I found it hard to believe the US only has a handful of one type of ballistic missiles interceptor. Don’t they have THAAD, and then a variety of Aegis missiles with many of their fleet? Separately, I know the Nike interceptors during the Cold War would actually have a nuclear explosion that would focus on x-rays that would fizzle incoming warheads, is there anything current rumored to use the same principles?
>>64449528How many different types of missiles do you really need for the express purpose of blowing up other missiles? The U.S. are masters of logistics, you know whatthat would mean applied to this? Make a few missiles that are good at killing a wide range of things so that you don't need 500 different production lines to make 500 different missiles.
>>64449528The US doesn’t plan to protect against ICBM attacks from established nuclear powers like Russia or China. It’s for rogue states like North Korea
You can't really intercept 100 different ICBMs that MIRV themselves into 500 warheads. It's prohibitively expensive. Most of the things like THAAD and SM-3 are for theater defense, not country wide defense.
>>64449528The plot of the movie requires the interceptors fail, they’ve got like ~60 cells for GBI up in Alaska so I’d hope they’d shoot more than two. Aegis is good but can be handwaved as the right ships just weren’t in the right area at the right time, they already more or less did that with the satellites missing the launch. THAAD is expensive and only really deployed where we think would be missiled, so not having a battery in Chicago tracks. Anyway first act is great but you should really shut it off after. You don’t really get anything from watching the same plot that many times. Would’ve worked better as a short film. I just hope it doesn’t fuck up the production of Villeneuve’s adaptation of the book they ripped off for it.
>>64449603It certainly helps against major powers, if only to make them waste more missiles that could potentially have been better used elsewhere.
>>64449603>>64449617>>64449647Yeah, I saw some interview with the film makers, and I actually give them some credit for being honest and upfront about>"we wanted to explore the decision making process and mental status that a certain type of nuclear event would require, so of the realm of probabilities we flat out picked the ones that would let us do that and they aren't the only ones"I don't think that's necessarily terrible so long as the choices COULD happen, even if odds are decent that one of the layers would catch it. Particularly when, understandable given what's involved but still when, it's all top secret so we the public don't actually know for sure to what standard it all is. There are government military projects that are pretty damn competently run and have performed superbly even if it took a decade or two of polishing and bug squashing and block revisions following initial deployment. There are also some that have been incompetent cluster fucks. So it doesn't break suspension of disbelief for me if in a time critical situation certain things have a failure. There are lots of other necessary assumptions too, like the actual leadership in place. So much comes down to the decision of a small number of humans and they aren't interchangeable parts, we've had some POTUS and cabinets in the nuclear age that were obviously more qualified and made of sterner stuff than others.That said I was bothered by the lack of finger printing showing up and the panic over one single warhead. THAT I felt was unrealistic. Losing a city or 8 is no joke for sure, but it's not remotely existential and there is zero need to worry about 2nd strike from that. Furthermore every single nation has slightly different isotope balances in their enriched U235 and Plutonium, and the geometry etc of their bombs and resulting boom is noticeably different in turn. After the fact, with plenty of time, attributing a given bomb to a given nation is doable.
>>64449701>That said I was bothered by the lack of finger printing showing up and the panic over one single warhead. THAT I felt was unrealistic. Losing a city or 8 is no joke for sure, but it's not remotely existential and there is zero need to worry about 2nd strike from that. Furthermore every single nation has slightly different isotope balances in their enriched U235 and Plutonium, and the geometry etc of their bombs and resulting boom is noticeably different in turn. After the fact, with plenty of time, attributing a given bomb to a given nation is doable.So basically I felt like the dramatic tension is undermined and that very fact is part of the meta-stability we've seen IRL. As the film demonstrated, even if somehow you miss the launch (enemy spookies nailing your detection assets is mostly likely but whatever) there is zero chance of not being detected during the rest of the flight, and it takes time. So a single missile cannot take out command and control, any appreciable retaliation not even land based missile sponge stuff, or potentially even the potus himself since he'll be scooted onto AF1 or a helicopter at least asap. And then attribution can be reliably determined, and an appropriate counter strike launched. A massive launch of course does require decision before the nukes land, but conversely a massive launch is possible for a such a tiny number of countries that attribution again is trivial.Hence MAD actually ends up holding even for single missile launches.
>>64449697Trying to defend against other major nuclear powers is just flushing down money. Sure you can always pull another CW strategy of bankrupting the enemy trying to beat your missile shield but with no credible nuclear threat at the moment it's rather pointless.
>>64449734it's more the fact that any sort of defense existing makes warhead allocation much more complicated, especially if those systems are mobile. Any target you might pick that would usually require, say, 2 warheads for a sufficiently high P(k) might now suddenly require 5 or even 8 warheads, depending on how much your enemy wants to commit to defending it. There might be AEGIS ships in the way of your missiles that you aren't aware of, there might be a sneaky THAAD somewhere, there might be an american attack sub shadowing your boomer. It's always a gamble whenever you allocate less warheads than the worst case scenario dictates you should to any target.In this case your arsenal of, say, 800 nukes might be enough to service 400 targets if no defences at all were present, but only 200 targets if you allocate conservatively. If you decide to be greedy, you're gambling with priority targets possibly remaining intact while your remaining launch platforms get obliterated by your enemy's conservatively allocated counter strike, which they can afford now that many of your launch platforms are empty
>>64449773Counterstrikes are always countervalue. Making a counterforce second strike is pointless; after receiving hits from hundreds or even thousands of warheads your country will be in no position to fight any sort of war. The only play is to punish your enemy hard enough that no one will ever consider a nuclear first strike again.
