So, if we ever do make a laser that can shoot down ICBM’s, doesn’t that make World War III much more likely? Mutual Assured Destruction has prevented world war for over 70 years. It would be a shame if we deployed battlefield lasers that worked great in an offensive roll, only to result in world wars that kill hundreds of millions of people.
I mean, everything we get, the spies for Russia and China steal in short order.
We did make one. It was tested and it worked.
We have not had a nuclear WWIII, so I do not think it makes it more likely.
Mutually Assured Destruction only works if your opponent cares about, and does not want, destruction. It requires a certain commonality of assumptions.
MAD was a fool’s concept based on similar beliefs. Try that on moslem extremists, it won’t work! The only way to go to war is to go to WIN.
They aren’t able to steal everything, and some of what they steal is not actually genuine. That’s why they have such a difficult time reverse engineering what they steal, like stealth technology they cannot make it work nearly as well as ours because the secret stuff that really makes our stealth tech extraordinary is compartmented and most likely the files about that stuff have never been exposed to the internet and very few people have actual knowledge of it because the info is so tightly compartmented.
sometime in the early 2000’s, I read a story about a tank mounted laser. It looked like a searchlight was mounted on the turret of a M1A1. They lit off a 155 about 23 miles away. This thing tracked and shot down the projectile, IN FLIGHT. It did it 3 times in a row.
Then the article and all references to it just disappeared.
Moreover, there was no nuclear war even when the US and Russia had only a relative few such weapons and there was no MAD doctrine. Major powers simply built up larger conventional forces. Again, the advantage goes to the US.