OT: Hwasong-15 missile

It goes off on its own with shock and can transition to detonation in a fire when in contact with combustible materials:

/wiki/RS-28_Sarmat and this can be configured to deploy FOBS warheads which are undefeatable

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while they're in orbit, and an interceptor will not have enough lead time to kill it when they decide to dive out of orbit. These things are going fa ster than fast, interceptors do not chase, they lead the trajectory and col lide with the target. Another challenge is intercepting at high enough alti tude to mitigate the effects of an explosion should it occur on impact, tha t may not be possible.

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the atmosphere, meaning the (non-existent domestic point defense) radar wil l drop track, and it's coming in at 250 miles per minute (see wiki spec), s till think you have enough time to re-acquire, designate and intercept? And the U..S. doesn't have any magic nuclear tipped interceptors. Get a grip.

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tmosphere to travel around the world. The US "experts" said it couldn't be done, nothing could survive the g's. Wickedly high g means missile grade g' s.

You don't want to talk about reality, you're off in the fantasy land of wha t could be done in a hypothetical world. The RV is already doing 250 mile p er minute when it's put in orbit. So an abrupt change in direction puts on the brakes? How does that work?

IOW, safe to be around.

Not really possible, exoatmospherically the neutron flux is moving at a good fraction of the speed of light - I doubt there's any way for a warhead to detect a nearby detonation from EM radiation, arm and initiate the firing sequence prior to being fried by the incoming neutrons.

It would be a lot of work regardless to attempt to "booby trap" a warhead like that for little payoff...electromagnetic pulse effects that damage electronics over a widespread area don't happen by magic, the detonation has to be optimal size at the optimal altitude. IIRC the warheads that are commonly carried for hitting long-distance surface targets nowadays aren't large enough, and also IIRC ~100 miles is not high enough.

It's moot anyway, modern anti-missiles and guidance systems are accurate enough to achieve a kinetic kill, no warhead and no warning needed or given. The high speed of descent works for you and against you, it's hard to hit due to its speed but it's also coming down gangbusters at ~Mach 10; at that speed the re-entry vehicle is pretty much at the mercy of Newton and definitely can't make any radical maneuvers.

Sure, it's hypothetically possible that a large thermonuclear warhead detonated at optimal altitude (i.e. high up in space) could generate an EMP effect that would damage electronics and electrical equipment over much of the continental US. The weapon system would have to be designed for that role, though, it likely wouldn't happen by accident.

I agree with you in the sense that while they built a prototype Safeguard ABM base that held IIRC 40 Spartan exoatmospheric interceptors and 40 Sprint endoatmospheric interceptors it was soon deactivated by act of Congress and abandoned. Not much point to it when the Soviets had ~12k weapons pointed this way.

In the event of an actual conflict it would probably have more-or-less done its job, firing until it was out of missiles, intercepting a couple until it was overwhelmed and blasted to rubble along with every other defense-related structure in Montana.

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, every bit of which has been exposed as a complete fraud. All Defense know s how to do is ripoff the government, they sure as hell can't make stuff th at works, and they're not above trying to snow the president, the congress and the public with their bullshit. This has only been going on for the pas t 75 years and nobody has a clue, which doesn't speak highly of the intelle ct of Americans.

That was a safe bet for them making all those wild claims for the system. T here would be no one around to do anything about it when it proved a total failure.

The hardware was a an engineering marvel for the time, deployed in a system of questionable-at-best military value, that very much had the stink of roasting pork all around it.

Because Soviet warheads on trajectories designed to strike Midwest missile fields at ground level re-entered the atmosphere at a very shallow angle they'd end up traveling the last couple kilometers to the target only 40 or 50 meters off the ground; there was also a plan to just pound some thin, tall titanium rods in random patterns around north of the missile fields. Ugly, cheap, probably about the same effectiveness

Are you talking about a nuclear defensive weapon? Wouldn't that be largely counter productive?

Going off in a sub-optimal location is better than being destroyed without having any use.

My understanding is the hitting a bullet with a bullet doesn't work as reliably as required. Better is an explosive which only has to get close and spray shrapnel.

I had not heard it would be that widespread. Sounds very dangerous for collateral damage, i.e. Canada and Mexico.

Yield was "only" 10-20 tons, at ~1km a shallow foxhole or solid wall to duck behind would've provided plenty of protection from heat and blast.

These guys don't look to be much more than 1km away from this 20 ton explosion:

Don't know about the range of the neutron flux, though. Wear a lead vest and helmet

You seem to be making my point for me. You still have not indicated where you learned so much about this stuff. Any chance you are making up any of it?

I dunno, they made lots of kinds of nuclear weapons both defensive and offensive. There were nuclear-tipped air to air missiles, nuclear depth charges, nuclear anti-submarine rockets, nuclear land mines, and yeah nuclear anti-missile missiles.

When it comes to actually using nuclear weapons like that I don't really think in terms of "productivity", though. The only realistic function is deterrence, the irony being they have to be physically capable of carrying out their lunatic "mission" to achieve that deterrence.

The Safeguard program was abandoned not because it wouldn't have worked more-or-less as advertised, it probably would have, but because ABMs in general were thought to be destabilizing and counter-productive to the goal at that time which was arms reduction. It would have been fairly trivial to overwhelm any realistic ABM system designed to defend against a Soviet or American attack just by building more warheads, which in general is also an arms-racey destabilizing thing to do.

Well, the Soviets at least certainly wouldn't have given a shit. Canada was considered as much of a target as the US, and Mexico...welp.

Here's a reference for a high-altitude test that had widespread EM effects:

"Starfish Prime caused an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) which was far larger than expected, so much larger that it drove much of the instrumentation off scale, causing great difficulty in getting accurate measurements. The Starfish Prime electromagnetic pulse also made those effects known to the public by causing electrical damage in Hawaii, about 1,445 kilometres (900 mi) away from the detonation point, knocking out about 300 streetlights, setting off numerous burglar alarms and damaging a telephone company microwave link (the detonation time was nine seconds after 11 p.m. in Hawaii)."

It also damaged a number of orbiting satellites.

...and hold your breath for, oh, 20 years.

As long as it's not 7:51 PM in West, TX where people built houses and schools next to a fertilizer plant with a few dozen tons of very safe to be around stuff because there had never been an explosion there before which proved that it was very very safe (to be around).

You seem to tons of it to create a real disaster - a warehouse store or at least a truckload.

It's not just the volume of explosive material required to create a massive explosion. There also the feature that the transition from a slow and rela tively innocuous decomposition seems to take quite a while, so that if you haven't got a few tons to start with you end up with a burnt-down shed, rat her than a large crater.

You're nuts. Of course there is energy to be released. An explosive that didn't release energy wouldn't be very useful, now would it? ANFO isn't easy to trigger, though, which is the whole point, here.

OK, so I think the reason many rockets had the turbopump exhaust angled outward is that you don't want it to melt the main engine nozzles when they gimbal. But, I guess if the rocket is so wide, the turbo exhausts would be out far enough to avoid that.

Jon

I believe that after a few years they determined there was no identifiable cause for the explosion, so it was decided to have been sabotage. While that doesn't make any difference for the people who lost their homes of lives, you can't say it was an industrial accident any more than being in an office tower is inherently unsafe because of WTC going down at 9-11.

Until very recent times the worst man-made explosion was in Halifax harbor many years ago. The entire city was leveled and many lost their lives. A cargo ship loaded with high explosives caught fire exploding with a force of nearly 3 kilotons of TNT, the largest ever until the detonation of nuclear munitions. The explosion even created a tsunami which wiped out a native community.

Relevant video:

Tim