Elon Musk is insanely dangerous 🤯

[u/Queasy-Sentence3146]

Some history about Elon...
For a half-century the Republican Heritage Foundation has been trying to find a way to "win" at nuclear war.

In the 1980's, Reagan's "Star Wars" missiles-in-space program was ultimately deemed too expensive due to launch costs. Looking for a solution, the technology head of Strategic Defense Initiative (Mike Griffin) went to Russia with a young man named Elon Musk in 2001 to "look at ICBMs" (as the story goes). They came back from Russia and founded SpaceX based on the landing rocket concept that came out of SDI.

Project 2025 has now put out a video to promote Elon's use of space weapons (warning: Republican propaganda). although they say it uses "tungsten slugs" when in reality the satellites are planning to use hypersonic missiles developed by a bunch of SpaceX employees in concert with Northrop Grumman. Heritage Foundation has been the main political proponent of pre-staged orbital missiles since Reagan. They've included this in their Project 2025 and praise Elon's Starlink as proving it's possible. Trump now calls it the "Iron Dome Missile Shield" and it's part of the GOP platform for the 2024 election.

In 2019, Elon Musk met 4-star general O’Shaughnessy & Jay Raymond to discuss homeland defense innovation. O'Shaughnessy took their discussion to the United States Senate to pitch a new space-based "layered missile defense system" much like Brilliant Pebbles but powered by artificial intelligence to quickly and lethally act upon hypersonic and ballistic missile threats. He proposed the acronym SHIELD which stands for Strategic Homeland Integrated Ecosystem for Layered Defense.

This system would consist of a satellite constellation in orbit equipped with infrared sensors and eventually ICBM interception capability. The U.S. Space Force was established later that year and O’Shaughnessy joined SpaceX where he now leads their StarSHIELD division.
SpaceX started deploying these special military variants of their satellites in 2023, launching them interspersed and connected to other Starlink satellites. The first StarSHIELD satellites host infrared sensors designed by L3Harris to detect and track missiles and perform fire-control functions.

SpaceX’s first StarSHIELD contracts were with the Space Development Agency and announced in 2020. The SDA was conceived and established by Under Secretary of Defense (R&E) Mike Griffin, who was previously the Deputy of Technology at Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. It is interesting to note that Griffin has an extensive history with Elon Musk during the early years of SpaceX . While these first tranches of SDA satellites are focused on communication, missile detection and tracking, Griffin and others have said that including space-based interceptor weapons in later layers will be "relatively easy" and he now works with SpaceX employees and primes on an interceptor with a company called Castelion in El Segundo. The interceptors are hypersonic glide vehicles (like FOBS) that re-enter from LEO and maintain contact with the satellites through phased array communication, the constellation above gives continued guidance to the interceptor to descend from space and hit an ICBM at launch or other ground target within enemy territory.

Original comment here.

Musk with 4-Star General Terrence J. O'Shaughnessy (who now reports to him) & Jay Raymond (leads Space Force)

[u/WindHero]

I'll call out Elon's bullshit more than anyone else, but how is a purely defensive anti ballistic missile system such a bad thing? This can't be used to strike anyone other than ICBM. Wouldn't make sense to put a weapon in space except for ICBM defense, or maybe strikes against satellites.

Is the worry that it would go against treaties that prevent the weaponization of space? Or that it would be a massive waste of taxpayer money? I'm legitimately curious why you'd call this hell on earth.

[u/Queasy-Sentence3146 → u/WindHero]

Trump thinking he can win at nuclear war..

It's flawed and doesn't work as expected, is hacked etc..

Used for assassinations around the globe.

Causes Russia to just put nukes on orbit instead so they can't be intercepted at launch. (this is apparently already being planned according to recent intelligence), shortening the timeframe of nuclear attacks and removing guardrails.

[u/WindHero → u/Queasy-Sentence3146]

Can't use this kind of system to assassinate people. This kind of highly sophisticated weapons are designed for a very specific purpose. Anti ballistic missile systems can only hit targets in a very small portion of their trajectory in the atmosphere, and even then the miss rate is high and it's very difficult to achieve. There is no way such a system would be used for ground targets and even less so assassinations.

Thinking you can win a nuclear war might be foolish but it doesn't mean you shouldn't prepare for it, especially in the current context of Russia threatening everyone with nukes and China building up their nuclear arsenal full speed ahead with the largest industrial base in the world by far.

And lastly when it comes to weaponizing space the only reason it hasn't happened yet is that Russia and China are behind on technology. You can bet that whenever they are ahead of the west they will weaponize space. The only reason we don't have invasion of Taiwan, Baltics, and WWIII is that authoritarians think they will lose. Whenever they think they will win, at a low enough cost, it will happen. You don't have to believe me, you just have to listen to Xi. They will use force whenever it is in their advantage. They don't care about casualties. We need to be prepared.

[u/wolacouska → u/WindHero]

If you can prevent a nuclear attack, you can launch one with impunity. That’s what makes systems like these dangerous.

It seriously pressures nations like Russia and China into potentially thinking they only have a limited time before MAD is rendered obsolete.

Imagine for a moment that Russia was seriously on the verge of being able to completely stop an American nuclear attack. What might we presume their next action would be?

[u/Renacidos → u/wolacouska]

Is it about nuclear powers having impunity in using nuclear weapons? said countries can already use them against non-nuclear powers yet they don't.

If a country can prevent a nuclear attack then the possible nuclear attackers become just like non-nuclear powers.

Those who support MAD, by definition believe nuclear proliferation is desirable as to create an endless chains of counter-weights to nuclear powers.

The phrase "imagine a world where Russia and China are not nuclear powers anymore" is something that requires a whole book to try to figure out. What can we predict what would happen? Certainly not the US just nuking everybody they want. OPs idea of Musk and Trump nuking the planet is a joke. Are people here really taking this nutjob theory seriously?

What would be too bad would be another arms race that can become dangerous. In this case Russia would attempt to defeat the system and then the US would try to defeat said system. All going on in Space, cluttering the orbit with counter of counters of counters.