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Hypersonic Missiles Are Unstoppable
- Causality1 7y agoAs far as I know ICBMs are still unstoppable once out of the boost phase and are moving at mach 20 by the time they leave the territory of the launching nation. The good news is that hypersonic missiles don't put us in any more danger than we're already in. The bad news is that despite being worthless we'll probably still spend a couple trillion dollars on them.
- garmaine 7y agoActually no, there is lots of tech to stop ICBMs, in launch, orbital and re-entry phase. Hypersonic flight basically avoids all the weaknesses exploited by this older anti-ICBM tech.
- gruez 7y ago>Actually no, there is lots of tech to stop ICBMs, in launch, orbital and re-entry phase. what's the success rate on those? afaik they're irrelevant, at least to russia/us because you can evade them by simply launching enough missiles (you only need a few missiles to take out all major population centers).
- garmaine 7y agoClassified. But the story of nuclear war is a bit more complicated than that. Sadly, city destruction doesn't usually fall into core considerations of win/loss.
- oAlbe 7y ago> Sadly, city destruction doesn't usually fall into core considerations of win/loss. What does? Acts of occupation?
- chipsa 7y agoDestroying their ability or willingness to make war. Doesn't need to be occupation, but if they can still fight, you haven't won yet. And destroying cities usually doesn't do much for stopping them from fighting. It mostly just makes them want to fight harder. The US lost the Vietnam War because we lost the willingness to fight. We can't effectively end the Afghanistan war because we can neither keep them from fighting, nor keep them from wanting to fight.
- chipsa 7y agoThe problem is launching enough missiles. Interceptors are expensive to develop, but cheap to make more of, and have relatively low cost of command and control (it doesn't matter if one gets launched by accident, right now). ICBMs are expensive to develop, expensive to make more of, and are expensive for command and control (because if one gets launched by accident, the world ends). So it's always going to be cheaper to make more interceptors than ICBMs. But beyond that, interceptors make the entire targeting situation more complex. If you've got 1000 warheads, and no defenses, you can hit 1000 targets (not actually true, because you have a certain amount of failure rate, but anyway). If you're facing 10 interceptors, and some of your targets must be destroyed, then you have to launch enough warheads at each target that must be destroyed to still go through even if all of them are intercepted. So now you have ~90 must destroy targets you can actually hit with your 1000 warheads, even though you're only facing 10 interceptors. Those 10 interceptors have effectively negated 900 enemy warheads.
- gruez 7y ago>So it's always going to be cheaper to make more interceptors than ICBMs. What's the source for this? Because I've also heard the opposite. Also, given that interceptors have to travel faster and more accurate than warhead ICBMs, you'd think they're more expensive to develop and have a higher unit cost. >Those 10 interceptors have effectively negated 900 enemy warheads. * The calculation you presented only really makes sense for very high intercept success rates. If the intercept rate is (conservatively) 80%, if the enemy sends 10 missiles, and you use all 10 interceptors on each, there's still a 91% chance of at least one missile coming through (1-0.8^10). The odds get better if you have double the number of interceptors (34%), but it's still unacceptably high. You'd need overwhelmingly more interceptors. * I doubt there's 90 "must destroy" targets. If you spend all your interceptors protecting one target, even if that survives, your country is still utterly devastated that there's 0 hope of a counter attack. Does it really matter that washington, DC survived but the rest of the us is reduced to rubble?
- garmaine 7y agoNukes are expensive.
- thunderbird120 7y agoThis is generally incorrect in several different ways. ICBMs are not invulnerable after their boost phase and ballistic missile defense continues to improve rapidly. The U.S. operates a small number of mid-course interceptors as part of the GMD system[1] to defend against small scale attacks from states such as North Korea. The low number of interceptors does not upset the balance of power with any larger nuclear states but that may change in the near future. The U.S. has been pursuing a new kill vehicle for its interceptors to replace the current EKV[2]. The MOKV was based on an earlier program to put multiple kill vehicles on a single rocket[3]. This would allow for a single rocket to potentially intercept up to 6 incoming warheads. What's more, this interceptor could be fitted to the SM-3 anti-ballistic missile missile used by the navy, massively increasing the total number of possible interceptors. Hypersonic missiles do not follow a predictable trajectory and fly much lower than ballistic missiles making their detection and engagement extremely difficult. Detection is actually the larger of the two issues. From the time a nuclear armed hypersonic missile is detected to the time it impacts could be fewer than 5 minutes. Far far less than the ~30 minutes of warning you get for ballistic missiles. This timeframe is too short for a proper chain of command and massively increases the risk of mistakes being made. It also incentivizes first strikes. Unfortunately, any nation that does not have this capability is at a massive disadvantage when confronted by a nation that does. Even if not used for nuclear strikes, hypersonics have the ability to destroy key, heavily defended targets with essentially no notice. This will likely make them extremely important for future engagements, especially naval ones. The U.S. has a large and very well defended navy which is key to its military strategy. China and Russia's focus on hypersonics is no coincidence. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-Based_Midcourse_Defense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-Based_Midcourse_Defense [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoatmospheric_Kill_Vehicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoatmospheric_Kill_Vehicle [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_Kill_Vehicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_Kill_Vehicle
- yardstick 7y agoI don’t see the MAD principle changing in light of these new weapons. The major players will still rely on it, but to ensure they can hold ip their end of the “deal” I expect we’ll see a lot more submarine based IBCMs. Compensating for any early knockout of ground missiles like minutemen etc.
