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.
In: 51
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.
Latest Answers