This was around the time that the US started to put Nuclear warheads on anti-balistic missile systems. Nike Hercules would have used high-altitude low-yield nuclear blasts within 100 miles of US cities to stop incoming ICBMs.
My guess is that this is what the author is referring to when he says "Air Force wanted to reassure people that it was OK to use atomic weapons to counter similar weapons being developed in Russia."
> This was around the time that the US started to put Nuclear warheads on anti-balistic missile systems. Nike Hercules would have used high-altitude low-yield nuclear blasts within 100 miles of US cities to stop incoming ICBMs.
This is earlier than that -- the weapon being tested is the AIR-2 Genie, a nuclear tipped unguided air-to-air rocket meant for shooting down Soviet bombers.
And to the statement from the article:
> The country was just beginning to worry about nuclear fallout, and the Air Force wanted to reassure people that it was OK to use atomic weapons to counter similar weapons being developed in Russia. (They didn't win this argument.)
This is incorrect -- the weapon tested in this particular test was the AIR-2 GENIE, which was deployed in operational service from 1957 to 1985. It was felt to be safe enough that it was acceptable to use for defense.
Why on earth would you need a nuclear weapon to intercept a ballistic missle? Certainly conventional explosives would have more than enough yield to destroy a single missle. Or is the idea that you don't have to hit the target exactly, you just have to be in the ballpark?
> Why on earth would you need a nuclear weapon to intercept a ballistic missle? Certainly conventional explosives would have more than enough yield to destroy a single missle. Or is the idea that you don't have to hit the target exactly, you just have to be in the ballpark?
Yep. Re-entering ballistic missiles come down really fast -- if you mistime the detonation of your warhead by a few microseconds, no conventional warhead can hit the target. Back when missiles just couldn't be accurate enough, they were deployed with nuclear warheads to have large enough area of effect.
And those missiles were insane. For example, look at the Sprint missile: It accelerates at 100g to reach mach 10 in 5 seconds, just in time to get close enough to nuke the target. After accelerating, the head of the missile glows brightly white hot from heating.
Modern ABMs are typically hittiles, that is they do away with the warhead completely and just intend to hit the target directly, using the fact that they don't have to carry a warhead to gain a drastically better kinematics.
Sorry to disappoint, but it's been in wide use for half a century. BAC coined it to market their Rapier missile which was accurate enough to not need a large fragmentation warhead, and it spread out from there.
Certainly not in the DoJ's R&D engineering teams, AFAIK. See my post above. That's not to say it's a more common colloquialism in commonwealth countries.
The OP is being humorous, I suspect. Nothing wrong with a good joke now and again.
In my experience (my father worked on several weapon systems programs and numerous other things, including somewhat more recently SM-3), I don't recall them being officially referred to as anything other than "kill vehicle" or "kinetic kill vehicle." Usually it was just "warhead" or "missile."
Besides, once you hit about Mach 6, your need for a warhead greatly diminishes.
That's right. It's very hard to hit an incoming object of radius 2m at hypersonic speeds even now. Back then getting within a few hundred meters and going kaboom was a good plan, given the cost of failure.
The goal of the current US missile defense system is to be able to counter 10s of incoming warheads by firing 200+ interceptors. The last I heard, only about 25 interceptors had been deployed. Bear in mind, however, that everyone with modern ICBMs uses MIRVs, so a single missile will release 5-10 warheads.
Honestly, the system is mostly meant to counter the growing threat from North Korea. Trying to defend against a real attack by Russia/China/almost any other opponent simply isn't realistic with current technology.
Yup. And there is technology to spot naive decoys (e.g. IR signature), and technology to make decoys more sophisticated. The ABMs have to hit the MIRV before the warheads deploy or knock out every potentially damaging warhead.
Russia and USA as the nuclear triad are in leagues of their own, with China/UK/France lagging far behind. China deliberately does not have a MAD capability or strategy. With an attack from an adversary like NK/Pakistan, we would hope we could throw a flock of ABMs at their missiles as fast as they could launch them and immediately blast the shit out of them in retaliation.
China might well be able to get stuff through, but we could limit the damage.
Russia is another ballgame. In an all-out nuclear assault, we could hope to knock out a few warheads here and there, but the numbers are grim. We would be facing a large proportion of our population centers looking like Hiroshima circa September 1945.
So yeah, North Korea is a leading threat, since they are led by a madman who could start a new bloody war in the Korean Peninsula that would devastate our closest allies in the region and pull in China and Russia, and may someday soon if unimpeded be able to actually develop a damaging missile or two that could reach our western shores, but Russia is an adversary led by a murderous autocrat who gives few fucks and could potentially push buttons that would make us a smoldering wasteland in a matter of hours.
Keep in mind that decoy RVs (inflatable mylar targets) are cheap. Overwhelming your adversary's sensing and response systems is a classic tactic, and not just in military combat.
My guess is that this is what the author is referring to when he says "Air Force wanted to reassure people that it was OK to use atomic weapons to counter similar weapons being developed in Russia."