Would it be feasible to make these missle defense missled nuke tipped? Since they are going towards the upper atmosphere, how much damage could a small nuke blast do, beyond the EMP? The failures now have to do with having a bullet hit a bullet. Wouldn’t it be easier to hit the bullet if you could throw the broadside of a barn up in front of it?
A few guesses as to why this wouldn’t even be tried:
- The nuclear blast itself could take place ‘harmlessly’, but there’ll be radioactive remains falling back to earth.
- There’s probably all sorts of treaties that the US is signed up to that forbid such new uses of nuclear technology.
- Cost. The defence system is expensive as it is - add in a nuclear capability and that’ll spiral further.
And if you have a problem during launch, you’ve probably made the situation even worse for yourself.
:rolleyes: Nukes aren’t generally armed on the ground man. Come on. If this were the case we’d have the same fear about launching the ICBMs after all.
I think the Defense Department actually looked at this before (I remember reading something about something similar a long time ago at least), but I think it was simply too expensive. The EMP would wreak havoc too, though no more so that the nukes being sent here would…so I doubt that would be a factor. Treaties though would probably get in the way of development of such a beast even if it were cost effective. Plus all those folks in Europe would probably explode if the US even THOUGHT about implimenting such a system. I’m sure it would be more effective to take out missiles with an area of effects blast with a larger radius than what we currently use for anti-missile defense (they don’t have to ‘hit’ the incoming missiles either btw…just get close enough to catch them in the blast radius. ICBMs aren’t exactly armored so ‘soft kills’ are fairly easy).
Fallout from what? The missile/bomb casing? Wouldn’t be very much fallout. Also, we can make much ‘cleaner’ nukes today so it wouldn’t be that big a problem…certainly not as big a problem as if those nukes they were trying to shoot down went off over a major city…or multiple major cities.
This and cost would be what would kill it I’d think. Probably cost even more than the treaties in fact.
-XT
‘Not much’ fallout wouldn’t be a great comfort to the people underneath. The difference is that thie scenario involves the explosion potentially taking place about American soil. Fallout over Moscow was never a big concern, but imagine the problems of trying to identify which large sections of Alaska need cordoning off after the explosion.
Who says it has to be armed to be dangerous? We have enough concerns about terrorists exploding a dirty bomb; much of the same concerns would apply here.
An unarmed nuclear warhead detonated at 40,000 ft. above the heartland of America ain’t something to sneeze at.
It has already been done:
Project Nike was an Army air-defense system adapted to (or at least claimed as) an anti-ballistic missile system in the 1960s.
Many Nike missiles were armed with nuclear warheads of up to 40 kT. They only had a range of about 100 miles.
I suspect the reason the idea isn’t revived with longer-ranged missiles is that the attempt to sell the program is based on its use in case of a “rogue nation” launching a missile or an accidental missile launch. It’s harder to justify one more nuclear detonation in that case than it is in a full nuclear exchange when thousands of nukes are going off.
Huh? If we are using nukes as an anti-ICBM shield then we’d be taking them out in the upper atmosphere. Why would large sections of Alaska need cordoning off?
In addition, consider the alternative. Instead of small amounts of radiation in the upper atmosphere, how much fall out do you suppose would be falling world wide from nuclear blasts over, say, LA, New York, Washington DC and 1 or 2 other major cities?? We won’t even count the DEATHS from those detonations IN the cities, as opposed to potential long term deaths due to the radiation falling from the upper atmosphere by preventing those strikes.
You said you would have made the situation worse. Unless you are predicting that ALL of these anti-ICBM nukes would fail and explode on take off I don’t see it. And if you blocked only a few incoming ICBMs you’ve pretty obviously made the situation better, at least as far as I can see. You do realize that if a missile not armed explodes on take off the most you’ll have is a bit of a mess, right? Its not going to set the nuke off, so really all you have to do is clean up a very small area. You know this, yes?
Consider the alternative for a moment. Lets see…nukes going off on major US cities, the POSSIBILITY that a anti-nuke missile might fail, explode and some farmers field needs to be cleaned up. Hmm…
-XT
The Safeguard system (the end result of Nike X) was nuclear tipped. It was brought online in October of 1975 (to protect a Minuteman complex in Mickelson Complex (in North Dakota) and deactivated in February of the following year for political and budgetary reasons. The cost was high (around $5B for that particuarly implementation) but there were a whole host of other reasons why it was shut down, including impending ABM treaties.
EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) is more of an issue for large, high altitude detonations. Low level air burst (which you would want for maximum surface damage) and ground burst (for penetration/counterfire preemption) aren’t going to do a lot of EMP damage outside of the primary blast zone because the pulse (which is line of sight) will be rapidly absorbed by the ground and the thick ground-level atmosphere. Some devices are designed specifically to direct a pulse down from suborbital altitude and blanket an area with EMP, but the small warhead you’d put on an interceptor would not be optimized for blast effect not neutron production.
