No non-”western” nuclear power is either ignoring deterrence or dispensing with it.

There are videos of lab tests of kinetic warheads that demonstrate that kinetic warheads are capable of delicate maneuvers that would be necessary “to hit a bullet with a bullet.” However, uninformed viewers might still harbor doubts as to real-world probabilities of the success of kinetics versus HE.

Another observation from the above video of Iron Dome is that their missiles appear slower than the missiles they are targeting and perhaps not much more maneuverable, unlike, for example, Hawks, which were so maneuverable that they were capable of turning around and destroying their launch sites if they were unable to locate a suitable target in flight.

The US defense budget involves sticker shock with systems such as the JSF and ICBM modernization. Anti-missile defense is hard and often unrewarding, and appears to have suffered from a lack of emphasis in comparison to other priorities.

One of the lessons from Kargil is that delicate deterrence theories developed symbiotically over several decades of the Cold War can be ignored by modern leaders with nuclear arsenals at their disposal. In the period since that conflict, those same leaders have continued to treat “Western” deterrence models as a foreign ideology with little relevance to their regional strategic considerations. Absent the limits on escalation that traditional deterrence theories provide, an increased focus on the development of better missile defense systems would appear both necessary and prudent.

This discussion seems to assume that Iranian Islamist leaders will only act rationally, thus ignoring their Koran’s basic teachings about waging war against “infidels.” At least the Soviet leaders were rational beings; they listened to their scientists about nuclear fallout’s devastating effects. Not so with the Mullahs, who barely conceal their desire for an endtimes jihad to establish,
G-d forbid, a global caliphate.