I’ve legitimately been curious about this. The nuclear arms race has been a threat for so long, do western countries really not have a mitigation strategy for them?
I assume we could shoot down any intercontinental weapons, and any airplane that entered allied airspace would immediately be shot down before it could drop a nuke.
Issue is that multiple countries have systems where it’s, “They launched nukes? We’ll launch all our nukes”
The mitigation is basically, “We will wipe you off the map if we think even ONE nuke is coming at us,” and this has nearly happened several times, only stopped because the system has a human at the final step, and humans when realizing they could end the world seem to hesitate
Intercontinental nukes basically can’t be shot down. This is because both sides can launch hundreds of rockets, each carrying multiple very small warheads. It’s basically impossible to intercept.
But can you not also just scale up the defense systems in parallel with the ballistic missiles carrying warheads? If we can expend billions for the construction of thousands of intercontinental missiles, can we then not also build tens of thousands of interceptors, maybe a handful for each potential incoming nuke?
We’d all die
I’ve legitimately been curious about this. The nuclear arms race has been a threat for so long, do western countries really not have a mitigation strategy for them?
I assume we could shoot down any intercontinental weapons, and any airplane that entered allied airspace would immediately be shot down before it could drop a nuke.
Issue is that multiple countries have systems where it’s, “They launched nukes? We’ll launch all our nukes”
The mitigation is basically, “We will wipe you off the map if we think even ONE nuke is coming at us,” and this has nearly happened several times, only stopped because the system has a human at the final step, and humans when realizing they could end the world seem to hesitate
Intercontinental nukes basically can’t be shot down. This is because both sides can launch hundreds of rockets, each carrying multiple very small warheads. It’s basically impossible to intercept.
But can you not also just scale up the defense systems in parallel with the ballistic missiles carrying warheads? If we can expend billions for the construction of thousands of intercontinental missiles, can we then not also build tens of thousands of interceptors, maybe a handful for each potential incoming nuke?
This isn’t a new idea, it’s been around sinde Reagan, and the consensus is that it’s just non-viable.