against their bomb, they are going to bargain harder, confident that your back is to the wall and there’s no way you’ll sacrifice a major city. But if you have a missile shield, and you tell them to go stuff it, they don’t KNOW that you are serious. Because maybe you’re counting on your shield to save you. It takes away a lot of blackmail power the Iranians would otherwise have.
And this makes the world safer. The big risk is that Iran or another country will decide that their nukes will make them immune from attack and will make other countries agree to just about everything they want. That means they may push very hard - perhaps past a breaking point. But if the U.S. has a missile shield, there’s a limit to how far they can push before the risk of needing the missile shield to protect you is outweighed by the magnitude of the demand. And since the Iranians will have no idea how truly effective the system is, they don’t know how hard they can push.
That’s why the thing was deployed now, when everyone agrees it still needs work. So long as its true effectiveness is secret, it gives the U.S. some negotiating room should nuclear blackmail take place.
You make some decent points, but here you really go off the deep end. What is this blackmail you speak of? Did the Soviet Union blackmail the US for five decades? If so, what did we give up? How did we ever defeat the USSR if we were so busy being screwed over by commie blackmail? Are you saying that whomever has the bomb therefore blackmails others? Are we being blackmailed by North Korea right now and I just haven’t noticed? This blackmail nonsense is just pure malarkey.
The idea that the US and the West is simply going to have to bend over and take it from another country with nuclear arms (unless we have some kind of missile shield) is so woefully ignorant of the last half century of history it simply boggles my mind.
Of course. Research into a cancer cure deserves more funds than one into FTL drives, because the cure is much more likely to be possible. We don’t have infinite resources.
None, really. In the highly unlikely event that someone decided to nuke us and we have such a shield ( that actually works ), they’ll either send an overwhelming number on missles like Russia could, or sneak one in overland or water, so we can’t see it coming.
You do NOT want to make a nuclear standoff more unstable. One of the arguments againt the original Star Wars idea was that is would make it rational for the Soviets to launch a nuclear first strike before we could complete it, since if they waited they couldn’t tell if we’d nuke them from safety.
:rolleyes: Yeah, right. They know that if they nuked even a small town they are all dead. They will never, ever do any such thing.
I’m sure they could manage a bioweapon or chemical weapon attack right now; have they they done so ? No. All this garbage about how the Iranians are slavering maniacs just waiting to nuke us is just standard right wing bigoted, paranoid, warmongering garbage. WE are far more likely to nuke THEM than the other way around. America is far more of a rogue nation than Iran; they should be more worried about our insane behavior than us about theirs.
Or if they were silly enough to nuike us, they just wouldn’t send it by missle. Duh.
Well, yes actually.
We gave up Eastern Europe; did nothing when the Hungarians tried to resist the Soviet Union, did nothing when Czechoslovakia tried to resist the Soviet Union, etc. All because the Soviet Union threatened to nuke Europe if we interfered.
We didn’t defeat the Soviet Union so much as had to wait until it finally decayed on it’s own. And of course there are those who claimed that our technological race with the Soviet Union ended up bankrupting them.
More by China, which will never let us crush North Korea no matter how obnoxious they get, and China has the nukes to back this up.
Many argue that the whole Vietnam deal was the US taking it up the ass. We couldn’t defeat the Viet Cong because we didn’t dare invade North Vietnam because we were afraid of the USSR and it’s nukes.
I hate to tell you, but Eastern Europe was written off by the US at Yalta in 1945, four years before the Soviets had the bomb. The Soviets basically completed their power grab by 1948 or so, a year before they had the bomb. I think you’re confusing “the US making a practical, but regrettable, policy decision” with blackmail. We also did nothing when China took Tibet, and China didn’t have nukes at the time. We also were not blackmailed out of providing arms to defeat the Russian army in Afghanistan – why didn’t commie blackmail work there? And we certainly were not intimidated by Soviet nukes to turn over Central America to Daniel Ortega and his supporters… not that I’m saying that the whole secret war and arms for hostages fiascos were good ideas.
Seems like a very reasonable strategy for dealing with Iran, too.
Maybe the South Koreans are blackmailing us, too, because they don’t want the US to invade North Korea either. Something about tens of thousands of civilians being killed in the first days of the war by conventional artillery.
If you stick a broomstick up your own ass, it’s silly to blame someone else for your aching butt. Vietnam was an American foreign policy mistake, and you can’t blame that on Chinese or Russian nuclear weapons.
Possibly- my impression of the time was that before 1948/1949 the US didn’t appreciate just how agressive the USSR would be after WW2, compared to it’s relative isolationism during the 1930s. Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech was a wakeup call to those who had thought that some vestige of democracy would remain in postwar eastern Europe. The alarm bells really went off when the Nationalist government of China fell to the Red Chinese. And by that time, the USSR did have the bomb. And certainly by the mid 1950s the US would have done anything it could to reduce the USSR’s power; that it did not aid the anti-Soviet uprisings was telling.
Tibet was too landlocked for the US to project any sort of conventional military power there. The only thing we could have done was nuke China, and after the Korean war we were at least temporarily unwilling to do that.
Lemme get back to you on that one.
Except that AFAIK, the Soviet Union didn’t directly commit terrorist acts to undermine the West; Iran has actively sponsered terrorism repeatedly in the past. As one commentator put it, “We might have thought the leaders of the Soviet Union were evil, but we never thought they were crazy”.
Yes you can. Arguably, the reason Vietnam was a foreign policy mistake was that we simply had no way to call North Vietnam to account for attacking South Vietnam.Because they had their seven-foot tall, three hundred and fifty pound brother standing behind them- the nuclear armed USSR.