The Lib Dem cabinet minister said a new continuous sea-based nuclear deterrent was "not financially realistic".
Gone will be the time-tested strategic Triad of intercontinental-range bombers and land- and sea-based missiles.
The country has been a leader in land-based turbines but lags behind China and Europe in sea-based efforts.
Its sea-based rival is at an earlier stage of development, with the first intercept planned in about a year.
When the land-based routes became less accessible after the collapse of the Mongol empire, European traders sought a sea-based alternative.
Then sea-based interceptors and other technologies can be added as soon as they are ready, to create a truly global missile defense.
The operation validates the Center's longstanding support for and confidence in sea-based missile defense and its evolving capability to protect the American people.
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Evolutionary sea-based defenses, an early version of which conducted a successful intercept of a short-range ballistic missile two months ago, meet both of these tests.
This office should then be charged with achieving the most capable possible sea-based systems for performing on an integrated basis boost, mid-course and terminal defense.
Of these, clearly the most cost-effective and -- if properly executed -- nearest-term would be a sea-based program using the Navy's existing Aegis fleet air defense assets.
This will almost certainly involve the use of sea-based assets utilizing the Navy's AEGIS fleet air defense infrastructure -- an option the Russians are determined to foreclose.
Some progress has also been made on sea-based missile defenses.
" He declared that "a robust, sea-based, lower-tier theater ballistic missile defense capability, found in the Navy Area Missile Defense Program, is critical to reducing operational risk to the warfighter.
It calls for substantially expanding the Navy's sea-based defenses to provide, among other things, protection of the U.S. East Coast and interior from attacks launched from and beyond the Atlantic.
It's fully equipped with sea-based missile defense systems, has long been the Navy's primary ship for the sea-based missile defense program and has the technology needed for the operation, officials said.
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Specifically, there has been no decision to ensure dual-capability in the next generation of tactical aircraft, and there is no planning for a next generation of a sea-based nuclear land-attack missile.
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Nearly all Antarctic tourism is sea-based, meaning that your transportation, meals and accommodation are combined in one neat package (your ship), so that no infrastructure has to be built ashore in Antarctica's delicate environment.
Currently, onshore exploration is small compared to sea-based exploration.
All the legal constraints that had prevented use of sea-based systems in missile defense schemes disappeared, and engineers could begin thinking about exploiting the full operational potential of the Aegis combat system.
Britain, France and Italy, having recently decided, after years of dithering, not to build a frigate together, still hope to produce a joint sea-based air-defence system which would have some capacity against missiles.
Sea-based missile defense is vital to our overall ability to defend ourselves, but it is not a substitute for the land-based system which is designed to provide defense against longer range ballistic missiles.
In fact, the New York Times reported on Saturday that Team Obama is poised to look at alternatives - sea-based missile defenses or putting those or other anti-missile systems ashore someplace other than Poland and the Czech Republic.
Biden -- and for that matter Secretary Perry -- may be saying that they would support the deployment of a sea-based missile defense off the coast of North Korea provided the system so deployed was compliant with the ABM Treaty.
Interestingly, two of the most vocal of critics of missile defense -- MIT's Professor Theodore Postol and IBM's Richard Garwin -- have been recently sighted recommending that AEGIS ships be adapted for sea-based missile defenses precisely to address this mission.
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The Dangers of Myopic Parochialism: A principal by-product of a decision to cancel space-based and sea-based elements while reactivating the E2I and GSTS would, of course, be to put almost the entire SDI program into the Army's hands -- much of it centered in Huntsville.
The Bush Administration has a sluggish, low-key missile defense effort under way: a limited ground-based system deployed in Alaska and California, which won't be much of a deterrent in today's world, and a still underdeveloped sea-based system modeled on the U.S. Navy's Aegis vertical launch system.
Thus, the U.S. has sought to organize its nuclear forces so that no enemy can launch a disarming first strike, mainly by fielding three distinctly different types of weapons: manned bombers, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles in hardened silos, and sea-based intercontinental ballistic missiles on stealthy Trident submarines.
Aegis began as a sea-based defense against hostile aircraft, but over three decades has evolved to become the most versatile missile-defense system in the world, due in no small part to the fact that destroyers and cruisers hosting the system can get wherever they need to be quickly.
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