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Trump wants an "American Iron Dome." Experts say that's ridiculous.
(www.motherjones.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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politics
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Yup - anyone who is likely to try and hit the US is far enough away is going to be using long range ballistic missiles, and it's been pretty conclusively demonstrated that it's technically feasible to intercept a single missile, it sure isn't reliable enough to be a reasonable deterrent or cheap enough to build enough launchers to give you any amount of coverage.
Iron dome works because Israel is small, with a concentrated population, and is being attacked with small, short range rockets that are easy to spot on radar - that isn't a likely scenario for the US to face
Well, we're probably working on that with the SM-3. They took out a satellite with it so hitting a mid course ICBM shouldn't be too hard.
The issue with ICBM interception as I understand it is that it's one of those cases where the economics heavily favor the attacker. An intercept missile requires a rocket just as capable the one launching the target, if not more so. But, you can't afford letting even a few nukes get through, even one is devasting, so given that the chance of a successful intercept isn't 100 percent (my understanding is that it's well below 100% currently, for likely real world conditions), you need several intercept missiles for every missile your enemy has. Any countermeasures that make taking the enemy missile out harder, like deploying decoys or such, increases the needed resources on your end far more than it increases the resources used by them.
It might be viable against countries like North Korea where the difference in resources is vast enough, but against any serious opponent like Russia or China, it's not likely to work out.
There are a couple things working in the defender's favor. The payload isn't nearly as heavy or large, so the rocket actually is quite a bit cheaper. This means putting multiples up for each ICBM isn't impossible. Also countermeasures deploy after re-entry. The SM-3 taking out a satellite was a big deal because it means it can hit stuff before re-entry and the protective covers come off. This also significantly cuts down on the number of intercepts required because Russian missiles actually carry a whole bunch of warheads and decoys.
So yeah it's still pretty hard to stop every warhead, but it's not the same situation as the 1980's where we'd be living in a post nuclear wasteland with every major city obliterated. Which is the point. We can go on as a country with a few craters. We cannot go on if we eat a thousand warheads.
To add really quick, it is a lot less missiles than people think. For example the Russians have 5,500 warheads. If all of them were slated for ICBMs then that would be around 500 missiles. Less because their smaller yields fit 15 per missile. And they aren't all slated for ICBMs either. Their current idea of ICBM defense is actually to send up short range nukes and nuke their own sky. They also have submarine and plane warheads which are dealt with by other missile defense systems. I don't want to make it sound like nukes are no big deal. I just don't want people thinking we're in the same situation we were 40 years ago. It would be a lot less devastating today.
MIRVs also throw the advantage heavily to the offense
They can take out an ICBM. It can't take out all the ICBMs.
We have more than one of them?