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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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.
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