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Russia Threatens Pre-emptive, Destructive Force On US Missile Defense
suraj.sun sends this quote from an article at the BBC:
"Russia says it is prepared to use 'destructive force pre-emptively' if the U.S. goes ahead with controversial plans for a missile defense system based in Central Europe. The warning came after the Russian defense minister said talks on missile defense were nearing a dead end. Moscow fears that missile interceptors would be a threat to Russia's security. But the U.S. and NATO say they are intended to protect against attacks from Iran or North Korea. 'A decision to use destructive force pre-emptively will be taken if the situation worsens,' chief of the Russian defense staff Gen Nikolai Makarov said. President Barack Obama ... scrapped plans for a network of bases spread across Poland and the Czech Republic with the capacity to intercept long-range missiles. But in 2010, the U.S. signed an agreement with Poland to use an old airstrip at Redzikowo, near the Baltic coast, as a missile defense base."
There goes the planet.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Please let it happen before the end of 2012, otherwise all those Mayan calculations that the world will end in this year will go to waste... :p
This is weird on so many levels.
So - what's really going on here?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
They call it a threat because it neutralizes the "Mutually Assured Destruction" balance that has thus far prevented thermonuclear war from being a viable option. If they can't shoot missiles at us, but we can shoot missiles at them, then there's nothing preventing us from just nuking them out of existence next time we have a disagreement.
The cold war is still pretty fresh in some people's minds...
The other meanings of "MAD" are not lost on anybody; but it isn't really a new concept.
Theory goes that, in the presence of multiple nuclear powers with overwhelming destructive capability, only the ability to launch a second-strike of sufficient magnitude to dissuade anybody from launching a first-strike against you is a viable defense.
If one party obtains an actually functional anti-missile system, they neutralize everybody else's second-strike capacity, and thus enjoy the ability to launch first-strikes at their pleasure.
Unfortunately, most of this stuff was hammered out under the cold war logic of an environment with ~2 main actors, both presumed to be rationally self-interested, with easy attribution of nuclear strikes, and other favorable conditions. It doesn't work nearly as nicely if you go to N actors, introduce actors who are either irrational or interested in various apocalypses, or dream up delivery mechanisms that make attribution hard...
(The cynics might also argue that both the US and Russia aren't entirely uninterested in playing at cold war, since they both have decades of experience with it, a glut of high-level policy types who were trained under the assumption that that would be their job, and both have discovered that 'dialog with North Korea' and 'Fundamentalist Sandbox Meatgrinder' are lousy games. Plus, the cold war was probably the historical high water mark for buying awesome toys from defense contractors without actually having to learn their weaknesses the hard way all that often...)
They call it a threat because it neutralizes the "Mutually Assured Destruction" balance that has thus far prevented thermonuclear war from being a viable option. If they can't shoot missiles at us, but we can shoot missiles at them, then there's nothing preventing us from just nuking them out of existence next time we have a disagreement.
The cold war is still pretty fresh in some people's minds...
See, that's the problem. Russian missiles are set to travel over the North Pole, not over Europe. This system would only defend against missiles targeting Europe, and even then its debatable. Of course, let's not even start on submarine and mobile launchers.
This system is no threat to Russia or MAD.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Here's what they know: The US (specifically, that well-known liberal peacenik Richard Nixon) signed a treaty in 1972 specifically saying that nobody was allowed to do anti-ballistic missile defense, specifically so that there would always be a MAD scenario if somebody decided to strike. Then George W Bush basically told the Russians to go to hell and that the US was ignoring the treaty. Then they spent a lot of time and money trying to improve their anti-ballistic missile defense. Now Barack Obama is deploying anti-ballistic missile defense right near Russia's border.
Another way of thinking about it: Would you be fine with $EVIL_EMPIRE deploying missile defense in Cuba, Mexico, and Canada?
I get the joke, but the fact that the US is deploying it suggests that they think they have something useful.
