It costs a multiple of the costs of cruise missiles and drones to knock them down, and it’s not clear if anything can knock down ballistic missiles. From Theodore A. Postal at unz.com:
EXCERPT FROM AN EMAIL WRITTEN IN RESPONSE TO A REQUEST FROM A FRIEND ASKING FOR HIS ASTUTE ANALYSIS OF IRAN’S DRONE AND MISSILE ATTACK ON ISRAEL.
Theodore Postol is Professor of Science, Technology and National Security Policy in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT.
I apologize for not getting back to you sooner with answers to your questions. I have been spending time trying to find any video data from the Iranian attacks on Israel that might be informative.
I have attached three video clips derived from some of the sources I found and have put them together in a way that will hopefully be helpful to you and your colleagues.
The first of these video clips is titled:
Real-Time & Slo Mo of Raw Video Clip of April 14, 2024 Iran Attack On Israel In Umm Al-Fahm P33_480_.mp4 (3.4 MB)
This clip shows two long-range Iranian missiles passing through the atmosphere, impacting, and exploding in Israel. The incoming missiles are bright spots in the video because they are traveling at a high enough speed (Mach 10 to 13) to be incandescent from atmospheric heating. For now, I will only give you several important highlights, but there is a lot more that can be derived from this particular video.
The video is cut into four sections.
The first section is simply the video as it appears in real time. The time-sequence is roughly 13 seconds long. The soundtrack has four sharp sounds like “gunfire,” which are simply the sounds from the ground-explosions delayed in time due to the speed of sound being much slower than the speed of light. Note that you can see only two ground-explosions, but the sound indicates there are two additional ground-explosions that occurred outside the field-of-view of the camera.
The second section is simply the first section repeated at one third speed, so you have a better chance of observing details.
Der Friedensstifter 