{"id":189994,"date":"2010-01-17T14:48:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-17T19:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/01\/17\/china-makes-missile-defense-test\/"},"modified":"2010-01-17T14:48:00","modified_gmt":"2010-01-17T19:48:00","slug":"china-makes-missile-defense-test","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/01\/17\/china-makes-missile-defense-test\/","title":{"rendered":"China Makes Missile Defense Test"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>China recently claimed to have <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dodbuzz.com\/2010\/01\/12\/prc-missile-test-muddies-waters\/\">successfully tested a mid-course ballistic missile defense system<\/a>. (also <a href=\"http:\/\/www.defencetalk.com\/china-says-missile-interception-test-successful-23677\/\">here<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p>There are also <a href=\"http:\/\/china-pla.blogspot.com\/2010\/01\/china-tests-midcourse-missile.html\">murmurs of a sea based variant<\/a>. (scroll down)<\/p>\n<p>This raises a number of questions, most notably how the PLA defines &#8220;success&#8221;, my guess is that this means the interceptor passed within lethal distance of the target.<\/p>\n<p>The technology could be hit to kill, but given the fact that the Chinese have successfully miniaturized nuclear warheads, my guess would be that it would armed with a nuclear warhead, either a sub kiloton neutron warhead, as was used in the Sprint, or a larger warhead as used on the Spartan (it was a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/W71\">5 mt W71<\/a>) that kills thermally, but I&#8217;m pulling these guesses out of my head, and they should be considered in no way authoritative.<\/p>\n<p>Nuclear warheads make targeting easier, you do not have to get a as close, or pass off to a terminal seeker as you do in hit to kill, and they eliminate many of the problems with decoys, since they get everything within a fairly large radius, making decoys moot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>China recently claimed to have successfully tested a mid-course ballistic missile defense system. (also here) There are also murmurs of a sea based variant. (scroll down) This raises a number of questions, most notably how the PLA defines &#8220;success&#8221;, my guess is that this means the interceptor passed within lethal distance of the target. The &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1170,1096],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-missile-defense"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189994"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189994\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}