posted 06-19- 12:45 PM               

Putin said he feared a “hectic and uncontrolled arms race” if the White House ignores the Kremlin’s view that a costly missile defense system would undermine decades of nuclear arms agreements.
Putin went on to say that if the ABM treaty is abandoned, Russia would move to rearm its missiles with multiple warheads banned under the START I agreement. “We will reinforce our capability,” Putin said. “The nuclear arsenal of Russia will be augmented multifold.”
The Russian leader insisted that Bush’s desire to build a missile shield would spark a dangerous arms race as countries like China see building more nuclear arms as the only way to overwhelm a U.S. national missile defense.

And here's what I said in a previous post in the other thread about missile defense...

Even the most avid proponents of missile defense agree that it cannot protect against an all out strike. No matter how elegant or accurate the missile shield is, it can be easily be overwhelmed by a high volume of missiles and/or MIRVs. And this doesn't even take into account the countermeasures that would be developed against the shield.

Incidently, this is another reason why some have argued, quite accurately, that the missile shield would lead to another arms race.

posted 06-19- 05:21 PM               

About getting the money to build more arms, They could just sell their older ones on the world market.

posted 06-19- 08:49 PM            

First you say,

1. We need a missile shield RIGHT NOW GODDAMMIT...HURRY, THE TERRORISTS ARE ABOUT TO ATTACK!!! LOL

Then you say,

2. Russia can't afford to maintian missiles.

UH, does anyone smell a contradiction here? So why the fuck do we need a billion + dollar missile shield anyway? Who has all this money to buy these missiles then? Bin Laden? Bill Gates? What a die hard conservative we have.

posted 06-19- 09:23 PM               

I never said we need a missle shield "RIGHT NOW GODDAMMIT". If your reading comprehension skills were beyond that of a 3rd grader you would have read that I said several times that we should NOT deploy it until we are confident that it works. Also, I never said that Russia was the biggest missle threat. I said that terrorists are the near-term threat and China the biggest overall threat.

What I didn't say, like you knee-jerk liberals who have a hissy fit over everything Bush proposes, is that we should reject the concept out of hand because it is technically impossible, unnecessary and/or too expensive.

posted 06-19- 09:58 PM               

How would you react if I said man I hate those whiney Americans?

Does it not sound like I'm talking about all of them?

posted 06-19- 10:15 PM               

Right... so, if you agree that China is a threat, how do you feel about Putin's statement that countries like China would build more arms in an effort to overwhelm our missile shield?

Second, I think it's disturbing the way you and Mirth laugh off Putin's statement. The Russian military might be impotent right now, but if we continue to alienate them and the rest of the world with our arrogance, they may find nations willing to help them nurse their massive yet ailing missile arsenal back to health... so to speak.

posted 06-19- 10:20 PM               

However, I can't imagine that terrorists would be able to buy a 50 foot ICBM, fuel it, and fire it accurately.

posted 06-19- 10:48 PM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by Spanky the Mad Dog:

Sorry, guess I took your meaning wrong.

How would you react if I said man I hate those whiney Americans?

Does it not sound like I'm talking about all of them?

---

Yes. There is something about the term "those" whiney Europeans that seems more inclusive than "the" whiney Europeans, but I see your point. I should have said "...you and whiney Europeans". It would help if you would quit reading jingoistic intent into everything I say.

posted 06-19- 10:59 PM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by JT:
>I said that terrorists are the near-term threat and China the biggest overall threat.

Right... so, if you agree that China is a threat, how do you feel about Putin's statement that countries like China would build more arms in an effort to overwhelm our missile shield?

Second, I think it's disturbing the way you and Mirth laugh off Putin's statement. The Russian military might be impotent right now, but if we continue to alienate them and the rest of the world with our arrogance, they may find nations willing to help them nurse their massive yet ailing missile arsenal back to health... so to speak.

[This message has been edited by JT (edited 06-19-2001).]

---

I didn't say China is a threat, but they will be if their government doesn't change. They are going to build their missiles whether we put up a shield or not. A shield will force them to build a lot more and delay when they delude themselves into thinking they can win a first strike. If they want to enter an arms race with us they had better look at the Soviet Union to see what will happen to them.

Yeah, right. A bunch of little countries are going to get together and finance the re-arming of a country bent on world domination just a few years ago. LOL That will happen when Kuwait re-arms Iraq. LOL Besides, they still have plenty of operational nukes to wipe us out, just no reason to commit suicide....but a madman?

posted 06-20- 07:33 AM            

"I didn't say China is a threat, but they will be if their government doesn't change."

Will you make up your mind already? Sounds like you didn't even hit second grade. You don't know what the hell is going on do you?

Plus you are stupid and naive anyway..None of your 'terrorists' even have missiles than can hit the US from here anyway.

