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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

Whats our current "best stuff" in missile tech?

I think its the THAAD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_High_Altitude_Area_De...

I wonder if the laser weapon systems will go anywhere in the end. Certainly seems easier to target, and cheaper to shoot. But there's still a lot of energy that needs to go into a missile to be certain it's disabled.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Weapon_System

An ICBM warhead is going to be a tough target for that. Very fast so you don't have long to heat it and fitted with heat shielding for reentry already.

It depends on what kind of missile you want to hit. A scud is very different from an ICBM, which are both quite different from anti-ship and some of the area denial weapons.

In perspective: The Russian Satan 2 is indefensible, and also the older SS-N-27 Sizzler shot from very nearby submarines. Not enough time to react on those.

There's really no such thing as an indefensible missile, just like there's no such thing as an impenetrable computer network. Difficult to defend against, those exist. Missiles with an extremely low probability that we can physically intercept, those exist. But defending against a missile starts as soon as a possibility of launch occurs, and you can bet that a lot of people spend a lot of time figuring out how to defend against "indefensible." They aren't perfect, but they aren't going to bat .000 either.

Well, Russians claim otherwise and Wikipedia confirms. It's of course highly contra-productive to tell such things the American public.

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