Comments

Firstly, the idea that the 'Rods from God' are equivalent to nuclear weapons is risible. Even at the quoted 36,000 feet per second (approx 11 km/s), the kinetic energy of a 100 kg projectile is about 6 GJ, which is on the order of 1.5 tons of TNT equivalent. That's a big bang, to be sure, but certainly not on the scale of even the smallest yield nukes (here, we're talking about yields in the hundreds of tons of TNT equivalent). There's also a big problem in that it takes a significant amount of energy to de-orbit one of these things. You can't just 'drop' it. The orbital angular momentum of the projectile has to be overcome otherwise it's not going anywhere. It also takes a seriously long time (hours) to get back from GEO, which is presumably where these things will be parked. They're not exactly an on-demand weapon like guided MLRS. Secondly, in what sense is the Pentagon's anti-missile program 'woefully unsuccessful'? THAAD works so well that its deployment date has been pushed forward three years from 2012 to 2009. The Navy's RIM-161 SM3 took out a de-orbiting satellite. Methinks a little bit of political bias crept into the editorial process here.