Newsy:
The U.S. ballistic missile defense program has traditionally been focused on stopping nuclear weapons from smaller states like North Korea. That might be about to change.
The 2019 Missile Defense Review, mandated by Congress back in 2016, explicitly considers Russia and China among the nuclear-armed adversaries missile defense is aimed at deterring attacks from. That’s a far cry from the last review in 2010, which stated that the U.S. missile defense program “does not have the capacity” to thwart an attack from Russia or China, and “is not intended to affect the strategic balance with those countries.”
Relations between the U.S., Russia and China have gotten markedly worse since 2010. But U.S. missile defense capabilities still face the same challenge they did back then — scale.
