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U.S. Missile Defense Against Iran Makes China/Russia Mad, Might Not Even Work
An anonymous reader writes "The United States, since the 1980s, has been trying to make missile defense work. Billions of dollars spent, tons of political capital spent, and not a lot to show. The U.S. does have two viable options: the SM-2 and SM-3, although neither are perfect. The U.S., with European allies, has been deploying missile defense in Europe to block a possible strike from Iranian nuclear tipped missiles (even though they have not made nukes or the missiles to carry them). One problem: such defenses could, in theory, also block Russian and Chinese missiles. Russia is now planning to make more missiles to counter such defenses and could pull out of the New Start Treaty. They may also stop helping U.S. forces to supply themselves in Afghanistan. Is this all worth it for something that might not even work?"
The big problem is not that it makes Russia mad, but that with further development it could make America not MAD. Without mutually assured destruction, the nuclear peace will come to an end. It's like the US is deliberately trying to force a WW3. It's about time to realise that the cold war is over.
is a cryptographic protocol between the ballistic missile and the interceptor:
Scenario 1:
US missile shield: Who are you? And what do you want?
Incoming missile: Huh?
US missile shield: **BAM**
Scenario 2:
US missile shield: Who are you? And what do you want?
Incoming missile: I'm a Soviet missile here to wipe out New Jersey. Here's a message digest signed by my private key.
US missile shield: Oh... well, OK.
Scenario 3 (imposter):
US missile shield: Who are you? And what do you want?
Incoming missile: I'm a Soviet missile. But you see, I'm afraid the dog got a hold of my...
US missile shield: **BAM**
Two probs:
1) "block a possible strike from Iranian nuclear tipped missiles" I'm going to take a wild guess that culturally they Might prefer using a Toyota pickup truck or a shipping container or a standard passenger jetliner as a delivery vehicle. In the US we've forgotten why we're fixated on missiles, its because the USSR couldn't realistically, say, drive a truck over here with a H-bomb, so it ends up being missile vs missile.
2) SM series is "standard missile". Its really hard to specify how much work went into ballistic missile defense vs plain ole blowing stuff up. So political types will charge it as either thousands to billions depending on which axe they have to grind. So.. that vim editor... how much money was spent on editing Python? Well, you could evaluate what percentage was used in the field for Perl vs Python. Or you could look at bugs filed. Or some BS about test suites. Fundamentally its just a pretty darn useful editor. Much as a SM is a pretty darn useful wide envelope missile. It is emphatically not a "ballistic defense only" weapon.
3) There's endless rumors and BS about how SM series can be hacked into hitting seaskimming cruise missiles, but fundamentally you're better off with fast acting projectile weapons. You don't get much warning...
I would assume "they" would put their bomb into the vehicle "we" (well, we as in we are merely a province or whatever of Israel, always acting exclusively with their interests in mind, according to our leaders) are least suited to defend against. I suppose with the possible exception of WWII era strategic bomber, I can't think of a less likely delivery vehicle than a ballistic missile. I would guess its almost infinitely more likely that an off the shelf Iranian submarine gets as close to the USS Enterprise as physically possible before the deadman switch is released, or a shipping container is delivered to the port of L.A. or whatever thats marked as Couscous but actually glows instead...
There ARE interesting things for Iran to do with ballistic missiles. Nuke is not one of them.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Outsource ABM systems manufacture to China.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
At one point, I worked in the mil side of weapons at Boeing.
The correct answer is not "might not". It's "will not".
Everyone in the industry knows what actually does work, and what we're talking about for the EU is not in the "workable" solutions choices.
Unless you think a 10 percent success rate with 90 percent getting through if they use all standard countermeasures is a "good thing". In real world operations with real weather, not faked tests.
Not that Iran could hit the broad side of a Polish barn - that's a fiction too.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"Obama is responsible for the effects of Republican led deregulation of the financial industry"
You do know that some of the more catastrophic deregulation was a bipartisan effort and was led by Bill Clinton, Larry Summers and Bob Rubin, especially repealing Glass Steagal and blocking derivatives regulation. You seem to be doing them same thing you are ridiculing, saying its all the other parties fault. Its entrenched power and greed that is at fault, and both parties have it in equal measure.
@de_machina
First of all, I am a finn. If you know any finns that would "in polite terms disagree with me", they are a minority and below you'll find out why.
You see, as with any small neutral country stuck between two grandiose empires that could stomp us out and not barely notice it throughout our independence (which is what they thought of us, namely Germany, USSR and later on NATO), we had our shills for all sides. During cold war we had our Soviet shills, and our NATO shills. I'm guessing you've been talking to descendants of the latter. Notably their numbers are in low 30 percentile and have been going down steadily across the country for almost a decade now as people with severe phobia of anything Russia-related due to WW2 part of our history die out of old age and we get more and more Russian tourists bringing good money into the economy.
On topic of disinformation, that either wasn't it, or if it was, it sure fooled everyone (including some medium level NATO attaches who were spying for us). In here, when you build a building that houses more then a few people, you have to, BY LAW to build a bomb shelter in it with mandated level of low ABC proofing since early cold war. Every big city has one to several bomb shelters typically dug into solid rock rated to survive a 20 kiloton tactical nuke explosion directly above itself. Note the payload, it was exactly what we were expecting NATO to drop on us in potential conflict and the goal was the classic Finnish pragmatism - to allow as many of our people as possible to survive to fight another day even at significant additional costs to economy. During peace time, they're used as hokey rinks, swimming pools and so on. I go to one such swimming pool weekly - the entrance is less then 500m from my home. They are also required by law to have a plan on how to prepare it to function as a bomb shelter within 4 weeks.
Do note that we had near zero nuclear treat from Soviets due to geography - any nukes in southern Finland where biggest cities are and where biggest shelters are built mean a likely fallout in 5.000.000 people city of Leningrad.
All in all, your argument is that of a classic NATO shill. "You had two wars with Soviets, therefore anyone opposing them is a force for good!". Except that opposing force was about as "evil" from our point of view, and the only meaningful difference for us independents caught between was the direction in which guns are pointed. Which was usually at us, from both sides, because both followed the "if you're not with us, you're potentially against us" doctrine. In the end, we survived independent because we played both sides against one another, just like we played Germany against USSR in 1944 to stay independent in spite of suffering the heaviest Red Army assault in the entire war.
Notably USSR gave us very good trading terms during Cold War, we were classified in the "Warsaw pact countries and Finland" category. Something that even NATO liked to use to trade with USSR and vice versa, because it meant being able to indirectly trade for things you couldn't trade directly due to political fallout through a politically stable country with a culture that valued privacy of such deals.
So in short, most Finns that actually live around here would tell you, in actually polite and laconic terms, to stuff it. We're the only country in Molotov-Ribbentrop that succeeded to stay independent, we succeeded to stay independent during Cold War in spite of pressure from USSR and NATO to join one of them, and we'll stay independent now if current polls about desirability of NATO membership are anything to go by. That is because history taught us one thing: empires only care about themselves and allying yourself with one of them would likely cost you independence as most unbalanced deals with the devil do.
P.S. It may surprise you to find out that we also have quite a few statues of Lenin around here. They're usually tactfully hidden, but we do remember who it was that gave us independence for first time in our history. So if you think that our history together with our neighbours started in WW2, you're sorely mistaken.