Protecting the United States from Nuclear Weapons of Mass Destruction through the National Missile Defense Program
Ever since nuclear weapons of mass destruction have existed, people have been attempting to create ways to prevent a war that would bring about a worldwide Arma-geddon. Many of today’s top military and government officials have been studying ways in which the United States can protect itself from a nuclear missile attack. What they have come up with is the National Missile Defense program, or NMD. The NMD would consist of a network of satellites, early-warning devices, and missiles pro-grammed to spot an incoming nuclear missile. When a nuclear missile is detected, the NMD would automatically launch the computer-guided interceptor missiles to seek out and destroy the incoming nuclear missile. This program, however, should not be im-plemented or researched any further. There are a few factors to support this claim. First, the NMD program is very costly. According to the website of the Federation of American Scientists, the projected total costs by the year 2005 will be close to $14 bil-lion dollars, obviously a large amount of money that could be well spent elsewhere. Second, the NMD program is ineffective. There are many ways for a rouge state or a terrorist group with nuclear capabilities to get around the NMD. Third, an American development of a NMD program would be a violation one of the most important inter-national nuclear weapons agreements of the nuclear age: the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM).
During the height of the cold war, the threat of a nuclear attack was real. Many citizens were afraid that an enemy state, most likely the Soviet Union, would launch nuclear missiles at ...
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The Cold War was a period of dark and melancholic times when the entire world lived in fear that the boiling pot may spill. The protectionist measures taken by Eisenhower kept the communists in check to suspend the progression of USSR’s radical ambitions and programs. From the suspenseful delirium from the Cold War, the United States often engaged in a dangerous policy of brinksmanship through the mid-1950s. Fortunately, these actions did not lead to a global nuclear disaster as both the US and USSR fully understood what the weapons of mass destruction were capable of.
National Missile Defense (NMD) is an extremely complex land-based ballistic missile system with the sole purpose of defending the United States against a ballistic missile attack from a foreign country. The NMD architecture consists of five main components.
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When Ronald Reagan was in the Presidency, he and his staff came up with the idea for a missile defense system that would defend the country in the event of a nuclear missile attack. This system was named "Star Wars" and the basic principal behind it was that it would be a shield that covered all fifty states. However, government officials soon realized that Reagan's defense system was impossible to build, so the program was dropped, but the idea to defend the country against a missile attack stuck around. Today, the U. S. Government is trying to build a new, more realistic missile defense system. However, not all the problems have been worked out, and the U. S. Government should not deploy their missile defense system without conducting further tests.
Nuclear weapons are the safest defense mechanism in the world. Although nuclear weapons can lead to mass destruction and the loss of thousands of lives when detonated, they are the optimal solution to the conflicts between countries in the future. The actual use of the nuclear weapon is not the deterrent, but rather just the mere fact that a country could use it against another country which avoids the large scale conflict. Thus, nuclear deterrence presents itself as a preferred security option. Firstly, based on deterrence theory, nuclear weapons will lead to Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). This means that if nuclear weapons are used in warfare, either side will not be able to succeed in winning, as the destruction caused by the weapons will be too much for either side to recuperate from. Since the detonation of “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” over Nagasaki and Hiroshima, nuclear weapons have never been used in warfare again. The world saw the destruction which a nuclear bomb could have. Ever since, this has driven fear to never use nuclear weapons. Although many countries possess nuclear weapons today, they have yet to engage in a nuclear war. This has so far maintained “a tense but global peace” (Mutual Assured Destruction, 2014). As the use of nuclear weapons would lead to the ultimate destruction of humankind, nuclear deterrence is a viable security option as shown by the MAD principles, the application of the MAD doctrine throughout history and the current global stability.
The United States of America is one of the most powerful countries in the world. This power is a direct result of the careful planning of policies that will govern the direction that the country goes. An effective defense policy is very important in assuring the safety of the citizens in the country and assuring a commanding position within the international community. In accordance, it is important that the United States should adopt a defense policy, so that they seek to form a coalition of strong allies in which they are the sole superpower so that in essence, they may control the whole international community. Before being able to actively pursue this defense policy and act powerful, we must make ourselves powerful. In the process of making ourselves powerful, we must carefully examine the existing threats to the country and this power that we want to have.
