The U.S. Has No Defense Against a Russian Nuclear Attack. Really | Hacker News Reader

The U.S. Has No Defense Against a Russian Nuclear Attack. Really

forbes.com

4 pointsfunkyy4 comments

The proposal - basically to re-kickstart Star Wars - is laughable. The physics doesn't work. We've known this for decades. The Ground-based Midcourse Defense, is only capable of 'intercepting a simple threat in a limited way' says the GAO. A full-fledged system, for the threat envisioned, would have to handle hundreds of incoming missiles, each with multiple warheads and multiple decoys. It's a lot cheaper to build a new ICBM with 1970s technology than build and maintain the hardware needed to shoot it down.

We also have no way of testing the system at scale.

The whitepaper starts "Nuclear war is the only foreseeable threat to America’s survival in this century". I'm confused on how that's foreseeable, while biological warfare, coastal flooding due to global warming, and the emptying of the Ogallala and other aquifers, are not.

The physics start to work if you decide to use nuclear weapons to shoot down incoming warheads.

That is why most research is geared towards having a "kill vehicle" destroy the warheads (as opposed to something like space based lasers, or railgun, etc).

An antiballistic-missle that kind-of-sort-of can destroy warheads with kinetic energy, is actually quite effective if you strap a powerful nuke onto it.

The general population would never accept having a bunch of nukes pointed to explode over their own country, but it is probably easier to ask forgiveness after defending against a nuclear strike than to ask permission before hand.

I made a mistake. I should have said "engineering" not "physics". The physics works in that a single interceptor has taken out a dummy warhead. What doesn't work is the ability to handle the scenarios in the whitepaper, where 200 missiles are coming in, with multiple reentry vehicles and decoys.

How do you test it?

The GMD has a 50% failure rate during hit-to-kill intercept tests. That's with a single target, time to prepare, and several decades of funding.

To implement the full shield the author wants systems for boost, coast, and reentry phases. This includes "hundreds of spacecraft ... to assure a handful are within range of boosting missiles at the time of launch." There's no one word of how to test system integration.

Going back to physics, one of the scenarios in the whitepaper is to defend the US against an attack with 10 nukes, designed to take down the power grid. Won't setting off our own defensive nukes give the same result? The same magazine has a article on how woefully unprepared the US is for an EMP attack, at http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterdetwiler/2014/07/31/protect... . Frankly, it makes Forbes sound like it's still lingering in the Cold War.

And just how do you hide away enough nuclear tipped missile interceptors to be useful, for the decades until they might used, without having to ask for some pretty big permission? There's a good chance that the operators will have to practice setting off nukes over their own houses, or that of friends and family. Not good for morale.

The U.S. has a defence system against a Russian nuclear attack. It is called a "massive and devastating coordinated first strike before they ever get a chance to nuke us".

A missile defence program is actually handy, not necessarily for the actual protective power it can provide, but for the rhetorical power it can provide for a President's adviser when the next Curtis Lemay demands that we attack them before then can attack us.

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