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Thanks for the info on the GBSD, I wasn't aware of that. I'm actually surprised, I thought the general trend was towards MIRVs. Yeah, I'm willing to concede th

Thanks for the info on the GBSD, I wasn't aware of that. I'm actually surprised, I thought the general trend was towards MIRVs. Yeah, I'm willing to concede the math is a lot more complicated than just "ABM is more expensive than nukes" and I could well be wrong on that point. I suppose if we really wanted to get to the bottom of it we would have to compare the ABM against the current Russian/Chinese arsenal, think about the relative costs of road-based/silo-based/sub-based missiles and their risks, compare rubles and dollars using something other than naive conversions to account for relative purchasing power, consider what impact decoy re-entry vehicles have on the equation, and a bunch of other factors. I think my original argument that ABM is inherently destabilizing stands though.

chipsa 4y ago
New START has warhead limits, as well as missile limits, and the US has decided it'd rather allocate the warheads to bombers and SLBMs instead of ICBMs. The ICBM force is in a sense, a strategic decoy: they're hardened to make you have to expend warheads on them, but the relative lack of warheads means that if you allocate more than one to take each out, you're probably not coming out ahead. But you have to honor the threat, so you can't just not hit them. So, they take 450 or more warheads from what you would otherwise want to hit.