Missile defense means there’s no threat of counter strikes.
Lieber and Press ‘6 (Keir Lieber is Director of the Security Studies Program and Associate Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Government. Daryl Press received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on international security and U.S. foreign policy. “The End of MAD? The Nuclear Dimension of U.S. Primacy”, 03-01-2006, https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec.2006.30.4.7)(Shiv)
MISSILE DEFENSE. U.S. offensive nuclear capabilities willgrowas the United States deploys a national missile defense (NMD) system. In 2001 the United States withdrew from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty and began to build a missile shield. The first contingent of NMD interceptors was deployed in 2004, but this stepis only the starting pointfor a large, multilayered missile defense system. To this end, the United States has doubled investment in missile defenseand accelerated research and development on a range of land-, air-, sea-, and space-based missile defense systems.52 Opponents of national missile defense raise two important critiquesregarding its feasibility. First, they note that even a few hundred incoming warheads would overwhelm any plausible defense. Second, a missile defense system based on intercepting warheads outside the Earth’s atmosphere is impractical because it is extremely difficult to differentiate decoys from warheads in space.53 Although both criticisms are cogent, even a limited missile shieldcould be a powerful complement to the offensive capabilities of U.S. nuclear forces. Russia has approximately 3,500 strategic nuclear warheads today, but if the United States struck before Russian forces were alerted, Russia would be lucky if a half-dozen warheads survived. A functioning missile defense system could conceivably destroy six warheads. Furthermore, the problem of differentiating warheads from decoys becomes less important if only a handful of surviving enemy warheads and decoys are left to intercept. Facing a small number of incoming warheads and decoys, U.S. interceptors could simply target them all.
Newly developed “Super-fuzes” eliminate all of Russia’s capabilities.
