warhead

Good luck trying to send in a team of people to destroy the nuclear program, that will all but invite a warhead/attack.

If various groups could get a nuclear warhead or dirty bomb, do you really believe they wouldn't use it?

The goal is to have warheads in flight to be able to continue to their target, so the strategy is to employ an NED.

But accelerating a kinetic warhead to .98c is just as much scifi as saying 'shoot them with phasors'.

I can't find much info on the warheads with a cursory search, but Wikipedia suggests a yield of 100kt, which is entirely plausible.

It's a documentary about nuclear warhead development and testing, with a lot of historical footage of the blasts themselves.

If you have the rocket power necessary to lift something into orbit, you have the rocket power necessary to put a warhead on a ballistic trajectory to any point on the earth's surface.

Modern SAM missiles have either a continuous rod warhead, a quite substantial affair that on detonation will spread shrapnel to a substantial range, or, even worse in this context, are kinetic killers like the HVM Starstreak the UK DoD is deploying.

For anyone with the ability to put a capsule into orbit and to retrieve it, also possessed the ability to spy on the other party, safely launch and drop a nuclear warhead into the other party's major cities, and one-up the enemy in a show of technical prowess and strength - something that would persuade those on the fence to pick the right side if it were.