@S1-A.ARPA,@MIT-MC:jcp@BRL.ARPA (04/30/85)
From: Joe Pistritto <jcp@BRL.ARPA> An interesting feature of most proposed SDI system is that they would be most vulnerable to 'overwhelming' by massive #s of missiles. This would tend to indicate that warheads that did get through would be clustered in a geographic region, possibly lessing the 'overall' damage somewhat. Of course, certain regions of the country have clustered targets (such as the Northeast), which would accentuate this effect. The greatest effect, of course, of an SDI is that it would render useless (even at an effectiveness of 80% or so), any military calculations based on destruction of specific targets, forcing the opponent to use other means (such as cruise missiles), or to use truly massive (exponentially massive as effectiveness is increased), numbers of warheads to destroy known targets. Note that all current nuclear scenerio thinking revolvs around destruction of specific classes of targets using specific kinds of weapons. SDI type defenses invalidate all that thinking. -JCP-