- drevil-v2 7y agoExactly my thoughts. To fully neuter MAD you would need to be 100% sure and then some that you got everything that the enemy had. Even a single missile getting through would be mean multiple warheads get deployed. That's too high a price to pay. And I am fairly certain that the decision to launch would not be obeyed without resistance.
- m_mueller 7y agoI guess that would change when underwater drones can be mass produced to such a degree that they could detect and hunt down all nuclear subs within strike distance almost instantly. It's unclear to me whether that's even realistic based on raw materials required.
- chipsa 7y agoMAD isn't a principle. It's an effect. The actual principle is Assured Destruction. It's just that everyone else also follows the same principle: we want to be sure of being able to destroy our enemies. We might also see airborne alerts resume (bombers flying around with nukes ready to avoid being caught on the ground)
- supermanfan 7y agoI have studied the Cold War and SDI ("Star Wars".) Russian and US leaders thought that MAD was idiotic - that defending your country against your adversaries was of the highest importance, not retaliating after your capital was in ashes. That was the motivation for the Moscow ABM ring (still exists) and SDI (the ABM part worked, the lasers didn't.) MAD is for policy wonks and technocrats, and is not what leaders rely on.
- erikpukinskis 7y agoIf anyone is interested in what could happen during an actual nuclear war, I’m reading a novel on the subject called Arc Light by Eric L Harry. It’s quite good so far. Weirdly terrifying, given that the action and writing is so clinical. So far it’s just fairly plain events. No drama or tears. And yet... terrifying and somehow moving.
- pmoriarty 7y agoThere's an old movie called Threads[1] that is probably the most disturbing depiction of nuclear war I've ever seen. Highly recommended. There's also an interesting, realistic simulation of how a conflict betweeen Russia and NATO might start.[2] [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0D3A5dnAqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0D3A5dnAqg
- CamperBob2 7y agoYour [2] link says 'Video unavailable' -- typo?
- pmoriarty 7y agoSorry about that. I've fixed the link. Please try again.
- RantyDave 7y agoSo I was thirteen, and living in England when that came out. They advertised it on TV with the shot of the woman pissing herself in the middle of the high street. I was really, quite concerned about nuclear war for really quite some time.
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoI was twenties. The era government sent everyone the "Protect and Survive" leaflet and showed the public information films, Threads gave everyone nightmares. It stuck with you, unforgettable, people were talking about it for ages after. The grimmest, bleakest TV ever made. Quite remarkable considering it obviously had a budget of pennies. Yet I'd also highly recommend it. "The Day After" is a schmaltzy Hollywood feel-good family movie in comparison.
- pmoriarty 7y ago"The weapons could even suddenly pierce the steel decks of one of America's 11 multibillion-dollar aircraft carriers, instantly stopping flight operations, a vulnerability that might eventually render the floating behemoths obsolete." Aren't they already obsolete?
- timClicks 7y agoNot at all. They enable the USA to have an almost unparalleled naval capability.
- colechristensen 7y agoIn a real shooting war they are very vulnerable high value targets which exist more for the egos of the upper ranks than for usefulness in combat. They work to intimidate adversaries and defeat much less capable opponents, but are too easily destroyed when coming up against a competent military.
- blackflame7000 7y agoYou need to control the airspace to be successful in war and in order to do that you need to be able to project your power across seas so that the fight is on their doorstep not ours. The carriers are there to make sure that if someone wants to cross the ocean with ill intent, they can deny them the airspace far out at sea making them struggle to even get to the country they seek to attack. The US always prefers to play an away game. Also, don't forget carriers are never alone and surrounded by multiple aegis guided missile cruisers which are the most accurate missile defense systems in existence.
