A massive American web of orbiting missile interceptors – celestial guardians perpetually circling the Earth – could in theory protect the United States against an all-out Russian nuclear attack, says a leading U.S. expert on nuclear and space weaponry and atomic warfare.
Three years into the Kremlin’s bombarding the West with threats to fire off nuclear warheads against NATO states aiding besieged Ukraine, the White House is moving toward constructing a futuristic shield of space weapons that could shoot down Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles.
A colossal network of these interceptors could be capable of destroying Russia’s entire armada of nuclear-tipped ICBMs if they were launched in an atomic blitzkrieg, says Todd Harrison, an internationally acclaimed scholar on space security and defense strategy at the American Enterprise Institute, a prominent Washington D.C.-headquartered think tank.
Harrison told me in an interview that in a small-scale model he adapted, a web of 1900 interceptors patrolling 500 kilometers above the Earth could successfully shoot down a limited number of just-launched nuclear missiles in their “boost phase,” or first three minutes of flight.
Stopping each Russian ICBM within 180 seconds of its blast-off with a “hit-to-kill” counter-weapon is essential, Harrison explains, before the missile can eject a quiver of warheads, each of which could engulf an American city in nuclear flames.
Russia’s Soviet-designed missile SS-18, for example, “is a silo-based,10-warhead heavy ICBM first deployed in 1988,” say four atomic arms experts at the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project.
Russia currently holds “approximately 34 SS-18s that can carry up to 340 warheads,” they reveal in a report, “Russian nuclear weapons, 2024,” released by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a publication founded by Albert Einstein as part of his movement aimed at preventing an atomic apocalypse via worldwide nuclear disarmament.
The SS-18, “which the United States and NATO designated ‘Satan’ – presumably to reflect its extraordinary destructive capability,” is due to be replaced in Russia’s ongoing nuclear modernization drive with the Sarmat, or SS-29, an even more powerful ICBM, the experts at the Federation of American Scientists say.
The Sarmat missile, now being tested, “could theoretically carry up to 14 warheads in two tiers of seven warheads each,” they add.
If an American space-based interceptor fails to hit an SS-18 during its boost phase, the U.S. would have to fire 10 ground-based interceptors to destroy all 10 warheads the missile released – on separate trajectories – as they descended during their intercontinental flight.
So the strategic advantage of halting the ICBMs right after their liftoff with the orbiting interceptors is overwhelming.
Just eight days after he regained the keys to the White House, President Donald Trump ordered the Department of Defense to rapidly blueprint the construction of constellations of next-generation interceptors in low Earth orbit, capable of lightning-speed boost-phase strikes, to protect the nation from a nuclear missile barrage – “the most catastrophic threat facing the United States.”
Todd Harrison, who holds an advanced degree in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says he updated a breakthrough study on alternative missile defense systems conducted by the American Physical Society back in 2004. The APS convened a group of elite U.S. “physicists and engineers, including individuals with experience in sensors, missiles, rocket interceptors, guidance and control, high-powered lasers, and missile-defense-related systems, to assess the technical feasibility of boost-phase intercept systems.”
“With the technology we judge could become available within the next 15 years,” the APS physicists predicted, “defending against a single ICBM would require a thousand or more interceptors.”
“Deploying such a system would require at least a five- to tenfold increase over current U.S. space-launch rates.”
The revolution in American commercial rockets that’s played out since then has provided skyrocketing U.S. space-launch rates, says Harrison, along with diving launch prices that could enable an expanding net of interceptors to be lofted.
Harrison says the 1900-interceptor model he tested has to be immensely scaled up to take out Russia’s entire chessboard of nuclear-armed ICBMs.
Due to its limited size, the prototype shield he modeled could only hit two ICMBs launched simultaneously from the same silo base. If four intercontinental missiles were lofted in a salvo, he adds, two could penetrate this minimal shield and reach their American targets.
Because the effectiveness of the shield scales linearly, he explains, its size would have to be doubled – to 3800 interceptors – to be able to take down four nuclear missiles launched in a cluster.
Yet the size of the Kremlin’s ICBM armada is many times larger, say the worldwide nuclear weapons monitors at the Federation of American Scientists.
“Russia’s Strategic Rocket Force currently deploys several variants of silo-based and mobile ICBMs,” they say in their report on Russia’s atomic arsenal.
Based on information gleaned from cutting-edge imagery satellites that scan Russian ICBM silos, and from data exchanges between Moscow and Washington required under the New START Treaty on nuclear arms limitations, they say, “We estimate that Russia may have approximately 326 nuclear-armed ICBMs, which we estimate can carry up to 1,246 warheads.”
If American defense strategists combine Russia’s 320-plus ICBMs with North Korea’s estimated 50-plus nuclear warheads, following the Cold War confederates’ signing of a new mutual defense pact in mid-2024, then the U.S. could design a shield to repel at least 400 ICBMs – to counter a synchronized launch by the aligned rogue powers.
The Earth-orbiting shield would have to be expanded to include 200,000 interceptors to ensure 400 ballistic missiles – launched simultaneously across Russia and North Korea – could all be struck down before releasing their civilization-crushing warheads, Harrison says.
SpaceX has led the revolution in low-cost rocketry, and its Titan-size Starship spacecraft, when perfected, is likely to provide the most economical means to lift the American interceptors into orbit, Harrison says.
Blue Origin’s just-debuted heavy-lift rocket, the New Glenn, could begin launching components of the shield this year, in line with the rapid-fire timetable suggested in President Trump’s call for “The Iron Dome for America” to be constructed at super-speeds.
Building and lofting a constellation of 200,000 space-based interceptors – with the potential to protect the entire United States, and the world – from a Kremlin-launched nuclear Armageddon, Harrison tells me, “would cost between $370 billion and $1.2 trillion.”
Although these figures seem rather high, the Federation of American Scientists predicted in a separate report, issued in May of 2024, that: “The United States has embarked on a wide-ranging nuclear modernization program that will ultimately see every nuclear delivery system replaced with newer versions over the coming decades.”
“The total cost of this modernization could reach over $1.7 trillion,” the Federation of American Scientists added. “Calls to increase the nuclear arsenal would increase cost further and compete with non-nuclear defense needs.”
That means that replacing the American nuclear modernization campaign with the war-stopping celestial missile shield, as part of a planet-wide nuclear disarmament agreement, could actually save the U.S. half a trillion dollars or more, and would dovetail with President Trump’s revelation in January that he aims to push for steep cuts in the nuclear weapons stockpiles created across the northern hemisphere.
“Tremendous amounts of money are being spent on nuclear, and the destructive capability is something that we don’t even want to talk about today, because you don’t want to hear it – it’s too depressing,” Trump declared during his first week back in the Oval Office. “So, we want to see if we can denuclearize, and I think that’s very possible.”
Space defense scholar Todd Harrison says the White House’s highlighting its strategy to assemble the world’s first space-based missile shield during the dawn of the new presidency might also be a way of bringing Russia to the negotiating table.
Read the full article here