Safeguard Program

>>33719229
There are a multitude of problems with actually having effective AICBM measures.


First off, it costs a fuck ton to maintain a large bank of missiles, launch sites, detection arrays and control positions.


Two, it makes nuclear exchanges less MAD and that is not a good thing. It turns nukes from a last resort or deterrent into a more general use weapon thanks to no fear of an effective counter attack.


Third, it creates a huge problem if you can't or won't cover 100% of your people perfectly: the people who aren't covered are going to be pissed with those that are.

They are at risk because the government won't protect them, so they will vote for someone who promises to extend the network.


One of the other problems is that it is a huge investment of resources and time that can be eliminated by other forces: spies and SF could be deployed to eliminate key sections of such a network or such. Rendering it useless.


Also the other problem: How do you know the enemy missiles are the nuclear ones?

What if they fire a bunch of "dud" missiles with no warheads along with ones that are nuclear? Suddenly your system has wasted a portion of it's capability on oversized fuel bombs.

What if they fire missiles that break into too many war heads or even "dud" heads as well? That overwhelm your defences?

What if they deployed chemical and biological weapon agents along side the nuclear ones? So that elimination of the missile still results in death and destruction?

What if they just fire radiological or toxic
materials at you and use your warheads to spread the material for them?

>>33719519
reading on it, most of your answers seem very reasonable and probably all of them contributed to its retirement. though..

>What if they deployed chemical and biological weapon agents along side the nuclear ones? So that elimination of the missile still results in death and destruction?
what if we automated the entire process? biological and chemical agents wouldn't be able to interfere. we have the tech

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzhkMujY4AQ

Documentary on the BOMARC system for anyone interested, not a ABM system but a SAM system that had a lot of advanced computing for the time.

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amen

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>>33719519
I'm pretty sure that MAD is or is becoming technologically obsolete. Minimizing, decentralizing, and networking all important infrastructure and military assets will force your enemy to put boots on the ground to disrupt your COG.

Or sometime in the next centuries we will develop H bombs without fission primaries, Obsoleting all current anti nuclear proliferation techniques.

>>33719229
it probably got prioritized below the laundry list of other retardedly expensive, hair-brained "defense" tech that the DD thinks will fly this week, right into our favorite tax revenue black hole

>>33719519
>Two, it makes nuclear exchanges less MAD and that is not a good thing.
MAD weakens deterrence.

>>33721527
>I'm pretty sure that MAD is or is becoming technologically obsolete.
It stopped being a thing in the 1970s


>Minimizing, decentralizing, and networking all important infrastructure and military assets will force your enemy to put boots on the ground to disrupt your COG.
Not accurate.

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ONLY reason they scrapped it is cause they feared the Russians would do something similar.

Which is fucking stupid! how do we ever expect to live in security if our enemies have nukes????

>>33719229

Lets say I have 50 assets I need to protect.

I have a defensive system that can stop a single warhead at a given time.
.
To have 100% protection, I need 50 defensive systems for every single warhead my enemy has.

That is an expensive ratio. But maybe my enemy is doesn't have a ton of money, and he can only afford 10 warheads. Meaning I only need 500 defensive batteries.

But then he gets a bright idea. Decoys. Decoys are actually pretty cheap. My enemy has enough money to buy 90 decoys.
To maintain my 100% protection, i now need 5000 defensive batteries.

Oh and if he fires all those war heads at me, none of my defensive batteries can be used to strike back at them. So I still have to spend a fuck ton of money on a bunch of offensive systems.

And if I get more assets, or they get more warheads, the math just gets worse and worse.

Or I could just buy 2 warheads for every warhead my enemy buys and make using those weapons a lose-lose situation which reduces their utility.

>>33719519

>first off, it costs a fuck ton to maintain a large bank of missiles, launch sites, detection arrays and control positions.

So ,either the enemy finds a cheaper way to counter it, or they are forced into an arms race were the US bankrupt them and win.

>Two, it makes nuclear exchanges less MAD and that is not a good thing. It turns nukes from a last resort or deterrent into a more general use weapon thanks to no fear of an effective counter attack.

So the enemy can't blackmail you into acepting their shit no matter how bad?

>One of the other problems is that it is a huge investment of resources and time that can be eliminated by other forces: spies and SF could be deployed to eliminate key sections of such a network or such. Rendering it useless.

The enemy will still be forced to spend in tech so that they are not outmached as even few ABMS can tip the ballance, and since their assets can be sabotaged too it won't matter as only a full scale exchange would reveal wich side got more compromised.

>How do you know the enemy missiles are the nuclear ones?

That's why you go for midcourse interception, destroying the missile before its payload or decoys can reach you.

>What if they deployed chemical and biological weapon agents along side the nuclear ones? So that elimination of the missile still results in death and destruction?

