I vote "crazy"

That was my original thought, but the article actually says the're just using exploding wires (but not bomb parts, or theatrical thunder: much larger wires)

y to save them is to launch them prior to arrival of the incoming.

nts

he publicized damage of a 1MT detonated at 10,000 feet above the U.S. Capit ol, is to leave a 400 ft deep crater and burn everything inside the beltway charcoal black. And they'll have a lot more than just one coming into that prize.

w the truth.

As far as people go, those shoulders must be equipped with blast valves to protect against the overpressure of the blast wave. It doesn't take much of an overpressure, compared to those actually produced, to kill. Something l ike only 35psi is lethal, and near ground zero the overpressure is easily 1

The command/firing bunkers are deeper still and several miles from the nearest actual silo but I agree that in the modern world most of the "hardening" of the US silo-based forces is for show and would provide zero defense whatsoever against a determined, massive strike against a missile field.

the Soviet/now Russian ICBMs at least are quite accurate enough to land right on top of every one of 'em less than 200 feet away probably and and pop them all out of commission no problem at all if they're still just sitting there when the warheads arrive.

Even Cheyenne Mountain facility isn't safe and hasn't been for a long time now, part of why they don't use it for anything that important anymore, all that hardening and giant blast doors are obsolete and just make life difficult for day-to-day work. The Soviets/Russian have heavy earth penetrators with large warheads that would just slam into the mountain one behind another until the whole thing is rubble.

It's why US deterrence relies on a large SLBM fleet too because in a first strike situation all that silo-based stuff is done.

On Feb 1, 2019, bitrex wrote (in article ):

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Blast effects vary as the cube of the distance, so a miss is as good as a mile.

Russian missile guidance was not nearly accurate enough to be sure of destroying all of each leg of the triad, back when it really mattered.

At the peak of the Cold War, both sides had of order 10,000 warheads - even

The intent was to convince even the most rabid Russian commander that the US counter strike would utterly destroy Mother Russia. And the Volga river would run boiling to the sea.

If you remember back when the US held multiple open-air nuclear tests in the Pacific in the 1950s. The US always announced the test in advance, and there were always a bunch of Russian "fishing vessels" loitering nearby the

that the Russians believed that the threat was real. They may actually have been invited to witness the test, to feel the full effect.

is one were aggressive enough, so it was full overkill.

Joe Gwinn

prolly cuz they were in international waters and the Navy lacked the authority to do that

They are really accurate without mid-course corrections and even more accurate with mid-course correction.

Dan

Unlike several of his even more right-wing physicist contemporaries, he recognised the dangers of anthropogenic global warming.

He is also the T in BET surface gas absorbtion theory, which gave me a bit of shock when I ran into it as a final year undergraduate in 1962. Not the place you'd expect to find the father of the hydrogen bomb.

He was a bit more than a bs artist - being a prominent scientist does depend on presentation skills, but Teller did have stuff to present.

Teller is one of the Hungarian, 'Martians'

(Leo Szilard, was a fascinating man, I read some nice biography.)

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That's wrong. Soviet ICBM CEP took underwent a quantum improvement in the l ate 70s, such much so, it effectively tripled their attack force in that it was good enough to support only one warhead to destroy a hard target versu s the previous assignment of three per target.

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Right, USSR was dead serious about destroying U.S. attack capability as wel l as defending the homeland.

This was major difference in the two strategies: U.S. was fixated on destro ying civilian populations, USSR was fixated on destroying weapons. The crum my little SLBM warheads, on the order of 40kt, were too small to do signifi cant harm to hardened targets like silos, they were all targeting civilian population centers. And the U.S. deliberately left its population centers v ulnerable.

On Feb 1, 2019, bitrex wrote (in article ):

for a military exercise. Especially if live fire is involved. And at the height of the Cold War and the Commie Threat, with memories of WW2 fresh in mind, they were not shy about it.

Joe Gwinn

On Feb 2, 2019, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote (in article):

How do you know this, or that it?s true? Please provide cites.

By the way, the other problem with Russian weapons was reliability. They would send multiple weapons to ensure that at least one loud bang happened, accurate or not. The US does the same, but need fewer weapons per target to ensure at least one sufficiently loud bang.

Joe Gwinn

On Feb 2, 2019, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote (in article):

with a far richer country.

More or less true, but no secret for sure:

Basically, there was and is no practical way to defend population centers against 10,000 warheads coming over the North Pole. Current missile defenses are intended only to handle rogues and accidents, and have far too few resources to do anything effective against a full-scale attack. This is by design, to avoid another full-scale arms race like the one that led to the accumulation of tens of thousands of warheads.

The theory of MAD was developed to ensure stability despite all this. Read "On Thermonuclear War",Herman Kahn, Transaction Publishers, 2006, for the full theory and rationale. It is a chilling read, but this is the deep foundation.

Joe Gwinn

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They came into satellite mapping technology that they used for a more preci se mapping of the Earth's gravitational field along all their prospective t rajectories. That and some stolen U.S technology did the trick for them. AW &ST ran an extensive expose on it sometime around 1980 IIRC.

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late 70s, such much so, it effectively tripled their attack force in that it was good enough to support only one warhead to destroy a hard target ver sus the previous assignment of three per target.

Did that have anything to do with the US selling equipment to make better b all bearings to the Soviets? Or was that the Chinese? I seem to recall To shiba had something to do with it, but that may have been a decade or two l ater than this.

Rick C.

- Tesla referral code -

On Feb 2, 2019, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote (in article):

I have subscribed to Aviation Week since forever, and my Father got it while I was growing up.

I don?t recall this story. Can you remember anything specific enough for Google to smile?

I also ran upon the following while trying to find the story:

Dr Steve Smith(1985) Problems of assessing missile accuracy, The RUSI Journal, 130:4, 35-40,DOI: 10.1080/03071848508522276

Joe Gwinn