Stranger, in your opinion, and ignoring any treaties that prohibit the militarization of space, would a defense system be feasible that largely focused on kinetic-kill of ballistic missiles in boost phase by LEO-ish based interceptors? Say, if the motors from the Sprint program were affixed to the proverbial tungsten telephone pole? It just seems that ICBMs are at their most vulnerable and most conspicuous in boost phase, which helps the defender avoid a lot of the problems of target acquisition, discrimination, and actually getting an interceptor in position to kill something like a MaRV.
The only relevant treaty on the militarization of space is the prohibition on nuclear weapons and other WMD. Also, nobody can build a military base on the moon or some other planet. So, no treaties need be ignored.
But a boost phase system has to be predicated on being able to detect, classify, and organize a counter-attack on a hostile rocket within a very short period of time - some estimates have stated that 45 seconds to do all that is the upper limit of the required amount of time, and then allowing a few minutes for the intercept to actually occur.
Just think about the challenges of being able to detect a launch, determine it is a weapon, and getting the President (or some other military leader, depending on the situation) to approve an attack on that missile within 45 seconds.
I did note the sci-fi reference. It was made by Teddy Kennedy, not Reagan. And the idea didn’t make us a laughing stock anywhere - Gorbachev was scared shitless by the idea, and was willing to give up a lot in return for a promise from Reagan (which was refused) to abandon the idea.
Fortunately, Reagan stood firm thru two summits, and on the third successfully negotiated the INF treaty that removed nuclear missiles from Europe.
Far from anyone laughing - it was a large part of Reagan’s vision of going beyond the MAD stalemate and actually winning the Cold War. Which is what happened.
Regards,
Shodan
I can assure you that in some circles it did. I well remember the time, and partly thanks to David Parnas, and additional technical analysis that appeared, the total infeasibility of the idea was quite apparent. Once this was so, Reagan’s continued posturing did indeed make him something of a laughingstock amongst many engineers. However the implicit component - that the US was prepared to continue to dramatically outspend the USSR clearly did have an effect on the unravelling of the regime. I remember at the time there were reports that some hawkish defence advocates were pitching that they could do SDI for one trillion dollars.
The other point about the performance of SDI - an attack is not a single launch. The USSR had hundreds of ICBMs. SDI needed to be able to reliably intercept all of them, even if they all launched simultaneously. Many would come from known locations, but many would come from submarines, which could be anywhere. A 90% kill rate is little better than none.
Boost phase interception is desirable exactly for the reasons you list; the system is at its most visible, most vulnerable, and least maneuverable; even a glancing blow will probably render the vehicle beyond control, and any damage to the propulsion system is likely to result in catastrophic failure. (Yes, it is flying at high speed but it is flying blind on inertial navigation and could only make slight instantaneous course adjustments without breaking in half.) Unfortunately, boost is also the hardest phase to reach the weapon; for a typical ICBM boost lasts only three or four minutes, and of course that interval is the first part of the flight. Late in boost it is flying about as fast as it will ever go, which means that in order to reach it the interceptor has to be pretty much right along side the trajectory. In LEO, this would require a constellation of interceptor platforms flying at high inclinations to cover the trajectories over any 24 hour period. Said interceptors would themselves be vulnerable to attack including a deliberate Kessler syndrome or ASAT attack, so you’d need a metric shitton of them.
The Brilliant Pebbles program (which was intended for mid-course interception after main boost ended but before the post boost vehicle started deploying reentry vehicles) developed best and worst case estimates for the constellation size were between 10,000 and 100,000 platforms, each with multiple interceptors. It was assumed that the cost would still be manageable (around US$10B in 1990 dollars) because the system would eschew the use of space-rated avionics for commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and would be delivered by reusable single-stage-to-orbit (RSSTO) launch vehicles which could be reloaded and refueled with a turnaround time in hours. (This was the genesis of the Delta Clipper program which was chartered to develop a vertically launched and landed RSSTO for this purpose.) The reality to anyone experienced in the development of advanced weapon systems and aerospace technologies is that the cost growth from viewgraph to prototype follows an exponential curve, and that the real program costs would likely grow in terms expressed by orders of magnitude, especially those predicated on a technology like SSTOs which has not come to pass and has turned out to be a lot more difficult in practice than on conceptual paper designs. COTS is also a dirty word for anyone who worked in the “faster, better, cheaper” paradigm of the early 'Nineties. While using commercial off the shelf components can save significant cost and, more importantly, accelerate development and procurement schedules, it also introduces a substantial amount of risk that would be intolerable in a strategically critical system and especially one that would have to be sufficiently robust to withstand attack itself.
