Brilliant Pebbles

This was a SDI program during the Reagan Administration.  I'm trying to find info on it, but there doesn't appear to be very much out there.  It may have been something similar to what I thought up myself.

In my opinion, the reason for SDI's geopolitical success was that it undermined the theory of MAD ( Mutual Assured Destruction).  MAD really is crazy though.  The trouble with MAD is that it may not work in all instances.  For example, what if the enemy is willing to endure the counter attack?  In such a case, the primary desire to destroy you will have been achieved regardless of the damage that will be inflicted upon yourself.  It is the folly of the frog that gave the scorpion a ride across the river.  The assumption being that the scorpion will take care not to hurt the frog, as it will die too--- but the scorpion doesn't care that it dies as long as you are dead too.

The liberal opposition to SDI said that you can't stop nuclear missiles.  But that could be wrong too.  From the movie Patton, I recall something that the Patton character said: "anything built by man can be overcome by man."  Whether or not the real General Patton ever said anything like that is irrelevant.  The fact of the matter is that it is true.  A missile can be defeated because it is made by man.  If a man made it, it can be defeated by another man.  The fallacy is believing that anything built by man can be invincible.  It is only invincible for the moment.  Given enough time, it too will be overcome.  Missiles built by man cannot be invincible forever.  Not unless someone wants them to be for some reason.

NOTE:   Unfortunately, sometimes I'm so disorganized that I can't find something on this blog.  There was something I'm sure that I wrote that suggested a possible way to stop nuclear weapons.

You have to understand why a weapon works in order to find a way to defeat it.  A nuclear bomb works because of a runaway nuclear chain reaction inside the warhead.  Disrupt that, and the bomb can't explode.  It so happens that a bomb --- delivered on a warhead fired by a rocket thousands of miles away ---- is going to be vulnerable to an attack.  There is a very sound reason for this.  As I have noted many times on this blog, mass is the great enemy of a rocket.  The more mass, the harder it is for it to get it going.  Therefore, a bomb cannot be shielded very much.  Shielding requires mass and mass cannot be afforded.  So, the weak point of a bomb is the bomb itself and its delivery system.

How to attack a fast moving bomb?  The critics say it like hitting a bullet with a bullet.  We do that all the time.  Whenever a docking in space occurs, you are not only hitting a bullet with a bullet, you are getting them to kiss gently!  So hitting a rocket with something else moving very fast is not impossible.  It has been done before.

I'd say that someone delivering a high powered shot to a warhead coming in has a good chance of disabling it.  The trick is to hit the fast moving object.  With the high powered computers of today, I'm sure that is a way to track where a warhead is going to be after having tracked it thousands of miles previously.  Just put a slug where it is going to be and that slug with penetrate the warhead and disable it.  It won't explode.

Perhaps Brilliant Pebbles worked that way.  It would track the warhead and fire high velocity tungsten projectiles at it.  The projectiles will hit the missile itself or the warhead.  Either way, the missile cannot achieve its objective.  It either won't explode or it won't get to its target.  MAD will have been demonstrated to be false.  Precisely why Clinton and the liberals didn't want it to continue.