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And yes, nukes are designed to go off above their targets rather than on the ground to maximize damage so they will go off in the atmosphere no matter what.

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How awful .

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Last Wednesday, the United States suffered its third failure in eight test attempts to shoot down a long-range dummy warhead in space over the Pacific Ocean, and scientific critics of the multibillion-dollar program have charged it is not yet mature enough to begin deployment. But Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have stressed the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and missile technology have sharply increased the need for such a defense against attack from "rogue states" such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea, especially in the wake of devastating attacks on America using hijacked airliners on Sept. 11, 2001.

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Deterrence: The minimalist school

Bernard Brodie, the pioneer strategist of nuclear war, was among the first to consider the complexities of war-fighting strategy in the nuclear age. Looking into World War II strategic bombing campaigns for lessons, Brodie glimpsed an iron law of nuclear war: A good defense is not good enough.

British defenses against German V-1 rocket attacks had been remarkably successful. Close to 2,300 rockets were reported to have targeted the city of London in a period of 81 days. At their peak, British air defenses shot down 97 of 101 approaching V-1 rockets, a truly impressive number. But, Brodie noted, "If those four had been atomic bombs, London survivors would not have considered the record good." In the nuclear age, defenses need to have zero margin of error.

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"In its one success, the system proved only that, with advance notice and careful planning, we could protect Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands from a solo missile attack from California. . . . The issue of deployment... is moot until the nation has a system that works reliably and repeatedly in tests. The Pentagon is not there yet."

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All ballistic missiles have three stages of flight.

The boost phase begins at launch and lasts until the rocket engines stop firing and pushing the missile away from Earth. Depending on the missile, this stage lasts three to five minutes. During much of this time, the missile is traveling relatively slowly although toward the end of this stage an ICBM can reach speeds of more than 24,000 kilometers per hour. The missile stays in one piece during this stage.

The midcourse phase begins after the propulsion system finishes firing and the missile is on a ballistic course toward its target. This is the longest stage of a missile’s flight, lasting up to 20 minutes for ICBMs. During the early part of the midcourse stage, the missile is still ascending toward its apogee, while during the latter part it is descending toward Earth. It is during this stage that the missile’s warhead, as well as any decoys, separate from the delivery vehicle.

The terminal phase begins when the missile’s warhead re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere, and it continues until impact or detonation. This stage takes less than a minute for a strategic warhead, which can be traveling at speeds greater than 3,200 kilometers per hour

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The ABL has yet to be flight-tested. About a year ago, full-rate production of the ABL was scheduled for 2008. The plan was to build seven aircraft, each estimated to cost roughly $500 million. At that time, the first shoot-down of a tactical missile was scheduled for 2003. Recently, the ABL program office announced that the first shoot-down of a tactical missile had been delayed to late 2004 because of many problems with the basic technology of high-power chemical lasers—about a one-year slip since last year and about a three-year slip since 1998. Accordingly, full-rate production probably cannot be started before 2010, and the cost will likely exceed $1 billion per aircraft.

Assuming all this can be done, it is important to note that the ABL presents significant operational challenges. The ABL will need to fly relatively close to enemy territory in order to have enough power to shoot down enemy missiles, and during a time of crisis it will need to be near the target area continuously. A 747 loaded with high-power laser equipment will make a large and inviting target to the enemy and will require protection in the air and on the ground. Finally, relatively simple countermeasures such as reflective surfaces on enemy missiles could negate the ABL’s capabilities.

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from the same link, written by Philip Coyle, a senior advisor at the Center for Defense Information, formerly assistant secretary of defense and the Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation from 1994 to 2001.

So we spend 1 billion per aircraft and the enemy can negate it with some aluminum foil? Not good.

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Lyrhawn, the Aegis boost-phase interceptors seem to me to be a billion dollar boondoogle.
[edit:I've seen other pages just now that say the Aegis missiles are not boost-phase inteceptors, I'm not sure now . ]
Here's an American Physical Society (APS, the nation's professional society for physicists) report on "Boost-Phase Intercept Systems for National Missile Defense"

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Simply put, it is physically impossible to intercept fast ICBMs in their boost phase, because the boost phase is too short, the interceptor basing locations are ineffective, and decision-making would need to be nearly instantaneous. The [APS] Study Group investigated all of the boost-phase programs in development or in consideration for development, including land-, sea-, air-based interceptors, space-based interceptors, and the Airborne Laser. One by one, they each fail.