Also, the ability to shit down tungsten rods on your opponent nation, or worse yet, intervening countries which bear no particular animus but may happened to be on the receiving end of the blowby is a weapon system. To shroud the globe in a ball of yard orbits of such a system is an implicit threat itself, and one to which I can’t imagine other nations would take kindly, or indeed, at all. The only more egregious way to piss off entire continents of people would be to start a two front war in the Middle East and Central Asia neatly bracketing the country you’ve already tacitly announced that you intend to force a “regime change” upon.
Well, there you have the Free Republic interpretation. On the other hand, the objective facts of the situation are that the declining price of oil weakened Soviet purchasing power abroad for critical goods and commodities that they were not able to make or grow within the Soviet Union or its client states. This, combined with a wave of labor strikes starting with the Polish Solidarity trade union brought the Soviet economy, which had been straggling along for decades, to a virtual halt, while the increasing morass of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the costly and embarrassing incident of the explosion of Chernobyl #4 stretched the Soviet economy to the breaking point. Faced with stark fiscal realities of an agricultural system that couldn’t feed the nation and manufacturing base that was dysfunctional and largely designed to produce military goods, Gorbechev attempted social and economic reform which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Aside from some pretty speeches and a modest amount of financial support for Solidarity and the mujahideen insurgents in Afghanistan (which was tormented during the Carter Administration at the behest of Zbignew Brzezenski), Reagan had nothing to do with this.
As for ballistic missile defense, the Soviets had their own “Star Wars” phase throughout the late 'Sixties and most of the 'Seventies. There were at least twenty programs which attempted to develop numerous technologies for missile defense including ground- and space-based interceptors, directed energy and kinetic kill weapons, various observation systems intended to distinguish pen aids from actual threats, anti-satellite blinding and interception systems, and even a last ditch semi-autonomous system which, when activated, would automatically issue launch instructions akin to the “Doomsday Device” thoroughly lampooned by strategist Herman Kahn and used as the basic plot device for Kubrick’s satirical masterpiece Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Many of the optical and IR surveillance systems in the Keyhole and later satellite systems were developed in part to gain intelligence into what the Soviets were doing at the Sary Shagan.
What we now know from archives is that the Soviets were very aware of the complexities and basic limitations of various missile defense systems and knew that the same limitations would apply to the cartoon fantasies being presented under the aegis of the Strategic Defense initiative. The Soviets were hardly “scared shitless” about being outclassed in an area they well knew would not bear fruit in the foreseeable future and that any mid-course or terminal phase ABM systems which could be deployed in a reasonable term could be easily be overwhelmed by the simple expedient of deploying more decoys or penetration aids. Although the R36M missile–known and feared in the West as the SS-18 ‘Satan’–was only deployed with ten warheads, it easily had the capacity to carry twice that many decoys with sufficient fidelity to be indistinguishable to any interception system; and by the early 'Seventies the Soviets had an actual advantage on the US for land-based long range ballistic missiles and parity or a slight advantage in SLBMs (in contrast to the false “missile gap” that Kennedy campaigned to the White House upon).
The only issue about SDI that the Soviets were concerned about was that it would spark a return to the vicious political infighting between countermeasures and ABM programs in order to save face countering SDI and the resulting expense. But the Soviet response to SDI, and indeed, to the US military buildup during the Reagan years, was largely to keep on keeping on; other than a slight increase in production of conventional military weapons and goods–most of which were sold on the market then or after the fall of the Soviet Union as surplus–they didn’t make any dramatic increases in military spending or production. Gorbechev’s main concern about Reagan’s obsession with SDI was that it would sidetrack the significant progress that both men made in discussing the elimination of entire classes of nuclear weapons, which to some extent it did as it delayed the ratification of the INF treaty until 1987 and ratification of START I until 1991 (well after Reagan left office and just before the Soviet Union collapsed).
Stranger
So, in other words, modern missile defences cannot reliably defeat a system with the complexity of the 1970’s era British Chevaline system.