Last nuclear armed UAV we had (QH-50 DASH) suffered from reliability problems, while the non-nuclear version we sold to Japan, didn't. The positive control links needed for nuclear devices present problems when you don't have people on board.
What is worse is that we flat out can't build B-52s if we wanted to. The main wing spar was a single piece, and the forge that made them is now razors. On the upside, all of the tooling for the B-1 and the B-2 are in storage someplace. Lockmart is doing the same (storage) with the long-lead tooling for the F-22.
The LCD support frame and hinge on my Inspiron 5150 died about a year and a half ago. Prior to that, the last failed component was the 4th motherboard in the system, which failed in early 2007 right before the warranty ran out. I got a new motherboard, battery, and power supply at that point.
That makes sense if you reject the possibility that humanity has the potential to destroy itself. What happens when some crazy guy weaponizes an Influenza strain that releases blue ring octopus toxin? Or breeds a hybrid of influenza and small pox?
Having a remote location that you can seal off is worth it.
It would buy you maybe another tenth of a second in dwell time. After that, the chrome has broken down due to heat, and then the material just fails. This happens because even astronomical mirrors don't reflect all of the incident light, thus some of the incoming light is converted to heat, which reduces the reflectivity. Now you've got a feedback loop where the heat causes more heat. Not long after that the base material fails - and can fail spectacularly.
With the proliferation of large Anti-ship cruise missiles to non-state actors (see Hezbollah). The threat to American forces deployed around the globe is rising. Then again, I'm going to guess that you are some lefty pacifist, and thus only worthy of derision and scorn.
Pol Pot tried about as hard as he could to form a communist state. He managed to kill off about a fifth of his nation's people. He's the most damning indictment of Communism there is.
Well we were going to turn the YAL-1 into AL-1, and buy a few more of them, but this wonderful thing called Obama showed up and *poof* changed the program back into an R&D one from a procurement one. All hail Obama, king of the idiots!
Update: I looked at Postal's 'Work' and it conisted of taking public source images, and puting cross-hairs at the center of them. Yeah, let's ignore the fact that the cameras are fixed, and the missiles and interceptors are moving in a three dimentional volume, because then we couldn't lie so easily!
Postal is a known lier. and thus anything he says can be ignored automatically. He's known for listening to briefings, turning around and saying the exact opposite, and then demanding that someone prove him wrong. Missile Defense works. It worked in the 1960s, and it works today. Anyone who says otherwise is either a lying bastard (like Postal) or uninformed.
Yeah because those thousands of radiological detectors in and around ports don't exist.
I don't have clearance either (just an educated layman), and I seriously doubt that people with clearance would venture into this debate.
Except decoys and other countermeasures don't work. We (the US) have had the sensors and computers to differentiate between real RVs and decoys, because, unless the decoy has the exact size, mass, and thermal signature as the real thing, we can ignore it. How we can is by tracking it on radar (a less massive RV wouldn't react the same to the Earth's mass, that is it wouldn't fall so fast, due to less inertia to punch through the atmosphere). And Thermal properties are important because the electronics in nuclear devices are sensitive and like to be kept in a nice stable temperature range. (Major source for the above paragraph is B. Bruce-Briggs' work "The Shield of Faith").
As for MIRVs, any public time-lapse photographs, you will see that the individual RVs are released sequentially, not all at once like you see on TV (source - MX missile test photographs at the National Museum of the United States Air Force).
And yes, the minor course correction features of modern RVs to allow for some accuracy adjustments. This allows us to use smaller devices, which fits with the policy of not directly harming civilians (as codified the various Geneva Conventions), but not letting civilian casualties stop us.
An ICBM is a suborbital rocket with a relatively huge payload capacity because it doesn't need to carry its warheads all the way up to orbital speed, and it doesn't have to waste payload mass on landing structure like heatshields and wings. You can carry a hell of a lot more tricks for dodging countermissiles on an ICBM than you can with this toy shuttle's payload bay.
Wrong. An RV (Re-entry Vehicle) comes in on a mathematically fixed path (that's why it's called a BALLISTIC MISSILE). The minor course correction ability that they have is to improve accuracy. Besides, Even SPARTAN (LIM-49A) and GBI have the range to hit the warhead bus before discharge of the warheads. Plus ICBMs don't have the energy you think they do.
I got mine using a photo ID (state drivers license), birth certificate, Social Security Card, and alternate photo.
It's called a Passport.
A computer scientist is someone who fixes things that aren't broken.
