The solution is shotguns with a rate of fire akin to a minigun. If you saturate the air and everything around it in a wall of bullets it's not getting through that.
Against hypersonics, this isn't really a solution.
The missiles are designed to force their way through thousands of pounds of air per second. Adding a few ounces of lead and/or hardened steel in the last few milliseconds before impact won't do much.
Put lipstick and false eyelashes on an other missile. This will make the hypersonic missile go "oh la lala!" and make it's eyes pop. It will then chase after the girl missile, forgetting everything about where it was going.
The iron dome but for real. We encapsulate the entire west in a giant iron tank and the missile will just boink right off it.
I will need 600 billion dollars to maybe possibly build this.
yea turns out lasers aren't magical lightsaber blades that immediately cut through anything, and actually need time to heat the surface of their target while having issues with penetrating thick or dense materials.
still less penetration less quick than if u used the nuke to propel a solid projectile real fast. photons have like negligible/arguably nonexistent mass, the real fun with lasers (as weapons) is using them to target enemy optics (mechanical or biological). one relatively weak but rapidly spinning laser array could permanently blind an entire unit or crowd of people nearly instantly if they don't have specialized protective equipment like high-quality mirror goggles (implausible) or camera/sensor helmets with replaceable/redundant sensors (likely doable in the future but impractical currently).
Wait, they were seriously looking into lasers for this? Because I, a non-technical person could've told you it's way cheaper to make missiles that spin, not to mention the ratio of power consumption per interception/number of cheap missiles to intercept
My non-expert opinion is there's no way you could keep a laser painted on a target manuevering at mach 13 long enough to actually melt it. How long do they even have between detection and impact? DEWs are appealing because they travel at light speed and don't need to carry ammo. ___ but you have to hold your flash light on the target until it heats up enough to fail. That's fine if you've got a cruise missile puttering along at a stately pace, but not a terminally manueverable hypersonic vehicle.