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Comment by stormfather | Hacker News Reader

I bet there are nuclear tipped interceptors too, though that wouldn't be public. Its a lot easier to destroy the incoming missile if your margin of error is a few miles versus a few meters. Not to mention it would blot out all the multiple re-entry vehicles. The public wouldn't want to know that's the plan but it would sure beat nukes detonating in cities.

I even remember reading about how the Soviets planned to chain detonate nukes over Moscow in the event of an exchange to destroy incoming ICMBs.

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GMD is hit-to-kill. Though I should point out that it’s broadly useless.

GMD is only capable of taking out 10-20 missiles at once. Russia and China both have hundreds of missiles, and if the DPRK isn’t there yet they will be soon. GMD is essentially useless at preventing a first strike. It was ostensibly meant for if a rogue state managed to launch a handful of ICBMs at the US, a scenario that really isn’t likely. What it would be useful for, is if the US were to strike first and take out the majority of the enemy’s missiles on the ground. To be clear, I don’t think that is why the US built it, and that isn’t part of the strategic thinking. But that possibility is exactly what Russia and China suspect about GMD. Hence their expansion of new weapons.

Yeah exactly. Shooting hundreds of bullets with your bullets. And each bullet you need to shoot breaks into smaller bullets upon re-entry that start randomly maneuvering. Hit to kill is just not practical against a peer firing hundreds of ICBMs.

That's why I suspect the US never stopped developing nuclear tipped ABMs with the Sprint I and II programs. They just went dark. It's the only logical way to defend against the only existential threat we face, and DC is gonna be first struck so you can bet the political class is incentivized to develop this.

Why keep it secret? Well first it interferes with MAD which is very destabilizing. Also its good to hold your most important cards close to your chest. And there's the fact that the public would be uncomfortable with the idea that our plan to survive involves so much radiation being thrown around. A lot of incentive to not talk about it...

I don’t think that makes sense. Where are the vast stockpiles of missiles? The silos? The thousands of people who would need to be on ready alert to launch those missiles? This also would require the US to have been cheating on the START treaties and probably the ABM treaty when it was in effect as well.

Also, nuclear-tipped ABM systems aren’t some sort of super power. Remember that all of this is happening in space at very high speeds. The Nike Zeus had to get within a kilometer of the target warhead before detonating. It’s not like you could throw a couple of these up and knock hundreds of incoming warheads out of the sky.

Not to forget: "Where are the rest of these?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safeguard_Program#/media/File:...

Or is there another option now, with the necessary coverage? From space, via SAT? Some sort of 'dent-detection' in the electromagnetic field instead, be it natural, or man-made?

Nuclear armed anti-balistic missiles have been made, but they're not in use as far as we know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel_program Spartan missiles were set to be armed with 5 MT warheads!

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