What does this nation’s people remember most about the Cold War? Is it the fear, terror, and the absolute uncertainty of not knowing if tomorrow you might not wake up or worse, wake up to all out nuclear hell? “The most terrifying moment in my life was October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I did not know all the facts - we have learned only recently how close we were to war - but I knew enough to make me tremble”-Joseph Rotblat. During those October days of 1962, John F. Kennedy and the United States braced for a nuclear attack that nobody was sure was coming. On the other side Nikita Khrushchev was hungry for power after being dominated by the U.S. for years during the long years of the Cold War. Khrushchev wanted to have the nuclear upper hand in the western hemisphere. With the help of Fidel Castro, Khrushchev could put nuclear weapons in Cuba.
Miles, James, Anton La Guardia, Natasha Loder, and Benjamin Sutherland. "Space invaders: China admits shooting down a satellite." In Modern Warfare, Intelligence and Deterrence: The technologies that are transforming them, edited by Benjamin Sutherland, 101-102. London: Economist Newspaper Ltd., 2011.
It was originally assumed that the SDI program was a virtually perfect defense against a large intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, attacks, which required very competent weapons. An ICBM has three levels of flight; the boost phase, the midcourse phase, and the terminal phase. With the SDI program, a space-based directed energy, or a laser, weapon would be used to destroy ICBM’s in the boost phase. Ground-based, space-based lasers or continental weapons could be used to destroy ICBM’s in midcourse, and ground-based beam weapons and missile interceptors could be used to destroy ICBM’s in the terminal phase. But as the goals of the program have evolved toward more realistic ambitions, the requirements for highly competent weapons diminished. Therefore, the initial focus on space-based directed energy weapons gradually shifted toward interest in ground-based kinetic energy weapons.
Much needed, these systems provide a counter move to a possible North Korea preemptive strike. Firstly, THAAD intercepts missiles at their terminal phase of their flight, this phase is when the missile re-enters the earth’s atmosphere and prepares to strike, which is the most dangerous part of the projectile's path. Empirically, THAAD hails a 100 percent success rate. Moreover, the aforementioned battery includes a multilayered shield approach to defense as it intercepts short, medium, and longer range missiles (Klingner). Much like THAAD, PAC-3 provides an “integrated, overlapping defense” to deter missile threats to the host nation (Department of Defense). Together, these two systems are able to complement each other via battle management, early warning data, and situational awareness to create an engaging multifaceted missile mitigation mechanism. However, although these systems have both been proven exceptional in practical defense, their positioning lacks coverage of the capital city of South Korea, Seoul. Specifically, THAAD’s position in Seongju, 135 miles away from the capital, puts it out of place to defend it (Newman). So, in order to bolster the defense for South Korea’s hotspot in the case of a direct attack from North Korea, the US should employ the Iron
Although both nations acknowledged the role of deterrence in maintaining the status quo, nevertheless both nations attempted to create a stockpile of weapons in excess of the other in order to gain ‘the upper hand”. In this way, deterrence gave a specific shape to the cold war characterized by the term “the arms race”. In 1957 the USSR created the ICBM (Intercontinental ballistic missile) then America also constructed their own ICBM 1959 hereby creating a cycle of the creation of weaponry, or accelerating a nuclear arms race as the term became. The role of deterrence in this case was to create WMD (weapons of mass destruction) to intimidate the opposition until they backed down. However the Soviet Union did not back down, so the nuclear arms race just continued. Classical theorists believe that the US created SNMF (shortage nuclear missiles fighters) with NATO (The North Atlantic Treaty Organization) because they thought the Soviet Union would not have the capability to copy them. This was thought to then slow down the escalation ladder of nuclear weapon and the arms race, because this weaponry would outgun them. Deterrence prevented a hot war during the Cuban Missile crisis – an event that came close to initiating MAD. Therefore, the practice of deterrence was responsible for preventing a hot war, and in doing so created “the arms race” a feature of the Cold War. Furthermore, the need to maintain and expand zones of influence, which could not be achieved by open conflict, led to conflict through proxy wars, yet another feature of the Cold
Armed Warheads are a constant danger and threat for everyone everywhere. They are constantly causing mistrust between governments and causing fear to its civilians. These weapons of terror and mass destruction have no legitimate military or strategic utility. Since the end of the Cold War more than 40,000 warheads have been unarmed, but the reasoning for keeping them remains the same. Countries still plead the idea of “nuclear deterrence”, which basically lets you keep your warheads t...
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