US Golden Dome unter „Optionen“ für die Kanadas Verteidigung, sagt Carney, sagt Carney
U.S. Golden Dome among ‘options’ for Canada’s defence, Carney says
US Golden Dome unter „Optionen“ für die Kanadas Verteidigung, sagt Carney, sagt Carney
U.S. Golden Dome among ‘options’ for Canada’s defence, Carney says
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Snippet from this news article:
“Prime Minister Mark Carney said Wednesday that Canada is reversing the trend of “deep integration” with the U.S. and exploring all options for strengthening its national defence — which include U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defence concept.
The Prime Minister’s Office confirmed Tuesdaythat the federal government’s talks with the U.S. about a new economic and security partnership “naturally include strengthening NORAD and related initiatives such as the Golden Dome,” after Trump unveiled plans for the proposed system.
That’s despite Carney repeatedly warning of the “threat” the U.S. poses to Canada’s economy and sovereignty under Trump, which the prime minister told reporters Wednesday is still true today.
“We had for almost half a century, we as Canada, a relationship with the Americans which was a steady process of deepening integration” on security and between the two nations’ economies, Carney said after a cabinet planning forum in Chelsea, Que.
“That process of deepening integration is over. We are in a position now where we co-operate when necessary, but not necessarily co-operate.”
I don’t object to this. I think missile defence is a valid and important initiative, and it’s not like we can fund something of this scale by ourselves. Paul Martin’s decision to say no to continental missile defence in 2005 was already pretty dubious (and seemed to be motivated by politics), and the world has changed a lot and gotten drastically more dangerous since then.
Strategic missile defense is insanely stupid for technical reasons, at least when you are using missiles to intercept missiles, and Golden Dome is even dumber because it’s basically just a giant Elon Musk embezzlement project with absolutely no current technical basis in fact. That being said, if goping along with something like this with little-to-no commitment of our treasure is what it takes to placate Trump I’m all for it.
The US has already been down this road, in the early Cold War.
Faced with the threat of Soviet ballistic missiles, the Americans developed anti-ballistic missile technology in Project NIke, culminating in Nike Zeus.
It was absolutely cutting-edge technology for the time: multiple computers, all networked together combining data from multiple radars, remote guiding nuclear-tipped interceptor missiles. (The early versions of project Nike were all vacuum tube technology!) It was tested and apparently worked. It could automatically shoot down American ICBMs mid-flight, anyway.
It was followed with the proposed Nike-X system which would have covered parts of the continental US with such a defence system.
Here’s the problem, though. It takes a rather simple rocket, which doesn’t need to be very accurate, or fast, to lob a big nuke at New York.
But it takes a very complicated rocket, which needs to be both very accurate and fast, to hit that rocket in flight.
And now you need a whole bunch of them (with some extras just in case) around every urban area you might want to intercept. And you don’t really know where the enemy might concentrate their fire.
Ballparking it, you need to spend 10 – 100x as much on missiles as the attacker does.
The proposed cost of Nike-X was $25 – $40 billion. In 1960 dollars. And overruns were expected.
And then there is the provocation of potentially upsetting the balance of mutually assured destruction. There are non-ballistic ways of delivering nukes which probably make any ABM system ultimately moot. Look into Project Pluto by the US around the same time – nuclear ramjet cruise missiles that would stay in the air for potentially years at a time, circling at hypersonic speeds waiting for strike orders.