Document:Why US missile defense is not a defensive but an offensive weapons system
article by Thomas Röper dated 10 March 2019Subjects: Nuclear War, First strike, Missile defense, Russia/Encirclement, WW3
Source: Link
Translated from German.
★ Start a Discussion about this document
Why U.S. missile defense is not a defensive but an offensive weapons system
To understand the missile defense, one must know the history and, above all, understand the perverse logic of nuclear armament and deterrence.
Nuclear deterrence, to which we owe the fact that the Cold War never became a hot war, works according to a very simple principle: If I know that I will also be destroyed in the event of an attack, then I will not attack. It was also said in those days, "The first to press the button is the second to die."
The superpowers of the Cold War therefore concluded the ABM Treaty, which prohibited them from developing missile defense systems. They wanted to make sure that neither side could feel safe from a counterattack.
[...]
So a missile defense is by no means a defensive system; on the contrary, it makes a nuclear attack possible in the first place. An enemy's first strike can hardly be defended against. This applies to both the USA and Russia. In a first strike, the entire nuclear arsenal is launched in one fell swoop, that is thousands of missiles, which makes defense practically impossible. But after a successful first strike, to intercept the sad remnants of the enemy in its counterstrike, that appears possible with a missile defense system.
This deceptive security was taken away by the superpowers during the Cold War through the ABM Treaty. However, when Russia was down after the Yeltsin era, the U.S. felt so superior that it terminated the ABM Treaty and began to develop missile defenses.
[...]
The assumption in the U.S. in developing missile defense was that you have to intercept ballistic missiles. These missiles fly on a ballistic trajectory that is fairly easy to predict. Thus, if one observes a missile launch, one can relatively quickly calculate the missile's course and then intercept it by firing a missile that crosses the predicted course of the attacking missile and destroys it.
There were two possible times for this interception: Either relatively shortly after launch, or relatively shortly before the missile's impact. The U.S. was preparing for both.
In order to hit a Russian missile shortly after launch, it is necessary to place missile defenses as close as possible to Russia's borders. Therefore, missile defenses were deployed in Romania and are currently being deployed in Poland. Doing the same in Ukraine was probably planned, but is currently ruled out.
But these two land-based sites are only a tiny part of the missile defense system. In addition, more than 100 ships are equipped with the missile defense systems or are being built especially for them. This means that Russia can also be encircled from the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, the Pacific and the Black Sea.
In addition, the missile defense system uses the MK-41 system as a launch pad. This system is universally deployable and can fire defensive missiles as well as Tomahawk cruise missiles, which in turn can carry nuclear warheads. Thus, the U.S. missile defense system simultaneously becomes an offensive weapon capable of launching cruise missiles in the immediate vicinity of the Russian border that can strike almost any target in Russia with nuclear weapons within 10-12 minutes.
Incidentally, this deployment of MK-41s in Romania was quite incidentally an open breach of the INF Treaty, which the U.S. has since terminated in order to now legally deploy Tomahawk cruise missiles on the Russian border, which the treaty had until then prohibited. But although everyone can immediately read this even on Wikipedia, the Western press claims that not the USA but Russia has violated the treaty.
[...]
The short warning time for the use of such cruise missiles is what makes it so dangerous. If Russia detects suspicious missiles, it has only a few minutes to decide whether or not to react nuclear.
And that's exactly the difference with the Cold War: Back then, things were simpler, people threatened each other with intercontinental ballistic missiles that had a longer flight time and thus a longer warning time. Today, on the other hand, the U.S. is creating a ring of missile sites in Europe and especially at sea around Russia, where the time for a decision is reduced to one or two minutes. And these missile sites can, first, conduct a first strike with Tomahawk cruise missiles and, second, use defensive missiles to try to intercept the Russian counterstrike.
Add to that the fact that the U.S. has a highly secret unmanned shuttle called the X-37, of which virtually nothing is known, but which has been undergoing testing since 2010. Some say it's supposed to be able to take out enemy satellites, others say it's for espionage, and still others say it's supposed to fire nuclear weapons directly from orbit, which would also mean only a very short warning time.
