Back in the day I did some work with the boys from Hill in the airspace in/over UTTR. I get in and out of SLC now and again, but we’re always arriving from the east and departing the same way. So not close enough to UTTR to enjoy it.
As to the Nellis area …
Nowadays I sometimes drag airliners along the north edge of the Nellis Range complex, so roughly Cedar City UT to 40 miles north of Tonopah NV. Makes it hard to see the good stuff concentrated more to the south.
Far better that than the alternative: along Iraqi roadside, crater hit you.
Damn glad you made it home in one piece. I’m glad I had my adventures, I’m glad I’m not still having them. You can only roll the dice so many times no matter how good / careful / both you are.
What happens—in as much as you know and can share—to a zipper-suited Sun God who ‘breaks The Box’ around (IIRC) R-4808? Does it happen often during Red/Green Flag? Or is most of the activity directed well away from it?
As big as Sedan is, now think about how much dirt a 500 kt+ warhead would move around a LCC. USAF should have stuck a parachute in the top of the things…
Is that the area over by Dugway that magazines like Popular Mechanics, were claiming was “the next Area 51?”
Never understood why, if .mil wanted to move everything away from 51—and why would they, very old fallout dusting from NTS aside—why they didn’t choose some island like Wake or one of the unbombed ones at Kwajalein or Eniwetok.
In my era it happened rarely. Like maybe once a year with all the flying going on around Nellis. The no-kidding Area 51 part is pretty far away from the areas that get used for daily training and for the Flag exercises. You’d have to be pretty well lost to end up there. OTOH … at 500 knots, you can be over 3 ridgelines and into where you don’t belong pretty quickly.
I only knew second hand of anyone who did it during my time there. He kept his job, and it Was Not Spoken Of Again. The mystery surrounding what happened to him was frankly scarier to the rest of us than whatever the reality probably was.
Unclassified info is all but impossible to locate. So ballparking madly:
IMO nobody ever expected to survive a direct hit. At the time Minuteman LCCs were designed in the late 1950s(!), ICBM CEPs were measured in miles, not feet. And the designers (though perhaps not the crews) weren’t worried about the much more accurate aerial bombardment since the US missiles would be long gone before the Soviet bombers go there a few hours later.
The LCCs were hardened, suspended, etc., to be able to withstand some blast overpressure and some ground motion intensity. The specs were / are doubtless classified. But the nature of any inverse-square law phenomenon says the problem gets manageable not too far out from where it’s totally untenable. From the other end of the gunsight I know that when targeting hardened underground facilities with nukes we planned and aimed carefully. Just hitting the same county wasn’t going to do anything useful.
So I believe the design assumption was that the Soviets could not put enough inaccurate missiles in a tight enough box in both space and time to have a decent chance of hurting the LCC before it got its mission accomplished. Note also that once the first warhead went off nearby, the atmosphere above the LCC would be a trifle stirred up and that won’t be helping the accuracy of other incoming warheads later. Plus maybe some radiation or X-ray effects on trailing warheads might attrit a few. Ref Dense Pack for more on the non-trivial problem of nuclear fratricide.
As well, lots of thought went into the overlapping C3 systems where any given LCC that got wiped would not leave their missiles unusable; other LCC(s) could take over control. With further backups behind them. And behind them and behind them. Ref wiki there’s an almost comical array of backups to the backup to the backups.
For sure the accuracy of non-US ICBMs has gotten much better since, and the blast resistance of those ancient LCCs has not that we know of.
More than that I can only guess as well as you can.
I don’t have to guess, but I do have to quietly ‘not offer comment.’ But I have visited an LCC up in yonder North Dakota, and they are built for survivability. The Soviets were smarter IMHO: instead of fixing their ground command posts and ground launch sites, and building them for survivability, they made everything mobile. But then again, they didn’t have pesky little things like “private property rights” nor “civilian safety laws.” The entire landscape was considered a launch site, so long as your TEL could get to whatever launching spot you wanted.
I am not military. UXO is UneXploded Ordnance. Bombs that don’t go off.
LCC is a Launch Control Capsule: that buried 80 feet or so underground capsule you might remember from Wargames. Two missileers per capsule, in charge of 10 missiles. 1 if Titan 2, but we don’t have those anymore. Big warheads scoop out enough dirt that the capsule might be intact, but it’s taking a 150 foot drop to the bottom of the crater.
Sorry: I was thinking of the guy who asked who knew which acronyms he used when asking. I forgot about everybody else.
LCC = Launch Control Capsule = the underground blast-resistant bunker where Minuteman missiles are controlled from. GG’s original question was that he looked at how shallowly those are buried versus the size of the crater from the nuclear test codenamed “Sedan” and figured the LCC’s didn’t stand a chance of survival. Which they don’t if hit directly by an ICBM warhead.
CEP - Circular Error, Probable. A measure of a weapon’s statistical accuracy. If you fire e.g. 100 missiles at a target and that type of missile has an individual CEP of 1 mile, 50% of the missiles should hit within 1 mile of the target and 50% will be farther away. Some perhaps very far away. For simplicity the dispersion is assumed to be radially symmetrical about the target but as a rule weapons are sloppier in range than they are in azimuth. Everything from a pistol to an ICBM has a computed CEP that goes into the decisions about how many of what kind of weapons are sent to achieve what kind of result against what kind of target.
C3 = C-cubed = Command, Control, and Communications. Mil-speak for the technological and organizational machinery that connects deciders to spotters and shooters to weapons so the decisions get implemented.
