So the recent announcement about North Korean missile launch got me thinking. Why are such things considered such a milestone?
We are talking about something the cold war superpowers were able to do 50 years ago. If NK or Iran developed a car or a computer or a car that was comparable to one developed in the 1950s or 60s it would be considered laughable.
Why is defense (particularly missile) tech apparently so hard to develop? I realize NK is a bit of a basket case, but a country like Iran has a fairly modern economy. Why isn’t it taken for granted that they (or any other similarly developed country) could recreated the missile technology of half a century ago in short order if they put their mind to it.
The superpowers did it with vast investment and (in the US case at least) collaboration with / immigration of scientists from around the world. Then of course many of the details are kept secret*. So first a rogue nation has to cross that hump.
Then, for something as sophisticated as a sub-launched nuclear missile, there are many separate components required in the final product, and during fabrication and testing. The US has a diversified industry which can produce many of the parts required, and can buy the rest from wherever.
In NK’s case, anything they can’t get from China they have to make themselves, and there are signs the Chinese are finally on board with sanctions against NK.
For cars OTOH, the details of how to make a basic kit car are readily available, and they don’t need to make a circa 1960s car…many of the parts of a modern car can be freely bought. Of course it won’t be cost-competitive with the existing car makers, but you didn’t ask that. Apples and oranges.
In case this sounds contradictory, involving scientist A in task A and scientist B in task B, doesn’t imply either scientist can return to their home country and explain how to do A-Z.
One difficulty with a lot of military hardware is that it generally explodes whether or not it’s working correctly. It makes testing expensive and difficult. Anyone can make a car if you tinker with it long enough. But something like an ICBM? Each test costs tens of millions of dollars, so you’d better make damn sure you get it as correct as possible the first time. Also, a missile has to be 100% correct before it works at all. A car with a broken engine still behaves mostly like a car, and it’s easy to see what went wrong. When a missile explodes a few seconds after launch or spins out of control or something else, it’s a tad more difficult to diagnose.
There is a book on the Pakistani nuclear programme called Eating Grass, which goes into this in some detail.
In it the author spends a lot of time explaining how the processes work and the thing which hits you time and time again is how complicated the whole thing is, not only do you need special components, you need to make special machinery to fabricate those, often to ridiculous tolerances. Which leads to the second issue, you need to ensure quality control and have confidence in the raw materials and components. It does not matter how good your designers are (and I don’t doubt that the NORKS have some excellent ones) if your local industry cannot reliably make (for instance) metals which are of the necessary specification.
In short, this is a game of countries with large industrial bases.
I am reminded of Charles Babbage who designed his difference engine, but no one was capable of building it at the time. The one in the Science Museum is built to his drawings with modern machinery and works perfectly.
Yes, and car explosions are quite rare. If you make an error when assembling your car, the likely result is that your car won’t run or that it will run poorly.
For the analogy, imagine if you had to buy a new engine, transmission, fuel tank, steering column, alternator, and electrical system every time your wheels got more than 2% out of alignment for more than 0.5 seconds. Imagine how expensive it would be to keep driving.
The first time I ever shaved, I considered that a pretty big milestone, even though both of my grandfathers were doing it 50 years previously.
And these things are also judged by their effects, not just by their difficulty. Once a nation gets nuclear bombs and missiles, and gets the bombs small enough and the missiles large enough that the former can fit on the latter, and gets the range on the missiles long enough to reach other nations, they’re a serious threat, no matter how easy or hard any of those steps were.
Even more puzzling to me, why is our national media-driven psyche so fixated on one anachronistic country developing cold-war technology, and almost always failing in the most elementary tests of it? This is like worrying about the Cargo Cult discovering slingshots.
A couple of guys in Oklahoma in a rented truck full of farm supplies did more damage than the North Koreans have the power to deliver.
Don’t we? This is a good example of what I meant by the OP. In the 1950s developing a guidance system for a ballistic missile was an incredible techincal feat that required the smartest minds on the planet. Nowadays the cheapest crappy smart phone has a more sophisticated guidance system.
Why isn’t a given that any country that dedicates a reasonable precent of its GDP on defemse could at the very least match that 1950s guidance tech?
A modern cell phone has more sophisticated sensors. That’s still a very small part of what a missile guidance system is.
Partly because a reasonable percent of GDP of a small country is still a small amount. GDP of North Korea is about 15 billion dollars. That’s less than 1/3 of Cuba.
