Supposedly the destruction caused by a V-2 IRBM was mostly caused by the impact of the airframe hitting the ground while going as quick as a bunny.
Further, at one point, the US military was kicking around the idea of fielding a non-nuclear ICBM. They would just put a big rock in the space for the warhead.
(This was a Bad Idea. You do not want to shoot off things they Other Guy might think is a nuke. It might make them jumpy.)
But, given a Minuteman II weighs about 35,000KG at launch, and that is is going 28,000 KPH at impact, and that the thing can toss a 400KG warhead, how big a boom would such a thing make?
How would we express the impact force of such a weapon in something I understand, like kilotons?
Does a ballistic missile have sufficient precision to hit a building-sized target? Wikipedia lists most of them of being able to hit within a few hundred meters. With a warhead that size, would it be enough to destroy the target? I thought that’s why we invented cruise missiles, to have long-range precision non-nuclear munitions. There’s also the fun “doom rods from god” idea.
The majority of effort in this area is not on warheads that would follow a traditional ballistic trajectory, but instead on using a missile to launch a suborbital hypersonic glide weapon, possibly incorporating a ramjet, to accelerate the weapon to Mach 10+. There’s a few different flavors of concepts, but I’m not sure there’s any reason to believe that it would be an inaccurate weapon.
That about covers it. If you think about it, the most kinetic energy that a kinetic warhead could possibly have would be a very small fraction of the energy contained in the fuel that was burned in the engine. It would be a very small fraction because the engine itself only delivers a modest fraction of the fuel’s energy to the vehicle, and a lot of that energy stays with the vehicle after the warhead separates.
Even if you take the mass of the entire Minuteman vehicle and payload together (which is much less than 35,000 kg after the fuel is used up), the total kinetic energy will be much less than what the fuel contained.
In Israel during the scudding, towards the end, we would bitch about the double-your-odds of getting hit by a falling Patriot. So, yeah, not cost effective, but everything falls and goes boom-ish.
Does the missile even hit the ground? My understanding was the MIRVs were launched while the missile is in space and the missile itself would tumble back to earth and probably be wrecked during re-entry (it is no longer aerodynamic with the nose cone gone).
Certainly the missile is a LOT lighter at the end after it has burned all its fuel.
With some modifications, ballistic missiles could be a lot more accurate. They typically rely on astral or inertial guidance to eliminate ways the target could use to mess with the guidance system because in nuclear engagements, you want something that’s as close to 100% reliable as you can and 200 meter CEP is not a problem. Astral and inertial guidance are reliable but not particularly precise.
If you’re willing to accept less than 100% reliable guidance, then GPS should give you a CEP in the tens of meters and radar or laser homing should give you a CEP of a few decimeters or meters. TV/infrared imaging/CCD guidance might do as well or better than radar guidance.
As for OP’s question, I don’t see why it would make a bigger boom than a 400kg meteorite.
Seems an awfully expensive way to miss a target. Even if the CEP could be reduced to, say, 30 meters, still half the RVs would miss by MORE than 100 feet. Cruise missiles are a much cheaper alternative.
I’m wondering at what altitude it’s supposed to both glide and go at Mach 10.
If we’re comparing ICBMs to cruise missiles, cruise missiles are indeed cheaper. They also don’t travel 10 000km in 30 minutes and arrive near Mach 20.
If we compare cruise missiles to ballistic missiles of the same broad range (e.g.: 1000km), I was under the impression that tactical ballistic missiles tend to be relatively simple and affordable, at least according to this page: Tactical ballistic missile - Wikipedia
With a typical CEP of 100 or more meters, your Mach 20 RV is still an expensive way to miss. Might as well flip your target ‘the bird’ from the far side of the planet, for all the actual effect on target you’ll get.
I wouldn’t call a 1000km missile a Tactical Balistic Missile - TBMs are tactical - that is, designed for in-theater use. 300km is more the upper end. At that range, yes, a TBM makes good sense for snap-shot targets, though the response time of a cruse missile at that range is still quite good.
Now, if you wish to discuss actually hitting a target with a RV, well, SRBM is where you want to be. But at ranges of 300-500km, you’d still be better off going with an ALCM or stand-off munition. Much less expensive, much more flexible.
There’s video of Minuteman dummy RVs hitting things at Kwajalein. Here’s a short, very grainy clip where you can see the impacts at 0:10.
I don’t think a ton of TNT is out of line with the energy of the explosion shown there. I’d think brisance is going to be way different than a chemical explosion of TNT, but I don’t know for certain.
Pershing II used radar to terrain match during its terminal guidance phase, the same sort of guidance concept that allegedly allowed ALCM to be able to split the uprights on a football field after a 2000 mile flight. Albeit, ALCM wasn’t pulling up from a Mach 10 reentry. For Pershing, accuracy was good enough to contemplate using KE penetrators for anti-airfield denial.
I’m not so sure; if the nuke were as expensive or moreso than the naked missile, in an exchange you could have more total missiles aloft at once even if a lot of them are in effect just very expensive tiny bombs.
You should be so sure. If the enemy detects incoming ICBM’s, they have to think it is nukes and will retaliate with their own nukes. Getting nuked over a conventional strike is a Bad Idea. Getting nuked for ANY reason is a Bad Idea. Now, the truth is not always a pleasant thing, but it is necessary to make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless, distinguishable post-war environments: one where you got twenty million people killed, and the other where you got a hundred and fifty million people killed.
Yeah, I had to shoe-horn that quote in here somewhere. It…might not fit.
ICBMs are viable precisely because Close counts with nukes. Kinetic projectiles, or even the relatively tiny amount of chemical explosives you could cram into an RV, you’d best hit directly. So… Fill the skies with basically so many rocks, and any direct hit you get will be an act of God.
Military planners don’t count on miracles. Thus, this idea was quickly shelved.
I think you missed the words in my post “in an exchange”. In other words, the missiles are already flying, but the enemy does not know which missiles have nukes. This is one step up from dummy warheads which I think already exist. Again, nearly useless if the price of the missile is high enough, but could possibly add more confusion to any enemy ABM intercepts.