The big problem is not that it makes Russia mad, but that with further development it could make America not MAD. Without mutually assured destruction, the nuclear peace will come to an end. It's like the US is deliberately trying to force a WW3. It's about time to realise that the cold war is over.

I concur - the simple facts are that we have a hand-full of anti-missile missiles. Russia has hundreds. They can overwhelm the system trivially. The system is only good against bad actors with a small number of missiles, i.e. North Korea and potentially Iran. Russia is more likely pissed off about the Radar near their borders being able to see stuff they shouldn't, but they use the anti-missile aspect of it as the whipping boy.

Haaaaaa. Wow. Because the US, today, really is going to use nuclear assets on Russia. Ok. No. You're just insane.

This is all economics. Russia and China are mad not because of anything relating to war, but because the US is selling things to countries that lessens the value of the things that Russia and China want to sell to different countries.

Think about it. Think about it. No not too hard, you'll hurt yourself.

Yeah. The countries that these missile defense systems are aimed at stopping from aggressive attacks? Those countries buy their hardware from Russia and China!

Money, world go round, etc etc etc.

Is a system that could save millions of lives without infringing on our freedoms worth it? Yes. How could anyone think otherwise. These missile defense system can not feasibly be used offensively. If someone gets mad at us for wanting to be able to defend ourselves, isn't that their problem?

The missile shield has no hope of countering the ICBMs that Russia currently maintains. However, there is a realistic hope to stop a stray missile--say, from a corrupt regime fixated on self-destruction. MAD still exists, but CGAD (Crazy General Assured Destruction) does not with such a system.

This is all posturing, particularly from two of the least moral nations in the world: Russia and China. And, unsurprisingly, they are both backers of a nuclear Iran, which just sounds wonderful considering the frequency of their "death to America" and "death to Israel" proclamations. Regardless of your position on the great Satan and Israel, those are not exactly inspiring statements, nor are they convincing anyone when they turn around and suggest that their nuclear lust is purely for civilian electricity.

Two probs:

1) "block a possible strike from Iranian nuclear tipped missiles" I'm going to take a wild guess that culturally they Might prefer using a Toyota pickup truck or a shipping container or a standard passenger jetliner as a delivery vehicle. In the US we've forgotten why we're fixated on missiles, its because the USSR couldn't realistically, say, drive a truck over here with a H-bomb, so it ends up being missile vs missile.

2) SM series is "standard missile". Its really hard to specify how much work went into ballistic missile defense vs plain ole blowing stuff up. So political types will charge it as either thousands to billions depending on which axe they have to grind. So.. that vim editor... how much money was spent on editing Python? Well, you could evaluate what percentage was used in the field for Perl vs Python. Or you could look at bugs filed. Or some BS about test suites. Fundamentally its just a pretty darn useful editor. Much as a SM is a pretty darn useful wide envelope missile. It is emphatically not a "ballistic defense only" weapon.

3) There's endless rumors and BS about how SM series can be hacked into hitting seaskimming cruise missiles, but fundamentally you're better off with fast acting projectile weapons. You don't get much warning...

I would assume "they" would put their bomb into the vehicle "we" (well, we as in we are merely a province or whatever of Israel, always acting exclusively with their interests in mind, according to our leaders) are least suited to defend against. I suppose with the possible exception of WWII era strategic bomber, I can't think of a less likely delivery vehicle than a ballistic missile. I would guess its almost infinitely more likely that an off the shelf Iranian submarine gets as close to the USS Enterprise as physically possible before the deadman switch is released, or a shipping container is delivered to the port of L.A. or whatever thats marked as Couscous but actually glows instead...

There ARE interesting things for Iran to do with ballistic missiles. Nuke is not one of them.

You have to understand that anything the US does makes Russia, or rather its "national leader", mad. The anti-American rhetoric on the Russian TV today is virtually identical to that during the height of the Cold War. It is also worth pointing out that today the level of state control over Russian TV is not much lower than it was back then.

To the Russian leadership the US is the whipping boy. According to them, the US State Department has organized and financed the protests against massive election fraud that are happening in Russia as we speak. According to them, all the problems in Russia are not caused by corruption and total disregard for the law or human dignity, but by the US. Therefore, anything the US does on the international scene will be immediately labeled a threat to Russia and loudly condemned.

