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Sunday, June 3, 2018

News That's Not News

The Drudge Report has a link today to a piece about hypersonic nuclear missiles and how these new weapons cannot be shot down.  Oh no!  That will mean that cities will be defenseless against nuclear attack by these weapons.

What a silly report.  That's pretty much where we are already.  When ICBMs were first developed about sixty years ago, there were no defenses available.  American and Soviet cities were targeted and both sides knew that any attack would lead to a massive response that would destroy the world.  The military doctrine was called "mutually assured destruction" or "MAD" for short.  Then in the 1980s, President Reagan announced his strategic defense initiative, a plan to create a missile defense system which could shoot down incoming missiles.  The Democrats and their media allies derided the idea as "Starwars", you know, something that could only happen in a sci-fi movie.  But then these anti-missile defense systems were developed and built.  But there's still a major problem:  the systems work well for short range or even medium range slow-moving, low flying missiles, but they perform haphazardly when confronting an ICBM.  Think of the Israeli's Iron Dome system and how well it performed against the thousands of missiles Hamas launched from Gaza in 2014; there was no significant damage in Israel despite all those missile launches.  The Hamas missiles were short range and simplistic, however.  Now consider that the tests on the US anti-ICBM systems are only successful slightly less than half the time.  That would mean that half of the enemy missiles would get through.  Then remember that the tests in question are set up as one missile coming at a time.  Were the Russians or Chinese to launch a nuclear strike against the USA, there would be tens or hundreds times more incoming missiles.  And finally, keep in mind that if just five nuclear missiles got through and hit New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston, there would be catastrophic damage and death.   Millions would die at a minimum.  In other words, there is no meaningful missile defense for ICBMs now.

The article is lamenting the loss of something that we don't really have.  It's news that's not really news.

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