What is the History of the Missile Defense Agency?

And its predecessor Ballistic Missile Defense Agency and its predecessor???
How are we stacking up with Russia and other nations?

In a fraction of a random second, missile defense is the most important project that I know of.

Is the Missile Defense Agency reforming? At what rate?

In short: and I won't bother researching my source for it, I had it once and not anymore.

Missile Defense is incredibly cheap; somewhere around 700 million in research.

For even 15% success (and I've heard it's as high as 50%) that's saving tens of millions of lives.

Thus...an overwhelming success.

The past is not so important because of the work done in MTHELs and the Airborne Laser.

History of NMD? Here is a good site detailing AD/ABM efforts over the year - www.fas.org...)

The Command Structure dates back from the early part of the Cold War where the threat of Nuclear equiped Soviet Bombers arising from the North Artic exsisted.

Shortly after the Soviets detonated there first nuclear device a large effort went towards the building of Radar fences along the US-Canadian border, middle Canada dubbed Mid-Canada line, and in Northern Canada near the Artic dubbed Dew Line along with Radars set up in Alaska and Thule Greenland.

Nonetheless, this required alot of dependence on Command-Control, so a major effort went into building the first large scale computers at the time which would be refered to as "SAGE", which soon after 8 years would cost 8-12 billion or 62 billion in todays terms with a average of 1 billion a year or 10 billion in todays laymen. This would end up costing more then the manhatton project and would remain the largest computers ever built utlizing 15,000 Vacuum tubes. 50 were to be built house in 25 SAGE instalations.

This would resemble the first "Air Defense" network structure that would soon lead to the development of a network of Detecting/Tracking of ICMB's and NORAD would soon become evolved.

The first ABM (Anti-Ballistic) effort would be "Defender" arming Nike missiles at the time (1958) with nuclear tipped warheads to intercept ICBM's. However, this had many flaws, including bliding all RADAR assets in the area as well as EW pulse.

In 1967, McNamara announced the Sentinel Program, which would create a thin layer of defense around major cities utlizing Spartan missile and the short range Sprint missile. Also to be equiped with the first phased array radars of the time, raytheon MSR;s (Which would later be implemented into Safeguard) and PAR's. However, Nixon announced a scale down version of Sentinel to be deployed around Minuteman ICBM's to defend against a possible ICBM threat.


Safeguard. Initally it was supposed to be deployed in three locations in Missouri, Montana and North Dakota. However due to the ABM treaty, only the North Dakota would be built.

It had reinforced underground launchers for thirty Spartan and sixteen Sprint nuclear tipped missiles (an additional fifty or so Sprint missiles were deployed at four remote launch sites). The complex was deactivated in 1976 after being operational for less than four months.

Radar Coverage from 1980'

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However, it wasn't until Strategic Defense Initiative dubbed Star Wars,which would be the predessor of the current NMD, that a large National Missile Defense would evolve.
Organization(www.defenselink.mil...)


Here is a nice graph of NMD since 1980 -


[edit on 29-3-2006 by Dago]

[edit on 29-3-2006 by Dago]

Dago, thank you for the excellent, excellent reply. I am sorry for the very late response.

May the Universe forces be with the USA missile defense.

Can the Missile Defense System turn out to be the biggest life-saving project in World History?