US Mainland Vulnerable to Massive ICBM Attack?
SputnikNews.com
31.03.2015
The history of US missile defense since 1983 has been one of waning expectations, noted American military expert Steven Pifer, admitting that the country has not yet built a reliable and affordable domestic missile defense system that could protect America against a massive ICBM attack.
The United States has yet to build a reliable domestic defense system that would completely protect the country against a massive ballistic missile attack, admitted Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine and director of the Arms Control Initiative at The Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
“The history of missile defense since 1983 has been one of downsizing expectations, as US programs have regularly encountered technological and budgetary limitations,” Steven Pifer noted.
The former ambassador revealed that the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) announced by Ronald Reagan in 1983 was intended to deal with thousands of incoming warheads.A more modest Global Protection Against Limited Strikes (GPALS) project that replaced the ambitious SDI under President George H.W. Bush aimed to stop about 200 warheads.
However, the National Missile Defense (NMD) Act of 1999 set a goal of intercepting a few to a couple of dozen warheads.
Protecting the US homeland, “continues to be a difficult task,” underscored Steven Pifer, pointing to the fact that the capabilities of the modern US Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system “remain uncertain at best.”
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