In stating that the US will destroy a Pyongyang ballistic missile carrying a nuclear warhead in mid-air, the Pentagon is not only misleading the public and its own government, it is outright lying, according to military experts with deep knowledge of missile-defense technology.
"No, we won't," counter military experts to claims by the Pentagon that the US may launch and intercept any missiles launched by the People's Democratic Republic of Korea (DPRK).
The United States will have a hard time trying to shoot down DPRK nuclear missiles, a point of view shared by Joe Cirincione, president of Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation specializing in nuclear weapons, and Kingston Reif, director of Disarmament and Threat Reduction policy at the nonpartisan Arms Control Association.
According to both experts, the United States touts its layered missile defense systems, even though almost none are capable of intercepting an ICBM.
When Pyongyang shot a missile over Japan, it flew high enough that no US system would be able to reach it, Cirincione wrote in a report for Defense One.
"The key word here is ‘over.' Like way over," Cirincione wrote. "Like 770 kilometers (475 miles) over Japan at the apogee of its flight path. Neither Japan nor the United States could have intercepted the missile. None of the theater ballistic missile defense weapons in existence can reach that high."
The US missile defense consists of three layers, including the Patriot, THAAD and the Aegis systems. For the sake of simplicity, their ranges can be memorized as 12, 125 and 1350 miles, respectively (thanks to the Business Insider for a nice chart).
However, all three are designed to take down a missile at its final, terminal, stage, while it is falling from the sky toward its target. Despite that the US has reportedly poured some $320 billion into missile defense systems over the last several decades, none of the systems is capable of reaching an ICBM (or even an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM)) in its middle or post-launch stage.
Well, they will take down an ICBM in the terminal stage, right? Wrong, the experts say. While the much-advertised Aegis system, for example, has displayed stellar results in test fires against short-range and medium-range targets, these results must be taken with a heavy dose of salt, according to Reif and Cirincione.
"Only one of those tests has been against an IRBM class target similar to the North's HS-12," Reif told Fox News.
"THAAD, Patriot and especially Aegis, have done fairly well in tests, but these have been tests designed for success, simplified, carefully staged and using mostly short-range targets," Cirincione stated.
