FOBS, or Fractional Orbit Bombardment System, Fractional Orbital Bombardment System - Wikipedia is a little different than the depressed trajectory shot in the OP. With FOBS, the payload is put in an actual orbit, then deorbited when desired. The advantage is the payload can arrive from an unanticipated direction. Like from over South America.
Disadvantages are it takes extra energy to put something in orbit, the payload needs to be larger to accommodate retro rockets, and its banned by treaty. The wiki also mentions that accuracy was crap; something I believe is no longer valid, given things like the PLA’s D-21, ballistic missile with terminal guidance.
For the D-5 Trident SLBM I mentioned in my example, both stages burn for a maximum of 130 seconds total. 65 each. After those burns, there’s no more energy save however long the 3rd stage burns and whatever mechanism is used to jettison warheads from the bus. In the normal SLBM flight path, this isn’t a problem, as the bus is well out of the atmosphere by this point, with 600 ish miles of altitude and ~8-11,000 MPH of forward velocity. As has already been stated it coasts ballistically to its target.
In atmosphere, and again, this may vary greatly how high in the atmosphere the payload ends up, it can’t coast. On the contrary, drag forces are going to be immense on the bus and RVs. I would guess the shroud would be destroyed well before this. Maybe it would work on a system with a unitary warhead, where the exterior of the payload is merely the exterior of the RV?
The rocket would have to launch to some intermediate height (50 miles let’s say), tip over horizontal-ish, thrusts with the remainder of the first stage. Then burn all of the second stage while sitting in what would essentially be a reentry-like plasma sheath. Then coast to the target. I can’t see a range greater than 600 miles with that kind of flight path, and I really can’t see the second stage burning nominally in those conditions. But if you could, you’d have a 600 mileish range rocket, that would be insanely inaccurate, would still achieve a high enough horizon to be seen by early warning radar, but only a 3 minute or so flight time
I mean the warhead internally is going through whatever particle accelerator power-up/gas injector warmup/other secret nuclear components that are needed to give the warhead it’s full yield. You are implying that more than the electronics are needed to arm it, some secret processes are happening inside the bomb that begin during some phase of ballistic missile flight.
It is public knowledge that compact, modern, fission-fusion nuclear warheads have complex components and additional steps than just setting off explosives, although of course the exact details are secret.
Obviously this hypothetical mission requires the warhead to explode with full yield mere seconds after launch with none of the normal phases, so obviously it would need modifications to the firmware to support this.
Possibly this would be achievable before the submarine departs by simply disassembling the payload of the nuclear missiles, removing the warheads, and replacing whatever circuit boards contain the firmware. If the russians were at least smart enough to disable flashing*, which they might not have done…
*microcontrollers and other embedded processors have pins where you can connect a programming device to them to load a different firmware image. There will be a connector or set of test points on the circuit board that the programmer connects to, or it can be done pre-soldering, this would have been done in the factory for a nuclear weapon. It is possible to set certain bits in the firmware image that locks the chip, which would be the obvious thing to do.
Come to think of it, if I were designing a nuclear weapon, I’d include mechanical safeties. Such as making it where the warhead needs to be ejected from the carrier spacecraft first before the battery in the warhead even completes the circuit. Or other hard safety mechanisms blocking the flow of electric current to the detonators. I’d be very interested in not having the weapon have even the remote possibility of exploding during prototyping or in storage or the factory.
This might be what Tripler was referring to without disclosing any non-public information.
So, the makers of the movie *The Iron Giant *did their homework when showing that a virtual point blank launch will still require a missile like that to go up into the stratosphere…
Go read Eric Schlosser’s, “Command and Control…” For the bibliography, if nothing else. It goes into the efforts the US took towards nuclear surety: the idea that the weapon will never detonate unless commanded to by a duly authorized entity, and that the weapon will always detonate once its enabling criteria are met. It’s pretty tough to do both at the same time, as it turns out.
Consider that for even a fission bomb of modest efficiency, the explosives that compress the core must be constructed with amazing precision and detonated with great control. Then, an artificial neutron source must bombard the core with a precisely timed pulse of neutrons. Too early, predetonation might occur, and a fizzle. Too late, doublings are lost, and fizzle.
Then consider that, for a staged thermonuclear, the construction of the bomb and timing of explosives must be so precise that radiation from within the bomb case can be harnessed to compress and heat deuterium so that it can fuse. Computer control of timing and detonation can be so precise now, I wouldn’t be surprised if the physics packages weren’t symmetrical—that they relied on precisely asymmetrical pulses from the timing computer to form a symmetrical implosion wave.
