Why can’t we detect and disable any missile leaving North Korean soil? Reagan started SDI 30 years ago and we still can’t intercept a missile with radar, satellites, lasers, heat-seeking technology, etc.? What gives?
Maybe the fact that SDI was, is and ever shall be a complete boondoggle has something to do with it.
They are currently working on some new interceptors, with some degree of success, but we are still decades away from anything I would bet my life on.
Still combinations of lag time and accuracy. You have to predict the path of the target. The distances are great. A small inaccuracy at any point can end up a large one by the time of intercept. Radar is not precise enough. The target missile is constantly correcting it’s course. You are trying to predict what those corrections are pointing at. If you calculate your path, just before the target corrects it’s path, you are on it’s old incorrect path, and so on and so on… The target can be programmed to deviate on purpose. A big problem with hitting crappy Scud missiles was how erratic their course was. And that was pretty short range slow stuff.
Missile defense is extremely difficult for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that ICBMs travel at speeds of 3-5 miles per second. Even assuming you know with amazing accuracy what the precise flight path of the missile will be, if your interceptor arrives just 1 millisecond late (or early) you can miss the target by 20 feet. But the bigger problem is that, for any type of missile defense, it is always easier and cheaper to find a way to work around the defense.
You mentioned lasers. Suppose it takes a 40 MW laser to shoot down an ICBM. What if the enemy responds by making the surface of the ICBM a highly polished chrome which reflects 90% of the laser? Now we need a 400 MW laser. So ask yourself, which is cheaper, building a laser that’s 10x more powerful or putting polished chrome on a rocket?
Suppose we could build a constellation of 48 satellites orbiting the globe, so that at least one satellite is always overhead. What if the enemy responds by building a satellite which will match speeds with one of our 48 satellites and then blow itself up? Which is cheaper, building a replacement anti-missile satellite (which can shoot down a moving target from a thousand miles away), or building an anti-satellite satellite that can take all the time in the world to slowly creep up on another satellite and then set off a simple bomb?
Suppose we had a system that could track and destroy up to 40 targets at once. What if the enemy only has 4 warheads but they build 80 decoys? Which is cheaper, doubling the size of an interceptor system or building decoys?
For every dollar spent on missile defense, the enemy only has to spend a few pennies getting around it.
But even worse is the fact that, long before we could build a space laser that was good enough to knock out an ICMB in flight, it would be much easier to build a space laser that was good enough to knock out a 747, or a Humvee, or a human being walking down the sidewalk. A space laser would be much more useful as an offensive weapon than a defensive one.
If North Korea was really serious about wanting to nuke the US, they could simply wrap a warhead inside a bale of marijuana and smuggle it into Los Angeles. A missile defense system wouldn’t help at all in that situation. NK isn’t trying to nuke us; they are trying to make themself important.
Here’s a follow-up question to think about. Suppose you hire an assassin for $20,000 and then the target found out about your assassin and spent $200,000 for a car with armor and bullet-proof glass. What would the assassin do? Whatever your answer is, do you think it would cost more than $200,000?
Personally, I think every country should have nukes. But. None that are capable of going further than their borders. Defensive only. Very costly to invade any country.
Is it public knowledge how effective the Patriot missiles were against the Scuds?
First of all, we can. Probably. There are 36 interceptors in Alaska ready to fire. However, the North Korean missile is ballistic and it was possible to predict it’s final destination. Most likely the launch was detected on MDA’s radars, and most likely they went to alert status and were ready to attempt an intercept. Since they predicted the missile would end up in the ocean (calculated by orbital energy, this is very accurate)
Notice I say attempt. If Kim Jong actually ordered a fission device loaded into an ICBM and the destination set to downtown LA, I would guess the chance of a successful intercept might be around 50% to 75%. The reason is that each intercept flyby, there’s a fairly high chance something goes wrong at one stage or another, and MDA has limited ammo (just 36 shots). Whether they would empty their magazines to maximize the chance to stop a single ICBM or not, even if the predicted impact was LA, is a question that obviously there is not going to be a public answer to.
This is why they didn’t waste an ABM on the north korean missile test.
(obviously the chance is much higher that the missile fails at one stage or another or the reentry vehicle breaks up before impact or the fission device fails from shoddy North Korean construction)
One of the problems with using anti-ballistic missiles on a North Korean launch is that they also look a lot like a nuclear attack on eastern Siberia. So you have to hope that Russia sees the North Korean missile and realizes what exactly is going on.
Who says we can’t?
Presumably there’s some way to tell the Russians, and they do know the positions of the ABM silos, and nuking Siberia isn’t going to prevent the Russians from being able to nuke us back. Hopefully they realize that.
The possibility is never being mentioned by journalists/pundits on the news shows. On the contrary, there is a lot of hand-wringing about when they’ll be able to reach the U.S. mainland, there being no good options, Kim Jong-un being suicidal, etc. Surface-to-Air missile technology has been around for a while now; it seems it could be applied to chasing another missile instead of an airplane but it sounds like the higher speeds is the issue. For now, these are crude NK missiles following a predictable, non-evasive flight path. We can’t know all the secret military technology that exists but I’m surprised the journalists aren’t asking about that possibility as opposed to attacking NK with all the disastrous consequences that could bring.
How would that restriction work?
