doug@uccsrg (10/18/83)
-nice and eleminating our (NATO) Atomic forces unilateraly would be folly in view of the willingness of certain non-westren european powers to use excessive force far more often than seems reasonable. In the Canadian tradation I would like to purpose a compromise which neither side will like at all. It could help to foster an atmosphere of trust where none exsists at present. The US of A would destroy or not develop the following systems: Trident II (missiles not subs) MX Purshing II all present land based ICBMs B1 bomber Tactical nukes in Europe Please note that this will eleminate any chance of a first strike, by the US of A on the USSR, being successfull. This would leave the USA with only the B52s and the navies subs. Neither of which could reasonably strike first. In order to 'deter' the Soviets a very large number of cruise missiles, air/ground/sea launched, should be generated. Commercial jets could/should replace the present B52 fleet for economic reasons (747?/767?). Early missile subs converted to carry as many cruise missiles as possible. Any form of ground launcher should be mobile. These cruise missiles should have a longer range than the present version. So called stealth versions are better. Warheads should be limited to 100kt. This should make it clear that a first strike on the NATO group can bring flexible and deadly response from the good guys. This leaves the good guys with a fair number of ICBM carrying subs. These could be used to destroy surface miltary targets or selectively respond to a nuclear threat. It is unlikely that if the number of ICBM carrying subs were kept reasonable(???) these could be used to silence the nuclear forces of the Soviet Union successfully! The good guys also have a large number of quite slow air breathing robot planes which, even if 80% of them were shot down (unlikely after the sub strikes) would davistate eastren Europe (Soviet Asia to). Futher no well defended heavily dug in bunker is really safe from these accurate little planes. Big civil defence bunkers in downtown Moscow do not work either. These things hit back real well. Of course this will require that NATO increase their conventional forces and this is not inexpensive. However neither is the MX missile system much less all the rest. What we would have then; We cannot reasonable strike first. They cannot strike first and survive. They *know* we cannot strike first. They *know* if they strike first - curtains for them. The Soviets need not fire on warning. The USA cannot fire on warning. All land based ground strike targets are gone fron USA. (these cause lots of evil radiation) NO nukes in the hands of front line troops. Peace and harmony throughout the land (I hope) OK FOLKS WOULD THIS WORK?? If not, why not?
shebs@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley Shebs) (10/23/83)
Rely on cruise missiles for a deterrent?
Perhaps I can relate a little of my impressions gained from some time
spend working (at Boeing) on the software for the Air-Launched Cruise
Missile (ALCM).
1. They are not invincible. The original cruise missile theory (from
1972 or thereabouts) was to have many small slow missiles flying low
to the ground, to escape radar detection. Unfortunately, we came up
with the idea of AWACS, among other things, and that meant that flying
low was no longer such a good idea (hence the stealth cruise missiles).
Also, a large collection of portable radar-equipped anti-aircraft batteries
can shoot down the missiles, and the missiles are pre-programmed, so
anyone with access to SAC's library of missions can find out where they
are going to be flying (the missions are top secret, of course, but human
pilots can deviate from a course if attacked - the missiles can't).
Too, the cruise missiles depend on a set of navigation maps (stored
onboard) for accuracy. If a Russian farmer digs a fishpond where a
map is supposed to be, any missiles overflying it have a substantial
chance of getting lost - and once it's disoriented, there's almost
no chance of regaining the correct course (few bomb worries though -
the warhead won't go off anyplace but the target, after a fairly
complicated set of conditions are met (at least that's the theory
(ask Ted Jardine (ssc-vax!tjj) for details))).
2. They are not reliable. The test flights had some rather entertaining
failures - missiles not starting and falling into the sea, running into
hillsides, etc, and some of these were due to the software, which is all
written in assembly language. My particular niche was in some of the
ground planning software development, which tries to determine if a given
mission can actually be flown successfully. For various reasons, this
is all probabilistic, and so one expects that some percentage of the missiles
will crash on the way. The lower you try to fly at, the worse (the ALCM
has less performance than the average Cessna, and can't really climb
over hills without crashing). The software we worked on was awful.
The original authors snuck away without documenting their code, and
it was strictly guesswork as to how things actually worked. There's
nothing quite like writing large documents about code which one does
not understand, and to know that nobody really cares whether the document
is correct or not. Our released software gave rise to over 5000 bug
reports, which works out to one bug for every several lines of Fortran
code. The flight software is mostly debugged now, but it's been worked
on for quite a few years.... but there's no sort of proof that it's
correct, and most of the original authors are long gone. On the other
hand, as far as I know the ground software was only responsible for
one test flight failure - the missile used a marginal navigation map
and got totally lost...
In fact, we told each other that, in a nuclear war, the safest place
in the world was at the North Pole, and the worst was 0 0, somewhere
in Equatorial Africa. Why? Well, none of the missiles have been
tested over the North Pole (for obvious reasons), but for navigation,
it's a singularity. We were sure that all the fancy inertial navgation
systems and their associated computers would divide by 0 or overflow
or something, reset themselves, and fly to 0 0.
There were a lot of reliability rumors, but they were mostly about the
hardware, and I'm not competent to speak of them.
The original article raised some other issues which are more general
in nature, relating to how cruise missiles are to be used. For instance,
If they are to be launched from airplanes (B-52, B-1B, whatever - 747's
are impractical - don't meet the requirements for maneuverability,
range, etc), either the airplanes must be kept continually airborne,
or else sit on runways. If the Russians launch a strike against airbases
from subs, then there's 5-10 minutes (?) to get the planes airborne
and out of range of the blast (that's where they get the term
"scrambling" :-) ). Continually airborne launchers were part of the
"Big Bird" proposal for MX, but it would require many planes to be
aloft at one time, and that they each have a great range.
This kind of thing is just the tip of the iceberg. Cruise missile
accuracies mean that they can be used against silos, but that's a
ground burst, which means fallout all over the world, but they're
so slow that they could only be used in a retributive strike, which
means air bursts over cities ("city-busting", as one old engineer put it),
but then the Russians have reloadable silos, so ground strikes are
necessary anyway, and so on ad nauseam. Much time was spent at work
arguing strategies, and methods, and defenses, and it made me aware
of the enormous complexity of the whole issue - not to mention the
moral angles. There were a surprising number of "fellow travelers"
among the software group, which is perhaps another reason to doubt
the reliability of ALCM...
stan the l.h.
utah-cs!shebs