So it all falls back on you again: "Why do we need to waste billions on something we don't need?"

Oh, and try to explain without your insults. If you want to play insult we can do that. It's hard to insult someone that can't think for himself, and follows a political party around like a blind sheep. Did you even go to school? High School? College? Grad School? There isn't a minimun IQ score to be considered a resident of Oregon? There isn't one for Texas...look at your president that garnered less than half the popular vote. You better hurry and move down here before the state finds out and deports you.

posted 06-20- 10:34 AM               

No, I don't think they would delude themselves into thinking they can win. They will build missiles to simply overwhelm our shield and thus render it useless... why waste unthinkable amounts of money on a missile shield if the Chinese are going to force us to return to a MAD style policy? It just doesn't make any sense.

>If they want to enter an arms race with us they had better look at the Soviet Union to see what will happen to them.

I don't know, Jerry.... I'm not exactly confident that we can outspend the Chinese into oblivion... especially after we build a useless missile shield. Perhaps we will be the ones who go broke this time?

>Yeah, right. A bunch of little countries are going to get together and finance the re-arming of a country bent on world domination just a few years ago. LOL That will happen when Kuwait re-arms Iraq. LOL Besides, they still have plenty of operational nukes to wipe us out, just no reason to commit suicide....but a madman?

Of course it could happen. This is the way the world works. It wasn't that long ago that we were chummy with Sadam. And who said any thing about little countries... I could see China and Russia getting very cozy with each other.

posted 06-20- 10:49 AM               

Yes, but there is a difference between being prepared and living with a false sense of security. Let's imagine that they do build this shield. How would they test it? I mean really test it. Would you be confident that such a system could protect us in a real war... not just a test?

posted 06-20- 02:14 PM            

Note, when I say "win" a nuke fest I simply mean that no other country has the capability to completely annihalate the US anymore although there would certainly be sever casualties in the US from what responses were mustered.

Right now we ARE the biggest kid on the block, militarily speaking, and missile defense would simply ensure that we stay that way for at least another decade or two. The rest of the world, understandably, doesn't much like this - nobody likes to admit that they are overmatched. Eventually China, if it's governemt holds, WILL become the global superpower. They are simply to large (and have too many resources to draw from) and since they have geared their country to that goal, unless something like a large scale war breaks out to change the situation they will achieve it. It is in the US's best interest to delay the day that China can equal us militarily as long as possible. The Chinese and US ideologies do not mix well - while we appear semi-friendly on the surface it is just a show. The EP-3 incident illustrates this quite clearly.

Many seem worried about the Russian response... which is silly. They don't even have the cash to keep their planes flying and ships floating, let alone the very expensive task of maintaining an ICBM fleet. They couldn't increase their fleet no matter how badly they wanted to. At this point Russia is still very much a third-world economy... and it will be decades, if ever, before they can compete economically on a par with the US. You can't compete in an arms race with a country that could literally buy and sell you. This is what happens when a government collapses and has to be rebuilt. Russia will continue to scream about how they will have to up their inventory in response to a shield and they will never actually do so - the USSR is truly dead.

China is already engaged in an arms race with the US. It's low key (on our side anyhow) right now because of how far behind they are in technology but that situation is rapidly changing. Within 5-10 years they will have a viable blue-water navy complete with carriers capable of projecting force globally and definately being capable of attemting to enforce their claim to the entire South China Sea as territorial waters. In the same time frame they will field a state of the art multirole fighter system using, in part, technology purchased from Russia that by all reports will be the equal, if not the better, of the F-22. This will provide them a viable offensive airforce and a very good carrier born fighter craft. They are also building advanced new nuclear attack subs of their own design and it is believed that along with several SSBN's they pruchased from Russia they are building their own. They have purchased huge amounts of armor (tanks, BMP's, etc..) from Russia and are actively working at upgrading them and creating their own designs based off Russian work - who, I might remind you built some VERY lethal tanks. If you think for one instant that they are simply doing this to defend their shores you are out of your mind. Their existing systems are plenty of deterrent against any invader. These upgrades also go beyond simply updateing their existing systems to more modern capabilites - they are adding entirely knew systems that are designed primarily for offensive action (carriers for example).

The "Arms Race" never ended - it simply shifted focus and slowed a bit in the west... in China it is going at a fervrent pace not seen in the west since the 60's.