The point is, mess with the timing on any of that, when the timing is encoded within those chips the hackers in your example are trying to bypass, and the bomb either won’t detonate at all, or will be basically a dirty bomb. It’s not the sort of thing one can hotwire—with exceptions like crude devices, things like SADM, an AIUI, 2-d linear implosion fission device that topped out at 1 kt.
The “hackers” are nuclear weapons engineers who are qualified and supported by a nation state. This hypothetical attack would have taken place in the 1980s probably, or perhaps today. I’m saying they know what they are doing, but they do need to make these preparations in secrecy, obviously.
I guess I don’t understand what you’re asking then. If they are nuclear weapons technicians and designers, I would imagine they’d have the capability to disassemble and reassemble their own country’s devices. They’d have the assorted documentation, manuals, engineering drawings, fixtures, and tooling to do the above. Basically what Pantex does. And, if the following article is right, even they screw up occassionally: The nuclear bomb that almost blew up | Grist
For another country’s devices, lacking the above know how and tooling, I’d think the exercise would be fraught with danger. Tripler, AIUI, does EOD as his day job. I don’t know if he could talk about his procedures for securing a foreign, unsecured and possibly arming, nuclear device, but I’m sure they’d be interesting.
Oh, if I’m understanding correctly, you mean the possibility of modifying an SLBM warhead to detonate under anything besides after a nominal flight? I don’t know, but I can’t imagine that’s anything capable of being done outside depot-level maintenance, and probably under the auspices of a national laboratory engineering program. IOW, and again, those who know won’t say, the guys on the boat won’t be able to do it.
I am implying nothing of the sort. I am stating that your aforementioned “crew of technicians with soldering irons bypassing most of the detonation interlocks” will not be “preparing the warhead to explode while it’s still in the submarine” from inside the submarine.
I retired from EOD. I now work in “a small town Northwest of Santa Fe”, as a “Device” Engineer (as in “devices of interest in this thread”). I go to Pantex frequently. Modesty and ‘discretion in an open message forum’ apply to my previous two sentences.
I’m not cleared for anything and never have been. Just an amateur interested in the subject. LANL and Sandia seem like awesome places to work. Never made it up the hill to the great museums you guys are supposed to have. I got sidetracked by the pottery at San Ildefonso and Santa Clara. And the scenery. Black Mesa’s about as imposing in person as it is in that Ansel Adam’s photo.
Threads like these really don’t belong in GQ, IMHO. I don’t know that definitive answers to a lot of the questions in this area that pop up can really be given in a forum like this, and I though guessing was frowned upon in this subforum.
One question I think you might be able to answer here though is, RRW is dead, AIUI. Is there anything coming to take its place? Or are the powers that be just going to do SLEPs and overhauls and kick the can down the road?
Oh man, you’re missing out! Are you near the area (within the state of New Mexico)? I learned that they’re going to start opening up some of the ‘behind-the-fence sites’ to the public for guided tours of the Manhattan Project National Park. Places like the Pond Cabin, Slotin’s Cabin, and other V-Site facilities. Come on up!! (Drop me a PM when you do!)
I fully agree. The OP has presented a hypothetical which cannot be meaningfully answered. Although, I think certain intelligent discussions can, and do take place, such as EdelwiessPirate and I discussing flight characteristics. I do hope he returns to the thread and helps get me straight on things.
[sub]Editorial to follow. . .[/sub]
[spoiler]The OP has a history of opening up hypothetically-based threads like this; and when definitive answers are given, the OP ignores them (and sometimes carries on with “diatribes”).
I cannot determine where the OP’s question originated, or what practical use he has to answer it, other than for purposes in a video game. I noted early on that no competent Soviet Captain would risk his boat or other nuclear weapons on such a dangerous mission when other tools are more appropriate [cruise missiles]. The OP tends to stick to cockamamie schemes just for the sake of “_________” (insert reason here), and you’ve noted I have a different tone with him than everyone else. With everyone else, I aim to be collegial and amiable; with the OP it is adversarial.
I’ll let it go for now, and will take any further editorial comments to that other thread.[/spoiler]
I’m a little hesitant to definitively give you an answer to this here and now. You’ll have to come and visit, and share a cup of coffee with me! . . . or a beer at Bathtub Row!
. . . or a beer at 