Sam Winter-Levy
speaker
361 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2026
last heard 10 Mar
Sam Winter-Levy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
That's not like a high-tech move, but it can make launching a first strike just significantly more difficult to pull off.
It might be worth just clarifying the distinction between missile defense, where you're trying to defend the continental United States against a nuclear strike from Russia or China.
Distinguishing that from things like Iron Dome in Israel, which listeners might have a sense is very effective,
Defending the United States against a kind of full-scale nuclear strike from Russia or China is just a vastly harder proposition than protecting small areas of a small country from pretty small rockets launched from Lebanon or from other neighboring states in the Middle East in context.
And just to put some context on how expensive and how difficult this is, right now the U.S.
is talking about potentially spending around $3.5 trillion dollars
over 20 years to build a missile defense system that might be able to block North Korea's ICBM arsenal, but definitely not one the size of Russia's, just to give you a sense of just how expensive and difficult missile defense is.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And I think there's two issues that kind of complicate that in addition.
One is that you don't know where a strike is coming from necessarily.
Right, okay.
In the case of submarines, it's not the case that you can just put, you know, all your missile defense systems around, you know, one particular city or in one, to protect against one attack trajectory.
These strikes could be coming from anywhere.
And the second is that states can use decoys alongside warheads.
Distinguishing between these decoys and the real warheads is a very challenging problem.
And so that's another way in which you can
overwhelm missile defense systems because it's often much cheaper to build additional decoys than it is to build additional interceptors.
So the economics combined with the physics of missile defense is just very challenging.
So yeah, as with every element of this, I think AI can certainly help with elements of this problem.
Software advances can make it easier to predict a missile's trajectory and speed up decision-making once you detect a launch.
Showing 141–160 of 361 · page 8 of 19
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