ARMS-D-Request@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU (Moderator) (02/22/86)
Arms-Discussion Digest Saturday, February 22, 1986 11:13AM
Volume 6, Issue 50
Today's Topics:
Do U.S. ICBM's use the same kind of seals as the Shuttle SRB's?
ICBM vs Shuttle solid rocket comparison
Re: Advanced Light Source & SDI
What happened when three H-bombs hit the ground in 1966
[MT354TMW%YALEVMX.BITNET: forwarded]
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Date: Fri, 21 Feb 86 00:29:35 EST
From: Herb Lin <LIN@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Subject: Do U.S. ICBM's use the same kind of seals as the Shuttle SRB's?
From: jon at uw-june.arpa (Jon Jacky)
I thought that the Shuttle SRB's were similar to the boosters for most of
the ICBM's in the U.S. strategic arsenal - the Minuteman, ..and soon,
MX .. Is there potential for the same kind of failure? Is it
significant that ICBM's are usually tested at Vandenberg in southern
California, while many ICBM's are stored in silos in North Dakota and
Wyoming,
where it is often much colder?
In the ground, you must remember that temperatures stabilize more as
you go deeper; thus, the temperature is essentially a time-independent
constant several feet into the ground.
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Date: Fri, 21 Feb 86 08:01 PST
From: Schuster.pasa@Xerox.COM
Subject: ICBM vs Shuttle solid rocket comparison
This is in response to Jon Jacky's recent request for information on how
our strategic arsenal missiles with solid rocket motors are designed
vis-a-vis the space shuttle's SRB.
From what I know, our military missiles' rocket motors are all built in
one piece, thus no seals are needed.
In fact the former head of Aerojet's rocket division which builds many
of our strategic missile motors, has been in the news recently and on
local talk shows here in California. He states that when Aerojet,
Lockheed and two other firms (whose names escape me) originally bid on
the shuttle's SRBs with designs employing one-piece construction, they
were all turned down in favor of Morton Thiokol for cost considerations.
This was despite the acknowledgement at the time by the proposal review
team that the one-piece construction method was more reliable.
The Aerojet man was quoted as saying that the Defense Dept. wouldn't let
him build strategic missiles that way (in sections), even if he had
wanted to.
As you may also know, it might not have been the cold weather alone that
was the culprit in chilling the seals. There is also a theory that a
small leak in one of the liquid fuel tanks could have existed and the
resulting escaped supercooled gases might have bathed the nearby SRB and
chilled the seals even more. This seems to be the only way to explain
why there was such a difference in the temperatures recorded between the
two SRBs 7 vs. 28 degrees F. (other then an error in measurement,
which had been initially assumed).
~Norm Schuster
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Date: Sat, 22 Feb 86 06:46:38 EST
From: ihnp4!utzoo!henry@seismo.CSS.GOV
Subject: Re: Advanced Light Source & SDI
"michael%ucbiris at BERKELEY.EDU (Tom Slone [(415)486-5954])" writes:
> ...Reagan's latest budget has on it $100 million for an Advanced Light
> Source (ALS) machine at Lawrence-Berkeley Labs...
> ...There have been many lay-offs here over the past few years and it
> seems peculiar to me for the President to be asking specifically for this
> apparently non-military equipment, especially when X-ray lasers are part
> of SDI. Is there a connection between the ALS and SDI's X-ray lasers?
As I recall it, the ALS is a synchrotron light source. There is no real
resemblance between this and an X-ray laser; in particular, synchrotron
sources are not lasers and do not produce coherent beams. They are similar
to X-ray lasers in the sense that spotlights are similar to visible lasers,
i.e. they both produce light.
Despite media images, Reagan does not think about SDI morning, noon, and
night. The most probable reason for the ALS funding, ignoring political
details of timing and location, is that synchrotron X-ray sources are the
latest hot new research-tool fad. Various people have been beating the
drum for them on grounds of keeping up with the Joneses in some important
areas of research.
> More specifically, will ALS further the development of SDI?
Only in the sense that one might learn something about X-ray handling
that would be relevant. This seems unlikely, given that the machinery
is so dissimilar. I would guess that the most likely SDI-relevant results
from ALS would be very indirect things like better microcircuits coming
out of ALS-based research. If you want to do something with no possible
application to military work in general, you will have to go become a
sculptor. *All* technology has military uses.
