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Pentagon shoots down mock intercontinental missile in sea-based test
In a first for the Pentagon's push to develop defenses against intercontinental-range ballistic missiles capable of striking the United States, a missile interceptor launched from a U.S. Navy ship at sea hit and destroyed a mock ICBM in flight Tuesday, officials said.
Previous tests against ICBM targets had used interceptors launched from underground silos in the U.S. If further, more challenging tests prove successful, the ship-based approach could add to the credibility and reliability of the Pentagon's existing missile-defense system.
The success of Tuesday's test is likely to draw particular interest from North Korea, whose development of ICBMs and nuclear weapons is the main reason the Pentagon has sought to accelerate its building of missile-defense systems over the past decade.
Also at Bloomberg and DefenseNews.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2020, @08:52AM
The goal here is obviously to destroy nuclear weapons as a threat. And there are few who would claim such an idea is a bad thing. Yet it's paradoxical.
Throughout history we were constantly killing and conquering each other in ever more violent and disruptive wars, wars which were growing ever more chaotic and deadly until 1945. After 1945 major disruptions started to become mostly political in nature such as the reunification of Germany or the collapse of the USSR. The era of super powers attacking each other in unrestrained force was over. What happened in 1945? That was the year we dropped two nuclear weapons on Japan killing hundreds of thousands immediately and an untold number over time. And so the era of outright war between "developed" nations had come to an end - "developed" being a euphemism for nuclear capable. With such power, there could be no victors in a war - only two countries turned to ruins.
As we inevitably reach the technological era where we manage to pacify the threat of nuclear weapons - we return to 1944, before the era of nuclear weapons: full scale war is back on the menu. It will be nothing like old wars since tactical nukes could eliminate any clumped gathering of force. But, whatever the exact form it takes, it will no doubt be a return to the age of war where you have millions of civilians being killed alongside extreme international instability. It's all so paradoxical. The weapon developed to gain absolute military domination instead led to demise of military domination as a thing. And now the defense being developed against weapons of mass devastation will instead be exactly what enables wars of mass devastation to resume.