https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/successful-u-missile-intercept-ends-060017616.html I'm no military expert, and I imagine that many posters who post in this part of the forum are, so I'd like to hear your opinions. This article above indicates that by successfully intercepting and destroying from a Navy ship an ICBM fired from land, the US is actually fostering an arms race that ultimately and paradoxically will make us less safe. Opinions?
The old saying, "the bombers always get through" also applies to missiles. No system is 100% effective, especially if your enemy can launch more than you can intercept. It only take one to **** up your day...
Do a simple google search on the author. He's the same nutjob that said we should keep paying Germany billions for "state security". This guy is a nutjob. But to your question, the person above me said it correctly. You can't intercept every missile if there are more offensive weapons coming at you than what you have in your defensive position.
OK, but then this shouldn't really damage the equilibrium of power and MAD between the main nuclear countries America, Russia, and China, but it would be good to have these systems to defend with a more unreliable, rogue, smaller nation like North Korea, right? If Russia wanted to attack us, they would send a barrage of hundreds, even thousands of sophisticated ICBMs, while if North Korea wanted to attack us, they'd send two or four primitive wants, and this kind of defense would stop them, right?
Maybe but the only other real option is to not do anything and hope our enemies don't do anything like that first. Only thing worse than not building a missile defense system and hoping Russia or China doesn't would be not building one and then they do it first. Now you're the one behind the power curve which is never a good thing. It's the same concept with nukes for the most part. Is the world safer because humans invented weapons of mass destruction or is it less safe? Sure for the first time in our planets existence a species living on it now literally has the power to completely destroy it, but the only thing worse for America than the creation of the atom bomb would be if the Soviets created the atom bomb first and nobody else figured out how to do it. That's why everyone agrees that we need to get rid of nukes but nobody who has nukes wants to volunteer to be the first one to do it and everyone who doesn't have nukes wishes they did. There will always be arms races because nobody trusts anybody else. No world power is ever going to stand up and say "Our nuclear arsenals are what keep the world in balance. We each need to have the ability to successfully nuke each other effectively or else that balance is lost and someone gets an unfair advantage. So nobody build nuclear intercept systems so we can all stay equally balanced". Then what? We agree to that and pray Russia and China aren't lying when they said they did too? Then a few years or decades down the road it turns out China lied and built an iron dome after all so now they can nuke us but we can't nuke them back because they can blow ours up so now they become the most powerful nation with the most bargaining chips? They don't trust us not to do that and we don't trust them or anyone else to keep their word either which is why we do stuff like this. We have no real choice, the consequences of us losing our effective nuclear capabilities are just way too dire to gamble with.
I think Russia would attack our cyber defenses first before anything else. Same with China. North Korea can attack our cyber units but they can't sustain a long attack given their national power outages and technology from the 1970's.
Yeah this kind of defense would likely stop N Korea's missiles. The balance of power is way more complex than just the fact that if you blow me up Ill blow you up back. It's more like yeah I can blow you up but I have no real reason to do that and wouldn't exactly gain anything meaningful from it and actually it would probably be more detrimental to our highly complex and integrated world if I decided to blow you up. It's all just a big chess game played with real weapons that nobody is really willing to actually use on each other. Every week or so for nearly the past 50 years Russia flies bombers to the edge of the ADIZ in Alaska and America scrambles jets to intercept them and turn them around. They are usually turned around and headed back by the time the fighters even get there because it's all a game. They know we aren't going to actually shoot them down even if they "accidentally" cross the ADIZ slightly and we know that even if we didn't scramble fighters every morning to go turn the Russians around they wouldn't just keep flying and drop a bomb on Anchorage for no reason. I have actual video of American F-15 pilots and Soviet Bear Bomber crews from the late 80s waving to each other from the cockpits as they are playing their daily game of cat and mouse. We've been doing this for decades. The balance of world power is based on the fact that we all stand to lose more than we gain by messing with each other so we just don't on a large scale like that. In reality there is no nation that could single handedly stop America if we just decided to come after you with all our might so there is a resemblance of a balance of power but there really is only one super power. Even regarding nukes we have 3rd strike capability meaning even after the 1st and second waves of nukes blows up damn near everything only we have the ability to pop back up and launch a 3rd and final wave before we're all dead anyway. Russia and China can't do that, they'd be dead after the 2nd strike, we'd at least be alive after that but the world is pretty much doomed so it wouldn't matter anyway. China is our "enemy" and we routinely harass them with our Carrier Battle Groups in the South China Sea just because we can and we both have nukes pointed directly at each others capital and other large cities but half the stuff in your house is made in China and you can get a passport and go visit over there if you so desire. We are "enemies" on paper but we're more like "friemenies. Same thing with Russia. If they were actually our legit enemies then you wouldn't be able to take a flight to Moscow and hang out as an American citizen. This missile system of ours has about a zero effective "deterrence" rate against Russia or China nuking us. As you said if they REALLY wanted to they would just launch hundreds of ICBMs and some would get through and nukes today are powerful...you don't need many to hit. But they didn't nuke us ten years ago before we had this system and they aren't gonna nuke us now that we have it for the same reason and that's the same reason why they don't nuke any of the other 200 something nations that don't actually have nukes to nuke them back with. They have no reason to.
@Nightmare515, @Badaboom and @ArmySoldier, thanks for your explanations. I learned a lot and you guys make much more sense than the author of this piece I linked to.
The article assumes facts not in evidence. So its wrong. It makes two assumptions: 1) That the test will resort in an arms race. Why would it? The U.S. has been testing ABMs for decades and we haven't had an arms race. 2) That an arms race would make the U.S. less safe. Why would it? The arms race with the Soviets is part of what brought down the U.S.S.R.
