[sam h]

I think the "rogue nation" thing is overplayed a little bit. Somebody like Kim in North Korea only cultivates the appearance of being crazy for strategic purposes - he's not interested in nuking us, just maintaining his little fiefdom. Non-state actors are certainly different, but the missile defense system largely won't help against them.

You make some good points about missile defense though. I don't know much about it. One question, however, seems to be how a place like China responds to our opting out of the ballistic missile treaty and going beyond MAD. It seems to me that the logical response from their end would be to build up their arsenal so they could eventually launch those 500 nukes and overwhelm the system. Not because they would want to start a war, but because for their own security purposes they'd need to be able to credibly threaten us. At some point we want to start trying to put the brakes on these arms races, not just to win them.