• Space Force: Trump says he wants a 'space-based missile defense layer'
    43 replies, posted
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/01/17/space-force-donald-trump-missile-defense/2602115002/ How to start an arms race in space 101
Isn't such a system also against the treaty once written in the 60's(?) that specifically states that no one can put weapons into space?
...so Star Wars?
and there is a very fucking good reason we shouldn't too If we stupidly created too much debris through space war we could effectively cause ourselves to be stranded on earth for quite some time
"Good, that means that we have the advantage"
Aren't mirv made to counter this sort of defence?
Mirvs have dummy warheads at the same time as real ones, so you'd have to intercept all of them to be safe.
It's specifically nuclear weapons, if I recall. Conventional missiles are A-OK.
I wonder if they wrote those laws before considering the kinetic bombardment thing
"Neither SALT II (1979), nor the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty,[3][4] nor the Outer Space Treaty explicitly prohibit the deployment in space of kinetic bombardment systems. However, SALT II and the Outer Space Treaty do prohibit weapons of mass destruction,[4] and kinetic bombardment would violate the spirit of the Outer Space Treaty.[3]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
It wouldn't just make space travel impossible for our species for centuries, it'd take down every single satellite in orbit without exception and make it impossible to put more up. In other words, while planetary extinction accelerated due to anthropogenic climate change, we'd be stranded here with nowhere else to go. And you can kiss conveniences like GPS and many internet and cell phone services goodbye. If Trump was actually going to do this I'd start hoping somebody took him out before he could make it happen.
Ion Cannon ready
its sad but not shocking a man so scientifically and functionally illiterate would demand such a catastrophically bad thing for all of humanity. A space based missile shield would go too far and present too much of a danger to the rest of the world as well as all future space endeavors.
He needs space force to protect the US from illegal aliens.
na we'll just build a great big dyson fence across the southern hemisphere of the solar system.
No one can put nukes in space.
And he's going to make the Martians pay for it.
and if they don't we'll repossess their moons!
Has this on his mind, yet can't go past McDonalds for a food budget with guests. Fuck oooooff
So a space-based missile defense system is not actually a bad idea. Mutually assured destruction has worked so far but it only prevents deliberate attacks by rational actors - it doesn't offer any protection against accidents or irrational actors. We've survived so far on a mix of luck and very intense efforts against proliferation. That will not hold forever. Eventually, someone's going to fuck up, or someone crazy is going to get their hands on nuclear weapons, and then millions of people die. We need to move past MAD - and that either means complete nuclear disarmament, or near-perfect missile defense. Since we can't even stop new countries from acquiring nukes, let alone get rid of Russia's or China's (or America's), defense is the only way. If you're going to build a missile defense system, space is the best place to do it. It's obviously infeasible to try to shoot missiles down during ascent; intercontinental missiles are moving too quickly during terminal descent to be reliably shot down, at least with any tech we currently have. So destroying missiles in space is the most reasonable way to build a missile defense system. It's still not easy but it's the least hard. Politically, it's problematic. While the Outer Space Treaty doesn't prohibit this sort of weapons system, it does prohibit weapons tests in space. Since this would be a weapons system in space, proper testing would require breaking that part of the treaty. Also, the ABM treaty limits the deployment of any anti-missile system. Bush withdrew us from that treaty but it's not 100% clear whether he had authority to do so (the Senate never voted to un-ratify). Further efforts to develop missile defenses would probably trigger further breakdown of arms control - a sensible way of defeating an anti-missile system is to fire more missiles than it can intercept. There's also the problem that a space-based anti-missile system is also a pretty capable anti-satellite system. That makes it a threat not just to countries with nuclear missiles, but ones with satellites, and there's a lot more countries with satellites than with nuclear missiles. So it's inherently not just a defensive system, but a potentially offensive one as well. And yes, it risks destabilizing MAD before it's ready. Under MAD philosophy, if you think an enemy is about to deploy a system that can prevent you from attacking, the only rational choice is to attack immediately (and beforehand, publicly commit to doing so, to deter anti-missile systems). This is a problem with any transition away from MAD - disarmament has the problem of hiding a significant advantage being easier when the total number of missiles is low (it's easy to hide 5 missiles when both sides are supposed to have 10; it's not easy to hide 500 missiles when both sides are supposed to have 1000). Since I think we have to become post-MAD eventually, this is something we're just going to have to deal with. And it's not impossible - it just needs to be a quantum leap in capabilities, not a continuous one. We need to go straight from "can shoot down 0% of missiles" to "can shoot down 99.999% of missiles", without stopping at "can shoot down 10% of missiles" or "can shoot down 60% of missiles" along the road. Is this the right call? Possibly. It's not an obviously wrong call, but neither is it obviously right. And a lot depends on specifics that are best kept secret - so we won't even know if we're doing things the right way until possibly too late. But it's something that will have to happen eventually - so the question really becomes, is the risk of this attempt fucking up (due to Trump or just because the tech isn't there yet) lower than the risk of continuing under a fragile MAD equilibrium?
