GNF & Science Posted by Oaktown Girl, 04 May 2007 04:43 am

SDI

By James Killus

A buddy of mine from the air biz used to work at Lawrence Livermore Labs, and he was once at a luncheon where Edward Teller was holding forth. Since there were several atmospheric scientists at that particular lunch, at one point Teller speculated on whether it would be possible to set up a series of nuclear explosions that would cause atmospheric particulates to precipitate out of the air.

My friend was a little nonplussed, because this was a truly loony idea. But after thinking about it for a while, he chalked it up to Teller having a little fun with his own reputation. He had, after all, basically invented the thermonuclear bomb, and had then spent much of his remaining career overseeing its refinement, and looking for some place to use it. From proposed massive canal building projects to attempts to get more natural gas out of geological formations, Teller always had that single tool that he was trying to use: the H-bomb.

Later, when we all heard about the Teller’s backing of the Strategic Defense Initiative (called “Star Wars” in the popular press), some of us immediately wondered, “Where’s the bomb?”

We learned soon enough about the proposed X-ray (or gamma ray) laser, which was supposed to be pumped by a thermonuclear explosion, so there you are and bob’s your uncle. I didn’t expect that to work, for technical reasons, and it didn’t.

SDI did not die with the gamma laser failure, however. We’ve had various debates about the feasibility of “hitting a bullet with a bullet” vs “smart rocks” or “brilliant pebbles,” (or “sentient sand” for all I know). In any case, there’s really no idea so lame that a DOD bureaucracy won’t champion it, but there are some things that generally don’t get said, so I’m going to say them here.

The fact is that there are certain paths of least resistance in engineering. Some ideas, no matter their soundness or unsoundness, will never happen, because something else that is technically easier will happen first. It’s important to know what it is that will happen first.

A ballistic missile’s brief career is divided into several important phases: launch, boost, ballistic (after the engines shut down, the missile is in free fall, or “ballistic; most of the ballistic phase is outside of the Earth’s atmosphere), re-entry, target, then boom. There were actually some studies in the early 1970s, during the ABM (anti-ballistic missile) debate, that suggested that it might barely be possible to stop a single bomb in the near-target phase, using what is essentially massive anti-aircraft fire, putting a more or less continuous shroud of shrapnel as an umbrella near the target. No one really thought of this as a good solution, for several thousand reasons, including the fact that it would only work on one bomb, and an early trigger would then blow all your anti-aircraft weapons to hell and gone.

Similarly, despite the PR graphics of SDI as a “shield,” there was never much intention to try to get at ballistic weapons in the re-entry phase as they come back into the Earth’s atmosphere), not least being that a single thermonuclear explosion at the edge of the atmosphere creates a good sized EMP pulse that will then blind subsequent defense radar.

That argument also applies to defensive measures during the entire ballistic phase, when the warheads are outside of the atmosphere in free-fall. But there’s actually a worse problem in the ballistic phase, camouflage.

In the absence of an atmosphere, anything, no matter how lightweight, follows a ballistic trajectory. It is very easy, therefore, to create decoys, simple balloons with the same radar signature as the warhead. In fact, you can put a balloon around the warhead and make it look exactly like the other balloons. Since the balloon/decoys weigh only a few ounces, you can put hundreds of them in the same ballistic trajectory as your warhead, turning the problem from “hitting a bullet with a bullet” to “shooting a needle in a haystack.”

So no one really expects to take out a warhead during the ballistic phase. That leaves us with launch and boost. Launch is over in a few seconds, so the real development work is on stopping missiles in the boost phase, when they are conveniently located far away from the target (us) and near the launch site (them).

But how? First you have to sense the launch, then find the missile, then target it, then put something near to it, then kill it. That implies a really good sensor network, plus the ability to put your kill vehicle near the target very quickly.

The sensor network is easy, or, more accurately, it’s so difficult that there’s really only one way to do it, and that must be space-based. You need orbiting infrared sensors to see the launch, then something akin to radar to track it. The radar will need to be close to the boost, and that too is almost necessarily space-based. There have been arguments about “pop up” systems, but those are mostly red herrings; it’s a lot easier to do it from space.

Likewise, it’s a lot easier to target a high velocity vehicle with something that starts off at high velocity. If your initial sensor is in space, and your radar net is in space, the same arguments tell you that your kill vehicle needs to be from space.

Along this development pathway, as your identification and tracking systems get better and better, there will come a time when only the most effective type of kill vehicle will work. You can talk all you want about “brilliant pebbles,” and “kinetic kill” vehicles, but nothing beats a nuke for destruction at a distance. At high altitudes, the energy from a nuclear weapon is primarily in the form of hard X-rays, with an attendant electromagnetic pulse. The hard X-rays can melt or crack a warhead by uneven heating, and a nuke doesn’t really care how many decoys you put up, it’s going to blow them all away. The electromagnetic pulse will probably even wreck any putative missile guidance system from a much greater range.