- bhouston 7y agoI think against China or Russia the carriers will be destroyed quite quickly. Against an inferior army like Iran, they will be okay. The purpose of aircraft carriers are more often to launch attacks against inferior nations or highly inferior subnational entities so they are useful there.
- ncmncm 7y agoThere's a special place in Hell for a guy who favors starting a new arms race over stopping the worldwide climate catastrophe.
- guggle 7y agoHell is here and now.
- 7373737373 7y ago[Citation needed] I dislike this unsubstantiated, unquantified doom-and-gloom-the-end-is-totally-nigh-mental-state-of-fear transmission. Rather, show us what the world specifically needs.
- Netcob 7y agoClimate catastrophe, overpopulation, resources running out (especially water), species being wiped out to the point where it will actually affect us, the end of antibiotics, large areas becoming uninhabitable... I wonder what happens to mutually assured destruction when the world is guaranteed a number of huge wars over resources?
- monk_e_boy 7y agoWelcome to the great filter. Maybe some rich people will make it out alive by moving to mars for a while.
- 7373737373 7y agoWouldn't "water running out" be the result of financial resource allocation failure (towards energy production and desalination) caused by politics, rather than the lack of resources per se?
- iamnothere 7y agoNo individual is responsible for things like this (if only!). This is a systems-level failure. It's only going to get worse; our short-term incentives are all wrong and our systems are set up to favor short-term thinking. Anyone with "power" who attempts to go against the existing incentives will be shut down. You need a mass movement supporting some real visionaries who are capable of solving the underlying systemic issues before there will be any real movement towards change. Unfortunately this takes time, and we may be out of time.
- 3327 7y agothey will be stoppable, just like anything else. radar arrays and space or ground lasers, etc. but essentially lasers. but a new age of war will be upon us. When all of the weapons get used up and the factories making them destroyed, and the radar installations and satellites fried with EMP's, then again it will be up to 17 year-olds fighting the fat man's war.
- cududa 7y agoWhat are you talking about? The missile defense shield is a farce. Sure it could catch one or two ICBM’s, but in all out war we’re fucked
- ganzuul 7y agoThe missiles are enveloped in a plasma sheath that not radio nor laser penetrates very well.
- perlgeek 7y agoIt's always an arm's race. Missile interceptions with lasers isn't easy, and if you have two working lasers for interception, the adversary can always try firing four missiles at once.
- tuxxy 7y agoThis is pretty ignorant of the capabilities of the nuclear triad. At some point, any missile defense system is going to have to estimate damage and pick some targets, but leave others. When there are multiple vehicles,.you're pretty much fucked. The idea that a missile defense system can prevent full-on nuclear warfare is false. It's meant for one-off strike deterence, not for full on war. If you don't stop a nuclear launch vehicle when it's on the ground or very shortly after launch, your chances at stopping it are slim.
- rurban 7y agoThey will not. The usual threat is this: A russian sub with a few Granit warheads shoots some from outside of Washington DC or LA or NY. They are too fast to be interceptable, too heavy and the reaction time is too low to react in any meaningful way. That's how the cold war and the space shield stopped being a threat. And as it happened someone already did shoot the Pentagon for a little warning message. That's the most likely explanation. But most likely not Russia, just one of their hypersonic nuclear missiles probably from the Kursk, without the warhead.
- bufferoverflow 7y agoICBMs have been around since 1960's. They travel at Mach 20+. Nothing really changed. MAD doctrine is still in play.
- kstenerud 7y agoThey can only reach that speed during boost (3-5 mins) and reentry (2 mins). The remainder of the time (25 mins or so of suborbital flight) is very detectable. The issue with hypersonic weapons is that they can fly low enough to be undetectable, and fast enough to reach their target before anyone knows what happened. That's enough to make any nation feel insecure and vulnerable and trigger happy.
- bufferoverflow 7y agoWe've had submarine nukes for a while too, they aren't really detectable until it's too late. They can also be blown up off shore to cause a megatsunami and wipe out the whole city.
- fit2rule 7y agoDoesn't all of this mean that we're nearing the limits of kinetic-energy based weapons and are on the cusp of a new age of laser weapons? I mean, sure - these missiles are hard to hit, but I'm guessing that something moving at the speed of light is going to trump it, easily ..
