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The problem is launching enough missiles. Interceptors are expensive to develop, but cheap to make more of, and have relatively low cost of command and control

by chipsa 7y ago

The problem is launching enough missiles. Interceptors are expensive to develop, but cheap to make more of, and have relatively low cost of command and control (it doesn't matter if one gets launched by accident, right now). ICBMs are expensive to develop, expensive to make more of, and are expensive for command and control (because if one gets launched by accident, the world ends). So it's always going to be cheaper to make more interceptors than ICBMs. But beyond that, interceptors make the entire targeting situation more complex. If you've got 1000 warheads, and no defenses, you can hit 1000 targets (not actually true, because you have a certain amount of failure rate, but anyway). If you're facing 10 interceptors, and some of your targets must be destroyed, then you have to launch enough warheads at each target that must be destroyed to still go through even if all of them are intercepted. So now you have ~90 must destroy targets you can actually hit with your 1000 warheads, even though you're only facing 10 interceptors. Those 10 interceptors have effectively negated 900 enemy warheads.

gruez 7y ago
>So it's always going to be cheaper to make more interceptors than ICBMs. What's the source for this? Because I've also heard the opposite. Also, given that interceptors have to travel faster and more accurate than warhead ICBMs, you'd think they're more expensive to develop and have a higher unit cost. >Those 10 interceptors have effectively negated 900 enemy warheads. * The calculation you presented only really makes sense for very high intercept success rates. If the intercept rate is (conservatively) 80%, if the enemy sends 10 missiles, and you use all 10 interceptors on each, there's still a 91% chance of at least one missile coming through (1-0.8^10). The odds get better if you have double the number of interceptors (34%), but it's still unacceptably high. You'd need overwhelmingly more interceptors. * I doubt there's 90 "must destroy" targets. If you spend all your interceptors protecting one target, even if that survives, your country is still utterly devastated that there's 0 hope of a counter attack. Does it really matter that washington, DC survived but the rest of the us is reduced to rubble?
- garmaine 7y ago
  Nukes are expensive.
- chipsa 7y ago
  The price for aircraft and spacecraft is almost entirely related to how much it weighs. A missile that's 10x heavier is going to be 10x more expensive, generally speaking, for a given nation. GBI is approximately 21 tons. A Minuteman III is approximately 33 tons. But you exclaim "The warheads are different!" It's hard to find the price, but an EKV is somewhere on the order of $20 million each. The W87-1 will cost somewhere between $8.6 and $14 billion for the entire program... not including the fissile pits that are being reused. This is still more per warhead than the EKV. Yes, the interceptors have to be more accurate, but they also use entirely different guidance systems. They don't actually have to travel faster, because they just have to be in the same place at the same time as the target, and the target can't really do anything to stop them. The problem with your statistical approach is that there's a chance that the target survives. And these are defined as must destroy targets. Places like launch control centers for ICBMs, Cheyenne Mountain for command control. Places you need to destroy to avoid them turning your own cities into self-lit parking lots. Because you aren't going to start a nuclear war to have a Pyrrhic victory. Because the point of the US nuclear deterrent is to turn you into a self-lit parking lot, on demand, in thirty minutes or less. And by making sure we can do that, we keep other countries from thinking that they can start using WMDs. Does it really matter that you destroyed Washington DC if you no longer have a country? The biggest advantage of interceptors is not that you saved a city that was targeted. Rather, you made the opposition make a choice on what would actually get targeted. A city blown up by 3 nukes isn't much different from one blown up by 1, but it's significantly different from a city blown up by zero. Example: back when the UK used V-bombers, they had 200 warheads targeted across the USSR. As Soviet defenses got better, the number of targets being hit was reduced. By the end of the Polaris program, all of the UK's warheads were targeted on Moscow. And I'd be surprised if there's only 90 must destroy targets in the US. Not that Russia has 1000 warheads, but the US also doesn't have 10 interceptors, because it was example numbers to make the math easy.

by chipsa 7y ago

gruez 7y ago

>So it's always going to be cheaper to make more interceptors than ICBMs. What's the source for this? Because I've also heard the opposite. Also, given that interceptors have to travel faster and more accurate than warhead ICBMs, you'd think they're more expensive to develop and have a higher unit cost. >Those 10 interceptors have effectively negated 900 enemy warheads. * The calculation you presented only really makes sense for very high intercept success rates. If the intercept rate is (conservatively) 80%, if the enemy sends 10 missiles, and you use all 10 interceptors on each, there's still a 91% chance of at least one missile coming through (1-0.8^10). The odds get better if you have double the number of interceptors (34%), but it's still unacceptably high. You'd need overwhelmingly more interceptors. * I doubt there's 90 "must destroy" targets. If you spend all your interceptors protecting one target, even if that survives, your country is still utterly devastated that there's 0 hope of a counter attack. Does it really matter that washington, DC survived but the rest of the us is reduced to rubble?

garmaine 7y ago
Nukes are expensive.
chipsa 7y ago
The price for aircraft and spacecraft is almost entirely related to how much it weighs. A missile that's 10x heavier is going to be 10x more expensive, generally speaking, for a given nation. GBI is approximately 21 tons. A Minuteman III is approximately 33 tons. But you exclaim "The warheads are different!" It's hard to find the price, but an EKV is somewhere on the order of $20 million each. The W87-1 will cost somewhere between $8.6 and $14 billion for the entire program... not including the fissile pits that are being reused. This is still more per warhead than the EKV. Yes, the interceptors have to be more accurate, but they also use entirely different guidance systems. They don't actually have to travel faster, because they just have to be in the same place at the same time as the target, and the target can't really do anything to stop them. The problem with your statistical approach is that there's a chance that the target survives. And these are defined as must destroy targets. Places like launch control centers for ICBMs, Cheyenne Mountain for command control. Places you need to destroy to avoid them turning your own cities into self-lit parking lots. Because you aren't going to start a nuclear war to have a Pyrrhic victory. Because the point of the US nuclear deterrent is to turn you into a self-lit parking lot, on demand, in thirty minutes or less. And by making sure we can do that, we keep other countries from thinking that they can start using WMDs. Does it really matter that you destroyed Washington DC if you no longer have a country? The biggest advantage of interceptors is not that you saved a city that was targeted. Rather, you made the opposition make a choice on what would actually get targeted. A city blown up by 3 nukes isn't much different from one blown up by 1, but it's significantly different from a city blown up by zero. Example: back when the UK used V-bombers, they had 200 warheads targeted across the USSR. As Soviet defenses got better, the number of targets being hit was reduced. By the end of the Polaris program, all of the UK's warheads were targeted on Moscow. And I'd be surprised if there's only 90 must destroy targets in the US. Not that Russia has 1000 warheads, but the US also doesn't have 10 interceptors, because it was example numbers to make the math easy.