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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The kinds of systems designed for this are called Point Defense systems- shooting shit out of the air, be it an airplane or a missile, is a monumentally difficult task. Planes, you can pull it off reasonably often if they get close. Missiles? Incredibly difficult. ICBMs that cross the planet, aren’t even near the surface until they’re too close to shoot down safely, and are traveling at multiple times the speed of sound? Nigh impossible.
Killing nukes in the air is like trying to shoot rain drops with your BB gun. You can hit the big target board in your back yard pretty easily, but trying to shoot rain drops is hard because they’re small, they’re moving around, and there are so many of them. You could have all your friends come over with their BB guns to help you shoot, but your parents don’t have enough money to buy all of you ammo to shoot and pizza rolls to feed you.
You are trying to hit a fridge sized object traveling at 2000-80,000 mph, in a debris field between 2 and 10 miles in radius, with another fridge sized object, and there are a bunch of other objects in the debris field that are made to look like the fridge sized object you are aiming for. Also in the case of Russian ICBMs the one you are aiming for can maneuver so it’s harder to predict vs a basic ballistic trajectory.
Sorry this isn’t a explanation but a question. How do we really know the US anti missile capabilities? That really seems like something that would be highly classified, no?
Ohhhhhh, **it can be done**, on a certain scale.
Governments have no interest in disclosing all their defensive capabilities to their enemies.
But even so, the US was showing successful interceptions several years ago. And if that’s what they were letting the public see then….
…..
EDIT: There are a lot of good answers here from people who know more than I. Just to be clear, I’m not anywhere near saying that MAD is outdated, or any country could 100% prevent obliteration. I’m just pointing out that if history is any guide, we the public won’t know what the armed forces can REALLY do in 2022 for a couple more decades.
We used smart bombs, to a degree, during **Vietnam** (I know people who built them back then, and I know where they worked.) But their existence was mostly a secret until Gulf War 1… 20 years later.
“If they show you a mouse, they’re hiding an elephant.”
EDIT EDIT: A lot of these comparisons are just silly. Trying to hit a bullet with another bullet? Y’all make it sound like there would be a human element to it when this is something quantum computers would be doing, literally a trillion times faster. It’s definitely possible.
Because they are pretty small and move very, very fast. They’re also equipped with electronic countermeasures that can interfere with any countermeasure satellites.
People are gonna talk about how hard it is. I’ma go tin foil hat and say it’s already been done to some extent for a while but it is kept HEAVILY under wraps in fear of surging forward the Arms Race (or there is a secret arms race that isn’t public knowledge).
There’s definitely known attempts of counter measures and counter-countermeasures. But I would not be surprised if the world is much farther along than we realize
We’ve got treaties against the militarization of space ever since the US tried to do their “star wars” thing with weaponized satellites. This was because of how it would disrupt the Mutually Assured Destruction balance we had created with nukes. So if a country like the US could just use weapons from space and nobody else could, that would completely mess up the MAD-balance.
There are systems that can intercept a nuclear missile…but you need a 100% success rate or else there are catastrophic consequences.
This does seem like a good project for the UN to undertake tbh, but the member states wouldn’t allow it (Russia, US, China specifically).
Even if they were to solve the icbm intercept issue, there are multiple other ways to deliver those payloads.
A space based system, to me, seems like the easiest way to intercept an ICBM. No worry about things like air resistance messing with plotting the intercept (or very little air resistance if it’s in a lower orbit).
I know nothing about this stuff to be honest, just some research on icbms and about 1000 hours in kerbal space program. Fun to imagine how it would be done though.
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