Land-based and sea-based interceptors need to be too close to the enemy--for North Korea, actually based inside North Korea itself. Space-based interceptors would require a "fleet of a thousand or more orbiting satellites just to intercept a single missile." Airborne Laser would not be able to "disable solid-propellant ICBMs at ranges useful for defending the United States."

Despite these conclusions, the Missile Defense Agency will spend nearly $1 billion in 2004 on boost-phase missile defense, and the October 2004 deployment announced by President Bush includes "up to 20 sea-based interceptors employed on existing Aegis ships to intercept ballistic missiles in the first few minutes after they are launched, during the boost and ascent phases of flight."

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2) Many operational and technical factors make the job of the defense more difficult than that of the attacker.
First, the defense must commit to a specific technology and architecture before the attacker does. This permits the attacker to tailor its countermeasures to the specific defense system. Second, the job of the defense is technically much more complex and difficult than that of the offense. This is especially true for defenses using hit-to-kill interceptors, for which there is little margin for error. Third, the defense must work the first time it is used. Fourth, the requirements on defense effectiveness are very high for a system intended to defend against nuclear and biological weapons—much higher than the requirements on offense effectiveness.

These inherent offensive advantages would enable an attacker to compensate for US technical superiority.

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They they launched them all at us, and our twenty largest cities, wouldn't you consider it a wise investment if the missile shield shot down three of them? or even one?

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Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999  |  IP: Logged | 

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No missile shield in the world short of a magical energy particle shield from Star Trek would save us if Russia launched all its nukes at us. But North Korea has less than twenty. They they launched them all at us, and our twenty largest cities, wouldn't you consider it a wise investment if the missile shield shot down three of them? or even one? That's still hundreds of millions of people. I'd say it's a worthy investment.

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• a single weapon fired by a terrorist
  group
• a small salvo from a rogue nation. Iran or N Korea are the likely suspects
• a mistaken or accidental attack from Russia
• an attack by China

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1) The planned NMD system could be defeated by technically simple countermeasures. Such countermeasures would be available to any emerging missile state that deploys a long-range ballistic missile.There are numerous tactics that an attacker could use to counter the planned NMD system. None of these countermeasures is new; indeed, most of these ideas are as old as ballistic missiles themselves.

All countries that have deployed long-range ballistic missiles (Britain, China, France, Russia, and the United States) have developed, produced, and in some cases deployed, countermeasures for their missiles. There is no reason to believe that emerging missile states would behave differently, especially when US missile defense development is front-page news.

[/b]Many highly effective countermeasures require a lower level of technology than that required to build a long-range ballistic missile (or nuclear weapon).[/b] The United States must anticipate that any potentially hostile country developing or acquiring ballistic missiles would have a parallel program to develop or acquire countermeasures to make those missiles effective in the face of US missile defenses. Countermeasure programs could be concealed from US intelligence much more easily than missile programs, and the United States should not assume that a lack of intelligence evidence is evidence that countermeasure programs do not exist. [cut text]And because these countermeasures use readily available materials and straightforward technologies, any emerging missile state could readily construct and employ them.

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8) Past US missile defense tests against missiles using "countermeasures" did not demonstrate that defenses could defeat such countermeasures.
The United States has conducted several missile defense flight tests of exoatmospheric hit-to-kill interceptors that included decoys or other countermeasures and that have been described as demonstrating that the defense could defeat the countermeasures. However, in every case in which the defense was able to distinguish the mock warhead from the decoys, it was only because it knew in advance what the distinguishing characteristics of the different objects would be. These tests reveal nothing about whether the defense could distinguish the warhead in a real attack, in which an attacker could disguise the warhead and deploy decoys that did not have distinguishing characteristics.

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To be believable, the GMD program must demonstrate that when a decoy actually resembles the target re-entry vehicle in some way, the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) can still tell the difference. To do this, at the very least the GMD program needs the combined capabilities of high-quality X-band radars, heat-sensing missile discriminating satellites, and interceptors with target discrimination capabilities as well. Problems continue in all three areas, meaning that if a “capability-based system” is deployed in 2004, it will have essentially no real capability.

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