Do the American ICBMs sitting silos already have targets assigned to them? And how hard is it to change the target?
Let us say, hypothetically, that it is still the cold war circa 1985. From that era, I would assume that most, if not all, ICBMs would have military and industrial targets inside the USSR. Let us now assume in this hypothetical that North Korea develops nukes and starts rattling sabres.
How long does it take to re-target an ICBM, in the silo, from the Kremlin to downtown Pyongyang? It is my understanding that most of the hardware that control ICBM launches are dated to the 1960s and maybe earlier.
Is the process easier in 2018 than it would have been in 1985?
Actually, that’s a pretty easy question. Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin agreed to de-target all nuclear weapons more than 20 years ago.
The process of retargeting is not as transparent, but it is widely known that the US nuclear war plans involve many different scenarios, such that all ICBMs and SLBMs are required to be able to be retargeted in very short periods of time.
This brief Wiki article on Minuteman ICBM targeting claims that all missiles can be retargeted in about 10 hours, and individual missiles in under 30 minutes. Not terribly efficient for playing Space Invaders, but still not as hardcoded as I thought.
I remember reading about the 30 minute time span in news articles back in the 90s discussing the detargeting of missiles. As I remember, all missiles are targeted to empty parts of the ocean as a safety measure.
IIRC Minuteman III has a pre-loaded list of targets and the crew can select from the list (I think its 8). ANything else requires some physical replacement of onboard equipment. Peacekeeper and Trident targeting can be done by the crews themselves during lanch prep.
I doubt the armed forces are very forthcoming about ICBM targeting controls. Any information we get is likely decades old. Is there any reason to believe they haven’t updated the controls?
Considering the navy is currently looking to replace their tomahawk missiles to updated guidance systems that can be changed while in flight, I’d think our ICBMs could use similar technology.
The LGM-118A ‘Peacekeeper’ and UGM-133 ‘Trident II’ or ‘D-5‘ were designed to be moveable systems with ‘flexible response’ (the Peacekeeper on the Air Force Rail Garrison program and Trident as part of the Navy Fleet Ballistic Missile program), and so both have more flexible targetting systems by default. (Flexible response means that they could be held in reserve and targetting for counterstrike operations rather than in a purely deterrent ‘Launch On Warning’ posture of the Minuteman and Titan ICBM wings.) Peacekeeper has been decommissioned since 2005 with the warhead buses and post-boost vehicles destroyed per treaty and the motors and associated hardware repurposed for space launch applications in the Orbital Sciences Taurus (SR118 first stage on the first two vehicles as “0 Stage”, Minotaur IV/V SLVs as all main booster stages).
Except for test flights, modern ICBMs do not receive guidance or send telementry in flight for obvious reasons, and it would be impractical to attempt to retarget an ICBM already in flight given the nature and precision required of the trajectory.
If I had to guess, I would assume that the 30 minute time span mentioned is pretty close to correct. It is faster (I assume) than needing to do manual calculations but not as fast as point and click on Google Maps.
This is one of those things that I would love to know how the whole process works, but I understand I never will know.
I did not know this, it is probably a good thing. I wonder what sort of policies China, India and Pakistan have…do they have armed missiles like the US and Russia or do they need to ‘assemble’ a bomb the way that Israel supposedly would?
A big problem with using the land-based missiles on North Korea (I mean other than all the other problems) isn’t that the missiles can’t be retargeted, but that Russia is between here and there. That’s…risky. If a Norwegian research rocket can cause problems, what happens when an actual Minuteman missile pops up and heads on a bearing straight toward Vladivostok?
I assume in the case of an American strike against North Korea SLBM’s might be used instead? Or let Moscow know first, though that raises all sorts of issues in itself.
Given that there is no real scenario in which a rapid nuclear response is required against North Korea (as they have a very limited arsenal of nuclear weapons and delivery systems that are not precise enough to hit strategic targets in the continental United States) it probably bears consideration in the hypothetical decision to strike Pyongyang or other facilities within North Korea to eschew using ballistic more missiles entirely and use the B-2 ‘Spirit’ for the mission it was actually designed for, thus saving everyone the international sphincter clinch of having nuclear-armed ballistic missiles in flight heading toward China and Russia.
Might there be a scenario where North Korean artillery is firing on Seoul, and it’s judged that nukes would be the quickest way to disable them? Though again, because of the time constraints there, they’d probably prefer to use short-range weapons from somewhere in the theater.
The use of nuclear weapons to respond to a conventional attack is the very definition of disporportionality, and probably counterproductive in any case as the blast and fallout effects are likely to do more damage and kill more people in Seoul andd Inchon than artillery bombardment. In short, this would be a way of taking a terrible situation and making it even worsw, notwithstanding how China would used such an act to further erode US influence in the region to advance its agenda of becoming the dominant regional superpower.
It is shocking how far the perception of the use of nuclear weapons has changed in the last twenty five years; after the Cold War, there was a collective sigh of relief as the two major nuclear superpowers stepped back from potential global destruction, and even in 2005 when there was serious discussion about advancing the development of the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) for a hypothetical war with Iran generated widespread condemnation (in addition to serious technical concerns about feasibility and containability) but there is now open discussion about the pre-emptive use or nuclear weapons against North Korea.
It’s a bad situation that the Kim regime has nuclear weapons and delivery systems (albeit crude and unreliable ones) but that doesn’t me that we should leap to the conclusion that a nuclear response is now justified either morally or strategically, nor that there is no better and more proportional response than to light off a few Tridents on a trajector that is certain to make multiple major nuclear powers check their underwear. We should not be repeating the history of last century with an uncritical eye toward the consequences.