Anti-ballistic missile
The German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a Social Democrat, expressed severe concerns about the way in which the U.S. had conveyed its plans to its European partners and criticised the U.S. administration for not having consulted Russia prior to announcing its endeavours to deploy a new missile defence system in Central Europe.
It was finally closed down during 1980 under a new leadership of Deng Xiaoping as it was seemingly deemed unnecessary after the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the Soviet Union and the United States and the closure of the US Safeguard ABM system.
[29] Involving France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, the HYDIS² (HYpersonic Defence Interceptor Study) was announced on June 20, 2023 and is a project led by MBDA.
HYDIS² is centered around the MBDA's Aquila hypersonic missile interceptor concept and will involve a consortium of 19 partners and over 30 subcontractors from 14 European countries.
[31] The ultimate goal of the project is to develop a countermeasure that could be integrated into the French-led EU TWISTER (Timely Warning and Interception with Space-based TheatER surveillance) capability program.
[39] As of 8 January 2020, the BMD programme has been completed and the Indian Air Force and the DRDO are awaiting government's final approval before the system is deployed to protect New Delhi and then Mumbai.
[41] India had previously planned to acquire NASAMS-II[42] but the Indian Air Force instead is now seeking a domestic alternative (potentially the land-based VL-SRSAM).
Lieutenant General Patrick J. O'Reilly, Director of the US Missile Defense Agency, said: "The design of Arrow 3 promises to be an extremely capable system, more advanced than what we have ever attempted in the U.S. with our programs."
Since 1998, when North Korea launched a Taepodong-1 missile over northern Japan, the Japanese have been jointly developing a new surface-to-air interceptor known as the Patriot Advanced Capability 3 (PAC-3) with the US.
[59] Combat effectiveness of newer systems against 1950s tactical ballistic missiles seems very high, as the MIM-104 Patriot (PAC-1 and PAC-2) had a 100% success rate in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
[63] Its stated range as a short to intermediate ballistic missile interceptor means that it is not designed to hit midcourse ICBMs, which can reach terminal phase speeds of mach 8 or greater.
[69] IBCS engagement stations will support identification and tracking of targets using sensor fusion from disparate data streams, and selection of appropriate kill vehicles from available launcher systems.
[78] The idea of destroying rockets before they can hit their target dates from the first use of modern missiles in warfare, the German V-1 and V-2 program of World War II.
A V-2's speed would require guns of effectively instantaneous reaction time,[dubious – discuss] or some sort of weapon with ranges on the order of dozens of miles, neither of which appeared possible.
[80] The American armed forces began experimenting with anti-missile missiles soon after World War II, as the extent of German research into rocketry became clear.
It conducted several test explosions of low-yield nuclear weapons – 1.7kt boosted fission W25 warheads – launched from ships to very high altitudes over the southern Atlantic Ocean.
[81] Such an explosion releases a burst of X-rays in the Earth's atmosphere, causing secondary showers of charged particles over an area hundreds of miles across.
[85] Nike Zeus failed to be a credible defense in an era of rapidly increasing ICBM counts due to its ability to attack only one target at a time.
Additionally, significant concerns about its ability to successfully intercept warheads in the presence of high-altitude nuclear explosions, including its own, lead to the conclusion that the system would simply be too costly for the very low amount of protection it could provide.
The experimental success of Nike X persuaded the Lyndon B. Johnson administration to propose a thin ABM defense, that could provide almost complete coverage of the United States.
The economics seemed simple enough; since rocket costs increase rapidly with size, the price of the ICBM launching a large warhead should always be greater than the much smaller interceptor missile needed to destroy it.
The Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative (often referred to as "Star Wars"), along with research into various energy-beam weaponry, brought new interest in the area of ABM technologies.
Post-war analyses show that the Patriot was much less effective than initially thought because of its radar and control system's inability to discriminate warheads from other objects when the Scud missiles broke up during reentry.
[91][92] Approved for acquisition by the Pentagon during 1991 but never realized, Brilliant Pebbles was a proposed space-based anti-ballistic system that was meant to avoid some of the problems of the earlier SDI concepts.
The system relied on improvements of computer technology, avoided problems with overly centralized command and control and risky, expensive development of large, complicated space defense satellites.
Rather than rely exclusively on ground-based control, the many small interceptors would cooperatively communicate among themselves and target a large swarm of ICBM warheads in space or in the late boost phase.
While the Reagan era Strategic Defense Initiative was intended to shield against a massive Soviet attack, during the early 1990s, President George H. W. Bush called for a more limited version using rocket-launched interceptors based on the ground at a single site.
The Lisbon Summit of 2010 saw the adoption of a NATO program that was formed in response to the threat of a rapid increase of ballistic missiles from potentially unfriendly regimes, though no specific region, state, or country was formally mentioned.
To combat this, Russia proposed that any ABM system enacted by NATO must be universal to operate, cover the entirety of the European continent, and not upset any nuclear parity.
The ICBM was launched from Kwajalein Atoll[97][98] in the general direction of Hawaii, triggering a satellite warning to a Colorado Air Force base, which then contacted the USS John Finn.
