Russia announced “new” systems aimed at defeating U.S. defenses. They change nothing.
an extravagant hype of a “breakthrough in developing new models of strategic weapons,” designed to ensure that Russia’s nuclear forces can defeat any defense the U.S. now has or can build.
.. I believe Putin’s aggressive stance was almost entirely for domestic consumption and geopolitical posturing. Though I don’t want to underestimate the importance of geopolitical posturing
.. Consider the new missile that presumably can defeat all of our defenses: Russia now has, and has had for many decades, missiles that can readily defeat U.S. defenses. Russia does not have to attack the U.S. from the south to do so. We have always believed that Russian missiles have decoys that can defeat our defenses by saturating them, even if our defenses were to work as advertised. And if we were to build more and better defenses, Russia would then build more and better decoys, or for that matter, more warheads for the missiles they already have. Building more decoys or more warheads is always easier and cheaper than building bigger and better defenses to defeat them. Even if our defenses were to shoot down 80 percent of the warheads in a large-scale attack (a percentage that no experience and no test data support), 200 to 300 nuclear warheads detonating in the U.S. could hardly be considered a successful “defense.” That is what the Russians can do with their present arsenal—and we can do the same. That is what mutual deterrence is all about.