Wait, WHAT?

[aumentou]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11711042

So, if this amazing and probably quite costly missile defence system is including Russia, then it's not there to protect us from the Russians, right? So who is it there to protect us from? Does anyone think China is likely to start a nuclear war?

Oh, I forgot. Missile defence isn't there to protect you from people. It's there to allow you to be aggressive towards people by removing their deterrence defence. So presumably the new US plan to deal with the Chinese owning them is to just nuke them.

Comments

[the-shoveller.livejournal.com]

It's more to do with making money for the defence industry than anything else. It was long acknowledged that the technology behind the missile shield didn't work and it took years (and billions) before it was in any way useful. It's a legacy of the Bush administration, of course, but I imagine that Obama realises that it will cost jobs and allow the Republican hawks to paint him as soft.

China and Russia are the only non-allied powers with an out-of-theatre missile capacity (and likely to only ones to have one in a decade's time) but I don't think their analysts are under any illusions about the efficacy of the US/NATO missile shield. Will it deter Iran or North Korea? Even if you assume they have any interest in attacking the US (which realistically, they don't) then they don't have the ability to do so even without the shield. They have no real reason to develop one either - it's prohibitively expensive, for virtually no benefit.