> That you know of. The 747 laser may not be a thing, but a military warplane with the next gen version of that laser may very well be
There is no reason to keep laser aircraft secret since they are only for limited use. The whole YAL-1 aircraft and the follow on program have been announced but we haven't seen the prototype. If was secretly working, wouldn’t have Congress complaining about budgets being cut. Laser research has been focused on short-range air defense.
You missed the part about deployment. Boost phase lasers need to be close to target, we would have noticed ones flying from Japan or South Korea around North Korea. If there was working laser system, they wouldn't be spending tons of money of missile-based defense.
> That you know of. Putting a rack of tungsten rods with basic guidance's system on a payload isn't really that complicated. They don't really need to be that big for localized destruction either. A 20x1 foot one has destructive power of an ICBM. A smaller one could take out a silo easily as it would penetrate quite far.
Hypersonic guidance is hard, ICBMs aren't guided. China has anti-ship missile but that is on slower IRBM. Unguided ballistic projectiles may not be accurate enough to hit silos.
That much tungsten weighs 34 tons. You also need to send up the rocket to drop it out of orbit. Falcon 9 can only put 22 ton into LEO, Falcon Heavy is 50 tons. Basically means either need smaller (there is a limit to size) or wait for Starship. SpaceX has dropped the price but it is also projectile per launch.
That size projectile would do 850 ton TNT at 10 km/s. Not as destructive as an warhead which are 100x more powerful. Other problem is that there isn't much use for 1 kT strike, it is too big for conventional warfare that prefers lots of precision strikes. Strategic attacks can be done with cruise missiles against non-peers and not at all against peers.
Final problem with kinetic bombardment is proliferation. There is no way to know if it is kinetic or nuclear payload and nuclear is much better option. Opponent would have to assume that any launch could be nuclear attack. Or if conventional then your proposed first strike. It is the same problem that scrapped conventional ICBM.
> If they use gps for guidance, they can definitely be jammed/misdirected with a strong enough fake gps signal. And setting off an emp that creates magnetic fields strong enough to cause high current in circuitry is not that farfetched - the guidance computer may be fairly shielded, but you still have servos and other parts exposed that would be affected.
They don't use GPS, they are inertially guided. Once they launch there is no outside output. The military hardens all of its electronics. Warheads are designed to have nuclear explosion go off next to them, both for nearby siblings and nuclear-armed SAMs.