Brilliant pebbles won't work against cruise missiles and nukes in cargo containers.
"..and nukes in cargo containers."
This Dimocrat line about 'we should be inspecting EVERY container,' is absolute bunk. Clearly no one who spouts that line knows a smidgen about statistics and has never been thru W. Edwards Deming's course. There's a predictive exercise called the Red Bead Exercise in which 10 or 20 beads are used to predict the color of a population, red or white. The Exercise is correct in a very, very high percentage of the time. It goes straight to the corporate philosophy of whether you choose to spend 20% of your fund to be pretty darn certain of your results or the remaining 80% of your fund to be certain. Spend 2 Billion to feel comfortable or spend 100 Billion to be sure, then put the excessive cost (the 98 Billion) around the necks of the Republicans.
Let's use the 98 Billion to build a really good fence btwn us and Mexico and us and Canada.
Neither would the reactive armor on our tanks protect NY against ICBM's. Does that mean we should not put reactive armor on tanks?
This is such a silly argument. If we followed your logic to its conclusion, we would be allowed only one weapon system for defense (in total) for all threats (nuclear and otherwise) and that single weapon system would have to protect us against every known threat.