I don't think it's very likely. All of the obvious improvements to our ability to shoot down missiles carrying nukes have equally obvious counters. Lasers don't work well on highly reflective surfaces, and hitting a missile with another missile is intrinsically difficult due to the speeds involved.
There might be partial defenses possibly between nations of different sizes. If a small country only has a single or a small handful of missiles, that can probably be defended against by a much larger country with an advanced defense. But an equally sized country can probably fire enough decoys to overwhelm any defense.
And this is all assuming the nukes are being delivered by missiles. Smuggling nukes in and then setting them off requires a completely different set of defenses, and I think the advantage lies with the attacker here as well.
tadrinth t1_iyn83ha wrote
Reply to Is it possible that nuclear defense technologies will surpass the abilities of nuclear weapons in the future, rendering them near useless? by Wide-Escape-5618
I don't think it's very likely. All of the obvious improvements to our ability to shoot down missiles carrying nukes have equally obvious counters. Lasers don't work well on highly reflective surfaces, and hitting a missile with another missile is intrinsically difficult due to the speeds involved.
There might be partial defenses possibly between nations of different sizes. If a small country only has a single or a small handful of missiles, that can probably be defended against by a much larger country with an advanced defense. But an equally sized country can probably fire enough decoys to overwhelm any defense.
And this is all assuming the nukes are being delivered by missiles. Smuggling nukes in and then setting them off requires a completely different set of defenses, and I think the advantage lies with the attacker here as well.