That's exactly my point. It cannot defend a whole nation. Nuclear missiles have already developed countermeasures via MIRV and will continue to do so for any future upgrades of BMD systems. As you also rightly said, BMD systems can be taken out and are very expensive.
It depends on what you are willing to risk. We take out Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi while you take out Tier 3 cities and lower, that's not a fair trade for Pak.
In the India-Pak context, it's a different ballgame. The distances to cover for a conventional strike are too much and targets too many for PAF to simply "take out" India's BMD. You will need an entire new air force the size of PAF with highly advanced jets at the F-35 level to even begin to contemplate taking out India's BMD. There's that much of a difference even without the S-400s.
MIRV isn't a threat anymore. AESA can track 1000+ targets and engage 16+ at once at the very minimum. And a major city could have as many as 2 systems deployed, which means 4 radars, which equals 64 targets at the minimum at a time. Which means you will have to use at least 64 warheads to saturate the defences of one city. And this is not counting at least 2 or even 3 chances the BMD system will get. So we are talking about a minimum of 128 warheads. 3 warheads per missile will give you 43 missiles. Do you even have that many strategic missiles? Do note this is for one city.
Of course, we can do a Russia and stick 5 regiments on each city, particularly Delhi and Mumbai. Then you will need 320 warheads at the minimum, or 107 missiles just to saturate the defences of one city.
And this is not even counting other SAM systems that are BMD capable, like the S-400 or the new XRSAM. Even the Barak-8 provides some BMD protection, particularly in the Delhi-Mumbai context. Of course, there's also new BMD technologies like lasers and mid course interceptors that can stop missiles before the separation stage.
The only effective way to beat BMD today is to make stuff that the BMD cannot stop in the first place. And that's really difficult in the India-Pak context because the distances are so small that the speed of such a system will not be effective enough, and if something that disregards distance is made, like a hypersonic cruise missile, Pak is not sophisticated to build such a system before India can counter it. Overall, it's a losing game.
I doubt that, I'm fairly certain China could do that to Taiwan if they pleased (but Taiwan could give a nasty bite).
Nope. It just means if you are only a conventional power, your bark is worse than your bite. Conventional missiles don't do too much harm and it cannot be used as a threat against a nuclear power anyway.
You are grossly underestimating the power of over a hundred nukes. They DO cause some nasty after effects.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/th...die-if-india-pakistan-start-nuclear-war-21623
That's a stupid article.
A lot of such doomsday articles are written by anti-nuclear groups that exaggerate the effects of fallout in order to build a public opinion against it. Even military experts with no nuke background are fooled by this.
Both our countries can launch all our nukes right now and life will go on as usual even in the unaffected parts of the target itself, let alone the rest of the countries or the world.
Even the MAD concept between the US and Russia is so exaggerated that it's funny, especially with modern nukes which are very small and carry very small amounts of radioactive material.
There are even idiots who believe they can poison rivers like the Ganga with just a few nukes. So idiotic that they think some 200Kg of uranium or 50Kg of plutonium will irradiate even small streams let alone some of the largest rivers when many times more amount than that is naturally available in our water systems.
People are gullible and they would rather believe Hollywood over scientific experts.
I listed the spending in terms of USD, and even if you take away the huge amount of cash spent on perks for troops, you are still left with a budget of over 400 billion USD which is far larger than Russia's current spending.
A Su-35 costs $25M. An F-15E costs upwards of $100M. You do the math.
Hindustan's dominance at sea is exaggerated. We can still defend ourselves from a blockade for a reasonable amount of time with our submerged fleet which will face a fresh supply of 8 new submarines pretty soon. We have also bought 4 new Chinese Type 54A frigates, and have CM-400AKG missiles that can pose a nasty threat to your carriers. We are expanding our navy and will continue to do as our economy improves, same goes for the rest of our military.
PN's surface fleet won't last 30 minutes. Probably a dozen Brahmos at best and it will cease to exist.
Indian ships have defences that work against something like the CM-400AKG. This missile type was countered by the Americans back in the 70s. You can simply outmanoeuvre these missiles also.
DE submarines are useless without a surface fleet protecting it. You forget that your subs cannot hit top speed for more than 2 hours or so. They will just get hunted down by helicopters.
PN is a peacetime navy, not a warfighing navy. The PAF is almost there, and the PA will follow. In about 10 years, the equation between Pak armed forces and Indian armed forces will change so much that we will become more frightening to Pakistan than the US armed forces.
