"Interference" is one possible way to call it. Another is "US Military getting ready to blast all objects in the sky with counter-nukes", and airplanes really don't want to be in the crossfire right now.
I don't really know how the US missile-defense system works. I'm imagining that old 1980s arcade game "Missile Command" though...
The missile-defense system work by using SAMs (Surface-to-Air Missiles). Having a nuke counter an ICBM will lead to far worse fallout. While you're correct, the planes don't want to be in that crossfire, the missile targeting system would more than easily account for civilian aircraft and avoid them.
SAMs aren't an alternative to nukes because SAMs can be nukes. The (retired) US Nike-Hercules (intended for anti-bomber) and Nike-Zeus (anti-warhead and, at least in testing, also anti-satellite for Zeus B) are examples.
(Note, if you live in the Bay Area there are a whole bunch of decommissioned bases for these missiles around.)
> Having a nuke counter an ICBM will lead to far worse fallout.
Nuclear airbursts that aren't in close proximity to the ground relative to yield have essentially zero fallout (fallout is basically irradiated debris from the ground kicked into the air by the explosion.) It may or may not increase the amount of flash radiation, but that's a shorter-term, smaller area problem. But the US doesn't (at least officially, and I doubt this could be effectively concealed) rely on nuclear air-to-surface defenses any more.
But any nuclear attack has an EMP risk, and I don't think a plane is where you want to be during an EMP. Plus, people on the ground when a threat is confirmed have a better chance of being able to follow an order to shelter than those in the air.
From a civil defense perspective, “ground the planes in the potential target area immediately and unconditionally on launch warning” makes a whole lot of sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIR-2_Genie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_Zeus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-135_anti-ballistic_missile_s... (currently active!)
Fallout is better than a city blowing up - we used to test nukes in the atmosphere, and while we've recognized that's not great, the calculus changes a bit with a nuke coming to blow up NYC or LA. You're right that we don't have nuclear-tipped anti-ballistic missiles currently, opting for more accurate conventional ABMs, but that's more about the US and Russia trying to reduce their nuclear arsenals.
ICBMs travel in excess of Mach 10, and typical SAMs are Mach 1 to Mach 5.
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Instead of using a small explosive to bring down an enemy nuke, surely there's an idea to use a bigger counter-nuke? Sure, there's going to be a ton of fallout, but that's still better than losing the entirety of San Francisco.
Its a lot easier to hit an enemy missile with a big-bomb, rather than using a little bomb. IE: load those SAMs with nukes and have at it. Even if you're slower, you got the strength and blast-radius of a nuke and have a better chance of bringing down the enemy ICBM.
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I don't think its an issue of "airplanes would be hit by a SAM". I think it's seriously the risk of airplanes literally getting caught in the blasts (that were aimed at the enemy missile).
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-161_Standard_Missile_3
Yes; Russia protects Moscow with such a system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-135_anti-ballistic_missile_s...
Army - Patriot
Army / Missile Defense Agency - THAAD
Army / Air Force / Missile Defense Agency - Ground-Based Midcourse Defense w/ GMI
Navy - Aegis w/ SM-3 (also, Aegis Ashore)
The most interesting is Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_High_Altitude_Area_De...
Basically you launch a missile that intercepts a high altitude missile and launch an object at it in a 'hit-to-kill'. It's been fairly successful in testing according to the link.
Do it high enough up and it's got similar fallout to the atmospheric tests we used to do. Not great, but better than millions dead on the ground.
High-altitude airbursts produce essentially no fallout; fallout is from tossing irradiated ground debris into the air from a ground burst or near-ground burst. Other than the missile itself and it's target, there's nothing for a high-altitude airburst to make fallout from.
> We don't have them currently, but both the US and Russia have tinkered with the concept.
“Widely deployed”, not “tinkered with”.
Those don't have nuclear warheads; that went out with Nike-Zeus in the 1960s.
Getting rid of some of that clutter sounds really nice for performance.
Except that argument sounds like an incentive to have a ten minute delay for any potential issue, no matter how little data you have and how unlikely the outcome.
Agreed. North Korea is now nuclear-armed. Every single one of those ICBMs could have a nuke on it now.
If only there were a central agency tasked providing aerospace warning, air sovereignty, and protection for Northern America.
We could call it something like the "North American Aerospace Defense Command". It could have decades of experience of this stuff!
OTOH perhaps the FAA should just make up stuff as they go.
They do exist. Talk to them, or read what they have to say. EDIT: This is the good ol' "Star Wars" missile defense problem, its been discussed for decades. I'm not myself fully up to date with it, but there's a ton of information online from Senate Hearings / House Hearings on whether or not building this missile defense was worthwhile.
They aren't really that confident in the probabilities of success in stopping a nuclear-armed ICBM. They're gonna try but its not like anyone has ever actually shot a nuke at the USA yet. The ultimate test of pragmatism has never happened yet.
There's almost no certainty that we can stop an ICBM. We have untested systems and untested warning systems that the Soviet Union never even bothered to test. But now there's a rogue nation trying to play tough guy sitting across the Pacific Ocean with nuclear weapons and an experimental ICBM platform.
If an ICBM gets launched, the USA is probably going to throw everything we got to try to stop the missile. Then we'll probably fail, and the city will get nuked anyway. But we gotta do everything within our power to make the probability of success as high as possible.
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San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc. etc. Any of those cities could be lost within a few minutes under these scenarios. If people are saying that this airplane stop-order was over a nuke, I think its actually 100% reasonable to have done these stop-flying orders.
These aren’t secrets. They’re well publicized facts that haven’t changed since the 1950s.
https://www.nknews.org/2022/01/north-korea-fires-unidentifie...
For scale: Hawaii is not only ten times as far away, that missile landed in the sea west of japan.
The hysteria displayed both by the FAA and in this thread is kinda shocking. I work with the military in Japan. Every time a North Korean missile flies into/over Japanese territory we get a warning about it...and then go about our business as usual. We can usually see their flight trajectories on our Common Operational Picture. This one was not significantly different from the dozen or so previous incidents. No idea why people in the States shat a brick and grounded civilian aircraft, especially if NORAD didn't concur with such an action.
Yes, we know what path it probably will take, but to actually _HIT_ such a target requires extremely precise tracking and positioning.
What we do know, is that they ground the entire West Coast's airplanes when an ICBM from North Korea is launched. My guess is that those radars probably work better when there's fewer airplanes in the sky. Hard to know for sure, the spooks don't seem to be talking about the details. But I'm working backwards here with Occam's razor.
This isn’t the first test, yet this is the first temporary grounding. Occam’s Razor suggests someone in the west coast ATC fucked up.
This one also crashed into the ocean, but it got further along. In particular, there seems to be confirmations that this DPRK ICBM test did in fact reach Mach 10.
If this is the first ICBM to reach hypersonic speeds and had something that looked like an intercontinental launch cycle, it would make sense to take it seriously.
*EVERY* ICBM hits hypersonic speeds.
The Hwasong-12 (EDIT: Hwasong-8 I mean) missile test only reached Mach 3, which is slower than hypersonic.
If this is the first successful hypersonic missile from North Korea, that's big news, and possibly warranting the severe response that our nuclear defense forces (probably) gave to the FAA.
Nothing you’ve been asserting makes any sense at all.