First-strike Enabling Weapons Systems
- Any missile defense system capable of wide-area (e.g. continental) coverage, and especially those enabling destruction of missiles in the boost phase, are first-strike-enabling weapons. The reason for this is that they allow for a nuclear strike to be launched with reduced fear of mutual assured destruction. Such a system has never been deployed, although a limited continental missile defense capability has been deployed by the U.S., but is only capable of defending against a handful of missiles.
- This does not apply, in general, to terminal missile defense systems, such as the former U.S. Safeguard Program or the Russian A-35/A-135 systems. Limited-area terminal missile defense systems, defending such targets as ICBM fields, or C4ISTAR facilities may, in fact, be stabilizing, because they ensure survivable retaliatory capacity, and/or survivable de-escalation capacity.
- This also might not apply to a "non-discriminatory" space-based missile defense system, even if it is—actually, precisely because it is—of global reach. Such a system would be designed to destroy all weapons launched by any nation in a ballistic trajectory, negating any nation's capability to launch any strike with ballistic missiles, assuming the system was sufficiently robust to repel attacks from all potential threats, and built to open standards openly agreed upon and adhered to. No such system has yet been seriously proposed.
Read more about this topic: First Strike
Famous quotes containing the words enabling, weapons and/or systems:
“...for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”
—Bible: New Testament, Philippians 2:13.
“Advertisers are the interpreters of our dreams—Joseph interpreting for Pharaoh. Like the movies, they infect the routine futility of our days with purposeful adventure. Their weapons are our weaknesses: fear, ambition, illness, pride, selfishness, desire, ignorance. And these weapons must be kept as bright as a sword.”
—E.B. (Elwyn Brooks)
“People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies stewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)