Was watching Smoothie this evening and he was rabbiting on about ballistic missile defense and it occurred to me that one of the facts that discourage belief in successful anti-ballistic missile operations is a simple matter of gravity and ruggedness. The whole idea of ABMs was predicated on the idea that we would 'shoot' down nuclear armed ballistic missiles using our own brilliant missiles and things like ERINT tended to satisfy the idea that this could work out successfully because it translated enormous velocity at intercept into a magnificent explosion at altitude as the kinetic energy of impact was released. The ERINT missile didn't even have a warhead.
What can one say about a MIRV that is being shot at with ABM? Well, the whole missile made it out of the silo or off the ground more or less intact and in accordance with the targeting parameters. It is now falling on the target. That is what ballistic means in this case. The missile, the warheads or the debris of same will hit the target in spite of the ABM unless it is all converted to energy rather dramatically.
That missile was probably supersonic within 2 seconds of launch which means that it and its components are pretty rugged. So, how much damage can an ICBM shroud take from blast fragments and will that terminate the function of the nuclear warheads? If it is a MIRV with multiple warheads on the bus, how many would be damaged or soak up the damage leaving the rest unimpaired by the intercept?
I get the idea that outside of Rand and a few offices in the Pentagon nobody ever gave all that much thought to that after 1980 because nobody that was talking Star Wars back then was talking publicly about putting atomic weapons on the interceptors again. That was an idea that faded from history when the powers that be decided to leave our cities and people vulnerable to nuclear weapons as the safest course of action. We know that worked with the sane men running the Soviet Union but you notice the whole concept started to fade away almost immediately when we considered nuclear ICBM in the hands of the Kim family or muslims anywhere.
I wonder what the real world tests show on the various interception exercises we've done over the last 20 years as we've tested THAAD, Patriot and SM6 missiles against ballistic missiles and conducted engineering analyses to see whether or not the warhead would have made it safely through the fragments of the interceptor warhead detonation.
After all, the damned thing is still going to fall on the target one way or the other and if the nuke goes off it's going to be hard on the target even if it misses by a mile or two. Let's be honest, the people likely to use nuclear weapons on us in the future are not going to be pretending to use them on counter-force targets, they'll be going after the largest cities on the continent and Washington, DC. It's going to be hard on the suburbs. It might be almost as destructive for the suburbs as electing democratic party politicians at every level of government and implementing ruthless DEI.
3 comments:
The target only has to be a point 400km above the doomed country. The EMP will transform them into 1830 in electrical technology. At that altitude mylar balloons look like warheads. Nobody will be able to discriminate a warhead from a decoy. Waiting until re-entry strips the decoys but nowadays there exist maneuvering glide vehicles, so ballistic prediction is out.
I remember back in 1991 a large number Scud missiles were fired into Israeli territory with a few being intercepted by PAC-3 missiles. Of course the SCUD warhead continued along its way and still blew up on the ground killing people.
There's a false sense of security that just because you can intercept an incoming missile that it, and all the debris (including the warhead), magically disappears into thin air.
When I was in HS one of my classmates was one of those quintessential genius nerds. Graduated early, started college with half of his Bachelor credits already completed...one of those guys. When he finished university he went to work for Reagan's "Star Wars" program doing things he couldn't talk about with the rest of us. But suffice it to say those brainiacs found that hitting an ICBM at any phase of it's travel was a tough nut and even under the best of circumstances they missed...a lot. As for destroying the warhead....you only have to insure the mechanisms tasked with detonating it at the right place/time/altitude are busted. That leaves you with some nuclear contamination at the point of impact....but no giant Kaboom.
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