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What if an intercontinental ballistic nuclear missile was launched at the continental United States homeland? Would the US defense system be about to shoot it down? How much warning would we have to choose how to respond?

The US homeland ballistic missile defense architecture centers on the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system, or GMD for short. It is designed to protect all 50 states from a limited long-range ballistic missile attack. Remember when I was talking about how, broadly speaking, these defense systems work by tracking, then destroying before impact? Well, broadly speaking, the GMD works like that: after detecting a missile launch, GMD’s sensors feed the data into a central control system, which then launches one or more interceptor missiles, which in turn, fly into the path of the incoming missile, release a kill vehicle and destroy the attacker’s missile on impact. But as I said, this is broadly speaking, very broadly. In truth, the GMD is a global system with 11 elements that span 15 time zones, and each element has to be precisely coordinated. And if something fails, everything can go wrong. Mock up of missile defense annual performance review 'Shows great potential, but tends to space out at critical moments.”

According to Annie Jacobsen’s book Nuclear War a scenario in which she interviewed the actual military and civilian experts who built these weapons; and developed all the response plans; she outlined how modern day satellite missile tracking can detect a ICBM launch in just seconds. Technology for detecting threats has vastly improved. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the technology has solved the age old problem of hitting a bullet with another bullet so to speak. Detecting and tracking is very different from shooting down. A new developments in submarine and air launched missiles means instead of 30 minute window it could be as little as 15 minutes to reach their targets. But first,

Let’s talk about the elements that make the GMD what it is, starting with how it tracks missiles, and then we’ll dive into how it destroys them. The GMD tracking depends on seven types of sensors: land, sea, and space.

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