I don't know. The Soviets are a worst-case scenario. In 1986 they had 1,400 ICBM silos. If a country like North Korea was attempting to fire off weaponry, their best-case scenario is probably more like 140 silos. Part of the 70-80% statistic was simply being overwhelmed by number of missles, so hitting 140 should be statistically much more do-able. So maybe you lose 2 or 3 major US cities (why nuke Canada and Mexico?). But considering that you've probably saved 200 million lives, that's still an admirable goal.
Our aircraft carriers have gun arrays that shred incoming missiles with bullets. Scaling this up to ICBMs trying to hit other ICBMs falling straight down out of the sky at thousands of miles per hour is pretty optimistic, but some of the tests (after the spectaular failures of the early and mid 90's) have been successful. That seems to me like a technology that will be a significant part of any defense strategy in the next 20 years.
And it's a purely defensive technology. Sure, it unfortunately might allow a power-mad leader to have less fear of consequences when deciding which 3rd world country they wanted to saddle us with. But the technology itself inherently ties up DoD resources doing something that can actually be considered Defense.
I think this is the right call for many reasons. And ship-based missile defense platforms that Obama has been talking about seems more flexible, and allows us to apply more pressure in the parts of the world where needed. And any dollar we don't pour into a hole of ticking off Russia is a dollar we can put into the promised massive reconstruction of Afghanastan (which we still haven't done). But it doesn't seem to me like missile defense technology in general is a platform that we should totally abandon. I'd rather we spent our defense dollars investigating that than more biological weapons research or just plain ordering more tanks.
Our aircraft carriers have gun arrays that shred incoming missiles with bullets. Scaling this up to ICBMs trying to hit other ICBMs falling straight down out of the sky at thousands of miles per hour is pretty optimistic, but some of the tests (after the spectaular failures of the early and mid 90's) have been successful. That seems to me like a technology that will be a significant part of any defense strategy in the next 20 years.
And it's a purely defensive technology. Sure, it unfortunately might allow a power-mad leader to have less fear of consequences when deciding which 3rd world country they wanted to saddle us with. But the technology itself inherently ties up DoD resources doing something that can actually be considered Defense.
I think this is the right call for many reasons. And ship-based missile defense platforms that Obama has been talking about seems more flexible, and allows us to apply more pressure in the parts of the world where needed. And any dollar we don't pour into a hole of ticking off Russia is a dollar we can put into the promised massive reconstruction of Afghanastan (which we still haven't done). But it doesn't seem to me like missile defense technology in general is a platform that we should totally abandon. I'd rather we spent our defense dollars investigating that than more biological weapons research or just plain ordering more tanks.
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