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I suspect this is perhaps the biggest disagreement between us. Where are you from, out of curiousity? I admit that I'm American, so you might say I'm biased, but I also understand the American culture of openness. The flaws in our system are widely publicised, and criticized, and used as propaganda by political opponents... all the while engineers work quitely behind the scenes to make them better. The result is that they get a lot of negative publicity, but work better than expected when they actually see combat. And they are intended to be used, not just put on display in a parade to deter invasions or stomp repress our own people. The more closed-off countries like Russia, Iran, and to some extent China, do the opposite- they take every opportunity to hype up their latest military hardware, while keeping its problems secret. When it finally gets tested in real war, it always seems to perform worse than what was promised. It's a pattern that we saw again, and again, and again throughout the cold war, and repeated again just this week, as American air power effortlessly dismantled Iranian/Russian air defense systems and shot down their missiles.
Which is to say- when American defense contractors say that, say, all recent tests of GBMD against ICBMs were successful, with an estimated 97% chance to kill when using multiple interceptors, or that Aegis can track missiles of all ranges, including ICBM, and relay that tracking to other systems like THAAD I tend to believe them. If you don't believe them, that's fine, but it does seem like China believes that their only hope is to massively increase their arsenal to overcome missile defense by raw numbers.
"A hypothetical scenario is analyzed in which the United States has a functioning BMD technology and enough interceptors to distribute them in a two-layer defense with the overall system efficiency of 90%, as targeted by U.S. war planners. It is assumed that the attacker has enough missiles to deliver a range between 500 and 6000 warheads to the continental United States. Results show that in the most optimistic case for the defender, with a very high individual interceptor kill effectiveness of 90% and with perfect decoy discrimination capability, the United States would need to spend on average 8 times more than the attacker, for a total cost between $60 billion and $500 billion. With a more realistic individual interceptor effectiveness of 50% and if the system is unable to discriminate against decoys, the United States would need to spend on average 70 times more, for a total cost between $430 billion and $5.3 trillion."
That's not quite what I was asking- I wanted to know, how much does it cost to produce a nuclear warhead? Is there even a number? I suspect that even China finds it difficult to mass-produce nuclear warheads.
But it doesn't matter. This is an old argument, going back to the 80s and hotly debated during the 2000s. I'm well aware that, until now, the price of nuclear weapons was much lower than the cost of any potential defense. But we will see if that changes. For now, the US can easily afford to spend enough for interceptors to protect against North Korea, and we've already handled the threat of Iran. So the only real threat left is the absolute worst case- an all out nuclear exchange with China and Russia firing literally all of their nukes against the US.
And yes, obviously that's bad. Obviously we must do everything we can to avoid such a terrible scenario.
But look at the numbers being quoted there. Based on the 90% effectiveness that we're currently seeing in tests, the worst case would be $500 billion. It's a large number, but it's not an impossible one. That's about 1/2 of 1 year of US military spending! Even the largest number of $5.3 trillion is roughly the scale of what they plan to spend, all together, on the F35 fighter. The US just has a lot of money to throw around on military hardware.
And again... let's just see how future tech develops which can alter that calculus. The Multiple Kill Vehicle program is, as far as I can tell, still being worked on. The Golden Dome plan is to put interceptors in orbit, destroying ICBMs before they can launch MIRVs, which drastically changes the cost balance. You shouldn't assume that technology will remain forever stuck in the 1980s! (unless, of course, you're Russia, in which case I guess it will...)
Well, that was my original point really. The US now stands in a position to dominate the world militarily, and I don't see how China is able to stop that at all. For every single country where they've invested money in business contracts to build soft power, the US can simply topple their government at any time it wishes. I'm not saying it should do this... but it could.
I'm going to be honest, this conversation has been quite bizarre. You're just stating the same few points over and over again even after they get addressed and outright citing things that contradict your points.
As I said, you guys want China to be the USSR so badly. I don't think this viewpoint is correct at all.