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry
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From: ucdavis!lll-crg!ihnp4!ihuxl!dcn@ucbvax.berkeley.edu
Date: Fri Feb 21 09:14:39 1986
Subject: What happened when three H-bombs hit the ground in 1966
Village radiates bomb fear
Palomares, Spain
Two decades after a bizzare accident in which three American
nuclear bombs fell - but failed to explode - on this Mediterranean hamlet,
the worried villagers of Palomares still fear they are being kept in the
dark. The sleepy backwater entered the 20th century with a jolt when a U.S.
Air Force bomber and a refueling plane were involved in an aerial
collision, dropping three hyrogen bombs on the village. A fourth bomb
fell into the sea.
Spain's Nuclear Energy Board recently gave the villagers a clean
bill of health. But after waiting nearly 20 years, the people of Palomares
are suspicious of official findings and are pressing for an independent
inquiry.
[...]
The bombs' safety devices prevented an explosion which could have
obliterated most of southern Spain, but the impact of the collision caused
a shower of radioactive plutonium and uranium to fall over the village,
125 miles south of Alicante. The bewildered villagers were not informed for
three days that the bombs were nuclear weapons. "I was out in the fields
when we heard a thunderous explosion," recalls Antonio Gonzalez, now a
white-haired, stooping village elder. "We looked up ... and saw black
and red fire and molten metal falling on us."
"We thought the world was coming to an end," recalls Flores, who
was a girl of 16 at the time. "One of the bombs made a huge crater in
our back yard. We played with the debris until they told us it was
dangerous," she says.
Despite the huge clean-up operation undertaken by the U.S. Air
Force - burning crops, killing animals and removing 2,000 tons of topsoil -
the villagers were told by American and Spanish doctors that they were
in no danger from plutonium poisoning. "We were told to burn our clothes
and take showers," Isabel Portillo remembers. "I scrubbed my children,
but I couldn't afford to burn our clothes."
Dr. Eduardo Farre, a senior researcher at the Scientific Institute
in Barcelona and a member of Palomares' independent medical commission,
fiercely contests the board's findings. "Plutonium is one of the most
toxic substances known to man," Farre said that, once plutonium comes
into contact with the air, it forms a compound with oxygen which is
deposited in the lungs, bones and liver when inhaled. He said cancer
was the most common consequence of plutonium poisoning but could take
15 to 30 years to develop.
Farre said the U.S. Air Force had conducted its own research
and financed the Nuclear Energy Board's work, but the results were
classified as military secrets.
Copied without permission from the Chicago Tribune, Friday, December 6, 1985.
Dave Newkirk, ihnp4!ihuxl!dcn
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Date: Saturday, 22 February 1986 01:21-EST
From: timothy m. wright <MT354TMW%YALEVMX.BITNET at WISCVM.WISC.EDU>
To: <ARMS-D-REQUEST at MIT-MC.ARPA>
1.) re: sound political thought from...Boskone.
One major trouble with Bova's scenario is that it assumes that ICBM
platforms are feasible. I won't argue with the idea that by 2086 good enough
software technology will be available for such a system. Unfortunately for
Bova, other vehicles than ICBMs are used for delivering nuclear warheads. Any
sort of depressed-trajectory missile (e.g., Pershing II, Trident D-5,
Midgetman, Cruise) will probably not leave the atmosphere, thus making
directed energy technology wasteful at best. In addition, reduced boost-phase
missiles will give any system less time. Then there are the problems of ASATs,
gravity bombs, nuclear artillery and land mines, and the chance of a
suitcase-style bomb. These weapons will compromise any space-based system.
2.) re: Pu/shuttle.
I read in the latest issue of The Nation that one of the shuttle's
planned missions included the Galileo-Jupiter probe, which would have had on
board about 46 pounds of Plutonium. A Challenger-type explosion would have
either vaporized or finely distributed the stuff all over the greater Cape
Canaveral area. I read somewhere a long time ago that Pu is most dangerous in
vaporized form because the lungs absorb it very efficiently and then pass it
on to the bloodstream.
3.) re: SRB seals and ICBMs
Even if all the O-rings on every solid-fuel missile we had were found to
be defective, it would matter little to deterrence. We have only 2118 warheads
on ICBMs (550*3 Minuteman III, 450*1 Minuteman II, 18*1 Titan II), but many
more on Poseidon and Trident subs. The O-rings on the subs would always be
above freezing, and thus probably insusceptible to loss of resiliancy. I would
suspect also that ICBM silos are kept heated to avoid the effects of cold on
electronic systems, but I have no facts to base this on.
--tim
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End of Arms-Discussion Digest
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