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Ted Cruz Proposes Reviving SDI To Counter N. Korean Nuclear Threat (blastingnews.com)
MarkWhittington writes: One of the more substantive issues that was discussed during the Republican presidential debate in Detroit concerned the latest threat to come out of North Korea. That country's mad, bad, and dangerous to know leader Kim Jong-Un has ordered his nuclear arsenal prepared and is firing missiles in the vicinity of Japan. The United States and South Korea have started military maneuvers, partly as a result of North Korea's actions. Discussions on deploying the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system in South Korea have also become urgent. Sen Ted Cruz, R-Texas would go one step further. He proposed reviving the idea of space-based missile defenses that were part of the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative.
Spending a bunch of money and making it look like we are making great progress in missile defense so that NK bankrupts itself trying to counter the counter measures? Aren't they already basically bankrupt?
I'm here all week :-)
Unable to achieve 100% intercept rate with SDI was not a "big issue". It was hyped as a big issue by people wanting to discredit the effort, mostly by smart-ass journalists and other ivy-league "intellectual" types to mock Reagan and make him seem like an imbecile. Achieving even a 10% intercept rate would be materially useful and save millions of lives, 50% tens of millions, and 75% a few hundred million.
That's what they were mocking - a man trying to save American lives. In the end, he ended up more-or-less ending the threat of world destruction from the Cold war.
Brett
Although I share your sentiment about the ludicrosity of SDI, I would like to debunk the myth of massive civilian benefit from defense spending. Money purposefully invested in civilian research programs (antibiotics, medical imaging, public health strategies providing healthcare for all Americans if I might be parochial, roads, bridges, trains, and space and lasers as you say, etc.) would have a much LARGER impact than hoping for trickle-down technology from Halliburton, after they enrich themselves.
Meanwhile, more and more unstable third world dictatorships and Islamic theocracies are either on the path to developing or already having nuclear weapons.
This is what happens when you won't get along with your neighbors. Trotskyist Neocon Nirvana.
Anyhow, thanks for revealing your fearful nature.
I support missile defense because I trust American engineers far more than third world lunatics.
They've all been replaced with H1-B visa holders from India. Make certain you trust them.
The original Star Wars was a feelgood pork project. A new version would be much the same. The problem of course is that you have to kill the missile early in the boost phase of operation. That phase doesn't last long, and if you go detonating your enemy's missile over another country, you almost certainly make yourself another enemy. If it makes it to your airspace to be detonated, you still have a failure what with EMP and radioactive snowflakes and all. How are people going to access their facebook? Ooops, sorry, cheap shot.
Are we any better now? Electronics certainly is, but there still isn't much time to react. And in a country where everything is considered "too expensive" any more, And the political situation abroad, I don't think planting the equivalent of ABM's right against the borders of our enemies - which in your case, appears to be everyone - will happen.
These considerations are't even political - they are some physics issues, which in the past have proven remarkably resilient to votes on whether they were true or not.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
That's why Bill went to Monica.
Well, how close you get to 100% matters, and the amount it matters depends on the scale of the threat you're dealing with.
Suppose you are 90% effective. That's well worth it when you're talking about an adversary with the capability of striking you with ten, or even a hundred warheads, especially if they're small and unreliable. Russia currently has 1800 deployed warheads, with a stockpile of some 8500. But let's say conservatively in a period of high tensions the Soviets have a thousand warhead targeted at the US. 90% effective would mean we get hit with about 100 warheads, which in the Soviet era ICBMs were in the 3-5 MT range, or 200x to 300x the yield of the Hiroshima bomb. Two or three, or even a half dozen such warheads would be survivable for a certain value of "survive", but a hundred would mean a highly probable total collapse of our society.
Now at the risk of sounding like a scare-quotes-intellectual, you really ought to consider how the opponent in this game will perceive and react to your missile defense system. If a hypothetical missile defense system is 100% effective or very close to it, it's game over; your enemy's missile arsenal is just useless junk. But if we're talking 90% effective, we're talking about a system which cannot stop the enemy arsenal from destroying us, provided that arsenal is intact.
So if you are a defense planner in the Kremlin, what is your assessment of this situation? That the Americans are stupid? Or that they intend to whittle down your arsenal with a first nuclear strike and then whittle down the survivors with the missile defense system? And if you are in a tense situation with the Americans, how does this affect your decision making? Do you use your arsenal early or risk losing it later?
So yes, those of us "intellectuals" with the handicap of being educated do rather think how close a missile defense system gets to 100% matters quite a bit. How close it has to be varies by situation of course. A 10% effectiveness rate would be materially useful against North Korea; it would have been merely destabilizing against the Soviets.
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We should just build a wall around NK.
And get MX to pay for it.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
...China needs a relatively stable NK (that doesn't actually carry out stupid shit) in order to maintain a buffer.
This brings up a fun question:
A "buffer" against... what? Puny South Korea? A Japan that is too demographically old/rich/disinterested in China to bother invading? The Philippines? Mongolia?
Historically, I get it - post-WWII, fears of Japan and such were rather justified. But it's been what, 70 years and a metric shitload of geopolitical changes? Pretty sure the whole buffer idea is a bit, shall we say, outdated.
The main reason for the existance of NK was to break up Korea and prevent a unified Korea from being an economic powerhouse dominating North Asia.
People look at NK today and its a basket case. But if Korea hadn't been broken up and that unified Korea had been under an economic management such as developed in South Korea, the agricultural wealth of the south and the mineral wealth of the north would have resulted in a nation which would be able to challenge even China, would have dwarfed Japan and would have been seen by the Soviet Union as a threat to their Eastern maritimes. South Korea has been doing pretty well industrially, great shipbuilding and other heavy industries. But thats nothing compared to what Korea COULD have been.
Consequently it was in the interest of all the regional powers, including the USA, to ensure that Korea was broken up.
For the Chinese, NK isn't a buffer in the normal sense of the world; its a handicap they are imposing on Korea as a whole.
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