Before WW2, the US had arguably the most educated scientific and technical population in the world. After WW2, the US had taken in refugees from Europe, captured all of the German military research facilities, had all of the German rocket scientists wanting to come over, and was able to recruit from everywhere in the world except for Soviet controlled areas. The Soviets weren’t as advanced as the US, but had a lot of sympathetic scientists in the US and were able to spy on US programs very easily.
North Korea has almost no education system and very few scientists and engineers, and those are often looking for a chance to jump ship. No scientists outside of NK want to spy for NK, and no one wants to emigrate there. Doing research programs without researchers (and technicians to build the projects) is rather difficult.
I’m not aware of any smart phone that has a more sophisticated guidance system than 1950s ballistic missiles that doesn’t also rely on a satellite network controlled by the US or Russia. Slapping GPS into a ballistic missile would be completely stupid because the US (or Russia if you use their system) can shut off your GPS signal or feed your missile false information at will, and the system is made with that capability in mind. And launching your own satellite network is expensive, difficult, and vulnerable to countermeasures (NK has no chance of this).
Also, I’m not aware of any smart phone that will survive the G-force and other environmental conditions in a ballistic missile.
Because any percent of North Korea’s GDP, especially adjusted for inflation, is tiny compared to what the 1950s US spent on rockets, they don’t have a lot of qualified people to work on it, and they can’t import much from outside.
In recent decades, rocket science has advanced relatively slowly. If anyone in the world could send people to the moon, then that would be major news, even though the Americans did that back in the sixties. So matching the state of the art from fifty years ago is less of a step back than it would be in many other fields (e.g., computer hardware).
Any country with unique and valuable military technology tries to limit its proliferation. That means technical information tends not to get published in the open literature, requiring Iran etc. to either reinvent the work themselves, or get the information by espionage. That’s different from non-military technology, which is often described by academics in journals, or in patent applications, or other public places, and where even if people aren’t supposed to disclose stuff because of an NDA, the penalties if they do are much lighter (might get sued) than for people who disclose classified information (might die in prison).
Countries also try to limit proliferation of sub-components that are known to be important in military technology, with export control regulations. For example, most GPS receivers refuse to operate at heights and speeds that would be valuable for a guided weapon. That forces other states to either expend the effort to get those components by subterfuge, or develop the components themselves. Modern supply chains are very complex. It would be difficult, for example, to build a car, computer, or other system of any scale with a supply chain that never reaches outside one country, even for China or the USA or the EU. The goal of export control regulations is to force enemy states to do exactly that.
As noted, the USA and the USSR are (or were) big countries. If North Korea matches their achievements, then they’re doing it with a small fraction of the resources.
True, but the same does not apply for other countries that are not such “basket cases”. Iran, for example, despite it’s form of government, has a relatively modern economy and education system. Why is it not a given that they could develop something at least on a par with 1950s US missile tech without much effort?
It’s been explained pretty well. Difficulty in getting the parts or resources needed. The manufacturing equipment and the measuring equipment needed to make sure that things were made correctly is very complex. Many of the 1950s components are no longer being made and can’t really be easily made anymore so you have to reinvent. And so on.
The fact is that all tech is hard. It might seem like making a blender is easy but it’s very difficult to make ten thousand of them a week cheaply enough to sell them at Costco for $19.
I don’t think it’s as much a matter of the basic science or technology being available. That stuff’s in the open literature dating back decades.
The issue is more of an engineering one; just because you know that you need a fuel tank, an oxidizer tank, a handful of turbopumps and a rocket motor, it doesn’t at all translate into being able to build a working rocket out of the gate.
And there just aren’t that many applications for rockets- most are state-sponsored uses like NASA or the military, so it’s not like you can go pick up a rocket motor on the open market and study it.
Most military missile technology is fairly tightly controlled, and the civilian stuff isn’t really “controlled” so much as there are a handful of manufacturers, and a handful of (mostly) government organizations or civilian companies (like United Space Alliance) who work for the government.
So the Iranians, North Koreans, and for that matter, Space-X, have to basically do ALL the engineering, design and test work of developing new rockets. It’s certainly easier today with the much greater abilities of modern-day computer systems for calculations and CAD and CAM capabilities, but it still takes a LOT of work and money to get it all working right. And in a lot of cases, they have to literally develop the manufacturing capabilities to build the components themselves, adding more engineering, design and $$$ to the mix, even assuming local industry can hack it at all.
Plus, if your best and brightest people are trying to flee and get out of your country, it just makes things even more complicated.
TL;DR- it’s not a technology issue, it’s an engineering and design issue, and it’s just flat-out expensive to do that kind of thing, regardless of the tech level.
