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Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ plan has a major obstacle: Physics
(www.sciencenews.org)
Honestly not sure I put stock in these types of objections. I remember these same types of people saying in the 2000s that the physics of missile interceptors just wouldn't work, that hitting a bullet with a bullet wasn't something you could reliably do and yet here we are, we've done it, the Russians have done it, the Chinese I assume have. Is it bad from the point of view of not liking militarism or how it breaks MAD and encourages the idea of a nuclear war? Yes obviously. Is it as impossible as they like to present it? Not at all.
“Intercepting even a single, nuclear-armed intercontinental-range ballistic missile or its warheads … is extremely challenging,” physicist Frederick Lamb of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, chair of the group that produced the report, said at an APS meeting in Anaheim, Calif. in March. “The ability of any missile defense system to do this reliably has not been demonstrated.”
Not demonstrated to you and your group of civilian scientist nerd friends because that shit is highly classified to prevent other nations from figuring out how to do the same thing. This is weasel words way of casting doubt by saying "uh I haven't personally seen the system or proof of it therefore I doubt it".
The U.S. Missile Defense Agency disputed the claims of the APS study, arguing that it relied on older data and unclassified reports that don’t reflect recent improvements and upgrades to the missile defense architecture.
I mean some of Russia's intercepts of things like Storm Shadow and ATACMs missiles show the idea has pretty good validity for some phases of ballistic missile course. Particularly launch and during boost and early mid-phase when you can hit them with a shower of interceptors from above before they begin maneuvering towards their target in earnest which is what this system proposes.
There's criticism for the success rate of the US mid-course system and it's true but that's because the US is behind compared to Russia, meaning it can be done, they just haven't completely smoothed over the problems in the way Russia has.
Terminal intercepts are I think unreliable at any scale due to the possibility of releasing dummy warheads, debris, all kinds of things at the last moment to trick systems. The amount of effort you have to put in at the last mile scales very favorably for attackers though I wouldn't say they're useless either if in high enough concentrations (I think a dozen batteries of the Russian s-500/600 system could definitely defend a military base again a couple warheads headed their way even with countermeasures). It just doesn't work for full nuclear exchange defense.
I believe they use uncharitable numbers of interceptors for example based on unclassified data and hostile assumptions of very low rates of success based off that old study of 60% success as well as things like range not that it will do them any good.
Critics note that this system has been about 60 percent effective in tests. However, that statistic includes tests going back over 25 years. The tests performed in more recent years have been more successful. “Any time you test a new system, there are going to be failures early on,” Peters says. “That’s how you learn what works.”
The problem is not in the physics. The problem is in the militarization of space and the arms races and the attempts to undo MAD and give the US nuclear supremacy to strike but not be struck back.
Nor is the problem cost as they like to nit-pick here without understanding the US is an empire with reserve currency status on the back-foot losing its hegemony and desperate to maintain it. A trillion dollars is not an impediment nor is several trillion especially if there's this idea the system can be used to allow us to hit China and destroy them for another century of plunder and dominance without reaping retaliation. I doubt they get to that point without Chinese counter-measures but it all ends with the US in terminal decline, back further against the wall having even more reasons to press the big button and send the rest of the world to hell while shielding Montana or NZ where the bunkers are from strikes but allowing everything else through.
At this point I think it's a foregone conclusion, the US is going to militarize space as they were about to in the 90s before the cold war ended with their victory. They're going to place interceptors up there and they're going to place nuclear weapons up there and argue they have to place the nukes up there because China could intercept them especially if they copied the US and put up their own space intercept system. Then other powers have to do the same and soon space is crowded with spies and missiles and kinetic kill systems and it's all just a powder keg and a nightmare. But that has nothing to do with the actual physics of it.
But you can't make a winning argument in America to Americans about the necessity of maintaining MAD for mutual security and deterrence because it necessitates depicting other actors as rational and once you start doing that you start undermining all the militarism and jingoism and propaganda about how dangerous and deranged and evil they are. So instead they resort to these "I haven't personally seen the data which is classified so there's no evidence of it" type weak sauce arguments which don't convince the politicians, don't convince the arms lobby, don't convince the military, all they do is convince a bunch of crunchy hippy protestors who weren't going to be listened to anyways. It's an evasion of our responsibility to push back against imperialism and war-mongering to use arguments like these and a sign of how bad things are and always have been in the west for expressing opinions against military build-up.