9 ms·

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 nuc

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."

openasocket 9y ago
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?
- angersock 9y ago
  At the time the Nike/Spartan systems were being developed, remember that interception was a lot harder and precision and accuracy was a lot lower.
  - openasocket 9y ago
    Ah, I forgot we're talking about systems designed in the late 50's and 60's!
  - rootusrootus 9y ago
    And even today, isn't the latest system under development only running about 50/50 on successful intercepts? It's a hard problem to solve.
    - openasocket 9y ago
      That's really unsettling. Could you launch like 10 of them at a single ICBM and reduce the odds of failure to 1/1024?
      - arethuza 9y ago
        Which would be fine if anyone launched a single ICBM attack. Probably explains why Moscow, which had a large ABM system installed to protect it, was targetted by ~400 weapons from various countries. e.g. The UK Chevaline system was pretty much designed to allow the UK to be confident of destroying Moscow.
      - dredmorbius 9y ago
        Cost / accuracy tradeoffs. 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.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - Merad 9y ago
        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.
        tgjsrkghruksd 9y ago
        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. All a matter of perspective.
- cperciva 9y ago
  There are two factors -- first, as you guessed, it's much easier to get a missile "close enough for a nuke" than it is to hit an ICBM. Second, nukes produce electromagnetic pulses, which could disable ICBMs which are too far away to be destroyed completely.
- robotresearcher 9y ago
  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.
  - robotresearcher 9y ago
    (edit: diameter 2m, not radius!)
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- Tuna-Fish 9y ago
  > 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.
  - Pxtl 9y ago
    > hittiles Oh god please tell me that's not a real word.
    - Tuna-Fish 9y ago
      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.
      - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
        I wouldn't say "wide use". Google has only 18,000 total hits for the term, and most of those seems to be false positives (e.g. "hit tile").
        Zancarius 9y ago
        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.
- arethuza 9y ago
  An ICBM RV is going really fast (up to 7 km/s!) and isn't really that big and not something you want to let get too close to a valuable target.
Tuna-Fish 9y ago
> 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.
Turing_Machine 9y ago
" Nike Hercules would have used high-altitude low-yield nuclear blasts within 100 miles of US cities to stop incoming ICBMs." They were intended to stop incoming bombers, not ICBMs.

openasocket 9y ago

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?

angersock 9y ago
At the time the Nike/Spartan systems were being developed, remember that interception was a lot harder and precision and accuracy was a lot lower.
- openasocket 9y ago
  Ah, I forgot we're talking about systems designed in the late 50's and 60's!
- rootusrootus 9y ago
  And even today, isn't the latest system under development only running about 50/50 on successful intercepts? It's a hard problem to solve.
  - openasocket 9y ago
    That's really unsettling. Could you launch like 10 of them at a single ICBM and reduce the odds of failure to 1/1024?
    - arethuza 9y ago
      Which would be fine if anyone launched a single ICBM attack. Probably explains why Moscow, which had a large ABM system installed to protect it, was targetted by ~400 weapons from various countries. e.g. The UK Chevaline system was pretty much designed to allow the UK to be confident of destroying Moscow.
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      Cost / accuracy tradeoffs. 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.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - Merad 9y ago
      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.
      - tgjsrkghruksd 9y ago
        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. All a matter of perspective.
cperciva 9y ago
There are two factors -- first, as you guessed, it's much easier to get a missile "close enough for a nuke" than it is to hit an ICBM. Second, nukes produce electromagnetic pulses, which could disable ICBMs which are too far away to be destroyed completely.
robotresearcher 9y ago
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.
- robotresearcher 9y ago
  (edit: diameter 2m, not radius!)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
Tuna-Fish 9y ago
> 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.
- Pxtl 9y ago
  > hittiles Oh god please tell me that's not a real word.
  - Tuna-Fish 9y ago
    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.
    - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
      I wouldn't say "wide use". Google has only 18,000 total hits for the term, and most of those seems to be false positives (e.g. "hit tile").
      - Zancarius 9y ago
        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.
arethuza 9y ago
An ICBM RV is going really fast (up to 7 km/s!) and isn't really that big and not something you want to let get too close to a valuable target.

Tuna-Fish 9y ago

> 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.

Turing_Machine 9y ago

" Nike Hercules would have used high-altitude low-yield nuclear blasts within 100 miles of US cities to stop incoming ICBMs." They were intended to stop incoming bombers, not ICBMs.