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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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frankmz - 07:56pm Jul 10, 2000 EST (#169 of 11858)

eaaeaa 7/9/00 9:46pm

It's about time we faced reality and diabused ourselves of the myths we have been telling ourselves, so here's my take on reality:

1) Deterrence will not work. It worked for a time with the USSR, (although coming perilously close to failing in October of 1962) but the whole MAD doctrine (mutually assured deterrence) is itself mad. It is anything but "assured" and for many reasons is bound to fail over the long run.

2) A missile defence system will not work. The very complexity of such a system assures failure. When there are a large number of things that can go wrong, you can be sure that something will. A missile defence can never be tested under real-world conditions, it must work the first time. Such a "defence" is illusory and in fact will be contra-productive by stimulating an arms race. Nations will be tempted to overcome any missile defence by the easiest way of doing so - by building enough missiles to overwhelm such a system.

3) Banning nuclear weapons will not work. Even if such a ban were to be agreed on, we could never be sure that some nation somewhere, or terrorists, were not building a nuclear device (not necesarily a missile!). But even if there were zero nuclear weapons in the world, the know-how of building them will not go away, and in a crisis, many nations would be able to "go nuclear" in a matter of months.

All this being said, what is the answer? Could it be that there is none?

Perhaps one silver lining to note, is that although Britain and France have nuclear weapons, we are not in fear of them. Perhaps the long-term answer is to do a lot more to build peaceful relations between peoples, and do a lot more to help solve many of the political, economic and social antagonisms between peoples, but with the history of the human race being as it is, I can hardly be optimistic about this.

armel7 - 09:12pm Jul 10, 2000 EST (#170 of 11858)
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steinkoenig - 12:07pm Jul 11, 2000 EST (#171 of 11858)

frankmz:

Hogwash! A system that doesn't work is not insurance. All any nation has to do to defeat a missile defence system is to build enough missiles to overwhelm the system.

Not even that, I think. The very nature of the decoy principle is to create cheap obfuscations to confuse even our sophisticated deep resolution radar schemes. I wouldn't imagine that it would be all that hard to mimic the metal skin of a warhead and characteristic EM signatures of the detonation circuitry. My understanding of our current NMD scheme is that the KKV itself has onboard electronics resembling a tweaked up guided missile. The problem is one of both speed and information here. At the high velocities necessary to hit a warhead at reentry, the generating the computing speed necessary to make course corrections alone is a feat. The phrase "hitting a bullet with a bullet" fits in here. I feel that we have probably come that far in ABM technology after our experiences with the Patriot, Arrow, etc.

What isn't being hit on is the difficulty in determining between a decoy, an actual warhead, and another KKV and making corresponding course corrections in the fractions of a second after the KKV onboard computer locks on to target. That's a rather sophisticated task, even for us. It means that we have developed rather sophisticated mass/radiation/EM sensors both small enough to fit in the nosecone of a missile and rugged enough to survive the G forces necessary for course corrections at velocities needed to match a MIRV warhead at reentry. It means that we have developed microcontrollers fast enough to parse the information from these sensors and make course corrections with incredibly slim margins of error in this snapshot of time. The tests demonstrate that we haven't done this yet. I seriously doubt that we're anywhere near it.

This doesn't mean that we won't get there after the gov't has pumped half a trillion into this project and harvested H1-Bs from all four corners of the globe to collectively smack their heads against our little math problem. I mean, I have patriotic faith that America can solve even the unsolvable. We can split the atom, put a man on the moon, and master the business cycle- but an NMD is on the level of all these things.

The very existence of a missile defence system promotes an arms race

Well, after we have built and successfully tested the thing, then we can worry about the technology leaking into the wrong hands. However, given America today, this has probably already happened and is happening as we speak. Expect the Chinese to unveil their NMD 10 years after we have built ours, maybe less.

This doesn't mean that having the first NMD won't be a praiseworthy feat- like being the first to split the atom or land on the moon. I would rather have a manned mission to Mars and simply ban nuclear weapons outright. Our conventional military is the best trained and most technologically advanced in the world as it is, so it would be an arrangement which would ultimately benefit us.

so we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars and still would not have a defence against an even bigger threat than existed to begin with!

Well, yes, there's also the additional expenditures necessary to maintain a tight enough technological "edge" on our end. The old issue of it being easier to destroy than create, to obfuscate than detect. By virtue of the American mission in the world, our enemies will always have this advantage in the NMD arena and other areas. It all comes back to MAD eventually (is this, perhaps, too fatalistic an assessment?).

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