A Token Missile Defense?

Why is America still stuck with token missile defense?

The answer harks back to a 1972 treaty, and despite that agreement expiring years ago, defense experts and politicians failed to move with the times

From article, (the anti-defense mentality of late 1960s politicians and academics, embodied in the spirit and main provisions of the 1972 US-Soviet anti-ballistic defense missile treaty, remains embedded in the US bureaucracy, our military and defense industry.

the 1972 treaty expired in 2002

the heart of official US policy: we must do nothing, develop or research anything, that poses obstacles to missiles from Russia or China striking America.

The ABM Treaty’s prohibition of missile defense by weapons based on “other physical principles” was inserted not because of a technical consensus that boost-phase defense by lasers was infeasible. On the contrary. The technical paths to space laser weapons’ development were already clear.

By 1976, the US Navy had developed a near-infrared laser scaleable to several megawatts. It had intended it for the defense of ships against cruise missiles, but discovered that lasers don’t propagate well or even reliably within the atmosphere – a lesson that the US government would have to re-learn again and again.

Not a few noted, however, that it would be lethal if deployed in orbit. That same year, the KH-11 intelligence satellite went into service. Its pointing-tracking system, accurate to tenths of a nano-radian, and its huge mirror, were the space laser weapon’s main missing ingredients. By 1979, a low-level effort to combine them began. Fifteen years later, The New York Times reported that the prototype was “nearly ready to fly.” It was canceled precisely because it would have defended against Russian and Chinese missiles. That was, and remains US policy.)

Me, "So while the US took the high road, countries like Russian and China are developing these very same weapons we refuse not too. If the U.S. does not pull our heads out of the sand and start building these weapons, Russia and China will one day use them against us."

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