Originally Posted by Mr1337Duck
They did a test with Star Wars earlier. They said it failed, but I think it's bullcrap. Think about it. If Joe Dictator decides to fire a nuke at Israel, he's gonna wonder if the nuke can be stopped. If he thinks it can't be stopped, he'll fire the nuke and sit on his arsenal of those, not bothering to develop better stuff. If he knows a nuke will be stopped by a laser, he'll attack some other way, some way we haven't learned to fight against.
And we're not worried about city-destroying nukes being created in the middle east, we're thinking more like suitcase nukes, ones that will destroy everything within 1-4 blocks, not something that could destroy Los Angeles. You don't fire these suitcase nukes, you hide them in a vehicle.
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First of all, the Star Wars program as we developed it was ground based and thus ineffective in all published evidence from the trials. Our anti-missle shield technology is now heading towards aircraft-mounted lasers (currently in development) for theatre defense. Satelite would be the most effective for the sake of accuracy and lack of targetting / technical aspects of ground based equipment, but is controversial because many nations, including Russia, have said that if the united states develops satelite based anti-missle weapons, they will begin selling nuclear weapons to any buyers, leading to massive proliferation.
Second, if we truely had a 100% effective, totally secret missle shield in place to shoot down a nuke launched from anywhere in the world, do you not think that this would begin to affect our world policy? The U.S. is working on numerous threat classification programs, like predator and eschalon to catigorize and accumulate information about covert terrorist style threats across the world. Once we had that in place, we would essentially be totally untouchable.
Thus, I do not believe the sucess rate for the Star Wars ground-based missle defense systems were downplayed. Were that the case, I don't think we would have invested millions into airborn anti-missle systems.