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Comment by JPKab | Hacker News Reader

Can someone please enlighten me, because I was under the impression that there is no ABM system on the planet capable of intercepting, let alone destroying, a large rock moving at 10km/second.

I'm not saying its impossible, but it just seems to me that there is a lot of misinformation as to what actually happened.

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I'm with you here. The RIM-161 standard anti-ballistic missile used by the US is quoted by wikipedia as having a speed of 9600km/h or 2.7km/s. Speeds in low-Earth orbit are about 7-8 km/s, objects entering from a solar orbit likely several times that. There is absolutely no way you would have significant success probability of intercepting it with a missile unless you knew the incoming orbit very precisely.

Just look at that dashcam footage: from entering the atmosphere to breakup was just a couple of seconds. On a very tangential orbit, no less.

Gazelle does at least 5.5km/s.

But how long does it take to get to that speed?

By the time its left the silo. Russians are dead keen on their one-shot silos packed to the gills with various devices (pneumatic, hydraulic, explosive) to bring a missile up to ludicrous speed very, very quickly.

Spent a very enlightening afternoon down an old bunker near pervomaisk.

Found some stats in the tourist brochure from there. 9.4m high,1.1m dia, 4km/s in 4s, which gives an acceleration if about 102g. 80-100km range. Max speed 7km/s. "directional blast" also, which is interesting.

The US Nike-X Sprint had similar performance (Wikipedia says only 90 gravities, and there's some nonphysical-looking footage of test launches on youtube somewhere). Pretty crazy, and I gather that MIRVs made that whole category of ABM obsolete.

Yup. Aforementioned satan missile can carry hundreds of warheads, and an equal number of decoys. Two of them, they said, could wipe out all US cities.

I'm skeptical there exists a system to automatically fire nukes at something and it has never had a false positive. Especially (chauvinistically) under control of the Russians through the fall of the the USSR.

I'm not sure a terrestrial power could do this without being way visible ahead of time.

I agree with you. Even (not chauvinistacally) under control of the USA, EU, China, Japan, India or Australia.

In a few cases Russian military officers like Stanislav Petrov have ignored protocol, not fired their nukes, and prevented global nuclear war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

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