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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dan3 who wrote (130174)	12/29/2000 4:42:50 PM
From: pgerassi	Respond to of 1572372

Dear Dan3: But he argued that it can't possibly work. That no ABM system can hit a target, yet a system, Patriot, was knocking down Scuds with regularity, which was not originally designed as an ABM. Using quick and dirty rewrites, it was tried and found to be decent at it. Further more, the design was to protect a high value target, not a whole region. If the Scud was more accurate, the destruction by blowing up a barracks would be deemed a better outcome than having your headquarters blown up (it still broke up the Scud into three major pieces). Before the war, all but, a few, said that the Patriot would fail to knock down any Scuds at all. Now Patriot, as it was being used, is a terminal (or reentry phase) defense. Had the targets been incoming warheads (decoys are ineffective during reentry phase), the burst would have caused the heat shield to break apart thus, causing the warhead to burn up. Most of the time, the burst really destroyed the incoming Scud into small pieces (the warhead blowing up helps a lot). As for the political problems, Russia would not do a first strike. They may rant and rave but, they are not stupid. Besides, did you forget about their system around Moscow? It is a possibility that it might have a longer range than they stated. It is good it never needed to be used. It is an open question whether the ABM treaty became ineffective at the demise of the USSR. Given the state of the Russian military, it is doubtful that a quick strike is doable (but I would not want to count on that). Full blown SDI is much harder. It is at least two additional phases beyond what is proposed. Pete