What an odd thing to say
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What if I told you we were well on the way to that, with proven technology and everything until we decided to sign a treaty with the commies that ended it?
If I remember correctly, the sprint "intercepted" incoming missiles with it's own nuclear warhead. So it's not really something that could ever be used because there are severe consequences for false positives. Not that hitting a civilian airliner or suburb with a patriot is a laugh, but it's a far cry from an accidental nuke.
Depends on the nuke. Latest generation "clean" nukes exist. The tampers are made of lead and inert materials, and they use a tiny, highly compressed, neutron-pumped primary to set off a bunch of lithium-6 to get the yield up into the multi-kiloton range. In an airburst they have very VERY little harmful fallout and all the kaboom comes from pure fusion. The radiation they emit is so low that to be close enough for it to hurt you would put you inside the blast radius. They'd make perfect sense as an ICBM intercept network.
So that's fission, so you're going to have fission products, which are bad for you, and vaporized unconsumed fissile material, which is also bad for you. Neutrons will also be absorbed into stable isotopes and induce them to be radioactive.
Fusion also emits neutrons. You're not just using a nuke for a bigger boom, you want the neutrons because they will change the isotopes in the incoming warhead and disable it. The purpose of the weapon is inseparable from the hazard.
And you're gonna kill everyone in nearby air planes. And then there's the EMP and shockwave effects, depending on altitude. And this is all assuming the airburst works and it doesn't just land in a metro area and kill a million people outright. Or that no one steals one of them because instead of central warhead storage you're gonna have these things deployed at hundreds of sites around the country on active ready with minimum wage flunkies fingering the buttons.
It's a weapon that can never be used. What would global politics have to look like before we're like "yeah lets have 18 year olds stationed around the country able to fire nukes the moment anything in the sky looks weird". At that point I'd much prefer a preemptive counter-force strike from the submarines.
The weapons are actually derived from the 1970s and 80s research into neutron bombs. The reason the primaries are compressed and pumped via external neutron sources is to greatly reduce the amount of fission fuel - meaning very little gets vaporized in the blast (so little that the ground area under the blast is safe after a few hours), and almost all of the energy comes from lithium-6 deuteride fusion. The blasts are also relatively small - a few kilotons (about a third of a Nagasaki) and are meant to go off thousands of feet in the air, safely away from the ground and high enough to not start fires. While the neutron pulse is slowed by an external casing of moderator (beryllium lined graphite AFAIK) to reduce the range and potency of the neutron radiation output. There would still be some significant compton scattering and so a modest EMP would be present, but we're talking a choice of "oh no my iphone got fried" vs "oh hey that Chinese ICBM with a 4MT warhead just blew up in my face" the choice is pretty clear.