The Golden Dome scheme is going to be such a disaster on so many levels that I am compelled to listicle:
- It won't work. That is, there can be no shield blocking all missiles. So, what's the point? How many nukes getting through would ruin your day? The challenge of knocking down hypersonics is huge, and, yes, it is not like the US had solved the problem of shooting down the ballistic missiles of yore. And, yes, the adversaries would invest in ways to fool the sensors, to evade the counter-fire, or just break the system via cyber attacks or anti-satellite attacks.
- The good news is that having a partial shield is incredibly destabilizing. Oh wait, that is bad news. Deterrence in the nuclear age requires the major players to each have enough forces that can survive a first strike to heaps of damage to their adversaries. A partial shield might be handy for blocking someone's second strike--hit the other side first, take out enough of their weapons that their second strike is small enough that the defenses block most of the response. This strategic situation would encourage each side to pre-empt rather than wait, so that an accident or a false alarm or a crisis might lead to a nuclear war.
- It will be incredibly expensive. The estimates are probably way too low, as the adversaries get a vote, and they would be responding imaginatively and intensely. Which means that the US would then have to invest even more in countering their counter-measures. Arms races are really, really expensive.
- It would be awful for the environment. Lots of space launches burning fuel in the atmosphere, occasional accidents in space creating yet more debris (does that count as an environmental disaster?).
- It would fuck over Canada in a huge way. Why? Because Trump expects Canada to join and then pay how much? At a time where Canadians detest Trump and find him to be thoroughly unreliable. Would he protect Canada? Probably not. So, Canada is screwed either way. Participate and spend a shit ton of money on stuff that won't work and won't be used for your defense OR don't participate and face Trump's increased wrath. Lovely.
- What is it with demented Republicans imagining magic space shields? This is the Strategic Defense Initiative all over again. The billions spent on SDI led to what exactly? Definitely not a sound nuclear defense system protecting the US. If you want to argue that it helped spend the Soviet Union into oblivion, who is the Soviet Union now? And, yes, this President is the same guy who thought stealth planes are as invisible as Wonder Woman's jet.
- Would divert defense spending from areas where it is needed, like developing local defenses against drones.
It sucks that there really is not a good solution for replacing mutual assured destruction, but wishing it away through massive defense spending on magical thinking is not the way to go.
2 comments:
Agreee....though it raises an interesting question of whether sdi spending had spill on effects around c4i2. Not sure we can even know since some of those techs would be still classified.
The problem with the spillover argument, besides that it is hard to know, is that there are probably far cheaper ways to get this kind of knowledge produced, like, say, investing in universities.
Post a Comment