Thankfully the development of such a system would take a very long time. Much longer than Trump's got left. So it doesn't really matter what he wants.
The short-answer issue with missile-defences is that they will give nations the confidence of "I can nuke them and they can't nuke me back" which could lead to nuclear war.
That's still MAD thinking. Try to think post-MAD. If the enemy can't nuke you back, why would you need to attack first? You have nothing to fear from them - their nukes are useless, and as long as you keep a token nuclear response ready, they're not going to attack you with anything without building missile defenses equal to your own. If they do, sure, now they might be able to attack you with conventional weapons without fear of nuclear reprisal - but now we're back at a pre-Trinity, or at least pre-Sputnik, sort of war. Given a choice of systems where one is "best case peace, worst case nuclear holocaust" and the other is "best case peace, worst case WW2", I'll take the latter, even if the chances of the worst case happening are higher. And while yes, a one-sided missile defense does give that one nation a lot of leverage over enemies... war is rarely popular, much less mass murder. A leader in even a really shitty democracy isn't going to nuke someone just because they can't fight back. Even China wouldn't do that, were they the ones with ABM and we without - it's just too bad for business.
No you big dumby Trump said it so its gotta be bad thats the point here
welcome to the Space Force recruits, man's final frontier! oh by the way the president didn't feel like giving NASA a budget this year and can't send us supplies so uh just eat whoever dies first
Shooting down an object in a suborbital trajectory wouldn't be high enough to cause any substantial risk to satellites in orbit.
An explosion can easily accelerate debris enough to put it in orbit. And if an arms race begins in space, it's possible that those very military satellites will be targeted, virtually ensuring kessler syndrome. There's a reason it hasn't been done yet.
If you shot a warhead in space I don't think there would be any substantial explosion, certainly not enough to boost debris into a stable orbit. And if you shot one in it's boost phase it would definitely not reach orbit. The reasons its not done is cost/necessity/politics. I'm obviously not an expert on the matter but I've never heard Kessler syndrome being a concern with intercepting ballistic missiles in space when the alternative is being nuked into Oblivion, anyway. At worst debris would be a temporary threat to objects in LEO. I'm highly skeptical of debris having enough horizontal velocity to boost into orbit. If you're using a laser to intercept missiles, could it also be used to zap substantial debris calculated to be a danger?
Well, we're not worried about huge chunks of debris causing damage - though that's definitely what'll end up happening in the event of Kessler syndrome - we're worried about absolutely tiny chunks of debris - everything from stuff the size and density of a paint chip to stuff the size of a golf ball - even ballistic missiles on a suborbital trajectory can produce these easily if hit by a missile system when at or near the apogee of its trajectory. The detonation of the missile or force of impact would be enough to put tens of thousands of tiny, light projectiles into orbit. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/651/949ba373-a436-4f99-9a5d-3af5a93d821e/image.png The amount of damage even something tiny and light can do in orbit is incredibly disproportionate, and every impact has the chance of generating more debris. In 2007, China shot down one of its own satellites in LEO with a kinetic kill vehicle in a missile test - a move that drew massive international condemnation not only for political reasons but because that event alone put an estimated 150,000 pieces of debris in orbit. As of 2016, nine years later, over 3,400 pieces larger than a golf ball had been detected relating to that one event, of which 2,867 were still in orbit. Anything smaller is undetectable and cannot be tracked.
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