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Comment by hamburglar1 | Hacker News Reader

Why would a nation like Russia or the US give in to total nuclear disarmament without a missle shield like this? A nuke free future is impossible without a shield like this available to all. All countries serious about disarment should be jointly contributing to this effort.

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Advances in offensive capabilities are spurred by advanced in defensive capabilities, and vice versa (going back to the time when the 'offensive' weapons were rocks and sticks, and the 'defensive' options were woven plant material).

The response to this sort of system is not "Oh, well, guess we can pack up the nukes now", it's "We need to invest in a nuclear delivery system that is capable of defeating this system", and the cycle starts all over again.

"Dang, they've developed an 'antivirus' program. Pack it up boys, viruses are obsolete now!"

If you think that the development of a space based missile system will only be developed with "defense" in mind, I have a surplus of bridges that I'd like to unload at a reasonable price.

Please explain how this has any meaningful advantage over the current system of silos and submarines. The ability to launch a nuclear missile from a space platform would be much more expensive, limited in size, vulnerable to attack, and invite massive complaints about there being such a missile parked in space.

The threat of using it as a really sucky attack platform is not why there are objections to missile defense.

It would have higher speeds and thus hard to intercept. This is going to lead to a new space weapons race, which is bad. US has no need for it as they have plenty of other good weapons anyway.

There is another far more terrible weapons system nobody is talking in public about. We should assume this 'space based missile' is a distraction from something so monstrous the public would lose its mind if its existence was confirmed.

A space based system doesn't need to be nuclear. Enough mass brought down from orbit on a specific target can be devastating without explosives.

Imagine that instead of flying a drone over your enemy with a missile, you instead launch a steel rod from space directly into their vehicle. Same destruction, no drone to alert them, you can target anywhere on earth.

It takes so much energy to bring a rod out of orbit. Not a good weapon.

Deorbiting something from low earth orbit takes a few hundred m/s of acceleration. That's roughly the same amount of acceleration an artillery projectile experiences. That's obviously not a trivial amount of energy, but it's not crazy.

I think the reason it's considered destabilizing is that it promises the possibility that the US could launch a first strike against Russia and then defend itself against the inevitable counterattack. So even in a defensive configuration, it has ostensible offensive value.

Of course, the keywords here are "promises" and "ostensible". It will never work well enough that a rational person would depend on it. (Note, in particular, that it can never be fully tested, short of actual nuclear war.) But can we assume our leaders will always be rational?

I believe the advantage of this over ballistic missiles is that there would be no cruise phase, which I have read is the most vulnerable part of the missiles trajectory. Once it is in the falling phase they move too quickly to be taken out.

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