This is where missile defense comes in, it is a handy catch-all to develop multiple types of weapons systems. Anything that can drop an ICBM in flight will have no trouble removing any aircraft from the sky. It also means that further development willbe done on energy weapons, which hold great promise for both scientific advancment as well as military applications.

posted 06-20- 05:50 PM            

The technical issues are really not that great (well, for an energy based system anyhow) the laser are rpoven and simply have to be scaled up to the appropraite power and manitain reliability. While there are technical hurdles to overcome here ther of an incremental variety instead of great leaps of technology. Did you know that a beam splitter/targetting mirror system meant for sapce use has already been developed? It would be placed in sychronous orbit over the us and ground based lasers would fire to the beam directors to kill missile just after they leave boost phase and exit the atmosphere - still over their country of origin. Any missile that survive the first pass of the system as the exit the atmosphere would then be target again by the same systems during the mid phase of flight and any that survived that pass would be targetted directly by the ground lasers as they entered terminal phase. At, say, 2 seconds per missile to destroy them (high estimate based on the THEL's purpoted less than one second kill time) and a post boost flight phase for most ICBM'2 of about 7 minutes before target impact one unit could destroy 210 missiles. With a network of 50 weapons you could destroy a peak of 10500 missile before they reached their terminal phase. At the height of MAD no-one had even 6000 missiles to fire at the US! The cost per unit on a defensive energy weapon would probably be less than the cost of 10 ICBMS - maening that for the cost of 500 ICBMS it would cost an opponent 11000 ICBMS to overwhelm our defenses. Heck, even the cost of that many decoys with orbital booster would wipe out a country! I you built a 75 unit defensive system with another few hundred ballistic interceptors you would have a very tight net capable of handling well over 10,000 incoming weapons with an extremely high degree of confidence. Nothing, from an engineering standpoint, is impossible if you really want to do it.

BTW - a system with 75 weapons, had it existed at the height of the cold war, would only have had to achieve a success rate of 38% to destroy every missile in Soviet arsenal - certainly an achievable success rate, wouldn't you say?

posted 06-20- 06:39 PM            

Sorry, I think your so full of shit it's
running out the top of your head. Do you have
any links to this information so we can read
it ourselves? Nothing I've read or heard says
anything about a success rate anywhere near
what your talking about.

posted 06-20- 07:34 PM            

ALSO I am not talking about the BALLISTIC systems that have been tested publically. Hitting a bullet with a bullet is still damned hard and very prone to failure. I am simply theorizing about ENERGY (read high-power IR laser) based systems whose potential predecessor is currently in testing (the THEL - Theatre High Energy Laser system).

Smokey, though I recognize that this is technically flame wars I would appreciate it if you did not attack me personally as I have always and will always extend that courtesy to you. Attack and question my ideas but please do not make it personal. I do not need that kind of aggravation. I post here for the intellectual stimulus of well formed arguments with my contemporaries, not personal abuse. Once again, I do recognize that this is flame-wars, but if you wish to continue to debate something with me I would appreciate the same courtesy I show you extended back to me.

Jerry - LOL! No shit, CA's power problem could be a major problem in any system! Funny thing is our state legislature is now pushing to revive nuke power in CA and even the staunchest of environmentalists seem to be keeping quite right now - perhaps they don't like living without their AC on these 105+ degree summer days, eh?

posted 06-20- 08:10 PM            

Fair enough. Sorry about the full of shit
remark. It was unnecessary. My appologys.

posted 06-20- 11:05 PM               

Actually, the technical difficulties are extremely complex and difficult to overcome. It's not just a matter of increasing the power output... if it were, we would already have this system. In fact, increasing the power is actually what complicates the challenge. Allow me to explain...

In order to shoot down ICBMs, you need to be able to target and fire over great distances... emphasis on great. To do that, these lasers would have to be enormous. The kind of precision mirror you would need in such a system would weigh well over 10,000 pounds... real figure, not hyperbole. According to one essay I read, targeting with something that massive is sort of like "... pointing from the Washington Monument to a baseball on the top of the Empire State Building...". Actually, it's worse than that because the baseball is moving at Mach 5. Again we're talking about trying to accurately aim lasers at small, fast moving objects that are extremely far away. I can't emphasize enough how difficult that is.

posted 06-20- 11:14 PM               

Let's not forget about decoys. Any country that is capable of launching a massive strike, is also capable of launching decoys. This complicates targeting enormously.

posted 06-20- 11:20 PM               

That's a little bit misleading. It takes 2 seconds for the beam to destroy the target, but you also need to consider how long it takes for the system to aquire and lock the target. We also don't know how much downtime there is between shots.

posted 06-21- 01:40 AM               

Well, I'm not a scientist and my knowledge of this stuff is somewhat of a jumble based on a lot of things I've seen and read, but I'll try to answer to the best of my knowledge. And if that doesn't work, I'll ask my brother, who is a scientist.

>Thirty years ago the astronauts put a small mirror on the moon so earthbound scientists could bounce lazer beams off it and get precise measurements of distance between the earth and the moon. I don't think we were using a 10,000 pound precision lazar mirror to do that. Your quote above implies that it is the great "emphasis on great" distance to an ICBM that requires such a large mirror.

Oh come on... everyone knows the moon shot was faked! Hehe... just kidding.