So let me be very blunt here. There’s nothing secret about any of this. It is the inevitable result of any feasibility analysis. SDI is about putting nuclear weapons in orbit. It always has been.

 

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Responses to “SDI”

  1. on 04 May 2007 at 7:20 am 1. black dog barking said …

    The logical consequence of MAD is insane.

    A more practical and efficient alternative to SDI is to turn our nukes on ourselves. Rather than target foreign cities use our weapons to mine/booby trap the cities that paid for the weapons. This would effectively deter invading armies plus be much cheaper to implement and maintain. Win, win.

  2. on 04 May 2007 at 8:17 am 2. JP Stormcrow said …

    SDI is about putting nuclear weapons in orbit. It always has been.

    At some level, maybe, but I think more accurate might be:

    SDI is about spending a gazillion “politically astute” dollars on just about everything under the sun. Oh and at some point we might put some nuclear weapons in orbit

  3. on 04 May 2007 at 11:14 am 3. James Killus said …

    JPS,

    I agree with the pork barrel aspect of what you say. That’s the “no idea so lame that a DOD bureaucracy won’t champion it” part.

    But if money is to be stuffed into the pockets of defense contractors, I would prefer for it to be on things with at some benefit to the country (a good example being Darpanet), or even things that totally don’t work, rather than see it spent on dangerous and evil ideas that make the U.S. less safe while also threatening the rest of the world.

    The waste of money aspect of SDI has been well documented. The hidden “first strike orbital nuclear capability” agenda is much less widely known.

  4. on 04 May 2007 at 11:44 am 4. spyder said …

    SDI is about putting nuclear weapons in orbit. It always has been.

    More like keeping them there, and increasing their efficiency and effectiveness. Space junk has become to be quite a nasty and voluminous problem.

  5. on 04 May 2007 at 11:53 am 5. Oaktown Girl said …

    But if money is to be stuffed into the pockets of defense contractors, I would prefer for it to be on things with at some benefit to the country…rather than see it spent on dangerous and evil ideas that make the U.S. less safe while also threatening the rest of the world.

    But…but that would wipe out the entire BushCo foreign (and domestic) policy plan! You’re treading on dangerously treasonous ground there, Mister.

    Seriously, thanks for this, James. And thanks for making it understandable to low-tech folks like me.

    I have heard (and if it’s true, it really pisses me off) that the space shuttle launches that have school teachers go up to do some experiments in space (much to the delight of the corporate media) are largely a distraction/cover for SDI research, which is the focus of what’s really going on. Any inside info on that, James?

    Off topic: Even tho I’m back at work today, your Minister of Justice is still sick and will be stuck at home tomorrow afternoon. I’m wondering if I host some live blogging of the Kentucky Derby (30 mins before start time) would anyone be interested in joining me? Your knowledge/lack of knowledge or love/hate/indifference for the race doesn’t really matter. Just some WAAGNFNP community fun. Any takers?

  6. on 04 May 2007 at 12:44 pm 6. spyder said …

    Derby LPGA mash mix blog???? That could have merits.

  7. on 04 May 2007 at 12:49 pm 7. Oaktown Girl said …

    Yeah, live blogging whatever is going on at the time, or just whatever you feel like talking about.

  8. on 04 May 2007 at 2:11 pm 8. James Killus said …

    Well, to catch spyder’s toss, I don’t think that there are actual thermonuclear weapons currently in orbit. I could be wrong about that, of course, the black budget being what it is, but that’s the sort of info that tends to leak around the edges, at least partly because so many of these guys can’t resist bragging. The hardest thing is to seperate out the times they’re just blowing smoke (which tends to be most of the time).

    “Space junk,” of course, exists aplenty. There are also a number of nuclear thermo-electric generators that have been launched, but those are almost entirely deep-space probes, with no calculable probability of returning to Earth, and which have no detonation capability in the first place. NTEGs use different isotopes than bombs.

    The space program as a whole is too much the pork-laden camel to be considered as having any sort of nefarious “purpose.” Much of the funding is hostage to old science fiction stories and the old science fiction fans who make up so much of NASA personnel. I’d love to have the military fund a Moonbase instead of SDI, but that’s never going to happen. The tradeoff is between the Moonbase and more deep space probes.

