eric@ucbvax.UUCP (10/17/83)
>From @MIT-MC:JLarson.PA@PARC-MAXC.ARPA Mon Oct 17 03:30:28 1983
Arms-Discussion Digest Volume 1 : Issue 60
Today's Topics:
Gromyko's Plane
Request for info
Anti-submarine warfare
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Date: 12 October 1983 04:17 EDT
From: James A. Cox <APPLE @ MIT-MC>
Subject: Gromyko's Plane
To: velu%umcp-cs @ UDEL-RELAY
[Velu Sinha] ... the US is acting very much out of place by
refusing to let Gromyko enter the United States in peace (ie in a
civilian airliner, at a civilian airport) to attend UN
meetings.
You've got your facts wrong. Governor Cuomo's letter to the New York
Times of last Sunday explained what happened. There has been a ban on
Aeroflot flights to the US since the invasion of Afghanistan. The
State Department asked New York and New Jersey to make an exception in
this case to allow Gromyko to come to the UN meeting. They declined.
Gromyko could still have come via another country's civilian airline,
as many other Soviet diplomats did. Or, the United States offered to
let his Aeroflot plane land at a military field. He chose neither,
which made Cuomo at least think that he decided not to come because he
didn't want to hear the inevitable criticism of his country's actions
in shooting down the airliner, rather than because of anything New
York or New Jersey did.
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Date: 11-Oct-83 00:24 PDT
From: William Daul - Tymshare Inc. Cupertino CA <WBD.TYM@OFFICE-2>
Subject: Re: spending spree
If anyone has further information on the DoD spending spree, I would love to
hear it? Does anyone know what they spent $4.2 Billion dollars on? Thanks,
--Bi<<
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Date: 15 Oct 83 22:42 PDT
From: CAULKINS%USC-ECL@MINET-NAP-EM.ARPA
Subject: Anti-submarine warfare
In the Fall 1983 issue of International Security (Vol 8, No 2, PP52 -
67) Richard Garwin has an article titled "Will Strategic Submarines Be
Vulnerable ?".
Garwin divides potential threats to strategic submarines (SSBN) into
three categories:
1) Those in which deployed SSBNs are kept within easy reach of an
attack weapon; this is known as "trailing".
2) Those in which the attacker can locate the SSBN accurately enough
so that one or more weapons (e.g., aircraft) can be directed to a
relatively small area to find the SSBN and attack it; this is known as
"tracking".
3) Those in which the entire SSBN deployment area must be searched at
the beginning of hostilities, and submarines destroyed only as they
were detected, localized, and attacked; this is known as "open ocean
search".
Garwin gives some numbers for SSBN operating areas as a function of
SLBM range (Moscow as the target): 2,800 km - 5.5 million km^2; 4,600
km - 19 million km^2; 7,400 km - 62 million km^2; 11,000 km - 180
million km^2.
He states that a homing torpedo has a range of 1 km or more, and a
rocket-propelled nuclear warhead of the SUBROC type 20 km or more. A
number of trailing countermeasures are suggested: 'delousing
facilities' through which the trailed SSBN could pass in which the
trailing submarines could be detected and attacked; areas of
artificially high acoustic noise to break sonar contact; ejection of
explosive charges by the trailed SSBN to destroy the trailers.
Tracking systems have a 'time-late' problem; even with perfect target
location, SSBNs can move significant distances during the propagation
time required by acoustic systems. Sound propagates at a speed of 1.5
km/second in the ocean; at a range of 5,000 km an 18 km/hr SSBN could
be anywhere in an area of 4,400 km^2. A 1-megaton warhead descending
to optimum depth in the ocean would have a kill radius of about 5.6 km
against a submarine at 100-meter depth. Using 30 minutes for the
flight time of the missile leads to the requirement to barrage some
2,300 km^2, which would require 23 single megaton warheads to destroy
a single undecoyed SSBN detected at 5,000 km range with perfect
accuracy.
An attack on SSBNs with nuclear weapons would spoil the ocean basin
for long-range acoustic detection for many hours because of the
intense sound produced by nuclear explosions and the subsequent
multiple reflections from the ocean boundaries. Even noisy submarines
radiate total acoustic noise of 0.1 watt; quiet submarines in the
range of 0.01 watt or less. It would be a trivial matter to provide a
long-endurance noisemaker which could transmit a recorded submarine
signature for a period of hours or days. The provision of hundreds or
thousands of such devices could well eliminate any SSBN detection at
all.
Blue-green laser ASW would involve the use of satellites or aircraft
on which the lasers would be mounted. These would be used to scan the
ocean surface (penetrating to a depth of 100 meters or so) and detect
disturbances in the received signals. Whether satellites or aircraft
were used, clouds would totally vitiate any capability to detect
submarines. Detailed analysis, independent of progress in laser
technology, shows there is no possibility of strategically significant
blue-green laser ASW because even the optimum laser color does not
penetrate (in a round-trip) to the comfortable operating depth of
existing submarines.
Against passive acoustic ASW, the technologies currently known for
reducing radiated noise, for raising the ocean noise level in the
region of submarine operations, and the provision of decoys to
simulate submarine noise would seem to have the advantage over
prospective developments in sensor technology and systems. Jamming
and decoys seem also to be considerably cheaper and more rapidly
dployable than vast arrays of sensors. Dragging the ocean botoom to
cut long-range communication by cable or fiberoptics ia an old art.
Among the strategic offensive forces thus far discussed [land-based
missiles, air-breathing weapons, strategic submarines], a fleet of
strategic submarines is our greatest assurance of continued
invulnerability.
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[End of ARMS-D Digest]