I am officially gone from
It is not a defensive system, not to the Russians anyway. It's true enough that it could be used defensively against Iran and North Korea, but it has an offensive role in an all out war against Russia. It breaks MAD, and while MAD is a ridiculously suicidal way to run a planet, it did manage to get us through the cold war pretty well.
See, here's the thing. The Russians know that even with their aging fleet of ICBMs, they can still overload any conceivable missile defense system. If the US has N interceptors gaurding New York City all Russia has to do is launch N+1 missiles at it (actually considerably less since the interception success rate is going to be much lower in real combat situations). And that ignores all the relatively cheap anti-interception technologies that could be used. So why are they so pissed? Because the US also just happens to also have a fleet of nuclear launch capable submarines, a fleet of stealth bombers, and hundreds of nuclear cruise missiles (which have been mothballed but could be easily brought back into service). A properly designed first strike could hit literally hundreds of targets inside Russia with nuclear weapons with less than 30 minutes warning.
Now, it's kind of hard to coordinate your counter attack when every military base in the country is a glowing glass crater. That's not to say they wouldn't have missiles, they'd have plenty, and the commanders in charge of them would have the authority to launch them, but launch them where? Without the communication and planning, the counter attack is going to be staggered, disorganized, and concentrated. Exactly the situation where a missile defense like the one the US is deploying could be effective against the Russians. The Russians are pissed about it (and about Star Wars in the 80s) because it gives the US a real first strike capability against them.
And yes, right now nuclear war is unlikely. But what about 30 years from now? What about 50? 50 years ago the US and Russia were staring at each other off the coast of Cuba, waiting for the other one to blink to decide who would be blamed for starting nuclear Armageddon. A lot can change in half a century.
.. defensive installation that we have offered them unfettered access to ..
Signed, An American Soldier
You are only presenting selected parts of the picture there, Soldier:
a) A missile array is a missile array: with todays modular technologies "defensive" can become "area denial" or "offensive" in a matter of minutes; if you are saying otherwise (i.e. that the array "poses no threat") bear in mind that you are not trying to convince the evening news audience, but experienced war generals that command the world's largest arsenal;
b) how about the Russians offering you "unfettered access" to a similar system in Cuba, established there to protect their interests (perhaps Russian businesses in the US) from potential radical central and south american rogue elements;
c) I am no pronounced military strategist, but opening many fronts (as the US is doing in the present era) comes with benefits as well as costs: there is NO WAY today's superpowers can tackle conflicts like the ones the US is maintaining, and at the SAME time take on skirmishes with another superpower: the Russians are well aware of this, and they know that they absolutely can vaporize the array and get away with it- and they are letting you know that they will do it. Remember that China is also a superpower, and good luck getting them on the table and heaving them your way while engaged in tens of other conflicts, especially in a decade or so when their orbital, ICBM, naval and electronic warfare capabilities will be much more enhanced in comparison with the present day.
d) as a soldier, I am sure you know that the one who strikes first, strikes many times and keeps on striking, get's to win. This array is just too close, its implementation is seen as an act of aggression, and you and I or anybody else might claim otherwise but that is of no consequence: the truth is that the Russians see it as a threat, and they are issuing a warning that if built, they are going to blow it into pieces. Not you, not your cities, not your country: only a base such as this one.
Bottomline, you can't have the cake and eat it. So go on, be my guest, spend billions of dollars and thousands of manhours to see it all vaporized in a jiffy, ignite global tensions, destroy families and sacrifise young soldier's lives (I don't expect the array to be unmanned when it gets hit) to back up a bunch of retarded arguments.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
There would be absolutely no strategic value to a Russian missile defense system in Cuba and Venezuela, not unless the United States wanted to launch a couple primitive SCUD-like missiles at those countries. What the Russians don't want is an American military presence in Central Europe. They want Poland to be in their sphere of influence like in the good old days, and they see this as a move into their territory. They themselves know that a missile defense system will be no threat to their defensive or offensive capabilities.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.