>>64449800the math changes once deterrence already failed. You aren't deterring shit and you can always threaten cities with nukes afterwards, but after being on the receiving end of a first launch you have all your nukes (minus any silos that acted as a nuclear sponge) while your enemy has depleted most of theirs and revealed which locations have them, by process of elimination. You can completely disarm the other state with a much smaller amount of warheads than they expended on you and end up in a situation where you're the last nation/alliance on the planet left standing with a credible nuclear arsenal. You can do whatever you want at that point, but nuking your enemy's cities one by one until capitulation is a better deal than totally destroying them back. It gives you a shot at rebuilding, at least
>>64449528I have no opinion on Zero Dark Thirty, but it's always been aggravating to me that Hurt Locker is considered a 'good' war movie. It was one of the most painfully shitty war movies I've ever sat through, and I instantly lose respect for anyone that rates it highly. I'm not even a misogynist, but it 100% felt like a war movie directed by an overly opinionated woman, and that just tanked the whole project.
>>64449528You bring up a valid point about Nike. I’d guess that the amount of of money burgers have put into the kinetic interceptors that a wider-range “anti-nuke” is not feasible any more. IDK maybe more shielding or something? I miss Oppenheimer guys
>>64449967>Zero Dark ThirtyIs it weird that I enjoyed the intel gathering and beating up people parts more than the actual raid
>>64450006That doesn't surprise, since depicting that kind of high-level power brokering is something she can do really well. She needs to stick more to 'West Wing' style stories, rather than pretending she knows what it's like to be a soldier.
>>64449967I wrote a really long review explaining in autistic detail all the stuff that makes it a shitty military movie way back in the day on my tumblr blog.Thanks for unlocking that memory, I guess.
>>64449528The US has a grand total of like seven THAAD batteries. AEGIS is installed on most of the USN's surface fleet but it's spread out worldwide so coverage of any individual region is limited.As >>64449603 >>64449617 point out, neither is intended to stop a full scale nuclear attack Russia or China. Even if the US quadrupled its number of THAAD batteries, you still wouldn't be able to realistically reload them in a fast enough to shoot down anything more than a few dozen missiles when the enemy is firing hundreds
>>64449647Agreed, the first act was interesting, I didn’t need to see it two more times. Captcha: XRGAY, how the second two acts felt.
>>64449528Do you seriously believe the United States would openly advertise that it has the capability to completely stop a full-scale nuclear attack?Of course their official position is>yeah bro we can totally only stop like 12 of those things dude definitely don't stop wasting money on more of them
>>64449528GBI is the only one rated for ICBMs
>>64449528I was stationed at a deterrence site many years ago in the military. We are adequately prepared to deter enemy ICBM's. That's as much as I'm comfortable saying without feeling like I'll get butt raped, but you need to understand that this movie was fiction and does not represent our real capabilities or actual readiness.That is all.
>>64450001>>64449528>I know the Nike interceptors during the Cold War would actually have a nuclear explosion that would focus on x-rays that would fizzle incoming warheadsFrom memory it was the later Spartan exoatmospheric ABM that intended to fizzle the incoming warheads with neutrons whilst the Nike Zeus intended to directly damage the warhead.>more shielding or something?There were developments to harden the RVs against high energy neutrons, such as the British Chevaline upgrade to Polaris in the 1970s.
>>64449826That's not how any of it works, though. You don't lose any of your nukes in a first strike because you launch a counterstrike the moment you detect the launches and determine they're coming your way. Otherwise you risk losing your counterstrike capability entirely.
>>64451755>I was stationed at a deterrence site many years ago in the military.Can I ask you a few questions, anon? What do you do during the shifts in the control bunkers? Do you just sit around maintaining comms and systems? Are you allowed to take food down there or play music? I know up top is a bit more chill with the security forces but a shift down there seems mind numbing.
Damn this thread so far has actually had some good discussion and hasn’t gone to shit flinging, good job.
It seems the Soviet Union (and Russia afterwards) have placed much of their ballistic missile defense priorities around Moscow to keep power centralized. What exactly is the US trying to defend with their systems being so spread out?
>>64452238People dying is a bad thing mkay
>>64452238the US chose to defend silo fields, on the theory that an ablation strike would become much much costlier
>>64449576That’s not how the military industrial complex works. Military companies make things because they get tax payer dollars to do it. It doesn’t matter if it gets used or if it’s obsolete. Just keep building to keep the money flowing.
This movie was fucking assSame story three times
>>64452238>What exactly is the US trying to defendThe US
>>64449603>>64451485people say "it's not designed to do that" because it failed to live up to its original design goals so the designers (the military industrial complex) moved the goalposts
>>64452338Ultimately it’s cheaper to build more ICBMs than to build interceptors. Golden Dome is retarded and more funding should’ve been given to Sentinel instead of SDI 2.0
>>64449528>I find it hard to believe [false claim] based on [slop propaganda]. I know [ancient history] so is [antique crap] still relevant?This template is disturbingly common.
>>64453313>This templateIt's not a template, it's thirdie thought process.
>>64449528I liked the part where the nuclear football turns out to be a regularly updated list of various targets sorted by priority/importance, and not some fancy one man doomsday trigger device. Also liked the part where one of the two exoatmospheric kill vehicles didn't deploy from the carrier rocket and the other missed its target... money well spent. Other than that, it's more propaganda against nuclear proliferation.
>>64452233Not that anon, but checklists. Readiness assessment. Just normal cleaning and painting. The fucking fences. The fueling bullshit.Just read shit.