We often get a false impression of how powerful these weapons are from the images of ground bursts and the resultant mushroom clouds and cratering. Not to diminish the power of a nuclear explosion, but the direct atmospheric pressure effects reduce in intensity as a (roughly) cube function, so larger and larger warheads don’t help a lot in covering hundreds of cubic miles of volume. ICBMs themselves (the booster) may not be armored–in fact, they’re pretty sensitive, which isn’t surprising when you realize its just a big wrapper around some solid fuel–but the re-entry vehicle (RV) is a pretty strong character. Even if you knocked it off its ballistic path it would still probably detonate. The idea of knocking out several at once is unlikely, unless they are converging at the same time to the same target. Also, remember these things are flying through the air at tens of thousands of miles an hour on re-entry. You aren’t going to have very many about the same locus for very long.
Fallout from an airburst–especially a thermonuclear device–would be minimal. Virtually all devices in the US arsenal are optimized to use the least amount of enriched uranium and plutonium (to save on weight as much as cost), and the hydrogen fusion reaction is virtually free of radioactives except for tritium production which is mostly burned up in the reaction. Secondary irradiation–inert components of the RV becoming radioactive–and suspended particles in the air are about the only thing that will become radioactive due to neutron flux. By itself it’s not a lot to worry about. But detonating weapons overhead cities (a la Sprint and HiBex) isn’t going to endear you to your public. Better than getting an nuclear sunburn, perhaps, but not the sort of game you are going to sell the rubes on.
And then there’s the question of who you are defending against and what you are trying to protect. Protecting missile complexes long enough to launch a return kiss is one thing; protecting civilians and cities with an invaulnerable umbrella (as Reagan was promising) is quite another. Here’s a recent thread on the topic of missile defense, if you’re interested.
Stranger
It doesn’t matter how clean our bomb is, it’s their bomb we have to worry about.
True, but doesn’t an explosion also spread out more in the upper atmosphere, thereby giving us a bigger barn to throw? But those warheads are pretty tough. Aren’t most nukes (at least the US ones) designed to be able to plow into the ground at full speed and not detonate?
In the case of a full out nuclear attack, how many missles are we willing to expend on a single enemy ICBM? We don’t have an infinity number of nukes, and at some point sacrifices may have to be made. Which city would you choose?
I think we’re ignoring the main reason not to do this, having any missile defense system at all allows the US to attack with nukes with impunity. Immediately all our allies and enemies will want a nuclear defense system, and then you’ve got a world where MAD is no longer a deterrent to nuclear war. Would you trust the world not to attack first with nukes because it’s “wrong”?
Several reasons.
-
EMP is bad. In the mid Cold War, while ICBMs were still a viable attack strategy, EMP would have been an unfortunate but acceptable side effect. Now knocking out a few GPS sats, half our global communication infrastructure, the odd spy satellite, and perhaps every computer system in a major urban area would be at least as bad strategically as a nuke hit. And don’t let the advertising fool you, SDI is nto aimed at single rogue launches, it’s a defense network to oppose major nuclear powers. Especially if your enemy thinks ahead and launches a second wave after you’ve crippled yourself.
-
A nuclear warhead would be heavier than a conventional one. Interceptor missiles have to be very, very fast and very, very manueverable. Even with a nuclear warhead you aren’t going to have a large time window to reach target. It’s arguable whether you’d be improving the likelihood of a hit.
-
There’s a reasonably good chance you’ll need to intercept the incoming missile close to its detonation point. Setting off a nuclear blast at that point would be a pyrrhic victory at best.
-
Nukes are less reliable. Simply put, they have not been used and tested as extensively as conventional warheads. There are enough problems in SDI without worrying about the warhead not triggering.
Actually, I don’t believe the ABM treaty had anything to do with the shutdown. In fact, the Safeguard system was completed after the treaty was signed and was allowed under the treaty:
Perhaps SDI was, but the program hasn’t been called SDI for more than a decade. It would seem that the pipe dream of a defense against an attack by hundreds of ICBMs has been given up on.
The changes and shakeups in the program over the last twelve years have given it a very different emphasis. The publicly available information about what is planned doesn’t look at all like it would have the capability of defending against an attack by a major nuclear power. Even if China launched 20 ICBMs simultaneously, it would probably overwhelm the system.
