The Myth of BMD

Dr N.C. Asthana

Indian media has been claiming that India’s Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) programme, which aims to provide a shield from all types of hostile missiles, including nuclear ones, is complete! Hyperbolic statements from various people including government scientists that claim a hit probability of 99.8 per cent, seek to engender a euphoric belief that our skies are now impregnable.

To the uninitiated, the basic idea of BMD may appear simple. Once fired, ballistic missiles fly in fixed parabolic trajectories like any other projectile such as an artillery shell, following the standard equations of projectile motion. This means that if you observe and measure an incoming missile’s path for a while, you can work out its forward trajectory. Then you can fire another missile on the same path so as to hit it—almost like hitting a bullet with a bullet, as the Pentagon calls it. More than half a century ago, when the missiles were not accurate, they sought to destroy the incoming missile by exploding a nuclear bomb somewhere in its vicinity—never mind the destruction below on your own territory!

In the following, we will examine the subject of ballistic missile defence from a technical perspective. However, before we do that, we must clearly understand that if it were indeed possible to make a fail-proof ballistic missile defence system, it would have rendered the ballistic missiles useless. Once a nation feels it can destroy enemy missiles before they hit its territory, it could very well be prompted to ‘finish off’ the enemy using its own missiles or other means. That would clearly lead to instantaneous and dangerous instability.

The very fact that, it could not happen from the days of the nuclear-tipped Nike Hercules BMD system in 1958 to the current GMD (Ground-based Mid-course Defence) means that BMD systems are not reliable.

India’s BMD systems

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