    I will, however, note an interesting turn of phrase found in a sound bite from this story on the Chinese anti-satellite test in January (this one was a “kinetic kill”):

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16689558/

    No such publicized destruction of a satellite in space has occurred in at least 15 years, said Marco Caceres, a space expert at the Teal Group, an aerospace consulting firm in Fairfax, Va.

    That’s the sort of careful phrasing that immediately makes me think that Mr. Caceres either knows of, or thinks he knows of, an unpublicized anti-satellite test.

    In any case, I’m pretty sure that the Chinese have just served notice that they will not sit on their thumbs while the U.S. puts a nuclear arsenal overhead.

  9. on 04 May 2007 at 2:48 pm 9. HAL said …

    SDI is about putting nuclear weapons in orbit. It always has been.

    I await further developments with great anticipation.

  10. on 04 May 2007 at 3:17 pm 10. Seattle said …

    You keep talking smack like that James and I’ll take my vintage VCR collection of Classic Star Trek and go home…. Then I’ll cuddle up with my collector’s edition 1st printing of “Have Spacesuit Will Travel” and eat junkfood out of my R2-D2 plastic snack bowl! So who’s going to meet me at the International Space Development Conference in Dallas on Memeorial Day Weekend? If you can’t convince them with science, how about tourism?

    http://isdc.nss.org/2007/info.html

  11. on 04 May 2007 at 4:20 pm 11. spyder said …

    I grew up deeply enmeshed in the US Space program, from its earliest days (the “east parking lot” facility of LAX operated by North American Aviation’s rocket propulsion group), on through the landings on the moon (my father was responsible for the first stage of the Saturn V), and then: well i stopped paying much attention after 1986 (except for deep space photo explorations). My snarky comment comes from my own father’s inability to carefully craft plausible deniability of efforts on the part of the DoD and NASA to weaponized space. It dates to his assigned/contracted work in the 50’s on nuclear rocket engines and other similar propulsion dreams (as you say hostage to old science fiction stories).

    During the period that Christopher Boyce was working at TRW, and acting as a Soviet spy with his lifetime buddy AD Lee, my dad was developing sophisticated propulsion systems for the minutest tweaking of orbital-based platforms (ostensibly for spy vehicles, but near the end of his life he hinted at more than that). He knew Boyce from the intel unit (Black Vault), because one of my pop’s skills was deconstructing Soviet space information and data, that our spies were delivering to us; and he had, back in the early 60s help develop the vast com/control systems in Australia that were imperative for NASA.

    His greatest concern was always the endless bits and chunks of crap floating around the earth, much of it extraordinarily small, but travelling at VHVs. The more junk we put up there, the more anti-satellite efforts increase (and they definitely will), we will have polluted space as dangerously to us as we have the Earth.

  12. on 04 May 2007 at 4:40 pm 12. Seattle said …

    If you’re a reader of William Gibson, you’d imagine a future of scrap collectors up there gathering up all our space junk and turning it into an orbiting Eden. Recycle! Reuse! Bombs into plowshares….

  13. on 04 May 2007 at 5:33 pm 13. James Killus said …

    Space has certainly been weaponized to a fair thee well if one includes C&C (command and control), and the spy satellite business has always been good. So far, at least, the only offensive weaponry has been of the satellite killer kind, though the recent “Rods from God” wetdreams are also annoying:

    http://www.popsci.com/popsci/technology/generaltechnology/df869aa138b84010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

    All the flecks and flinders do create some problems for near Earth orbits, the Chinese test result supposedly created tens of thousands of pieces of space junk. That’s a problem for observation satellites, which tend to be in all kinds of near-Earth criss-crossing orbits (from polar to equitorial with everything in between).

    Geosynchronous orbits are a lot cleaner, since satellites there are mostly equatorial (otherwise they aren’t geosynchronous, and there’s not many reasons to otherwise put satellites up that high).

    Very few of the flinders make it to Earth after re-entry, of course, so they’re not actively dangerous to people. So I remain of the opinion that junk ideas here on the ground are a lot more dangerous than junk in space.

    I have to admit that the nuclear rockets designs were spiffy, though. I used one of them in a story once:

    http://www.sff.net/people/james-killus/Text/Aphrodite.pdf

    But it is important to distinguish fact from fiction.

  14. on 04 May 2007 at 6:20 pm 14. spyder said …

    Actually Seattle, that is something NASA and the EU programs have been considering. Currently we don’t have the capability of launching a mission to Mars or Jupitor/Saturn’s moons from Earth. We need to do so from space, or on the moon, manufacturing the rocket and launching it from out there. The space junk and debris, if it could be safely collected (an enormous if), would be considered to be useful base resource materials. Off into outer space you go my friends, we wish you bon voyage.

