How Many Nukes Does The World Need

How Many Nukes Does the World Need?

Is the National Missile Defense a good use of taxpayer dollars? In today's expanding economy, it becomes necessary to provide stability and to protect our achievements. The United States has been involved in a multitude of treaties (one being the ABM, Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty) with China and Russia since before the fall of the Soviet Empire against the use of a national missile defense. More recently under the administrations of presidents William Clinton and George W. Bush, these treaties have been broken. "On March 17, the Senate voted 97 to 3 in favor of mandating National Missile Defense deployment "as soon as technologically feasible." On March 18, the House adopted the Weldon (R-PA)-Spratt (D-SC) bill 317 - 105 endorsing missile defense deployment, and later accepted the Senate language. On July 22, President Clinton signed the bill into law."(4) Although the main concern of U.S. government is to better secure the United States against missile attacks, it is done in vain. The White House is being criticized by its people as spending considerable amounts of tax dollars on an unsound concept and criticized by the world as breaching a long lasting treaty on account of the White House's own arrogance.

"This missile defense system is designed to protect all 50 states against the threat of limited strategic ballistic missile attack by "rogue state" such as North Korea, Iran or Iraq and against a small accidental or unauthorized launch of long-range missiles from Russia or China."(4) Supporters of the MDA (Missile Defense Agency) report that their mission is to "develop, test and prepare for deployment of this missile defense system".(1) The MDA makes it quite clear that their intent is to use this technology as a defense purpose from some of the smaller countries that have recently acquired ICBM warheads. Most supporters of the MDA say that the ABM treaty was old and out-dated and did not recognize the concerns of today. While being correct in that sense,

The logic of the MDA is understandable. If a long-range hostile missile is launched at the United States, the United States will be prepared to intercept and destroy this missile. There is a flaw in this concept however. An anti-ballistic missile may only destroy one ICBM payload at a time. Not to mention that when ICBMs are launched, decoy missiles are also launched with it. Added to that fact, it takes under an hour to launch a missile and have it reach it's destination. Therefore, only a few interceptors can be launched at the incoming missile. If more than five or more ICBMs were launched, guaranteed there would be a catastrophic ending.

More positively, if the United States were to receive an attack for a country such as North Korea for instance, which only has available 5 or 6 ICBMs, the outcome would most likely be prevail for the United States in a situation such as that. However, North Korea should at least know that with the few amount of ICBMs that they contain, they would know that they do not contain the ability annihilate the United States before the U.S. can launch a post-attack attack. The U.S. contains over 10,000 ICBMs, the most on the planet, and North Korea would know that as soon as U.S. satellites detect where a missile that hit United States soil was launched from, the United States would have enough firepower to completely obliterate the country of North Korea. The best approach for a small country like North Korea would be to sneak a missile into the United States in a freight container of which the United States receives millions of each week. Missile defense systems cannot detect such an attack.

With that scenario aside, yet another problem arises. This type of technology has never been tested before. Models and simulations have been performed to show how the defense bases could work, however there has been no real tests. In fact, the only real way to test the missile defense bases is if the country using it is already under attack. The United States government has already