I had thought that technology akin to what’s shown in this scene from The Fifth Element (0:26-0:33) essentially existed for anti-aircraft defense. Whether that scales up to missile defense, I am not sure.
Could be difficult considering the variation in size of countries. A standard short range and small capacity device would mean larger countries would need larger numbers of them. Some countries are so small that even a defensive launch may be quite suicidal.
Open inspections are required. And those who already seek to rule the world would have to agree.
Considering the current insane military situations all over the place. It might be less insane in some ways. A world wide mutual assured destruction setup. But only with your immediate neighbors. And not entirely total destruction.
I’m not privy to the exact state of the art in missile interception is. But I do know that most of what takes place in the news about all this, isn’t so much concerned with the missile danger itself, as it is with the political implications and opportunities involved.
Back in the 1980’s, it wasn’t the ACCOMPLISHMENT of the ABM programs that Reagan’s administration depended on for progress against the nuclear standoff, it was the SUGGESTION of them. Remember as well, how Reagan also made it a point to talk openly about how a nuclear war wouldn’t actually be all that bad. That too was calculated political gamesmanship, and not real planning.
How much of the hubbub about NK’s nuclear capability is media hype, taking advantage of public fears to sell commercial time, how much is politicians of all kinds and in all the involved countries playing it all up for the sake of political gains at home, I have no idea.
I do know, that once Reagan was out of office, and the USSR dissolved, I never again heard any big news about the Star Wars initiative again. I rather doubt that it was ever properly funded, or made any serious progress, since the best we could come up with in the ME was the Patriot system,and that’s STILL what’s being sold to European nations worried about Russia.
Is everyone here just going to randomly ramble on instead of discussing the actual deployed technology and it’s limitations?
Right now, a North Korean ICBM with an endpoint in the Pacific ocean is a very high, and very fast target. You can’t fire at it from a ship unless that ship were in the perfect spot already. You can’t fire at it during it’s boost phase from North Korea unless you had an airborne laser weapon working or ships close to the coastline ready to fire and again, the ideal trajectory.
What they DO have are 2 things :
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While the missile is in space, there are intercept windows where you could potentially fire another ICBM, basically, that doesn’t have a nuclear warhead. It has a spacecraft that will attempt to collide with the missile.
a. The closing speed is going to be several kilometers/second, so this is a very difficult intercept b. It hasn't worked too well in past tests c. The enemy can just inflate metal balloons and deploy them in a cloud near the warhead bus. Done correctly, it will be almost impossible to tell the difference between the balloons and the real warhead. (hopefully the north koreans don't have this technology but it's a straightforward process to develop it if they have the resources) d. It's firing a whole ICBM off, and there's only 36 of these missiles ready to fire.
- While the warhead is falling through the upper atmosphere - going even faster now - you can attempt to fire what is basically an upgraded SAM at it. You need to have a ship basically right under it when this happens - you could maybe protect LA if you had the ship already in place. It’s also not a sure thing, but since any metal balloons would have been blown free, the radar targets you see are the real ICBM reentry vehicles. The problem is the ship can only protect a small radius around itself - any farther away, and the SM3 won’t have enough propellant for an intercept.
That’s what they have. It’s better than nothing, but if China or Russia opens fire on the USA, tens of millions of people are going to die anyway. It is not remotely an adequate defense against a major power, it’s intended to protect against small nuclear armed nations like Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, and so on.
I would think the Russians would definitely understand that. Just what is in Eastern Siberia that the Russians would think we would attack unprovoked ?
In general, your post was excellent, but you lost me here. How would wrapping the warhead in marijuana help smuggle it in? Seems like wrapping it in something that we’re not already trying to intercept would be more effective.
Besides the puzzling marijuana part, the argument (often used as anti-Ballistic Missile Defense point) ‘they could just smuggle it in’ is doubtful IMO. Maybe some day we’ll see a state actor hand over a nuclear weapon to a non-state actor or some kind of third party agents necessary to smuggle it. But there’s a big ‘agency’ issue there of trust and control. You can’t hire random Southeast Asians (like the Kim half brother assassination) as easily or comfortably to smuggle a nuke. And it wouldn’t necessarily be easy to smuggle one limiting the operation to NK nationals. Possible certainly, but smuggling scenario’s are not a valid reason to categorically class BMD as some kind of Maginot Line (a comparison made with the limitations of the criticism of historical French fixed defenses well in mind, they were not categorically useless either).
I agree the post made other good points. But to just focus on Ballistic Missile Defense, I would say that’s highly worthwhile for the US, on a scale to put into doubt the capability of relatively small ICBM arsenals. I would also add elements to that defense to cover fractional orbit trajectories coming from the south rather than just conventional trajectories from the north (fraction orbit is plenty accurate enough for an EMP attack). And I would not base the decision on penny wise, pound foolish accounting of whether that costs the US more than NK’s programs cost NK (or even Iran’s or others all put together) which really isn’t the relevant metric.
That said, is NK seeking to launch a nuclear ICBM against the US just as soon as it has a reasonably reliable one? Very likely not IMO.
But the purpose of the missile is not to nuke the US. The purpose is to act as a deterrence against US invasion of North Korea. How would a smuggled-in nuke act as deterrence?? Are they just going to say “We planted a nuke somewhere in your country” and expect the US government to believe them? Or allow one to be found (giving the US a chance to study it, find out how it was smuggled, etc) and tell them there’s more?