This is not a rate of “1 per warhead”. The 97% chance to kill is based off multiple interceptors, thus we come back to the main problem about defence being much harder than offence. Yes, you can push kill rates to arbitrarily high levels so long as the number of interceptors you can use against a warhead are unbounded. Though to do that would be completely infeasible since it also results in an insanely high cost. And that 97% figure is also questionable in a more statistically-based sense, since that figure assumes that each warhead's failure is independent - so if each munition has a kill probability of 56% then four will give you a probability of 97%. But failures could well be correlated, if e.g. they are caused by bad weather. Test successes are also conducted under ideal circumstances and usually don't feature bad weather, night-time conditions, and don't tend to include countermeasures that an opponent would likely utilise in a real-life scenario.
I do largely rely on the current reported figures, and they are the basis for why I think comprehensive missile defence is not a workable idea. More so, what I really don't believe in are the massive future promises of “swear to God guys, we have X and Y and Z in the pipeline, it's going to be amazing”, followed by the American public’s tendency to blow these things out of proportion even more than the government does. You are exceptionally bullish on the idea of an orbital interceptor in spite of the large number of physical obstacles that plague the concept.
It's funny also that you talk about the "American culture of openness" that allows flaws to be exposed, and meanwhile all the American theorists that are openly talking about the near-impossibility of mounting a comprehensive nuclear defence are straight-up being ignored within this very discussion. A culture of openness does not help you get a better or more sober picture of your actual capabilities if you just believe whatever you want in the end and artificially glaze everything American by default.
Which is pretty much all they need to do, given the inherent asymmetry in nuclear warfare. The house always wins. Why spend so much on fancy R&D in this case when a simple solution suffices?
You say that all China does is toothless posturing to make itself look good on the international stage, but that’s explicitly not what they are doing here - this is simply the most efficient, least flashy possible response to your geopolitical rival building interceptors, and ironically here you are criticising them for not trying to score publicity and optics points over the US with vanity projects that only waste time and money. It's not about trying to impress you, it's just a decision that makes perfect sense.
And I barely even have a horse in this race! I’m neither Mainland Chinese or American and don’t really have strong identification with one of these world powers. But this confidence that the U.S. can steamroll the world is folly.
It's in the study evaluating costs of defence vs. offence. The total unit cost is $42m including maintenance costs, launch facilities and other sundry expenses. On the other hand, missile defence systems such as Aegis Ship boast an estimated unit cost of $60m, Aegis Ashore has a unit cost of $258m, and NGI interceptors have unit costs of $487m.
And, as your Wikipedia article notes, your legacy GMDs cost $75m each, though that's not directly comparable since I'm not certain that's adjusted for inflation to 2023 dollars like those in the study are, I'm not sure it includes maintenance costs, and so on.
These are significant cost differences.
90% is not the actual cited kill rate for an individual GMD interceptor, which is what the $500 billion is based off, so you're using the wrong number there. The single shot probability of kill is estimated by your own source at 56%, which puts us much closer to the 70-times-the-offence's cost range.
And the dollar values provided in the study don't really matter themselves, rather, it's the ratio of spending between the defender and attacker you should focus on. I'm not certain that when there's an escalation of hostilities the US can actually outspend China 70 times over to ensure its own defence.
And even if it can, 10% of all warheads fired will still hit the US.
It's not. It was discontinued alongside the RKV (a technology it was dependent on).
It doesn't and it's a bad idea. Please refer to my previous comment.
This is basically invoking magical science fiction handwavium. If you want your projections of the future to be largely based off wishful thinking about how the US is going to skyrocket and dominate the world, then fine, but I would prefer to base it off something more concrete.
The discussion we've been having is pertinent to this point. Your assertion that it's capable of doing this is partially based on the US' purported ability to scare every other nuclear power into submission by swinging its dick around and showing off the sheer strapping size of its arsenal (that it can supposedly use at will without sustaining significant losses itself), so the above discussion is very relevant.
And just because China isn’t keen on exporting democratic-socialism-with-Chinese-characteristics around the world, doesn’t start war every time the US intervenes in overseas affairs, and is capable of making elementary cost-benefit calculations does not mean that it won’t react once the US treads on what it considers as its core sphere of influence.
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It certainly seems that inasmuch as you have a NATO bloc and an Axis of Resistance bloc, if you compare the Russian air force's performance in Ukraine and the United States/Israel's performance in Iran, you have to come out of it thinking NATO has superior air defense systems.
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