- anotheryou 7y agocan laser counter kinetic energy? I thought they just trigger any explosive on board
- shdh 7y agoIf intercepted during navigation
- hutzlibu 7y agoWell, photons do have kinetic energy as well ... but very little, so yes, the idea is to heat up the explosive enough.
- anotheryou 7y agoI somehow thought they might be purely kinetic at that speed
- nradov 7y agoLasers can't shoot over the horizon, or through hills, or even through clouds.
- fit2rule 7y agoFixed-point lasers can't. Lasers on missiles can.
- ganzuul 7y agoA hafnium isomer doped fiber optic that can refract gamma rays could possibly meet this challenge.
- ganzuul 7y agoAh, getting downvoted by the ignorant and mute. Another beautiful day at Y-combinator.
- chipsa 7y agoYou're getting downvoted because you don't explain enough in your one line post.
- ganzuul 7y agoThat is a poor reason to downvote. There exists a metastable isotope of hafnium which is able to undergo stimulated emission, producing gamma ray laser light. There was some controversy of wheter x-rays could also stimulate this emission but that isn't a prerequisite for light amplificafion in this case. Gamma ray optics is difficult because of the short wavelengths but refraction has been demonstrated at very oblique angles. Fiber optics also has very oblique angles for its total internal reflection. Doped fiber lasers is a well-know field with lots of industrial application. Producing metastable hafnium can be done with e.g. a cyclotron. It is not very efficient, but for an extreme existential threat it is probably not insurmountable. Hafnium produced in this way could be used a nuclear bomb which isn't actually regulated by treaties, so there is even more controversy to navigate than just that from academia. There is no neutron flux between nuclei. All the energy is stored in the metastable structure inside the nuclei. Unlike regular fiber lasers there would be no pumping once the fiber is installed. Instead it would come pre-charged and be single-use. Its shelf-life isn't indefinite.
- eveningcoffee 7y agoDo you mean a gamma laser?
- 7y ago
- joyjoyjoy 7y ago"Meanwhile, in the late-twentieth-century phase of the arms race, the role of unpredictable chance increased. When hours (or days) and miles (or hundreds of miles) separate defeat from victory, and therefore an error of command can be remedied by throwing in reserves, or retreating, or counterattacking, then there is room to reduce the element of chance. But when micromillimeters and nanoseconds determine the outcome, then chance enters like a god of war, deciding victory or defeat; it is magnified and lifted out of the microscopic scale of atomic physics. The fastest, best weapons system comes up against the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which nothing can overcome, because that principle is a basic property of matter in the Universe. It need not be a computer breakdown in satellite reconnaissance or in missiles whose warheads parry defenses with laser beams; if a series of electronic defensive impulses is even a billionth of a second slow in meeting a similar series of offensive impulses, that is enough for a toss of the dice to decide the outcome of the Final Encounter. Unaware of this state of affairs, the major antagonists of the planet devised two opposite strategies. One can call them the "scalpel" and the "hammer." The constant escalation of pay-load megatonnage was the hammer; the improvement of detection and swift destruction in flight was the scalpel. They also reckoned on the deterrent of the "dead man's revenge": the enemy would realize that even in winning he would perish, since a totally obliterated country would still respond -- automatically and posthumously -- with a strike that would make defeat universal. Such was the direction the arms race was taking, and such was its destination, which no one wanted but no one knew how to avoid. How does the engineer minimize error in a very large, very complex system? He does trial runs to test it; he looks for weak spots, weak links. But there was no way of testing a system designed to wage global nuclear war, a system made up of surface, submarine, air-launched, and satellite missiles, antimissiles, and multiple centers of command and communications, ready to loose gigantic destructive forces in wave on wave of reciprocal atomic strikes. No maneuvers, no computer simulation, could re-create the actual conditions of such a battle. Unaware of this state of affairs, the major antagonists of the planet devised two opposite strategies. One can call them the "scalpel" and the "hammer." The constant escalation of pay-load megatonnage was the hammer; the improvement of detection and swift destruction in flight was the scalpel. They also reckoned on the deterrent of the "dead man's revenge": the enemy would realize that even in winning he would perish, since a totally obliterated country would still respond -- automatically and posthumously -- with a strike that would make defeat universal. Such was the direction the arms race was taking, and such was its destination, which no one wanted but no one knew how to avoid. How does the engineer minimize error in a very large, very complex system? He does trial runs to test it; he looks for weak spots, weak links. But there was no way of testing a system designed to wage global nuclear war, a system made up of surface, submarine, air-launched, and satellite missiles, antimissiles, and multiple centers of command and communications, ready to loose gigantic destructive forces in wave on wave of reciprocal atomic strikes. No maneuvers, no computer simulation, could re-create the actual conditions of such a battle. Increasing speed of operation marked each new weapons system, particularly the decision-making function (to strike or not to strike, where, how, with what force held in reserve, at what risk, etc.), and this increasing speed also brought the incalculable factor of chance into play. Lightning-fast systems made lightning-fast mistakes. When a fraction of a second determined the safety or destruction of a region, a great metropolis, an industrial complex, or a large fleet, it was impossible to achieve military certainty. One could even say that victory had ceased to be distinguishable from defeat. In a word, the arms race was heading toward a Pyrrhic situation."
