In Defense of Missile Defense
&gt; A system which stops 50% of incoming missiles means that only half as many people will die in a nuclear war,<p>That doesn&#x27;t make sense. The population isn&#x27;t evenly distributed, and a target can have multiple missiles directed at it.<p>New START set the number of warheads to 1,550.<p>The 500 largest US cities have a population (2016) of 103,020,808. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cdc.gov&#x2F;places&#x2F;about&#x2F;500-cities-2016-2019&#x2F;pdfs&#x2F;500-cities-by-state.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cdc.gov&#x2F;places&#x2F;about&#x2F;500-cities-2016-2019&#x2F;pdfs&#x2F;5...</a> . (Note LA, Long Beach, and Anaheim are different cities, when I should be using metropolitan areas, so my estimate is low-balling things.)<p>With 6x coverage of the largest cities, and 2x coverage of the smallest, that&#x27;s a good chance of ~100 million deaths, even with a 50% missile intercept rate.<p>While a 0% intercept rate will still leave many people alive, in the sparsest parts of the US - not a factor of 2.<p>&gt; [footnote] but the number of targets is cut by 50% either way<p>Note how targets are places or cities, not people. Nuking Gann Valley, South Dakota kills far fewer people, and causes far less disruption, than nuking Seattle.<p>&gt; Obviously, these are one-off tests in ideal conditions<p>Last I knew, we had no good numbers for realistic conditions. I last looked at this years ago. At the time they were doing things like including a transmitter with the missile, and excluding chaff and other counter-measures.<p>Clearly if real-world numbers were a 5% then the entire calculation is wrong.<p>&gt;  The last half-century has seen very little in the way of better decoy technology, and massive improvements in discrimination.<p>Citation needed in how those improvements affect the overall intercept rate, and the cost&#x2F;benefit of running an expensive defense system vs. building a few more nukes.<p>&gt; In practice, no leader this side of Stalin is likely to court those kind of losses unless they really need to, no matter how much they stand to gain from it<p>Really now?<p>No one like Curtis LeMay - willing to nuke Vietnam if that were needed to end the war - will ever become president?<p>And ... won&#x27;t that encourage North Korea to build more bombs? Because the argument seems to be that with 99% effectiveness, the 30 to 40 nuclear weapons they currently have gives a ~33% of having a strike in the US. So the US could nuke North Korea and risk it. Which means North Korea should build more nukes.<p>Ditto for every other smaller nuclear power.<p>&gt; whose opposition often seemed to flow more from political opposition to Reagan than from a technical evaluation of the merits of the system<p>We&#x27;ve spent how many billions of dollars since the 1980s, to build a missile defense system, and we still don&#x27;t have something that could handle a 1980s-era Soviet attack?<p>Yeah, I&#x27;m going to say the critics were right.