In a recent article Forecasting Costs of U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense Against a Major Nuclear Strike, the authors analyze a hypothetical scenario in which “the United States has a functioning BMD technology and enough interceptors to distribute them in a two-layer defense with the overall system efficiency of 90%, as targeted by U.S. war planners. It is assumed that the attacker has enough missiles to deliver a range between 500 and 6000 warheads to the continental United States. Results show that in the most optimistic case for the defender, with a very high individual interceptor kill effectiveness of 90% and with perfect decoy discrimination capability, the United States would need to spend on average 8 times more than the attacker, for a total cost between $60 billion and $500 billion. With a more realistic individual interceptor effectiveness of 50% and if the system is unable to discriminate against decoys, the United States would need to spend on average 70 times more, for a total cost between $430 billion and $5.3 trillion.”
Ukraine has made the task easier for the US in several ways:
- It removed hundreds of strategic nuclear missiles from its territory thus saving the US funds on following each of the sites that contained them. (Arms Control Association numbers of what Ukraine got rid of).
- Ukraine stopped producing new strategic missiles thus saving the US money to follow the new technologies that could spread to hostile countries. (In 2017, Moscow still tried to blame Ukraine for the technology in North Korean missiles – NYTimes article)
- Without Ukraine’s expertise, Russia is having problems launching its new missile. (2025 article in BusinessInsider)
Adding together all the savings and multiplying by 30 years, we can surely arrive at hundreds of billions of US dollars. Even without the moral obligation to help defend the country that the US had basically disarmed, the saved funds should suffice to cover the costs of the conventional weapons necessary for Ukraine to win the war.
Bill Clinton expresses regret about convincing Ukraine to give up nukes >
