Nukes in this day and age seem to me like they should effectively be obsolete. I feel like in the age of satellite observation and the idea of geo-privacy being basically null, every developed country ought to have anti icbm tech, similar to an mrap. Short of mass amounts of dirty bombs, I feel like nuclear war should be a non issue in modern times.
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An icbm is vulnerable during the few minutes following its launch. After that it’s out of range of interception systems, basically most of the flight takes place in space. Interception during re-entry is also complicated as the missile travels extremely fast then splits and spread decoys.
ICBMs travel a lot faster than your average missile. They’re much harder to hit, particularly at altitude, and often release multiple warheads when they get closer to ground.
A couple of things you seem to not consider.
1: Nukelear warheads are attached to advanced missiles. The tech has continued to be developed just as the counter tech has.
2: Nukes arn’t JUST missiles
Russia has some pretty scary nuclear torpedoes that are quite difficult to counter.
3: Russia has a LOT of nukes.
If you manage to shoot down 9/10, there are still enough getting through to basically destroy anything they want.
Ballistic missiles are a tough target to hit due to their high speed. You have to maneuver an interceptor close enough to them and then set off explosives with near-perfect timing to disable the nuclear weapon inside. Some countries have figured out how to do this, and the design of nuclear missiles has been adapted to account for the defenses. Generally the method consists of detecting the launch in the boost phase with satellite assets, launching your interceptors while the ICBM is in coast phase above the atmosphere, and then intercepting the ICBM either in the coast phase or terminal phase (while it’s descending through the atmosphere towards its target).
One of the strategies used in ICBMs is to have multiple warheads in a single missile, or even have many dummy warheads interspersed. So to stop a single missile, many interceptors are needed. Even missing one warhead means a city is vaporized.
Classic ICBMs follow a ballistic trajectory, which means they don’t try to steer once the boost phase of their flight is over. Modern ICBMs have begun to include the ability to maneuver during the terminal phase of flight. This makes it much more challenging to intercept them, since they can take evasive maneuvers to dodge an interceptor or at least take a non-ballistic trajectory that your interceptor wasn’t prepared for.
Another recent method is hypersonic missiles. These are effectively missiles that no longer follow a ballistic trajectory for any phase of their flight, instead staying in the atmosphere and maneuvering continuously. With a range encompassing the entire planet, you could see how it might be a challenge to intercept them. If you detect a hypersonic missile launch, where should you launch your interceptors from? The hypersonic missile is traveling towards the west coast now, but it could turn and target the east coast relatively quickly and now you’ve wasted interceptors on the west coast, leaving yourself vulnerable to the next missile.
So, in summary, it’s what they call an arms race. People have been coming up with counter-measures and counter-counter-measures and counter-counter-counter-measures for the past half a century. The current situation is that no one has confidence they could shoot down any where near all of the other side’s missiles, and a nuclear exchange would result in mutually assured destruction for every country that participated, as well as most that don’t.
ICBMs travel in a ballistic curve through space. They pierce out of the atmosphere near their launch site, mostly deep inside the country firing it, thus there won’t be any intercepting weaponry nearby to kill the ICBM in its vulnerable ascension phase. Once it’s high and fast enough, it is orders of magnitude harder to hit with another missile, because that missile would have to be faster and more agile to hit. As soon as the ICBM reaches its highest point in suborbital spaceflight, it deploys its warhead(s) (multiple are possible) that is basically only the tip of the missile with even less cross section area for guiding radars to aim at for the intercepting missile system. Also the warhead now begins its reentry into atmosphere at hypersonic speeds (Mach 5+). To intercept that, you’d basically need to hit a flying bullet with a rifle shot from where it’s going to. If you miss by one inch, you’re done for.
The Iron Dome in Israel is the most effective air defense system in the world and for every incoming ballistic missile, it fires two counter missiles to increase chances to hit. It still has an effectivity of only 90 %. Now imagine that there isn’t only one ICBM incoming, but 20 at once. Even with a global Iron Dome, we’d still have 2 nukes hitting their targets. Now imagine that these ICBMs are MIRVs and hold 4 warheads per ICBM. That’s 80 nukes incoming. 8 will hit a major population area. That’s a total defeat by all means, if not worse.
Even if there was a good chance to detect, aim and intercept ICBMs, it’s now gone, since there are newer kinds of missiles available, that don’t fly ballistic. They are shot into the upper atmosphere and fly aerodynamically at mach 5+ in a flat approach which makes them way harder to detect and aim at, because they are suddenly coming from behind the horizon at godspeed. This means literally zero reaction time. The moment you can lock your guiding radars on it, you don’t even have enough time to arm and launch your intercepting missiles.
Some nations have the weaponry to shoot nukes down (For instance, the US Patriot anti-air system can be used to shoot down ballistic missiles) and shooting at a nuclear warhead will more likely break it than set it off, but the problem with deploying these systems en masse is the sheer expense of it. A single Patriot has some 20 km of range against a ballistic missile, and each system costs somewhere between 1 and 6 million. Lets go for 3 million as an average.
Now lets say you wanted to protect the New York metropolitan area with a single ring of them. Ignoring the logistical problems of how to get those to places like the Long Island Sound, this means that, doing a very rough estimate with Google Maps, you’d have a line of about 600 km to guard. Even if we assumed that each system had a 100% kill rate against ballistic missiles, which it doesnt, and even if we ignore the fact that these 20 km of range are under optimum conditions only, this leaves us with 30 systems for the entire circumference. These system would cost a cumulative 90 million. Again, this is just to protect New York.
Now consider the running costs that this brings. Also consider that you’ll probably need several lines to ensure a shootdown of the missiles, and that the systems won’t all be in operation 100% of the time, and the costs easily rise into the hundreds of millions. Now, do this for all cities in the US. If you did that, the costs would quickly reach the 10s of billions. Sure, this might be affordable for the US, but not so much for smaller nations, and try convincing senate of THAT proposal.
A lot of people are failing to mention there was a limit placed on anti Ballistic Missile development with the various treaty talks. Between. 1972 and 2002 there were treaties in place.
While that was a long time ago, anti missile technology is catching up. There are various programs in place.
Regular missiles are hard to hit. ICBM’s (which are fired from one continent to hit another) are much harder because of how fast they travel, and because they basically plummet out of space to hit their target.
But sure, let’s say we can intercept and shoot down most of them, most of the time. That’d be tough, but it *might* be doable, if you’re a big country with a well-funded high-tech military and you’re willing to pour big money into it.
The problem is that both the US and Russia have thousands of them. Even if you can shoot down 90% of them, you still get hit by hundreds of nukes. So what’s the point?
You also mention satellite observation, but that doesn’t help spot a missile in flight. That’s useful for observing big, slow targets like a convoy of tanks. A small, fast-moving missile is basically invisible to these satellites.
There’s a school of thought that all countries should be vulnerable to a nuclear strike in order to aid with deterrence.
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