  15. on 04 May 2007 at 6:54 pm 15. Oaktown Girl said …

    Sorry James - your last comment went into our spam bucket. Two links shouldn’t do that, but the spam bucket sometimes has a mind of its own. If ever you your comment doesn’t pop up right away, please don’t hesitate to ask one of us admins “what happened?” (via a link-free comment or email one of us directly). That goes for everybody, by the way.

    Oh my - the A’s just hit a 3-run homer (Nick Swisher) in the bottom of the 9th in Tampa to break a 2-2 tie. A big deal because the A’s have so many players injured, it’s a miracle they can field a team at all. But this is Open Thread stuff. Let me get that open thread up as soon as I can.

  16. on 04 May 2007 at 9:18 pm 16. James Killus said …

    It may have been because I was checking out the links during “preview” and probably made text changes up the the bitter end, because of the OCD imitation I sometimes do. Truth to tell I hadn’t noticed the failure to post; end of the day thing etc.

    So, thank you. I appreciate it.

  17. on 05 May 2007 at 11:00 am 17. christian h. said …

    James, thank you so much for this post - elegantly cutting through the crap, as it were.
    I always had the feeling that while SDI had some logic if evaluated under the insane terms of cold war nuclear balance - a dangerous logic, but there you go - its reincarnation doesn’t. A system that destroys, say, 90% of incoming missiles is an offensive threat to the other side in a MAD scenario (degrading their second strike capability); but a 90% chance of shooting down a single missile North Korea or Iran don’t have seems like an awful gamble (imagine a president saying: “we will not give in to nuclear blackmail! I am 90% sure NYC won’t be wiped off the map.”) Given that - together with the non-feasability of the system officially considered - it is certainly no surprise Russia and China don’t believe a word they are told about the supposed purpose of the system.

  18. on 05 May 2007 at 1:41 pm 18. The Constructivist said …

    You’ll be glad to know that I refrained of sullying the pure libertarianism of my Nagasaki post by proposing something like the following: in the fine fine fine print of the U.S. nuclear auction contract, it says that the U.S. reserves the right to nuke your corporate HQ/capital city/etc. if it suspects that the nuke you just purchased is ever used on a U.S. city, either by you or by someone who acquired or stole it from you.

    Because now I realize that my Le Blogue Berube comment ages ago that the “Global” in “Global Nuclear Fireball” had been woefully undertheorized was off target–the point is not to theorize the GNF, it is to engineer it!

    I move the WAAGNFNP support SDI for any and all nations who want to demonstrate their dedication to the GNF.

  19. on 05 May 2007 at 4:30 pm 19. Aloysius said …

    “SDI is about putting nuclear weapons in orbit. It always has been.”

    Certainly the Soviets knew it. The offensive potential of SDI scared them. When the US turned up its nose at their diplomatic proposals to de-militarize space, they responded with a programme of their own which was somewhat more honest about its goals. Called Polyus, it was meant to be a nuclear-armed space station theoretically capable of dropping warheads on any point in the US within six minutes with little or no warning (no vulnerable boost phase!).

    http://www.astronautix.com/craft/polyus.htm

    Never made it to space, thank goodness.

  20. on 06 May 2007 at 2:11 pm 20. spyder said …

    I move the WAAGNFNP support SDI for any and all nations who want to demonstrate their dedication to the GNF

    I second the motion, and call for a discussion. There can be no GNF without total proliferation, and the faster we can promote the better off the cockroaches and bacteria shall be.

    As for space, i have no reason to not believe that the US has launched geosynchronous orbitals that both control oceanic launched MIRV’d weapons, and space “dropped” ones as well.

  21. on 06 May 2007 at 11:36 pm 21. The Constructivist said …

    spyder, if we can get our parliamentary process moving quickly enough in re: Party platform and all, we may be able to field a candidate in 2008. Oaktown Girl, care to find out from our Chairman-for-Life how he feels about the “Draft Berube 2008″ crumbs I’ve been leaving at Pandagon every so often?

  22. on 06 May 2007 at 11:50 pm 22. JP Stormcrow said …

    Draft Berube 2008

    I was thinking that we should dig up the corpse of Curtis LeMay and run that.

    We just prop up the cadaver at pep rallies running a continuuous loop of: If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting. Very punchy and not boring for Broder and the pundits. Get Tim Burton to do the campaign commercials.

  23. on 09 May 2007 at 9:20 am 23. josh said …

    Actually cockroaches don’t survive that well, its a bit of an urban legend. Like you said though, some bacteria will be fine.

    Seperate point but it does seem to be this very odd idea many people have that the answer to loads of weapons is more weapons. Presumably the answer to those weapons will be still more weapons.