North Korea Backs Down

[Anomalocaris]

Perspective anti-ICBM technology seems more likely to increase the number of warheads that will get through rather than decreasing it, by encourage china and Russia to enlarge their arsenal by an amount equal to what it takes to get through, plus same safety margin.   They can afford fairly large safety margins because it is far cheaper to build more ICBMs and equip them with penetration aids to defeat of missile defense than it takes to deploy the defense in the first place.

I did a paper on this in college. Between MIRVs, decoys, and cruise missiles, it seems obvious to me that even point-defense could be overwhelmed, and a nation-wide defense seems not possible with any technology we've conceived yet.

Against a primitive ICBM with one warhead, like the North Korean missile, it may be possible to provide sufficient terminal interceptors to assure reasonable chance of interception, provided the North Koreans don't get too clever with decoys.

Each heavy ICBM like Chinese DF-41 and Russian RS-28 missile can deliver 10 warheads and up to 20-40 decoys each.   In other words it takes 30-50 interceptors to assure successful point defense against one ICBM, assuming the interceptors never miss.  But  after 37 years of development and deployment,  the US ballistic missile defense system still doesn't have 30-50 deployed operational interceptors.  In other words if every interceptor works perfectly, not a scenario supported by test results, there is not enough interceptors to assure intercption of all the decoys and real warheads of just one single Russian or Chinese heavy ICBM.  I think pentagon projects the Chinese will be deploying 6 new DF-41 each year, and can surge to twice that rate on short notice.  Clearly the hardware based, terminal defense strategy adopted by the American approach to security against the missile threat from a major power is hopeless.

The only approach on the horizon that appears to provide better odds is boost phase interception. Here the goal is to take out the ICBM shortly after launch, when everything is still in one piece, than to hunt down the warheads and decoys separately after they separated from the missile booster. This would appear to,require positioning assets relatively close to the launch site. This is possible against a small country like North Korea, and seems impossible against large country with sophisticated air defense and anti-satellite capability, like china and Russia.