Guided artillery, like Excalibur with muzzle velocities that can exceed 1000m/s and unit costs of <$100k can be at edge of space in ~30s, perhaps faster than a missile, with ramjet variants (Nammo etc) even faster (up to perhaps 1500m/s) and it would not be that difficult to create a muti-barrel gun system for a few 10′s of millions that could fire off 10′s of low cost guided rounds in a second (with guidance and detonation signals sent from ground) to detonate when in close proximity to target.
Lasers seems pretty hopeless as a defense given clouds and ablative coatings, unless very high power and located in large numbers in space based constellations.
I think the big problem is if one or more warheads are blown up at limits of interceptor range, to blind or otherwise disable necessarily sensitive interceptor instruments. following Mirvs don’t need to be very accurate with large warheads.
And Mirvs could be very cheaply given random guidance directions during reentry to screw up defenses.
Militarised space is also a big problem. With cheap and un-monitorable space launch parking 1000 warheads in geostationary orbit (or beyond) will soon be viable for China or USA, and they can be launched in a coordinated way without warning, potentially with radar stealthing features, and give as little as 5-10s from start of re-entry to detonation for every target across the whole world and no way for local systems to know if they are just meteorites. If subs can be tracked (likely with drones or enough ocean based sensors) then decapitation 1st strikes become viable.
I also worry about space based lasers as non-nuclear first strike weapons. A day of over flights from a constellation of multi MW laser weapons that might only cost a few hundred million each—say a few $10′s of billions in total (a tiny fraction of annual military budgets) - could see a million fires lit in your country, every transformer taken out, electrical grid and internet gone, powerstations, oil and gas infrastructure wrecked. Bridge trusses melted (wrecked), ships sunk. Most heavy vehicles and locomotives incapacitated and take decades to recover from. Over a few weeks you could basically send a country back to the 17th century.
I don’t think there will ever be a viable defense to nukes given easy paths to making them tougher, faster, less detectable, and so less and less interceptable. But every other branch of military tech is getting similarly more lethal and impossible to defend against unless we all start living in caves with geothermal power sources or somesuch the necessity for a harmonious world is going to matter more and more.
Guided artillery, like Excalibur with muzzle velocities that can exceed 1000m/s and unit costs of <$100k can be at edge of space in ~30s, perhaps faster than a missile, with ramjet variants (Nammo etc) even faster (up to perhaps 1500m/s)
This is wild, I did not know that Excalibur had CEP under 1 meter or that there were artillery shells with solid-fueled ramjet engines.
Guided artillery, like Excalibur with muzzle velocities that can exceed 1000m/s and unit costs of <$100k can be at edge of space in ~30s, perhaps faster than a missile, with ramjet variants (Nammo etc) even faster (up to perhaps 1500m/s) and it would not be that difficult to create a muti-barrel gun system for a few 10′s of millions that could fire off 10′s of low cost guided rounds in a second (with guidance and detonation signals sent from ground) to detonate when in close proximity to target.
Lasers seems pretty hopeless as a defense given clouds and ablative coatings, unless very high power and located in large numbers in space based constellations.
I think the big problem is if one or more warheads are blown up at limits of interceptor range, to blind or otherwise disable necessarily sensitive interceptor instruments. following Mirvs don’t need to be very accurate with large warheads.
And Mirvs could be very cheaply given random guidance directions during reentry to screw up defenses.
Militarised space is also a big problem. With cheap and un-monitorable space launch parking 1000 warheads in geostationary orbit (or beyond) will soon be viable for China or USA, and they can be launched in a coordinated way without warning, potentially with radar stealthing features, and give as little as 5-10s from start of re-entry to detonation for every target across the whole world and no way for local systems to know if they are just meteorites. If subs can be tracked (likely with drones or enough ocean based sensors) then decapitation 1st strikes become viable.
I also worry about space based lasers as non-nuclear first strike weapons. A day of over flights from a constellation of multi MW laser weapons that might only cost a few hundred million each—say a few $10′s of billions in total (a tiny fraction of annual military budgets) - could see a million fires lit in your country, every transformer taken out, electrical grid and internet gone, powerstations, oil and gas infrastructure wrecked. Bridge trusses melted (wrecked), ships sunk. Most heavy vehicles and locomotives incapacitated and take decades to recover from. Over a few weeks you could basically send a country back to the 17th century.
I don’t think there will ever be a viable defense to nukes given easy paths to making them tougher, faster, less detectable, and so less and less interceptable. But every other branch of military tech is getting similarly more lethal and impossible to defend against unless we all start living in caves with geothermal power sources or somesuch the necessity for a harmonious world is going to matter more and more.
This is wild, I did not know that Excalibur had CEP under 1 meter or that there were artillery shells with solid-fueled ramjet engines.
Not range but height. You blow up a warhead high enough the drones can’t intercept it, and all the drones below fall out of the air