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Critics Say US Antimissile Defense Flawed, Dangerous
Hugh Pickens writes "The New York Times reports that President Obama's plans for reducing America's nuclear arsenal and defeating Iran's missiles rely heavily on a new generation of antimissile defenses which last year he called 'proven and effective.' Now a new analysis being published by two antimissile critics at MIT and Cornell casts doubt on the reliability of the SM-3 rocket-powered interceptor. The Pentagon asserts that the SM-3, or Standard Missile 3, had intercepted 84 percent of incoming targets in tests. But a re-examination of results from 10 of those apparently successful tests by Theodore A. Postol and George N. Lewis finds only one or two successful intercepts, for a success rate of 10 to 20 percent. Most of the approaching warheads, they say, would have been knocked off course but not destroyed, and while that might work against a conventionally armed missile, it suggests that a nuclear warhead might still detonate. 'The system is highly fragile and brittle and will intercept warheads only by accident, if ever,' says Dr. Postol, a former Pentagon science adviser who forcefully criticized the performance of the Patriot antimissile system in the 1991 Persian Gulf war. Dr. Postol says the SM-3 interceptor must shatter the warhead directly, and public statements of the Pentagon agency seem to suggest that it agrees. In combat, the scientists added, 'the warhead would have not been destroyed, but would have continued toward the target.'"
Protection Against Threats Real, Imagined or Theoretical.
so much like a rehash of the Patriot missile / SCUD results from the first gulf war? You'd think the military-industrial complex could afford to make up new lies.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Their real point is successful intercept of the entire missile body != intercept of the warhead, not that the intercept missed entirely. Of course, the SM-3 system has actually done an exo-atmospheric intercept (failing satellite over the Pacific).... (speaking as someone who actually used to run a ship capable of doing this.)
The antimissile defense might be flawed but that has nothing to do with reducing America's nuclear arsenal. There'll still be enough nuclear weapons available to act as a deterrent. The anti-missile defense system plays a completely different role, that of deflecting attacks, rather than preventing them. You can't deflect attacks with ICBMs, so Obama's plan for reducing the nuclear arsenal doesn't rely on antimissile defense.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Don't forget to set a password, in case some UFO loon goes poking around.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Atari, actually; the targeting system is called "Missile Command" and most of the problems stem from the fact that it can only intercept missiles moving inside a single two-dimensional plane.
Apple's approach was to make the United States so shiny and expensive that nobody in their right mind would fire a missile at them. Also, they would've replaced the American airspace with a robust aluminum shell. This plan was rejected because citizens would have had to go through a boot camp before they could use Windows software. Okay, and some naysayers complained about the unibody shell making air travel impossible and causing massive damage to nature and agriculture by completely shutting out the sun.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
a warhead is pretty fragile and a lot of things have to work in unison and perfectly together to produce a nuclear explosion. if you hit it hard enough to damage it and prevent an explosion it's good enough
I don't believe we will seem full nuclear weapon non-proliferation, ever.
Don't be so pessimistic.
We'll see nuclear weapon disappear when we find cheaper, smaller, ways to destroy an attacking country.
No point in keeping the large nuclear complexes if you can have some portable gravity discombobulators hidden in a couple dozen places, ready to pulverize any perceived threat.
If I were you I'd be worried about someone discovering a weapon that can be built with common materials, portable and powerful enough to destroy a country.
The problems with anti-missile defense are more basic than that:
(1) Basic geometry -- you have to station a slew of defensive missiles every 20 miles along your borders. That's because you are not going to hit anything going Mach 12 across your path-- you need a close to head-on intercept angle.
(2) Cheap and easy countermeasures. Even if you bankrupt your country setting up (1), the bad guys just switch to using sub or boat launched cruise missiles. Or low-trajectory ICBM's. Or put the bomb on a freight or passenger plane. It's mighty foolish to spend a trillion $ and have all that effort counteracted by a visit to UPS and $187.54.
JR Oppenheimer did this math in his head in 1952 as he was testifying to a govt comittee. Nothing has changed since then.
I for one am not really at all afraid of someone launching ballistic missiles at us. The fact that it hasn't happened yet gives me some comfort that chances are, humans aren't quite that suicidal as a whole.
What does scare me is some lone crazy group getting ahold of a nuke and sneaking it into a city. Missile defense systems aren't going to do anything to protect us from that.
ìì!
...and I can tell you that our flight tests have demonstrated our ability to not only hit the target, but decide where to hit it. We have advanced FEA simulations that determine exactly what damage we're going to do when we hit it at a given location at a given angle, and our organization supports our current aiming techniques as "lethal." Given that we tend to aim very reliably, it sounds like the argument here simply about aiming location, which is the result of a few parameters in the software. That's a completely different story than saying the entire system is flawed.
" Now a new analysis being published by two antimissile critics at MIT and Cornell casts doubt on the reliability of the SM-3 rocket-powered interceptor."
Pro-immigration groups publish report citing benefits of illegal immigration.
Anti-gun group publishes report on the danger of guns.
Pro-drug group publish a report down playing down the dangers of drugs
Pro-Democrat group publish report on the short comings of Republicans
Pro-Republican group publish report on the short comings of Democrats
Advocate group publishes report that promotes/detracts from whatever the group promotes/detracts from.
Are we seeing a pattern here?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Now that presumes, of course, a credible threat from a rogue nations with a few missiles. However, given the developments in NK and Iran, that seems to be a somewhat realistic threat that should be looked at.
No, there will likely never be an anti-missile system that could deal with, say, the Russian arsenal. You get tons and tons of missiles and it'll overwhelm the ability to intercept them all, or even a significant number. However that doesn't mean a system couldn't provide a reasonable probability of intercepting a few missiles. No certainty, but some chance is better than no chance.
