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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

And thus the old quote about sticks and stones being used to fight world war 4.

I'm not sure about Russia's or China's anti ballistic technology. I know their hypersonic tech is superior to our own currently.

But what if a country could deploy nuclear weapons against another nation and defend themselves against incoming missiles, due to a temporary technological advantage? It changes the game. I'm not sure if that's where we're at currently, but I know that the hypersonic and nuclear tech is why we are so hesitant to enter the Ukrainian war outright.

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You know this? You have intel (that's probably classified NOFORN) or you've just read about Zircon? The Russians can hype their wunderwaffen til the cows come home, but they haven't demonstrated reliable, deployable systems.

If you think hypersonic weapons are any deterrent to the US involvement in Ukraine, you're just being silly. The Russians don't even have enough Kalibr cruise missiles to take out a 3rd rate military. They don't have enough money (or perhaps just too much corruption) to install active defenses for their MBTs (no Arena/Trophy).

The only reason we don't have US troops in Ukraine is because of the SS-18 Satan and Bulava SLBM.

And no one has an effective defense against the number of ICBMs/SLBMs on each side. The ABM systems around Moscow are too few to counter the number of warheads assigned, and the US missile defense is too raw (and also out of position) to defend against Russian missiles.

Extant American ballistic missile defenses don't seem sufficient to repel a committed ICBM/SLBM attack from Russia, or even China. THAAD and Patriot can only protect a relatively small area around each installation, not even remotely enough to protect the whole country in a war like that. GMD can intercept ballistic missiles mid course and has substantial range, but no more than a few dozen interceptors total for the entire country. Aegis is formidable and numerous, but the SM-3 interceptors used by those ships have substantially less range compared to GMD interceptors, and only some of the missiles carried by Aegis ships will be those SM-3s.

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