What? We absolutely don’t. Even if our missile defences work 1:1, that doesn’t account for decoys.
We should curb stomp Putin because the precedent he’s set, if accepted, will lead to nuclear war by prompting a global cascade of wars of conquest.
56 Aegis BMD equipped ships. Source: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/weapons/RL33745.pdf Japan also has 8 equipped ships.
Operational land-based Aegis BMD sites in Poland, Romania and the US.
Given how well Russian technology has performed in Ukraine versus American technology, I'd put money on American tech. I'd also put money on the US having systems that aren't public knowledge.
Russia's sabre rattling has grown increasingly unhinged and frequent which suggests they feel the same way.
Edit - should mention, it's thought that Russia has ~300 operational ICBMs. Also, I don't think our systems would be 100% effective. But I think they'd be effective enough that the US would survive.
Europe cannot do anything remotely like that, so close to everything west of the Ural would burn and pretty much everyone there would die, hundreds of millions of dead and God knows how many more further to the east. The soot from burning cities and forests would darken the whole northern hemisphere for several growing seasons, large parts of the US population would probably just freeze or starve, more so if the US has been hit as well. And that leaves out fallout dispersal, especially from the inventories of nuclear power plants hit with nukes and so on.
There simply is no winning an all-out nuclear war.
There's already been over 2000 nuclear warhead detonations and nothing remotely like that has happened. In fact, the fallout isn't noticeable at all. Granted, the tests were in remote locations, but all the planetary effects people worry about haven't happened at all.
> Europe cannot do anything remotely like that
Several European nations do have missiles capable of taking out ICBMs, on top of US Aegis sites, seaborne Aegis sites, Patriot batteries, etc...
> There simply is no winning an all-out nuclear war
Depends on what you consider winning. I agree it's bad. But equally bad is allowing dictatorships to do whatever they want because they have nukes. Which is where we're at. One day it's Ukraine, the next it's Lithuania, then it's Romania, Finland or Poland. Or maybe Taiwan. Then Japan. And so on. Where do we draw the line?
They said "soot from burning cities and forests." Nothing about fallout.
It's speculation shared by nuclear and climate scientists.
Some quick maths. 15 million ha is 150,000km2. Tsar Bomba blast area was 16km2. It would take over 9000 Tsar Bombas to burn as much forest as only Canada's 2023 forest fire season.
Maybe provide some source for your assertion...
The fire burns beyond the blast area.
Also, urban fires produce
> Maybe provide some source for your assertion
Sure [1][2].
One, no—it’s about fire effects. It’s in the title.
Two, you literally cited blast area to estimate burn area.
Three, do you need a source for fires being able to spread? If I toss a match into a dry forest, is the area of the matchhead a predictor of particulate volume?
Totally wrong. You’re still comparing forest and urban fires, and assuming you’ve calculated a burn mass from blast effects alone.
> There's zero basis for it
So you still haven’t read the first source. The one with “superfires” in the title.
Capable of carrying 1,185 warheads. Plus decoys.
The “T” in THAAD stands for terminal. That means the warheads and decoys must be targeted separately. We’d need thousands of THAAD interceptors to even begin to feel comfortable about surviving, as a republic, a Russian nuclear exchange. (To say nothing of such an exchange immediately leaving us intensely vulnerable to China.)
Our missile defences protect against rogue nuclear states. North Korea. Some day, Iran. They are not intended to defeat MAD.
Yes. Terminal means the downward phase of a ballistic missile's flight. THAAD can target them before they reenter the atmosphere. That's the point.
And other BMD systems are designed to target them in the earlier phases of flight.
Not relevant. They've already separated. That means you have to count warheads and decoys, not missiles.