ICBM tests during cold war

Hi!

First I want to so say hello to to all the dopers around. I´ve been reading this board for quite a while. It´s fantastic!

Now here´s my question:
During the cold war, especially when satellites were used, how did the nuclear powers manage to test their ICBM without provoking a “preemptive” attack?

AFAIK, NATO wouldn´t wait until a russian missile hit its target to strike back.

Nevertheless, the ICBM had to be tested.

How could the “other side” distinguish between a test and the beginning of an attack?
Regards
Kalimero

Well, one thing you would do is launch the missiles in some direction other than towards the Other Side. The U.S. conducted ICBM tests from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, with the missiles aimed at Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (formerly part of the U.S. Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands). A missile headed from Vandenberg to Kwajalein is pretty clearly not headed for the Soviet Union/Russia.

Another point: There is a 1988 treaty, the Ballistic Missile Launch Notification Agreement, which (as the name suggests) requires the United States and Soviet Union (or now, I presume, Russia, as the recognized successor state of the USSR with regard to international treaties) to notify the other party at least 24 hours in advance of any strategic missile tests of the areas from which the missile will be launched and where it will impact.

IIRC, the inability to test all conditions led to some serious uncertaintly about how well our missiles would perform if called upon to strike at the USSR. Specifically, missiles aimed at the USSR would have been fired over the north polar regions. In the days before GPS was available, those missiles had guidance systems that could be affected by magnetic and/or gravitational anamolies. Without actually test-firing a missile over the Arctic Ocean, there was no way to be certain that its guidance system was correctly calibrated for that particular route. And test-firing in that direction might well have brought on a total nuclear war.

Of course, those nasty Russkies couldn’t carry out those tests, either, so the playing field remained fairly level.

They would (and do) tell us. As we do (and did) tell them. Any time a rocket of a certain size is fired anywhere in the world, we (the US military)know about it. MEBuckner’s link sums it up, but I’m pretty sure we had a “hand shake” agreement before that.

As an example of how reacting to non-hostile launches you don’t know about can be a very real, and continuing, problem, there’s the Norwegian/Russian incident from 1995. A Black Brant rocket was routinely launched from Norway as part of a research programme into the Northern Lights. The Norwegians had previously, and again entirely routinely, informed the Russians about the launch well in advance. But the latter had managed to lose the information somewhere in their bureaucracy and their early-warning organisation hadn’t been told. To them, the launch got flagged as possibly hostile. This wasn’t entirely because they thought it was unannounced - it had a slightly unusual takeoff phase that happened to look more like how their tracking system classified ICBM launches. More alarmingly, with the track they had available, it was possible that it had been launched from a sub off the Norwegian coast. Furthermore, just such a trajectory was consistent with the opening move in an old-fashioned Cold War-era first strike: slip a single warhead in to knock out their communications and monitoring with EMP before they can react, then let rip with the rest. The decision was bumped up to Yeltsin, who mercifully decided to sit tight and see what happened.
This article contains a relatively detailed chronological account of the incident, including the notification stage.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US conducted a regularly scheduled test missile launch. The Soviets had been notified, but becuase of the increased tensions, some thought it was an attack. The Pentagon, simply forgot to cancel such maneuvers during the incident.

Source: “We Now Know,” by John Gaddis