US Missile Shield already Defeated? 375
Anonymous Coward writes "Forbes is reporting that although interest in the missile defense system has waned while the US military addresses more pressing matters of immediate concern, the Russians have already developed an anti-missile-defense missile designed to defeat the system. Were the US military to actually prove that the missile defense shield worked, the Russian rocket's "zig-zag" flightpath taken en route to it's target would render the shield useless. Russian President Vladimir Putin says that the non-ballistic trajectory would leave the projectile virtually impossible to down or divert. The author feels inclined to say that the missile defense shield was intended as a defense against rogue states such as North Korea that have not acquired this technology yet."
Re:Already covered in Get Smart (Score:3, Informative)
It was defeated before it was begun (Score:2, Informative)
"Our nuclear threat will not be coming to us in the nose-cone of an SS-20, it will come to us in a Ryder Truck" - Me discussing missle defense on the Bernie Ward show 9/10/2001
Re:Correct me if I'm wrong (Score:5, Informative)
No. The treaty was with the Soviet Union, the USSR.
Sophistry.
The treaty was useless since the collapse of the Soviet Empire.
Because whatever political entity succeeds the Soviet Empire couldn't possibly launch nuclear missiles at us, could they?
Treaties can also be broken at any time.
People can be murdered at any time as well...that doesn't make it right. For this treaty to be abrogated legitimately, one of the necessary conditions for abrogation spelled out in the treaty must be met. To justify his unilateral action, Bush cited Article XV of the ABM Treaty, which states that the Treaty could be abrogated by one of the parties "if extraordinary events related to the subject matter of this treaty have jeopardized its supreme interests." To date, the President has not specified the 'extraordinary events' which supposedly prompted his decision, and has not explained how the United States' continued adherence to the ABM Treaty could 'jeopardize' its 'supreme interests'.
That treaty would not have stopped nukes from raining down on American cities.
Funny...the treaty was in existence from 1972 to 2002, ans I don't recall a single nuclear incident on U.S soil during that time. Fast forward to now...no treaty, and Putin's bragging about a missile that can penetrate our defense system (admittedly, not much of a boast, given the pathetic state of the 'missile defense system'). Seems to me there's a bit of a correlation there.
The missle[sic] defense shield *might*.
You might want to keep up on current events [washingtonpost.com]. Bottom line: our President threw away a 30-year old treaty like so much garbage, needlessly antagonizing other nations, to pursue a technology that is still firmly in pipe-dream status. Not much of a surprise, though, given that this same President pulled out of the Kyoto Accords on Climate Change, withdrew the US from the treaty creating an International Criminal Court, opposed a Protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention that would allow for inspections and verification, and failed to fulfill US obligations related to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. Again, I can't help but see a trend.
Re:Correct me if I'm wrong (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view.php?Sto
Re:Russia isn't the issue (Score:3, Informative)
The problem is, there are people out there these days that MAD (Mutually Assured Distruction) doesn't work for. There are rogue groups out there that really don't care if they die, they expect to die (don't mean to sound condescending here, but did you miss 9/11 and all the suicide bombers in Israel/Palestine?), they hope to die for their cause so they can join Allah or whoever (there are others, not just Muslims, with such fanaticism). Granted someone who rises to power for a whole nation possibly doesn't share these views (witness the coward Taliban, running away and sending others to die for them), but I wouldn't rule it out completely (see Hamas, last week). I wish the world continued to be so simple where simply making sure it was understood nuking the US meant death, therefore you don't nuke the US, but I fear those days are long gone in my mind.
Russian Engineer != Russian Manufacturing (Score:2, Informative)
Regardless... never doubt the capabilities of Russian equipment when they have the resources and the guy turning the wrench actually reads the blue prints.
All sorts of reasons (Score:3, Informative)
1. Hard to get a big enough EMP (unless you're using nukes - see below).
2. Biological warheads are still very dangerous even without any sort of electronic system in the head.
3. Not needed - the missle shield is already effective when you realize that we'll be putting nuclear warheads on the anti-missle missles.
There are too many easy ways to defeat the shield - another really easy choice is to drop dummies all over the place (like missle command, except only a few are live - and you don't know which ones). Balloons can be used to distract targetting too. I went to a pretty convincing talk about this at the Hopkins Physics department.
No, the only way it can be effective is to have nuclear-tipped missles, and they know that. They're just getting us ready for it slowly. "Oh, it worked, but now they have this, so we'll need to use nukes. And we've already spent $183947374984 on it, after all."
--LWM
Re:What about an EMP? (Score:3, Informative)
Not that hard actually; the US has had the capability to do that reliably for at least 15 years. Computers are much faster than the physics we can drive with the materials we can fabricate. The design problem is very much a material one.