Chemical and biological weapons are vastly inferior compared to nuclear ones. They are also neutralised by the heat.

>What if they just fire radiological or toxic
materials at you and use your warheads to spread the material for them?

Radiological weapons are meme tier if you are not talking about salted nuclear ones, even them they lose yeild to enhance radiation.

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>>33722589
counter mirv tech is being researched all the time

the MAD system is stupid. We'll never conquer the hordes without counter-icbm systems.

>>33722663
First off, you assume I am talking about the US. I am making a general case for why no nation has developed such a system beyond prototypes and sketches.


As to your point about blackmail: if both sides are going to be nuked, then neither can threaten the other with an nuclear attack realistically speaking.


Then there is your point about being forced to spend time countering ABM systems. Which is quite false, as I already addressed how it could be done easily and without significant increases in costs.

As to their assets being subject to sabotage too, I would refute it but I am writing this at 5 AM and my mind is falling apart. So I'll concede this point to you, at least for now.


I fail to see what you mean about mid-course interception.


As to chem weapons, many of them would remain after the elimination of their carrier rocket given their somewhat stable chemical nature.

You do have a point about Bio-weapons in this regard but we can make Bio-weapons which are resilient to extreme heat and pressure. It wouldn't take much more than the creation of a few samples for a large number of war heads to be produced.


As to the ineffectiveness of Radiological weapons, they are still a threat and can cause long term damage to a population or make an area infertile / unusable.

>>33723397

>First off, you assume I am talking about the US. I am making a general case for why no nation has developed such a system beyond prototypes and sketches.

Wrong, both US and Rússia have those systems rigor now. Only they close to keep it limited by a treaty to avoid an arms race wich benefits Rússia, as only the US have the tech and the money to keep a massive network of ABMS

>if both sides are going to be nuked, then neither can threaten the other with an nuclear attack realistically speaking.

Once MAD is broken, the stronger side has considerable leverage to bully the other side.

>Then there is your point about being forced to spend time countering ABM systems. Which is quite false, as I already addressed how it could be done easily and without significant increases in costs.

Well, the soviet did went bankrupt while designing space weapons to counter Reagan' s SDI, and Rússia was posses when NATO was about to put ABMS in eastern europe, and so are the Chinese with the THAAD deployment in South Korea.

>As to their assets being subject to sabotage too, I would refute it but I am writing this at 5 AM and my mind is falling apart. So I'll concede this point to you, at least for now.

Trump and Obama did this to North Korean ballistic missiles.

>I fail to see what you mean about mid-course interception.

To shoots down the missiles over the ocean in space.

>As to chem weapons, many of them would remain after the elimination of their carrier rocket given their somewhat stable chemical nature.

More than half of the chemical or biological agents of a given weapon are destroyed by the explosive used to disperse them. They are that weak against heat.

>As to the ineffectiveness of Radiological weapons, they are still a threat and can cause long term damage to a population or make an area infertile / unusable.

Only salted nuclear bombs. Dirty bombs are not even classified as weapons of mass destruction by some specialists.

>>33722716
We "Conquer" the hordes by pretending they are one of us, and handing the country over to them. Problem solved

The real benefit of these systems is that they dont have to be very effective to have a huge impact on your enemies ability to hit targets.

Lets say you have a target that your plan requires a 90% kill probability. When you build your plan, you take into account many factors, such as reliability and survivability. One of these factors is the ability of the weapon to make it through defenses.

Lets say that with all those factors against an undefended target, you need 2 warheads to get to .9 pk.

But if we have a defensive system it can change things. Maybe instead of two warheads we now need three, even if the defensive systems only have a .01 pk vs an incoming weapon.

As an example, the Russians would need 800 warheads to takw out US ICBM silos. This would leave them with about 1000 to use on other targets.
But with even a marginally effective ABM system may mean the Russians need 1200 warheads to hit the silos, leaving 600 for other targets.

This only marginally effective system has effectively reduced the Russian arsenal by 400 warheads before it as intercepted a single target.

>>33724333
Except
A: A non-nuclear decoy warhead cannot be told from a nuclear warhead
B: It's cheaper to build ICBM's than to build these interceptors

>>33724349
A) doesnt matter. Even a system that only has a .01 Pk can have an outsize impact on targeting.

B) doesnt matter for the same reason

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>>33724349
wrong

I wonder if space-based directed energy anti-ICBM measures will ever become feasible.

IIRC, the problems were largely around satellite vulnerability and targeting large numbers of missiles with them, right?

What if we had interceptors alongside current surveillance systems that launched when the nukes started flying and took down at the very least some of them in flight?

>>33724693
By interceptors, I mean directed-energy based antimissile spacecrafts (presumably vertical-launched ones for speed constraints, unless you just throw them off a space elevator)

>>33724693

Look up Nuclear Pumped Lasers.

surprised as to how this thread hasn't slid under the countless others