"CRS Questions very basis of Bush's "Missile Defense"

[swag]

(certainly Raytheon must consider their money for those big pro-Bush "Texas Style Barbecues," which everyone enjoyed so much, well spent, considering the American taxpayer money that now gets wasted on this unworkable garbage, much to the benefit of Raytheon and other wealthy "defense" contractors.)

via the Center for Defense Information (www.cdi.org) dispatch

CRS (Congressional Research Service) questions effectiveness of missile defense A newly-updated report by Congressional Research Service (CRS) questions the effectiveness of the fledgling ballistic missile defense system being championed by the White House. In "Missile Defense: The Current Debate," CRS raises the question of whether kinetic intercept or hit-to-kill can be reliably used to defend large swathes of territory against long-range missiles. It points out, "There is no unambiguous, empirical evidence to support the contention that kinetic kill for ICBM defense will work." Furthermore, the report takes on claims of the layered systems' impermeability, stating that "There is no empirical evidence of air defense system with a probability of intercept much greater than about 30 percent." CRS doubts that layering the defenses will greatly increase protection against missile attacks, as ICBMs that pass through several layers could unduly stress the weapon systems and possibly even cause "the collapse of the missile defense system." The report is available at http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RL31111.pdf.
(Global Security Newswire, June 3, 2005)

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RL31111.pdf

[whistle]

1. A kinetic kill for ICBM means that the nuclear bombs would...

...scatter like the Columbia shuttle and rain down randomly over hundreds of square miles to be detonated automatically creating huge 10 to 50 megaton atmospheric nuclear bursts that would eradicate every living thing below their 10 to 20 mile diameter kill zone.

Picture an ICBM with say 50 warheads kinetically killed while reentering the atmosphere heading in toward Philadelphia. So it might reenter 50 miles above Indianapolis IN. The inertia of the warheads would carry them spinning out of control over a 500 mile square area covering eastern Indiana, western Pennsylvania and numerous other unpredictable locations as the atomic warheads come down who knows where. That could wipe out 2 to 10 million people within minutes while killing 10's of millions more from radiation sickness. The entire scenario of of a Star Wars missile defense shield is pure insanity.

[swag]

2. Thanks for the additional information.

Clearly Bush's "Missile Defense" scam is not only useless and dangerous (as those like the late Lar Erik Nelson pointed out time and again), it is a massive and growing rip-off of the American taxpayer to further enrich these already bloated-and-still-bilking contractors.

[hecate77]

6. Not likely, as much as you might like it to be so for scaring people

Those warheads would not survive reentry unless on precise trajectories. Any disruption of the missle in boost phase would not likely result in nuclear explosions, just a lot of radioactive debris in the country of origin. There are devices to keep them from exploding in the home country if the rocket fails to achieve minimum altitude (not really armed until out of the atmosphere, or at least into the high point of the trajectory if short range). If it is hit in space before the MIRVs are released, they would be scattered (if not outright destroyed), or at least deflected from the nominal course, and would not survive reentry. Anything spinning would burn up on reentry. Anything hitting at too steep an angle would burn up. Anything hitting at too shallow an angle would skip off, and probably be lost in space or later reenter at a bad angle and burn up. If you hit it after it releases its MIRVs, well, you missed, didn't you, so who cares what happens to the shell.

Aerodynamics is a bitch. Anything travelling at those speeds that suddenly becomes non-aerodynamic would not likely survive. Witness the Space Shuttle......

However, the most likely result is a complete miss, so it hardly matters. And that is the main point. If someone was launching a MIRVed vehicle at us, there would likely be more than one, and if we miss even one, we get hit. If a few errant weapons manage to make it through reentry and explode, that would be the least of our problems.

But again, it is very, very, very unlikely we could hit them with kinetics anyway.

As far as I know, every method so far devised has serious shortcomings, including space based platforms with nukes or lasers on board.

[whistle]

7. Well, the good news is that I'm likely totally wrong.....

...the bad news is that because a kinetic hit is so unlikely that the missile defense shield is a useless defense investment.

[killbotfactory]

3. It's military pork

plain and simple.

[swag]

4. aka Corporate Welfare of the most expensive and useless kind.

[hecate77]

5. The physics community has been against this from the very start

It simply is not possible to do this with anything we are likely to have in the forseeable future. There are many articles on this in the science mags.

[whistle]

8. Physics eh, that's a branch of science and of course BushCo....

...and the religious right are totally opposed to science :sarcasm:

[swag]

9. $10 billion slated for Bush's worthless "missile defense" fy 2005

Everybody knows conceptually and very practically, this stuff doesn't work. Yet "conservatives" cheer this multi-billion annual give-away for worthless technology that gives nothing beyond a dangerously false sense of security.

"Under the Bush administration, missile defenses have received $7 billion to $9 billion annually, and the fiscal year (FY) 2005 budget request is more than $10 billion, about half of which is for the ground-based system. The United States has spent more than $90 billion on various missile defense programs since 1983. Over the next five years, administration plans call for spending nearly $60 billion more on these programs."

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_security/missile_defense/page.cfm?pageID=1522