Editors, this article is a complete troll. This has nothing to do with "News for Nerds", and it's not even newsworthy.

For the record, it was recently published that President Obama is in talks with Russia to give some classified tactical information [reuters.com] about United States nuclear missiles in return for Russia's approval of the missile defense systems.

Except your stupid attempt at humor ignores a massive difference between Christian and Muslim ideals. Muslim suicide bombers are hailed as martyrs, and they get to go to Heaven. Christian ideals see murderous suicide as a sin, which cannot be forgiven because you are dead, thus sending you to Hell. The idea of the Rapture is that you ascend to Heaven before the Apocalypse, rather than as/after you cause it.

I'm not particularly religious, but I can recognize which side is crazier than the other; it's not even close as one still lives in the Dark Ages, while the other has finally slithered into the present, or near-present.

Normally don't reply to AC, but that is a dangerous assumption that is probably not correct. Middle-eastern dictators yell "death to Israel, death to America" so much so that it's the most tired, worn-out cliche in the world. The Iranian people don't even believe it any more. The greatest fear of Iran's leadership is that they have lost their legitimacy in the eyes of the people, and they need a confrontation with an external enemy to deflect criticism about their own mismanagement of the country.

When we make assumptions, i.e. Iranians are a bunch of suicidal maniacs bent on Armageddon, we limit our abilities to find the best answer to solving real political problems. Yes, a nuclear Iran is a very bad thing. But another middle-eastern war wouldn't be much better, and might be even worse. We need to honestly evaluate the situation and develop our plans based upon sound assumptions. We tend to build up all these third-rate dictators in our heads to be the next Adolf, go to war, then find out the emperor never had any clothes. I have seen way too many false assumptions driving plans in my day and I have the scars to prove it. Let's all cool down and get this one right.

Not relevant. What Russia/China want to sell (and in fact have a long history of doing exactly that) is not a ballistic-missile shield (which they don't possess) but ballistic missile systems (which they do) and which are rendered considerably less valuable if there is a semi-universal anti-ballistic system. Of course, it won't impact China or Russia's ability to blow up the planet: thousand of missiles with thousands of warheads assures no ABM system in existence right now could do that (not to mention the radioactive fallout from their destruction alone would be rather terrifying).

It is an offensive weapon, the offence part being the fact that the mutually assured destruction of the US is no longer assured. If the missile shield worked as advertised the US would be free to nuke other countries with impunity. The whole point of other countries developing their own nuclear capabilities was to protect themselves from nuclear attack, and if the US acquired such a system everyone else would be forced to develop their own.

So even if the system did work it wouldn't be long before someone figures out how to thwart it, and a new arms race begins.

This seems to be a common theme for the US: destabilize the world in the name of self-defence.

Wow the ignorance on this topic is amazing (probably from pro-war propaganda on NBC, FOX, CNN... in other words the defense corporations). Iran doesn't even HAVE a missile capable of reaching Israel. The only missile that has the necessary carrying capacity for the weight of a nuke only goes 100+ miles. They have longer missiles that reach 1000 miles, but that's still far short of Israel, and those only carry a few pounds of TNT/conventional bombs. So why on earth are you worried about a missile strike that is beyond Iran's capability?

Besides Israel has 300+ nuclear weapons. They don't need the U.S. to act because in the event of a war, Israel will have already turned Iran into a wasteland, long before our soldiers arrive on the scene. They are more than capable of wiping-out their Arab neighbors (which is why they don't attack).

Final thought: Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty with the U.S., England, France, and so on. Israel is not. There's nothing to hold them back.

So you're saying Russia and China are mad because the missile shield will interfere with their ability to sell nuclear ICBMs to small nations?

That's... I'm not sure whether to call it 'massively uninformed' or just bugfuck insane.

Frankly, I don't care if it makes them mad. They can either go to defcon 1 and start WW3 or they can stew in it.

The US is going to make itself safe. We have even offered Russia and china this technology repeatedly. We don't mind if they can stop our missiles too. The goal is not to give the US first strike capability as much as it is to take first strike capability away from any other ICBM power.

