An NRC committee reports that available technologies can be used to help interceptors single out targets from decoys and calls for some programs to be shut down.
The current US ballistic missile defense system provides “early, but fragile,” homeland protection from a potential missile launch from North Korea, but a more robust capability would guard against a strike from other small clandestine nuclear weapons states, according to a committee of experts convened by the National Research Council.
The NRC report, Making Sense of Ballistic Missile Defense, concludes that boost-phase missile defense should be abandoned and that the ground-based midcourse defense system, which deploys 30 ground-based midcourse interceptors at Fort Greely in Alaska and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, requires a third interceptor base in the Northeast to be effective. All three bases should have smaller but more capable interceptor missiles, and they should make greater use of the five existing US early-warning radar sites by deploying X-band radar installations at those locations.
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