Well, not exactly. What we primarially think of as the “blast” is the pressure shockwave from the device, which is actually a secondary (or tertiary, depending on how you look at it) effect of the actual detonation. It’s a result of superheating the atmosphere by high energy gammas. No atmosphere, no blast. The main effect in a zero-atmosphere environment would be the neutron flux, which would be lethal at close range but which will drop off rapidly. The long and short of it is, even with a large bomb optimized for neutron flux you’d have to be relatively close. Modern “mid-course” ABM (the GBI) dispenses with the whole nuke thing and goes for a hit-to-kill solution. This is actually technically feasible, and Raytheon (who is building the H2K “fourth stage”) has had good success in testing with their vehicle. It’s actually the one part of the GBI program that has gone well. The booster, on the other hand, keeps having problems in just leaving the launch pad…but that’s a “launch problem” not a “design problem”. :dubious:
The deep penetrators (which are designed to kill armored silos or underground bunkers) are designed to do that, though they are quite limited by the hard physics of the situation as to how far they can penetrate…and that’s all I’ll say about that. But most are designed for air burst. They’re still robust–a near miss probably won’t disable them.
That’s an extremely valid argument against “strategic” comprehensive defense. It is a game theory problem that the defender is going to lose unless they are willing to spend vastly more resources than the attacker. Even if you figure an 80% interception rate, you are still going to have to dedicate more than two intercepters to each inbound bogie; and the real prohibition in cost isn’t the payload but the booster and support equipment, so it doesn’t really matter, from a cost standpoint, whether your interceptors are nuclear tipped or conventional hit-to-kill weapons. Real plans for ABM (as opposed to Reagan’s Star Wars plan) assume that you are protecting your missile installations and/or other strategic assets in order to be able to counterstrike. In other words, ABM simply becomes another component of Mutually Assured Destruction, by which a disarming first strike is made impossible. Since a disarming first strike hasn’t been a possibility since the late Sixties anyway, and because our submarine ballistic missile force has sufficcient firepower and accuracy to provide effective counterstrike capability, ABM is obsoleted in that regime.
MAD isn’t really a deterrent for any power we are likely to face in the near future in any case. The two powers that are capable of launching any kind of strategic strike on the US–they being the Russian Federation and the Peoples’ Republic Of China–are not likely to want to destroy the US. Fight over trade sanctions, yes. Launch a strike, no. We are more likely to be attacked by a rogue state (Korea) or a stateless body (some nameless terrorist faction with access to or currently unlikely capability to build a nuclear device.) However, in either case, the enemy in question is far more likely to deliver the device by boat, small aircraft, or some other covert means rather than a ballistic missile…so again, ABM doesn’t really protect us.
That situation might change, if the PRC were to become more at odds with us, or if France decided to become a strategic enemy in response to our mocking, or if that fat-headed lunatic in North Korea wins the Irish Lottery and suddenly hires some competent rocketry experts to make his missiles flight straight and far, but I find it unlikely. There are far more likely threats, and putting effort into the ABM effort just guarantees that other methods would be used for delivery.
But it keeps defense contractors in business. Oops, did I say that? :o
Stranger
What I meant was that the system couldn’t be expanded to protect other installations (as originally intended) and the defense of a single complex was basically a showpiece of no strategic value. At the same time, we were upgrading the Posiden sub-launched missiles were succeeding the Polaris missiles with greater range and accuracy, and the Ohio-class subs and their Trident missiles with MIRV buses were shortly to come on line, so counterstrike capability from the submarine force made land-based protection less important. The expense of a $5B per complex ABM system was less important than 3-4 boomers, silent and deadly in the North Atlantic, which was one of the reasons we gave away ABM in the first place.
It just wasn’t a cost-effective system from a strategic point of view, and wasn’t a feasible system from a comprehensive protection POV. The ABM ban which limited us to one installation was almost superfluous at that point.
Stranger
I have to take issue with this. Early nuclear weapons were tested extensively. George Dyson’s Project Orion describes the extent of design and testing back in the good old days :rolleyes: before the atmospheric test ban. (It’s also a good read even if he does fawn all over his father’s contributions.)
I’d guess that the probability of a US warhead not triggering is far less than a fuse failure on your average hand-grenade. The things are build and tested to such precision that a failure of the warhead is far less likely than failure of the actual delivery vehicle in getting it to where it needs to go. While the Redstone Arsenal was spinning rocket after rocket out of control, Los Alamos and Sandia were detonating device after device practically without failure.
Of course, this was back in the day when Detroit was turning out cars that could last a decade or more, too. These days, it might be a good idea to source it out to the Japanese. :eek:
Stranger
As an aside, I do recall reading somewhere that Moscow was/is defending from incoming ICBM’s by four nuclear missiles of its own to act as a last minute defence, detonating infront of an incoming missile.
Is this true? Is the system still in operation?
So would it be fair to say that despite all the allegations of unrealistically easy or rigged tests, the final interception of a reentry vehicle is not the problem, but sensors and launching the interceptor still are problems?
