Saturday, November 8, 2008

Nuke Hunting Drones

Israel is working on a UAV that is able to distinguish between nuclear warheads and decoys in their latest effort to provide a missile shield. It is fairly clear that the message they are sending is to Iran, but it may not be as effective as they hope. I am not saying the technology will not work, indeed Israel has an amazing record of developing rather exotic technologies that do work. The problem is that it assumes a nuclear strike will come in missile form. Such an attack would be foolish. While Israel does not comment as to if it has nuclear warheads, it is widely believed that they do. At last I checked they had three German built subs which only have one real purpose, that is as a second strike platform. I do not think the Iranians would be foolish enough to launch a nuke at Israel. If they plan on attacking, it seems much more plausible that they would smuggle a weapon into Israel then launch one. You can instantly tell where a launch comes from, but if a nuke goes off "all of a sudden" with no missile trail it is much harder to know were it came from and who was behind the attack.

Still, you should always try to cover all your bases. Technology that defends you from from nuclear missile strikes is one of those basis. Knowing what I do about Israel, I am sure they have technology and are working on other technology in an effort to cover the rest of their bases.


http://blog.wired.com
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/11/israel-wants-nu.html

"Israeli military is working on "a high-fly­ing, long-endurance unmanned in­frared sensor" that can tell the difference between "nuclear war­heads amid doz­ens of decoys sent to confound na­tional missile defenses," Defense News' Barbara Opall-Rome reports. "If implemented, the Israeli program will mark the first use of an unmanned platform for [n]uclear warhead hunting."
...
Picking out a war­head from sophisticated decoys is "if not the most challenging, one of the most challenging problems that missile defense people are working," GlobalSecurity.org director John Pike tells Defense News. But it's not impossible.
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