As to Iran and NK this makes the cheap third rate ICBMs from these powers totally ineffective. Already Israel is shooting down the cheap missiles from the palestinians on a daily basis. And that's just a test bed for the short range applications. Ultimately, we're going to have a global system of anti ICBM nets that detect at launch and then have MANY opportunities at various ranges to shoot down missiles. Practically from the start they're going to have to start dodging anti ICBM fire. And by the time the missile storm gets to the target very little if anything should have survived.

This is how we kill the ICBM. We're not disarming. We need to make ICBMs obsolete.

what we don't know is if that meant that the US wanted conditions (the most obvious being 'you cannot keep selling missiles to unstable regimes and you have to cough up full technical information on all missiles already sold'), if the russians were genuine, or just wanted in so they could build counter measures to sell, or if the US Bush/Obama/Clinton were just being dumb.

My money is on 'dumb' but I could easily be wrong.

First of all, I am a finn. If you know any finns that would "in polite terms disagree with me", they are a minority and below you'll find out why.

You see, as with any small neutral country stuck between two grandiose empires that could stomp us out and not barely notice it throughout our independence (which is what they thought of us, namely Germany, USSR and later on NATO), we had our shills for all sides. During cold war we had our Soviet shills, and our NATO shills. I'm guessing you've been talking to descendants of the latter. Notably their numbers are in low 30 percentile and have been going down steadily across the country for almost a decade now as people with severe phobia of anything Russia-related due to WW2 part of our history die out of old age and we get more and more Russian tourists bringing good money into the economy.

On topic of disinformation, that either wasn't it, or if it was, it sure fooled everyone (including some medium level NATO attaches who were spying for us). In here, when you build a building that houses more then a few people, you have to, BY LAW to build a bomb shelter in it with mandated level of low ABC proofing since early cold war. Every big city has one to several bomb shelters typically dug into solid rock rated to survive a 20 kiloton tactical nuke explosion directly above itself. Note the payload, it was exactly what we were expecting NATO to drop on us in potential conflict and the goal was the classic Finnish pragmatism - to allow as many of our people as possible to survive to fight another day even at significant additional costs to economy. During peace time, they're used as hokey rinks, swimming pools and so on. I go to one such swimming pool weekly - the entrance is less then 500m from my home. They are also required by law to have a plan on how to prepare it to function as a bomb shelter within 4 weeks.

Do note that we had near zero nuclear treat from Soviets due to geography - any nukes in southern Finland where biggest cities are and where biggest shelters are built mean a likely fallout in 5.000.000 people city of Leningrad.

All in all, your argument is that of a classic NATO shill. "You had two wars with Soviets, therefore anyone opposing them is a force for good!". Except that opposing force was about as "evil" from our point of view, and the only meaningful difference for us independents caught between was the direction in which guns are pointed. Which was usually at us, from both sides, because both followed the "if you're not with us, you're potentially against us" doctrine. In the end, we survived independent because we played both sides against one another, just like we played Germany against USSR in 1944 to stay independent in spite of suffering the heaviest Red Army assault in the entire war.
Notably USSR gave us very good trading terms during Cold War, we were classified in the "Warsaw pact countries and Finland" category. Something that even NATO liked to use to trade with USSR and vice versa, because it meant being able to indirectly trade for things you couldn't trade directly due to political fallout through a politically stable country with a culture that valued privacy of such deals.

So in short, most Finns that actually live around here would tell you, in actually polite and laconic terms, to stuff it. We're the only country in Molotov-Ribbentrop that succeeded to stay independent, we succeeded to stay independent during Cold War in spite of pressure from USSR and NATO to join one of them, and we'll stay independent now if current polls about desirability of NATO membership are anything to go by. That is because history taught us one thing: empires only care about themselves and allying yourself with one of them would likely cost you independence as most unbalanced deals with the devil do.

P.S. It may surprise you to find out that we also have quite a few statues of Lenin around here. They're usually tactfully hidden, but we do remember who it was that gave us independence for first time in our history. So if you think that our history together with our neighbours started in WW2, you're sorely mistaken.