The recently leaked report on the United States’ willingness to use nuclear weapons is a small datapoint supporting my cyncical view of why I think my country has been so eager to develop a balistic missile defense.
The US understands that if we use a nuke, we are going to get smacked, hard.
NMD is an attempt to allow us to unilateraly use a nuclear weapon, and duck the consequences.
Suppose our fearless leaders decide to drop a “crowd pleaser” on someone. Wouldn’t you suppose that Russia or China might decide that Dallas, Houston, LA, or (ghod forbid San Francisco) was forfeit? So you’d want a way to take the third party counterstrike. If you shoot down the response, then you can say: the only way to go is for you to back down and accept that the US can use nuclear weapons with impunity, or escalate and murder everyone on the planet.
