[Reporting from home with the wrong return address . . .] thomas malloy wrote:
>Last night on the BBC news they reported the then breaking news that the >American missile had hit the spy satellite. I couldn't help but smile, >Parksie was wrong yet again. Long term Vortexians will recall his >attacks on the antimissile system. It was a waste of money, a government >boondoggle, it would never work. Worse, the government was going full >speed ahead building it. Well, it appears that he was wrong. As much as I dislike Park, in this case he is right. Even a stopped [analog] clock is right twice a day. Anti-satellite weapons (ASAT) were successfully demonstrated by the U.S. long ago. The first nuclear ASAT Nike was in 1963, and a kinetic ASAT was successfully tested in 1985. The Chinese demonstrated one recently. They are far easier to engineer than anti-missile systems (SDI). Satellites are easy to detect because they follow fixed orbits at relatively slow speeds, and you can predict where they will be weeks in advance, whereas you have only about 15 minutes to detect and stop an incoming nuclear warhead. Satellites do not have any anti-ASAT equipment on board. They take no evasive action -- especially this one, which was disabled. They are far larger than incoming nuclear missiles; this one was the size of a bus, whereas a MIRV nuclear warhead is the size of a trashcan. U.S. 1980s ASATs were launched from an aircraft, meaning it was a simple, small rocket, whereas an an effective anti-ballistic missile system would be gigantic, because it would have to stop dozens of incoming rockets. An anti-missile system would be very easy to defeat. Countermeasures include things like putting balloons on board the incoming missiles that inflate and drift away from the warhead. These would be far cheaper per rocket than the cost of the anti-missile system, and far easier to implement. The difference is a few hundred dollars versus tens of millions. This is asymmetric warfare. It would cost the U.S. trillions of dollars to defeat weapons that cost a few billion dollars. Even we can't afford that. SDI began after the first ASAT proved successful, and $60 to $90 billion has been spent on the R&D phase so far, but SDI has failed every realistic test, and there is no telling how many tens of billions more dollars it would take to make it work. Perhaps, in the future, a breakthrough will make a viable SDI possible. That's another matter. - Jed