The REASON they do it is a simple point of engineering that most people overlook: the typical terminal closing speed exceeds even the detonation velocity of the best military explosives. In other words, compared to the missiles, an explosion is moving in slow motion -- the target will outrun the blast wave with ease. The reality is even worse in that mechanically coupling the detonation to the target (which is hardened) is very substantially slower than the detonation itself. One could very precisely time and place an explosion in the path of the incoming missile, but that is a much more complicated scheme than just hitting the bloody thing directly. If you think about it, terminal guidance has been able to get very close to targets for a long time, and reliably hitting the target is nothing more than reducing the error a bit -- an evolutionary engineering problem.
Therefore, the only good choice is to directly couple the missiles by physical contact, and at those velocities, the energy of an explosive falls below the noise floor anyway. Kinetic kills are not just a design choice, at those velocities it is almost a design necessity. Beam weapons are the other option, but those have other issues.
Re:Correct me if I'm wrong (Score:5, Informative)
As for the Patriot missle performance in the Gulf War, it is just as incorrect to say they didn't work as to say they did. The truth is, they "sort of" worked. I read the official (non-classified) government study on this when it came out. Here's a summary of their conclusions:
1) Some Scud missiles were successfully intercepted, but the success rate was closer to 50% than the 90% claimed by the military. Some of the Scuds likely broke up on their own because they were modified by Iraq to extend their range using poorly designed modifications.
2) Only half the damage done by a Scud is due to the warhead. The rest is due to kinetic energy, and this is not changed by a successful intercept. Thus a Patriot missile success only cuts the damage in half and alters where it comes down.
3) Since the modified Iraqi Scuds are very inaccurate missiles, altering where it comes down was of little value. The Iraqi Scuds were mostly terrorist devices rather than tactical weapons. They lobbed them at the coalition troops in hopes of causing chaos -- not to neutralize military targets.
Will we ever have a missile defense that can stop close to 100% of any missile fired? Of couse not. However, the technology to shoot down a militarily useful percentage of incoming missiles is indeed possible. To say otherwise is simply not correct.
Re:Correct me if I'm wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Here's one about how one got progressively more inaccurate.
http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/gao/im92026.htm [fas.org]
Here is a degradation of the original claim of 25%:
http://www.fas.org/news/usa/1992/59740945-5974359
And here's a more accurate final assessment:
http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/docops/rp911024.h
better?
Re:Correct me if I'm wrong (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Correct me if I'm wrong (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps the problem is that you have not specified which "Missile Defense" system you are reffering to not working. The facts stated in the article regarding succesful tests are true. The Reuters article does not specify which system they are talking about but there were in fact succesful tests of the SM-3/Aegis missile defense system late last year.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/micro_stories.p
Re:Basically the same tech (Score:3, Informative)
Cruise missiles are roughly as hard to shoot down as airplanes, which is something that's been done for almost 100 years, now. In fact, despite being a bigger target, an airplane is in some respects more difficult since the pilot may be aware that a missile is after him and take action that is specifically appropriate to the circumstance. I don't believe any current cruise missile does anything beyond programmed manuevering. The forte of cruise missiles is that they are relatively cheap, and they are hard to spot, especially Tomahawks and ALCM's because they fly so darn close to the ground.
Current generation ballistic missiles follow very predictable flight paths. The difficulty in hitting them comes from the fact that they are generally a long ways away from anything that can hit them, and they move very fast. Future missiles will still have limited manuverability.
Re:Correct me if I'm wrong (Score:5, Informative)
I was SCUDed in Dharan, Riyadh and King Khalid Military City; all in Saudi Arabia.
The most memorable was watching a single SCUD missle flying overhead about 11oclock in Riyadh. Everyone was dumbling with their gas masks and tumbling over each other to get into a large foxhole nearby, but I just stood there, mesmerized at the extreme reality taking place before my eyes. I was separated from my unit and had just got off a C-130 from Dharan and found my bags pilfered upon landing. No gas mask.
A patriot battery was behind me about 50 meters, but boy was those suckers loud. Two patriots were launched; one hit the SCUD motor, the other just barely missed the warhead. The warhead tumbled into a busy part of the city about a click from my position and exploded in a flash of light. I later learned it hit an apartment building and killed a person.
So, Mr. Anonymous Coward Parent, you are very wrong.
Re:Nice. (Score:1, Informative)
I haven't a clue why they bother, but both North Korea and Iran have ballistic missile development programs in progress (go figure for yourself). North Korea launched a test over Japan well out into the Pacific Ocean not too long ago. It demonstrated that it could almost go far enough to hit Washington State. North Korea's next generation of ballistic missile will almost certainly be able to. The Iranians are working on one to reach at least as far as Israel, and probably Western Europe, Western China and India. When combined with the nukes they're developing, that will give them a greate deal of influence in the middle east. Probably even control.
Re:You're not wrong (Score:3, Informative)
OTOH, the history of [S|A]AM missiles shows that hitting a moving object is very doable - when done by a professional organization. (You don't even have to go as high tech as missile as your interceptor. I've seen what's left of a 5 inch shell after being hit by a bullet from Phalanx. It wasn't much.)