As the title says, how can we make it so that anti-ballistic missile technology is so advanced as to make ballistic missiles obsolete?
And what happens then?
And what happens then?
AHC\WI: ABM technology makes ballistic missiles obsolete?
- Thread starter Alternate History Geek
- Start date
If the principle of effective MAD is disrupted, it becomes possible to 'win' a war against an industrialized power.
Thus industrialized total war becomes a possibility again, but this time with nuclear weapons as a battlefield munition.
Within fifteen to twenty years such a war would be fought with catastrophic human casualties in the hundreds of millions. Mass strategic bombing will be resorted to against industrial and population areas, sometimes with nuclear weapons, leaving many of the world's largest cities in ruins.
Large parts of the world's arable farm land, and important ecosystems will likely be destroyed during the course of mechanized warfare, and many of our scarce resources will either be rapidly consumed by war economies, or have their extraction infrastructure wrecked during the course of fighting.
To maintain war efforts, authoritarian and totalitarian political measures will eventually be enacted by most participants, drastically reducing freedom of speech, freedom of movement, and the political power of the population at large.
After that it will only get worse.
Thus industrialized total war becomes a possibility again, but this time with nuclear weapons as a battlefield munition.
Within fifteen to twenty years such a war would be fought with catastrophic human casualties in the hundreds of millions. Mass strategic bombing will be resorted to against industrial and population areas, sometimes with nuclear weapons, leaving many of the world's largest cities in ruins.
Large parts of the world's arable farm land, and important ecosystems will likely be destroyed during the course of mechanized warfare, and many of our scarce resources will either be rapidly consumed by war economies, or have their extraction infrastructure wrecked during the course of fighting.
To maintain war efforts, authoritarian and totalitarian political measures will eventually be enacted by most participants, drastically reducing freedom of speech, freedom of movement, and the political power of the population at large.
After that it will only get worse.
ABM technology that is good enough to stop a small attack or even a fair percentage of a large attack is certainly possible. I find it had to imagine a scenario though where it could be made efficient enough to make ballistic missiles obsolete (by and large more effective offenses are easier to develop than the defense).
That being said, perhaps stealth cruise missiles? Cruise missiles are already pretty hard to stop, so they become the basis of nuclear force projection.
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Bill
You mean like how SAM's have made the air force obsolete? Short of ASB you cant change the cat and mouse game.
It can't. Simply because when ABM makes current missiles obsolete new missiles will be developed. It's same with tanks and AT weapons and aircraft and AD weapons. One side improves, other side makes something that makes that improvement obsolete then first side improves again and on and on.
The only example of this concept working is the Israeli Iron Dome system which mostly deals with Hamas backyard Scuds. The fact that it isn't 100% effective against such a low-quality threat even today suggests the technology is still beyond us and unlikely to emerge during the Cold War as we knew it OTL.
asat weapons.
and worst case the enemy sends up a satellite which meats up with the ion cannon and highjacks it.
If someone developes and implements a ABM system that is 90%+ effective then they have fairly good system that would make any body question the usefullness of balistic missiles.
Also the IRON dome system is a single system and it isn't employed in a layered defense. A true national ABM system would have multiple layers of protection for intercepting missiles.
Read "The Big One" ATL series by Stuard Slade and you will get a good idea.
http://www.amazon.com/Big-One-Stuar...8&qid=1416604140&sr=8-7&keywords=stuart+slade
As it stands now interceptors are more expensive than building more ballistic missiles. Also they are going to be nuclear so if even one gets through it will do large amounts of damage.
The problem is we have no idea the cost of the nuclear warhead on top. So determing true cost of the ICBM system is very difficult. So drawing conclusions about cost is very problematic. Also a national ABM system would result in mass production of different types of interceptors and costs would go down. I assume you are refencing the cost of the Interceptor for the Ground based mid-course defense. Yes if one gets through large amounts of damage results but a national ABM system could be the difference between surviving as a intact nation (even if you take some hits) or being reduced to living in the bronze age.
90% effective is not good enough when you're talking nuclear warheads. 90% effective means every warhead is now MIRVed and you'd see even larger stockpiles of nuclear arms than we saw OTL since the strategy now would be to spam the enemy defense systems.
If your odds of not getting vaporized are 99 out of 100 then all the other guy has to do is fire 100 missiles. One getting through means goodbye DC.
Riain
Banned
That's right, the USSR had about 1400 ICBMs at it's peak, built up at immense cost and over a period of decades. If this force can only hit 14 targets then it's not a very good investment.
That assumes one warhead per ICBM. If you've got effective ABM systems that swat 90% and the other ten percent are looking at 5 warheads per missile that gets through you're looking at 70 possible targets at the low end.
Even if you're only talking 14 get through that's 14 nuclear strikes. It isn't enough to completely destroy the United States but with 14 getting through you can plaster DC, New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas/Fort Worth, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, St. Louis, New Orleans, and Nashville. Suffering from a strike on that scale would be a simply unprecedented amount of damage and permanently cripple American society in every possible way. If you're talking MIRVing then congratulations, you've got 70 targets at least going up in a mushroom cloud.
There's no benefit to an ABM system if it is not 100% effective when the payload is a nuke. Even one bomb getting through is a disaster.
Riain
Banned
There is great benefit to an ABM system that is even 50% effective, because you don't know which target will be hit and which will be unscathed. Its easy to say that 14 cities will be destroyed by the 14 (or whatever number) warheads that sneak through, but the way it might play out is that DC might end up unscathed and St Louis cops 3 or 4 warheads and is obliterated. So you can't be sure that your highest priority targets will be destroyed.
ABM systems work on the same assumptions that PVO Strany, ADCOM and RAF Fighter Command worked on in the 50s and early 60s, and they were effective enough to force the development of ballistic missiles to circumvent these IADS.
The attacker doesn't get to pick which targets get hit. Those 14 targets might not be cities. For example a prime target could be NORAD, not mention all the Air Force bases, you have ICBM silos, you have naval bases. refineries, nuclear power plants, communication hubs, rail yards. The introduction of ABM adds a lot of targetting uncertanity to a nuclear attack plan. I know this will sound cruel but even if all of those cities got taken out by Airbursts the US is hurt but not crippled. Even in those cities a lot of infranstucture is still in-tact. You detonate a 800kt Soviet Nuke (USed on a SS-25 missile) on downtown LA the LA port and Long Beach harbor are completely intact. The refineries in that area are just fine from the overpressure. The scary thing is because rail-road tracks are so hard to destroy, you have to nail the major junctions with ground burst. After the initial fallout subsidies after the first couple of weeks you could move cargo again through the LA rail yards. You would have to clear the cars damaged but the rails would still be intact. The major infranstructure is left in place. Trains can still move cargo, refineries are still up etc. To say there is no benefit of ABM unless it is 100% effective is just in-correct.
There's a very real chance that this never occurs, because espionage is definitely advanced enough to find out about it before the technology is fully deployed, at which point everything depends on the perception of the other side. And that perception is going to be massively colored by this attempt to make nuclear war winnable.
So, either there's a dialogue where everybody agrees not to try to actually implement an effective ABM shield, or everybody dusts off their favorite piece of literature from Dr. Strangelove.
