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Launching retrograde means you have to make your rocket bigger. And once you are travelling at orbital velocities, a glancing blow is quite enough to cause cata

Launching retrograde means you have to make your rocket bigger. And once you are travelling at orbital velocities, a glancing blow is quite enough to cause catastrophic damage anyway.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
A bigger rocket or a smaller payload, yes. Higher-energy collisions should produce more and higher-energy shrapnel, through, leading to even less predictable mess. Also, Inescapable Hypervelocity Shredder™ has a nice ring to it, and it would be giant "fuck you" to the rest of the world; precisely something you'd want to do if you were crazy and hated the West.
- vidarh 9y ago
  > precisely something you'd want to do if you were crazy and hated the West. That assume the leadership is actually crazy and hating the west, though, rather than a mix of in a bind because their own propaganda has made a lot of their population expect a hard line against the west, and genuinely believing they are facing a threat. To dig into history, Reagan by most reports reacted to the indications of the Soviet fear over Able Archer 83 [1] (where the Soviets may have come dangerously close to thinking the NATO exercise was a smoke screen for an intended first strike) with shock that they might have actually seen America that way. He later wrote in his autobiography (copied from Wikipedia): > "Three years had taught me something surprising about the Russians: Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans. Perhaps this shouldn't have surprised me, but it did...During my first years in Washington, I think many of us in the administration took it for granted that the Russians, like ourselves, considered it unthinkable that the United States would launch a first strike against them. But the more experience I had with Soviet leaders and other heads of state who knew them, the more I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike...Well, if that was the case, I was even more anxious to get a top Soviet leader in a room alone and try to convince him we had no designs on the Soviet Union and Russians had nothing to fear from us." In other words: if your opponents seems to act irrational, it's worth considering that maybe it is because you don't understand their world view. If someone is threatening to nuke you left right and center, is it more likely they are crazy, or that their starting worldview has led them to a conclusion that they are under such dire threat that they have no other choice than to play up their capabilities as deterrence? It is worth considering because the avenues to defend against a madman vs. a scared but mostly rational person are potentially very different. E.g. the latter is more likely to respond well to attempts at giving them reasons to feel safer. (and as much as I dislike a lot of Reagans legacy, the above realisation was a large part of him changing tack on foreign policy towards actually talking to the Soviet leadership, and it made a huge difference, and he deserved praise for doing so instead of just blindly continuing to push the same aggressive line he started out with) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83

Launching retrograde means you have to make your rocket bigger. And once you are travelling at orbital velocities, a glancing blow is quite enough to cause catastrophic damage anyway.

TeMPOraL 9y ago

A bigger rocket or a smaller payload, yes. Higher-energy collisions should produce more and higher-energy shrapnel, through, leading to even less predictable mess. Also, Inescapable Hypervelocity Shredder™ has a nice ring to it, and it would be giant "fuck you" to the rest of the world; precisely something you'd want to do if you were crazy and hated the West.

vidarh 9y ago
> precisely something you'd want to do if you were crazy and hated the West. That assume the leadership is actually crazy and hating the west, though, rather than a mix of in a bind because their own propaganda has made a lot of their population expect a hard line against the west, and genuinely believing they are facing a threat. To dig into history, Reagan by most reports reacted to the indications of the Soviet fear over Able Archer 83 [1] (where the Soviets may have come dangerously close to thinking the NATO exercise was a smoke screen for an intended first strike) with shock that they might have actually seen America that way. He later wrote in his autobiography (copied from Wikipedia): > "Three years had taught me something surprising about the Russians: Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans. Perhaps this shouldn't have surprised me, but it did...During my first years in Washington, I think many of us in the administration took it for granted that the Russians, like ourselves, considered it unthinkable that the United States would launch a first strike against them. But the more experience I had with Soviet leaders and other heads of state who knew them, the more I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike...Well, if that was the case, I was even more anxious to get a top Soviet leader in a room alone and try to convince him we had no designs on the Soviet Union and Russians had nothing to fear from us." In other words: if your opponents seems to act irrational, it's worth considering that maybe it is because you don't understand their world view. If someone is threatening to nuke you left right and center, is it more likely they are crazy, or that their starting worldview has led them to a conclusion that they are under such dire threat that they have no other choice than to play up their capabilities as deterrence? It is worth considering because the avenues to defend against a madman vs. a scared but mostly rational person are potentially very different. E.g. the latter is more likely to respond well to attempts at giving them reasons to feel safer. (and as much as I dislike a lot of Reagans legacy, the above realisation was a large part of him changing tack on foreign policy towards actually talking to the Soviet leadership, and it made a huge difference, and he deserved praise for doing so instead of just blindly continuing to push the same aggressive line he started out with) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83