People also need to remember this isn't pure pie-in-the-sky stuff. The Aegis Combat System is quite capable of anti-missile capabilities. It can track and engage anti-ship missiles quite well. Now of course ICBMs are a whole different problem, not in the least of which because of their speed, but it is the same "track and engage" idea and there is working hardware.
The real question is if it is worth the cost and overall, I think it is. Reason being that I do see the idea of a missile launch from a place like NK as a possibility. Now if that happens, and the missile hits an American city, it is going to be large scale nuclear war. The US will launch a counter attack. The most optimistic scenario would be that the only deaths would be those from the initial attack, and then more or less everyone in the country the US launched at, but it very well might not end there. The US launch might trigger other launches from other countries.
However, if the missile is stopped, well then the possibility exists for a more measured response.
I think that makes it worth it. I don't worry much about nuclear war between large powers. Reason is that the power to make a launch doesn't lie in the hands of one person, and the nations are ruled by sane people. Maybe not nice people, but sane people. They know the consequences, they don't want to see that, the weapons are a last resort kind of deterrent only. However there are places like NK, where a single person rules, and where the sanity of that person is a bit suspect. That is a case where a nuclear launch is a possibility if they obtain the weapons, and they seem to be working on it. That I worry a bit more about.
So to me, it seems worth it over all. Also let's please not pretend like defense R&D is a 100% sunk cost or anything, that we pour money in to the projects and get nothing useful in return. Often, we get technologies that can be used in other devices or the like, both defense and non-defense. Sometimes, we get things with direct major civilian applications.
Please remember that GPS was invented because the military wanted to be able to locate all their vehicles and ships accurately anywhere. That was the motivating factor behind it. However it has proved to be the sole most important invention in civilian navigation since, well, since the sextant probably.
Over all, I think it is worth it and I disagree it is dangerous. Do remember that nuclear bombs are complex, precise devices. You don't have to obliterate one to stop it from exploding, only cause damage to any number of systems and they don't work anymore. Ya the missile might still hit its target but so long as it doesn't trigger the nuclear reaction, the damage will be fairly small scale.
In my armchair analyst opinion, intercepting a missile launch is not the most important part: detecting it is. Thanks to global trade, nobody with the economy to build enough nukes to wipe another industrialized trading nation off the map has any real incentive to do it. Anyone else can destroy a major city, but that is going to bring retribution of a biblical scale from the entire rest of the world if the true source of the attack can be determined. So firing off a couple of missiles is essentially an act of suicide anyway. An attacker's only hope is to somehow disguise the origin of the nuke to create plausible deniability. So this means a detection network alone is sufficient to ensure a missile is rendered a poor choice of delivery system.
Yep, I do see a pattern. People paid to hold an opinion (in this case the pro-shield ones) are quoted as "experts", yet, people that form an opinion on their own, based on aquired knowledge are quoted as "anti" or "pro-cause".
It is like some of the money is flowing to the ones quoting people, but who am I to know, I'm probably some anti-lucrative-press or something like that.
Rethinking email
Just curious - for how long are you people going to blame Bush for everything? I ask this in seriousness. When Obama is no longer President, will you blame him for everything that happens with the new President, or will you continue to blame Bush until another Republican gets into office?
I ask this in seriousness, I really want to know.
Probably for a few more decades. I say this in seriousness, I really think he was that bad.
Bush was in power for 8 years, and radically turned America upside down. He turned America into a country that is, as Obama tactfully put it during his Berlin speech, "part of the problem rather than part of the solution" for many Europeans.
Obama has now been in power for not quite the 8 years, and he doesn't have a 9/11 event to push through many changes quickly. (I am not claiming that 9/11 was a setup, but it came in quite convenient for Bush).
Bush gathered a bunch of warmongers around him, and some are still there. He allowed the weapons industry to be stronger (it simply became an even bigger industry with even more lobby powers).
The legacy of Bush will last. He was no good president, but he sure changed a lot.
So, I'll probably be blaming Bush for the next couple of decades for a lot of things... I truly believe he was one of the worst things that ever happened to America.
It's going to take quite a while for the consequences of Bush's decisions to be completely filtered out of the government. There are a lot of appointed positions such as Federal judges that you can't just throw out. There's the trillions of dollars of debt from his tax cuts, Medicare part D, and two wars that are going to shape tax and budget policy for at least the next decade. There's inherent structural things like the impact of No Child Left Behind that aren't fundamentally reshaped by Presidential fiat or congressional committee composition, and as things like the BP oil spill and stuff like the subprime/CDO meltdown (much of which could be traced back to decisions made in the Clinton era like the Commodities Futures Modernization Act) show, unintended consequences of the previous administration's actions can pop up years into even a second term. It isn't necessarily purely partisan to pin stuff on the Bush administration, it's just plain cause and effect. No politician inherits a blank slate, and political/economic forces move at a pace measured in years. Issues like the struggling economy and national debt may be 'Obama's problem' to deal with, but not everything is his fault, and which topics you attribute to either category probably depend on your political agenda.
moron at 1600 Penn Ave announced that we wouldn't use them in response to one.
Wow. Someone else a "moron" because they've figured out (a) that, as Robert Gates says, "there's no credible scenario where a chemical weapon could have the kind of consequences that would warrant a nuclear response" AND we have a conventional arsenal that's enough of a threat by itself and (b) there's potential in offering even rogue states carrots as well as sticks and (c) if for some reason we're wrong about (a), it's not as if we couldn't reconsider?
Go on. Tell us who you consider "smart."
Also, maybe let us know what you think about:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/09/stewart-rips-fox-news-for_n_531455.html?ref=fb&src=sp
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2010_05/Kimball-Thielmann
Tweet, tweet.