Anyway, yes, you need a big mirror. I'm not exactly sure why, but I think it has to do with the fact that you need to be able to focus the mirror to an extremely high degree in order to keep the beam potent enough to bring down an ICBM that is extremely far away.

But if you're merely trying to bounce lasers off the moon mirrors so you can take distance readings, you don't need such a potent laser because even a weak signal will give you what you need. Here is a quote from a website about the Moon Mirrors...

"Laser beams are used because they remain tightly focused for large distances. Nevertheless, there is enough dispersion of the beam that it is about 7 kilometers in diameter when it reaches the Moon and 20 kilometers in diameter when it returns to Earth. Because of this very weak signal, observations are made for several hours at a time. By averaging the signal for this period, the distance to the Moon can be measured to an accuracy of about 3 centimeters (the average distance from the Earth to the Moon is about 385,000 kilometers)."

7 kilometer dispersion... get my drift?

Here is a link if you'd like to read more... http://www.lpi.usra.edu/expmoon/Apollo11/A11_Experiments_LRRR.html

>The moon is 240,000 miles away, an ICBM maybe 5,000 when we are targeting it. This does not compute if distance is the determining factor.

Even though the moon is a much farther target than the ICBM, the beam used to shoot a missile has to be exponentially more powerful than the beam used in the moon mirror experiments. In order to produce a beam that powerful you need a big mirror.

The size of the mirror in the laser might also have something to do with the power output. In other words, the mirror might have to be large to handle a heavy power load... but that's just a guess.

Anyway, here's a cool pic... big laser... kind of puts things into perspective, no?

[This message has been edited by JT (edited 06-21-2001).]

posted 06-21- 02:39 AM               

Look it up. You might change your opinion on the viability of ground based lasers as a defense against ICBMs.

How many of these did you guys want to order up?

posted 06-21- 11:08 AM               

I also read that atmosphere is indeed a big factor. Shooting through various atmospheric conditions can reduce the accuracy of the beam over great distances... the mirage effect.

posted 06-21- 12:19 PM            

Your still operating in the realm of chemical based lasers, where power output is directly related to how efficiently your chemical of choice lases... these systems are not using chem lasers but rather solid state lasers... it's kind of like the difference in computing power that came about when the vacuum tube was replaced with the integrated circuit. Solid state lasers, while not a "new" idea, are still very young in pratcie but are much more scaleable than chmical based laser ever dreamt of being. Also, the laser user for moon-distancing is a visible spectrum laser... whcih is far more suceptible (sp?) to spread than an IR beam. With a chem laser, power in does not neccesarily equle power out. With a solid state laser supposedly power in does very nearly equal power out.

Your right, my 2 seconds was an optimistic number... but even with 75 units it illustrated the possibilities. Imagine what a couple of hundred units could do. Decoys would not be an issue with a system of a couple hundred hundred units... you just fry them too. It is far more expensive to maintain a fleet of thousand of ICBMS (hundreds of million a year on maintenance) and decoys than it would be to maintain a couple of hundred beam weapons. I have no firm number on this but it just make sense to me.

As for the mirror... yep, they are exepnsive. Of course right now they are only made one at a time and each one is a custon order - make a mass order for a couple hundred identical mirrors and assembly line economicb will drive the cost way down. This is alos an area where new research money would be focused to bring the costs down and quality up.

Also, there is a fairly new technology out there called, I think, adaptive mirrors. These were developed for astronimcal purposes are are basically a mirror that can change its shape on the fly at high speed. They are used to compensate for distortions in images caused by the bending of light by atmospheric effects. I'm pretty sure it Mauna Kae in Hawaii that has on of these installed and has been able to produce images near the quality of the Hubble. This same technology could be adapted to provide for much finer focusing of a laser with a less expensive mirror (a big cost in big mirrors is making them thermally stable - so they don't warp with temperature changes). This info I know because my second love in life (after flight) is astronomy - so I keep up on this stuff.

the other advantage to an adaptive mirror is that it ould be able to compensate for flaws in it's surface - thus lengthing it's operationla life before replacement. It also allows you to replace piece of the mirror instaed of the whole mirror - at a much lowered cost.

I have thought about this for quite some time... and like I said before - there is always an engineering soultion. Costs will be like any program - the first prototpyes will be very expensive.. then you set up an assembly line for the finished product and the price falls through the floor.

Anyhow, all of this is basically moot anyways. The US is going to have a missile shield of some sort, that is becoming abundntly clear. I hope it is an energy based one because if it is ballistic only it is just a waste of time and money. Ideally it would be energy with ballistic as a backup.

-Stark

LOL! I came back to fix my typos... but it's not worth it - too many of em! That's what I get for being in a hurry.

posted 06-21- 12:33 PM               

http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/program/index.html

http://www.ucsusa.org/arms/0missile.html