Anyway, that's not a fundamental advantage the way the economics of brilliant-pebble solution is. For example, one of the major problems for the Navy during the latter part of the Cold War was a decidely low-tech problem - John Walker. Namely, that SOB was giving the Soviets the "word of the day" from 1967 to 1985 - the Soviet Union was basically reading every single piece of flash traffic the Navy had for nearly twenty years. And in 1987 or so, Toshiba's generous gift of high-precision milling machines to the Soviet Navy enabled them to get a whole lot quieter with their missile boats. And with problems like that, it's pretty clear that any advantage held by the US Navy is at best temporary - you're right back to a plain old arms race under the Atlantic, unless you're prepared to take advantage of a temporary gap in abilities and nuke 'em preemptively.
Yes, but my point was that BP forces the adversary to switch his attack from a mode for which the was previously NO defense (ground-based missiles) to modes for which we already had SOME defense, even if it isn't perfect.
Even if our anti-sub capability was slightly porous, it would require an ENORMOUS capital investment in nuclear missile subs by an opponent if he wanted to be assured he would sneak enough missiles through to take out the US deterrent capability with his sub-launched missiles.
In the end, the ultimate testimonial to the brilliance of Brilliant Pebbles is that the Soviets didn't bother to devise a counter strategy. And, based on their own testimony, it wasn't for lack of trying. They simply realized that anything they tried to do to give themselves a successful first-strike capability would break the bank in the face of BP defense scenario. And shifting the attack mode really didn't deliver the mail, because we already have defenses, admittedly imperfect, for submarine and air-launched strategic attacks.
At this point, I pretty much forgotten what exactly that we we arguing about. I think our differences can be resolved by stipulating that BP isn't touted as a system that makes nuclear warfare impossible in all theoretical circumstances; but rather that it made successful nuclear warfare under the circumstances that existed between the Soviet Union and the United States in the waning years of the Cold War economically impractical.
Under different circumstances, with a different adversary and a different defender, BP might not seem so brilliant, but then it wasn't dreamed up in a vacuum -- Teller and his pals were working from the specific scenario of a Soviet Attack on the US, and their sole objective was to find a strategy that would make it impractical for the Soviets to prevail. In this limited sense, I think they acheived their goal.
Actually, it was 1993. Within 3 months of Clinton taking over the White House. Toshiba correctly judged that there was no longer a real Sheriff in town.