>either side shortens the time to launch nukes (by pre-launching / staging them in orbit or otherwise).
Assuming he means, "shorten the time to deliver the nuke," I'm guessing he is mistaken here: having the nuke in orbit lengthens the time needed to deliver the nuke, not shorten it.
According to a National Academy of Sciences study, the intercept can happen within a couple minutes if the satellite deploying the interceptor is over the enemy territory launching the ICBM..
The sentence I am criticizing is not about interception of ICBMs, so your link is not relevant.
In particular, when the goal is to intercept an ICBM, the enemy helpfully raises the target to be (briefly) at the same altitude as the satellite. (An ICBM's max altitude is much higher than low-earth orbit.) If the goal is for a satellite to attack a city, the enemy does not helpfully raise the city to orbital altitudes.
I think the idea is in an arms race, if you can't launch ICBM nukes anymore (because of Musk's orbital interceptors) then you have to pre-launch nukes into orbit. THOSE nukes can then strike faster than ICBMs (just like interceptors can).
I understood the we were talking about "pre-launching" nukes into orbit.
I also understand that those nukes regularly get deliciously close to their targets (100 miles or so) (delicious from the point of view of the attacker).
I stand by my assertion however: to be explicit, for the same energy budget, it is quicker to hit a target from the ground half-way around the world from the target than it is to hit the target from orbit even if the satellite is directly above the target. The exception to that is laser weapons because a laser beam has no momentum whereas all the "strategic" nukes in the US arsenal weigh at least 200 lb, which is a lot of momentum when moving at orbital speed.
(Also, it is vastly cheaper to maintain infrastructure on the ground than in orbit.)
The problem is that most of your orbital assets will be in the wrong place when the conflict kicks off. Just look at a map of Starlink and observe how many satellites are nowhere near Russia/China. You'd have to launch a ridiculous number of satellites which would never be used.
I also don't understand why intercepting faster is worth anything.
I havent done the numbers but you are probably right.
Orbits are very unintuitive things. For starters they're much higher than a suborbital trajectory.
You would also need to pre-target to stage in orbit and at that point you're locked into that trajectory unless you brought A LOT of extra fuel. This would inevitably be slower and less flexible regardless.
The only way for this to have any advantage is to stage a ton of nukes in orbit at different trajectories, which is politically insane.
FYI, OP got banned from reddit for sock puppeting and doxxing (assuming it was the same person). He created a fake reddit user using the name of someone and registered it to their private email address. https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/1d4qenj/fyi_the_u...
Assuming he means, "shorten the time to deliver the nuke," I'm guessing he is mistaken here: having the nuke in orbit lengthens the time needed to deliver the nuke, not shorten it.