The Obama administration added 14 more interceptor missiles at Fort Greely in 2017. There, they release a “kill vehicle” to intercept and destroy the nuclear warhead above the atmosphere after it separates from the incoming missile. Guided by radar and satellite sensors, they’re designed to pursue an enemy missile into space. In a rushed effort completed by 2004, the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system began with 30 interceptor missiles in underground silos: 26 at Fort Greely in Alaska and four more at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The move came shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks amid heightened concern about a nuclear attack from a rogue state like North Korea and freed the US from restrictions on deploying a national missile defense system. Bush pulled the nation out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty it had signed with the Soviet Union. The main missile defense system protecting the United States was developed after President George W. “If Russia wants to penetrate US missile defenses, they can.” “There are ways that Russia can strike the United States that really makes the GBI system virtually useless,” said Soofer, a nonresident senior associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank. Russia can overwhelm the US system by launching many more nuclear missiles than it could possibly knock out with its small squadron of ground-based interceptors. The US must depend on nuclear deterrence because the arithmetic of our limited missile defense system and Russia’s massive arsenal doesn’t add up, said Robert Soofer, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy during the Trump administration. We have a missile shield, we’ll be fine.’ It’s just a very pervasive misunderstanding.” “I’ve been critical of setting up a no-fly zone partially on the basis of escalation risks and people reply, ‘Well, let the Russians try to nuke us. “I’ve seen it on my Twitter mentions,” he said. Panda said many Americans don’t realize the US has little protection against a nuclear attack. A few days later, he announced Russia’s nuclear forces had been placed in “special combat readiness.” The US downplayed the move and gave no indication it changed its own nuclear readiness level, known by another frightening Cold War-era acronym called DEFCON. “Anyone who tries to interfere with us, or even more so, to create threats for our country and our people, must know that Russia’s response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences as you have never before experienced in your history,” he said in a televised speech. “It’s fundamentally uncomfortable, this idea that we let the other guy have the ability to take us out and we expect the other guy to let us have the ability to do that, and we’re both going to stay rational and neither of us is going to cause the other to act on it,” said Ankit Panda, a senior fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington, D.C., think tank.Īnalysts have raised concerns that Putin has not been acting rational in his attack on Ukraine and in statements like the one he made when launching the invasion. That’s probably surprising, and frightening, to many people, experts said. “The United States relies on nuclear deterrence to address the large and more sophisticated Russian and Chinese intercontinental ballistic missile capabilities,” according to the Defense Department’s most recent Missile Defense Review. It’s a doctrine known to those who grew up during the Cold War as mutual assured destruction or MAD - any nuclear attack on the US would result in a counterstrike that would annihilate both countries. For a military superpower like Russia, the US depends on its own vast nuclear arsenal of about 5,400 warheads as a deterrent. Official Pentagon policy states that its system is only designed to protect the nation from nuclear missiles fired by a rogue state like North Korea. It’s so difficult that the US intentionally hasn’t even tried. “This idea of an impenetrable shield against an enormous arsenal of Russian missiles is just a fantasy,” said Laura Grego, a fellow at MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Security and Policy who co-chaired the American Physical Society team that wrote the report.
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