- greggeter 7y agoOh, how powerful we'd be if we "put our mind to it" and replaced all power generation with Gen4 nuclear then give the tech away to the world.
- jandrewrogers 7y agoThis is the reason that the next generation of close-range active intercept technologies that have been undergoing testing for many years now in the US are (1) hyperkinetic and (2) have a detection-to-engage latency measured in tens of milliseconds. Even if you are moving at hypersonic velocities, closing several kilometers is a lifetime compared to the reaction speed of defensive systems with these properties. The US has been experimenting with and studying this particular defense problem for 30 years. An interesting aspect of US military R&D is that whenever they design a new type of weapon system they concurrently start design of a defense against that type of weapon system. It creates a bit of an internal arms race but also keeps their defensive capability balanced with their offensive capability.
- salawat 7y agoThese aren't unstoppable. The key is early detection, and filling the approach path with as much debris as possible. The high relative velocity does the rest. Hypersonic weapons are a double edged sword. On the one hand, they are incredibly fast. On the other, going fast highly constrains your trajectory. A predictable trajectory equals a defensible approach.
- tim333 7y agoThe difference with these hypersonic missiles over ballistic ones is they can manoeuvre at high G. Early detection is of limited use if the thing swerves away from where your debris is.
- banku_brougham 7y agoI had understood that regular missiles (such as ICBMs) are pretty much unstoppable too. There are some anti missile programs but publicly available test results are poor, even with extremely favorable test conditions. Why is this topic in the news right now?
- mdorazio 7y agoThe Iranian missile that shot down the US drone was of the hypersonic variety (though I’m pretty sure just about any modern SAM could shoot down a drone), so people are more interested than previously.
- jandrewrogers 7y agoICBM intercept has been a solved problem for (at least) a quarter century in the US, the core capability is quite reliable. The practical gaps show up in two tangential areas: upgrading systems designed for anti-aircraft applications to also intercept ballistic missiles and enabling kinetic intercept on hypersonic rocket platforms. The first case, which includes examples like the Patriot missile system, are making missile systems do something they were never designed to do. You can only modify them so far but it is cheaper to modify them than to design an entirely new system, if you can make it work. In practice though, many of these are being slated for replacement as it was a stopgap measure. The second case is more interesting. Conventional missile motors designed for ballistic intercept can consistently hit the target. But they are too slow to close the distance to the target, allowing the inbound missile to get closer than the military would like. Hyperkinetic interceptors can close the target very quickly, but the materials performance envelope required does not play well with precise terminal guidance systems due to ablation of the missile as it transits the atmosphere. Basically, the necessary precision of control could not be delivered over the entire flight time due to materials degradation. (This is related to why incoming hypersonic missiles have limited maneuverability -- maneuvering destroys the structural integrity of the materials it is made from.) The US appears to have solved the problem of hyperkinetic intercept of hypersonic targets in recent years. I think what confuses people is that the tests of new systems are only designed to test the things that currently don't work well. They know they can reliably discriminate decoys and do kinetic intercept, that is proven capability and doesn't need to be tested. What they need to test is things like precision terminal guidance when attached to one of these newfangled hyperkinetic rocket motors that ablates itself mid-flight, which turned out to be a much more difficult challenge.
- teslaberry 7y agothe flurry of articles about 'hypersonics' have me questioning the nature of the propoganda value of these articles, regardless of any discussion on the substance of how 'true' the existence of these technologies is claimed to be. really, first strike in a 'nuclear war' is nothing because it's unlikely. the real thing you should be worried about is how these wespons change the calculus of those who don't have them or have ways to detect them, when dealing with the superpowers that have them..... that , and drone delivered bioweapons being used to genocide the third world. that's what's more likely to be used , and that's what you should be thinking about. the endless stream of propogated media coverage on hypersonics has a reason. and that has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of 'hypersonics'