|
About Russian complaints in recent weeks about US plans to deploy anti-missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. The US says they are focused at potential Iranian missiles aimed at North America. Russian spokesmen insist they are intended to destroy Russian missiles retaliating against the US in a nuclear exchange.
A lot of people have taken this seriously because they don't realise the technical error, although the Russian military surely do. The flaw in this Russian claim is simple: missiles launched from the Czech Republic, say, cannot ever hope to intercept missiles launched from Russia against America, because the Earth is round.
If you look at a flat map and use a ruler, a missile flight path from Russia to North America might indeed seem to fly directly westwards and cross Poland and the Czech Republic. But run the path on a globe, with a string, and you can see that the true paths run to the northwest from Russia, out over Iceland. The only destinations of long-range Russian-based rockets that cross the Czech Republic would be Brazil or Venezuela: not likely enemies.
Russian military missiles are fast-burn boosters, so there is only a two- or three-minute interval when an infrared-guided anti-missile could actually see and hope to hit its target. The flight path is so far north of the proposed bases that to reach the missile in that interval would require a rocket four times as fast as any ever built. If this interval is missed, the would-be anti-missile would then be in an even more hopeless chase of the Russian missile. Nobody is building such an anti-missile, and probably nobody knows how to even start. So by principles of rocket science, the recent Russian complaints can be shown to be false.
Anyway, Russia and Chine have far more missiles than could ever be shot down by the missile defence system the US is planning. It can only hope to work against an enemy with only a handful of long-range missiles.
The real reason why Russia is making a fuss is because it doesn't want US bases defending against Iranian missile attack in Poland and the Czech Republic as they would strengthen the military ties between the US and those countries. Russia wants to prevent that happening because it wants to separate its former satellite states from the western alliance. That's why Putin is now threatening to target nuclear missiles at Europe if the bases go ahead.
|