The GBI is a mid-course interceptor. It is supposed to intercept the RV in its exo-atmospheric transit and destroy it. From what I understand, the assessments of the EKV (kill vehicle) from a functional point of view have been largely successful (five out of seven ain’t bad at all in this kind of test). However, these are tests of the single system launched off of a different booster than the operational one, against known and discriminated targets. This isn’t cheating, BTW; the standard procedure is to test individual systems against known quantities and then move on to more realistic and complete systems tests from there. We haven’t done that, though, and we’re probably not going to do that based on budget restrictions, so the resultant functionality of the system is still largely in question.
Even if the EKV works as planned, hitting the RV is the last step in a sequence of operations, from detecting the incoming bogey (easy), determining that it is a threat (pretty easy) coordinating a launch (system incomplete), launching the booster (multiple failures even given preparation), staging and closing on the target (again, multiple failures even given ideal conditions), discriminating between the RV and decoys (???), and closing to the target for termination (mostly successful in single-system tests). If any one of these fails, they all fail; and given the nonfunctional state of several parts of the system (not counting test failures of the booster), any claims that it is operational, or even on a contingency basis, are dubious at best.
Even if it works, say, 80% of the time (hopelessly optimistic estimate, IMHO), you are going to have to have significant duplication. As someone else pointed out, if the PRC were suddenly to go nuts and fire 20 missiles at us, the system would be massively overwhelmed. If North Korea were to file one missile at us…well, it would spiral off course and land somewhere in the Ocean, hopefully far away from our Nipponese friends. The NK (for whose threats the GBI system is nominally tasked to protect against) hasn’t demonstrated any competence with long range, multi-stage boosters for ICBM application.
There’s nothing horribly nonfeasible about mid-course interception; unlike the logistical and time-critical nature of boost-phase interception or the problems with tracking and intercepting an inbound RV at terminal ballistic velocity, mid-course is comparatively easy (or at least, within the realm of feasibility). But the system is not validated, despite being in place and “operational”, and the fact is even if it were an effective system all it would do, in terms of averting an attack by a rogue state or stateless group, is redirect the attack vector to a more covert method of delivery (which they’d probably do anyway–I don’t know of many terrorist groups with access and capability to launch a three stage ICBM, and NK sure as hell ain’t there either now or in the next couple of decades). A larger opponent–China, we’ll say–would simply blast through the system by numerical advantage. We’d retaliate, of course, and that would be more devistating for them than us, but we’d do that anyway.
IMHO, of course, but it seems like a big waste of money for a system of questionable (at best) functionality and strategic detriment. And it will, if seriously implemented, probably lead to some kind of arms race between the Eurasian nuclear powers to both build and defeat their own ABM systems, as if that weren’t going to happen anyway. :rolleyes:
Stranger
An entirely HE (High Explosive) based weapon system has a much different command hierarchy structure than a system which uses nuclear weapons. In the days of cold war brinkmanship, we always, and I do mean every second, had missiles within five minutes of launch with nuclear warheads tasked with creating a “Nuclear Umbrella” through which the Soviet Union could not attack with missiles aimed at our strategic launchers. We had a very frequent schedule of readiness testing, to keep that command control reactive, and rapid.
That no longer exists. For a number of reasons, it was set aside back in the last century. One big one is that the feint and strike tactic could expend half of the system’s available ammunition with ten percent or less of the opposition’s equipment. Then, in the radioactive and meteorological chaos of the next hour or so, you could launch your two part major strike without worrying about that level of attack. The fact that this leaves thousands of radioactive clouds drifting around the sky was “collateral” damage.
That threat is not reasonable in today’s world. The Soviet Union doesn’t exist. It’s former members lack a unified first/second strike potential that could guarantee our inability to retaliate in kind. Striking first with nuclear weapons is a pretty much guaranteed alliance builder, too. So, only those who are already ghetto nations can consider it as a tactic. It sucks for them, too, but they might not realize it.
However, a nuclear armed ready defense is a very big system, requiring massive control systems, thousands of people, and billions of dollars in equipment that are not part of the weapons system itself. Then there is the cost of the weapons system, as well. Our old nuclear technology is not designed for the nano second precision in timing that is called for in anti missile defense. We planned to light up the entire sky for a few hours back then. Our big plan defended only a few specific parts of the country, where missiles were situated. We never planned to save New York City, or Los Angles. We didn’t even plan to save Washington DC. We defended Minot North Dakota.
And it is very doubtful that our plan would have actually worked. Thirty minutes to verify the threat, get word to the President, have him make a decision, have the military forces arm their missiles, and then acquire a target, fire, move downrange, intercept, and then explode. It’s the first three steps that kill you, by the way, because you can’t actually practice them. And even a proven system has enough variable effectiveness that military thinking pretty much demands multiple targeting of each threat.
And what if it wasn’t a nuke? It is now!
Tris
“Our friend brings us good news. If the Persians darken the sun with their arrows, we will be able to fight in the shade.” ~ Dieneces of Sparta ~