I'm not American but if there is a nuclear war we'll alll be affected by the fallout anyway.
I skimmed through a book "Nuclear War - A Scenario" over the last day or so by journalist Annie Jacobsen, which mixes factual data based on interviews with those in the nuclear field and a scenario in which North Korea launches two nuclear missiles aimed at US nuclear power plants and nuclear research facilities.
At one point in the book she quotes "The multibilion-dollar SBIRS constellation of early-warning satellites can no longer see what remains of the North Korean ICBM. It can no longer see the nuclear warhead en route to the United States. The warhead has gone ballistic and is now all but invisible to the satellite's sensors, coasting as it is on a high-speed trajectory to an apogee, or high point, somewhere over planet earth."
The point she was making is that the satellites are designed to pick up the launch phase ie. the hot gases and their signature. Once the rocket stops firing a few minutes later and it's gone "ballistic", the satellites can no longer see it.
I'm a bit of a cynic when it comes to the military though. When the "Star Wars" program was being mooted under Reagan, I remember having a discussion with my old pastor. His comment was "They (the US) have gone quiet about it. I think they've got it up and running." Supposedly it was a failure, but that could be a convenient cover story. My assumption is that it's a laser based system designed to heat up the already red hot incoming warhead to incineration point. The old pastor was usually right (viz. God was telling him), but time will tell.
There are two types of surface-to-surface missiles: ballistic and cruise. A ballistic missile is an unmanned, rocket powered weapon.
forceindia.net
In the case of India’s Agni II with a range of 2,000km, the outer surface of the re-entry vehicle heats up to 3,000 degree centigrade.
Either way it would take a lot more detection and monitoring ability tnan a local "Iron dome" system for ICBM's. Adding to the problem are sub-launched ballistic missiles which reduce flight time from about 26 minutes for Russian and 28 minutes for Korean land based missiles to about 7 minutes for a Russian sub based 1000 kilometers from the US coastline.
Of course the US has a similar if not bigger fleet, with each Ohio submarine able to launch 80 warheads (20 ICBM's with 4 warheads each) in about a minute and a half. The author quoted "the firepower on one of these submarines can pretty much destroy a nation".
The scenario she painted in the book was depressing. Five billion people would die in an all out nuclear exchange in a matter of days, and survivors if any would be forced to live underground.
