eli5: why can’t we intercept nuclear missiles?
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With ICBMs the issue is that they tend to be launched either from well within enemy territory or from submarines somewhere in the ocean you don’t know at the time. Both of these makes catching the missiles on the way up very difficult or impractical.
Once they are “up” they are in space and outside of the reach of most kinds of attacks. Most missiles can’t even reach space at all or maneuver without air, much less intercept something in a suborbital trajectory.
On the way down a single ICBM can likely split into 10 separately targeted warheads along with another 90 decoys which try to look as much as possible like warheads. This greatly increases the resources needed to devote to intercepting the strike, as if you confuse a decoy with a warhead you are wasting your defensive missiles. On the other hand not shooting down what you think is a decoy and being wrong means a city being flattened.
That is even if you can shoot them down at all. An Iron Dome missile goes about 500 mph, which is roughly the speed of a cruise missile. A typical fighter jet can go around 1500 mph or mach 2. A Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system designed to shoot down ICBMs on reentry has missiles that go up to 6,300 mph or mach 8.2!
But the ICBM warheads are going to be entering the atmosphere at around mach 21 or in excess of 16,000 mph. That is absolutely *screaming* fast and it doesn’t leave a lot of time to react. From launch to hitting the target it only takes about 30 minutes.
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