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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Aside from the technical challenges, there is a reasoning that having working defences against nukes is bad.
The reasoning goes like this:
The threat of retaliation and mutually assured destruction is what keeps countries from using nukes.
Anti-nuke defences would take away that threat. An attacking country would no longer have to fear its own destruction.
Therefore it would make using nukes a viable option again, which is bad for everyone but the country with the defences.
Ignoring the engineering side, there’s the geopolitical/game theory side to consider.
Let’s say America starts developing anti ICBM technology. What should Russia do? If they don’t do anything, eventually the Americans are safe from being nuked while Russia is still vulnerable. This is obviously unacceptable. Develop their own tech? Too hard and costly. Much easier to just nuke the other guy before he develops any technology.
If nuclear war were a non issue, massive conventional wars would be common, like they were before nukes were invented. Care for a draft card? Ukraine used to have old Soviet nukes. It stupidly gave them up. Now what’s happening?
MIRV’d ICBMs with countermeasures and nuclear cruise missiles are way too hard to detect and destroy, especially when multiples are simultaneously launched.
Don’t even get me started on hypersonic missies.
That’s why the USSR was mad at Regan’s ‘Star Wars’ defense program…. The USA would have had missile countermeasures but they did not have them.
Thing is there are just sooo many missiles. It’s down a lot from Cold War days. (late 1990s Soviet Union had 39000 nuclear warheads). Plus you have Submarine launches which can be from anywhere and wouldn’t have any warning time.
>why isn’t the world set up to kill nukes in the air?
I don’t understand your question. The world **IS** set up to kill nukes in the air. The Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis, the Indians, and, of course, the US all have anti-ballistic missile systems, as do Japan, the UK, France, and Italy.
You may have heard of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (a.k.a *Star Wars*). It was a program designed to develop high energy lasers and other “beam weapons” to knock out nuclear missiles. There are even satellite based anti-missile systems.
You may also have heard of the Cruise Missile. The point behind a cruise missile is for the missile to fly an erratic, unpredictable course to the target. It does this specifically so that it can avoid anti-missile defences.
The problem isn’t that we don’t have the technology. The problem is that no matter how good it is, it will never make the nuclear threat disappear. It only takes one nuke getting through to cause massive devastation. In fact, our current deterrent strategy, MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) is designed around overwhelming and swamping any defense. “No matter how hard you nuke us, we’ll bomb you to the stone age”. Creating so effective a defense as to make nukes obsolete will create a situation where they’d be vitrually guaranteed to be used.
Well most nuclear powers get real antsy when you start funding a defense system that would effectively make their biggest threat a dud. Something about removing themselves from M.A.D. giving them an unfair advantage. I may be misremembering this but about 20 years ago the US was planning on putting a bunch of money into antinuclear tech and either Russia or China(maybe both) were treating it as almost an act of war.
Other than all the logistical issues, there’s also the issue of pure statistics. No system is 100% effective – ever. And anything less than that will leak, and a single leaked nuke is still a lot – so even with a system as you propose, they won’t become a non issue.
for the same reason we don’t have bullets that shoot down other bullets, it is really hard. icbm are bigger than bullets, but they are also moving an order of magnitude faster.
We do kinda, but hypersonic icbms are just to fast, here’s a easy way to put it, throwing a football at another football in the air you have a chance to hit it at least and that’s the comparison for old icbms, now with new icbms it’s like trying to shoot a bullet mid air with another bullet
My job is to hit the side of a barn with a baseball, your job is to throw a second baseball that will knock my baseball out of the air before mine hits the barn. Which one of us has the easier job?
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