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Why did NIKE have such a short time operational? Did the bomber threat dissipate that quickly?
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Aug 12, 2012 19:47
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davecrazy posted:Why did NIKE have such a short time operational? Did the bomber threat dissipate that quickly? grover fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Aug 12, 2012 |
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Aug 12, 2012 19:56
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davecrazy posted:Why did NIKE have such a short time operational? Did the bomber threat dissipate that quickly?
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Aug 12, 2012 20:04
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grover posted:(Nuclear warheads which would be exploding over US territory, incidently...) I keep hearing this about nuclear anti-ICBM stuff, but how much of a problem would it have really been? My understanding of all this, especially with regards to nuclear anti-bomber missiles, is that the warhead yields are low enough and they are bursting high enough that it's not really going to be that huge an issue for the people on the ground. I mean, yeah, we're not going to pop a couple low-megaton range nukes a few miles over NYC to celebrate New Year's any time soon, but everything I've read or been told about the really nasty effects of nuclear bombing has it being irradiated poo poo on ground level and fallout consisting of soot and small particle debris that get kicked into the lower atmosphere (and which come down when it rains) being the really ugly poo poo you need to worry about. Someone who actually knows what the gently caress about this stuff please correct me.
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Aug 12, 2012 20:05
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Cyrano4747 posted:I keep hearing this about nuclear anti-ICBM stuff, but how much of a problem would it have really been? My understanding of all this, especially with regards to nuclear anti-bomber missiles, is that the warhead yields are low enough and they are bursting high enough that it's not really going to be that huge an issue for the people on the ground. The niche left by the Nike systems was eventually filled by Patriot missiles in the 80s, which ultimately featured technology effective enough to work without nuclear warheads. grover fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Aug 12, 2012 |
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Aug 12, 2012 20:15
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Aug 12, 2012 20:51
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Cyrano4747 posted:I keep hearing this about nuclear anti-ICBM stuff, but how much of a problem would it have really been? My understanding of all this, especially with regards to nuclear anti-bomber missiles, is that the warhead yields are low enough and they are bursting high enough that it's not really going to be that huge an issue for the people on the ground. While it wasn't much of a problem when they were deployed, it seems like the potential EMP effects from all those bombs going off would be pretty significant, especially with the anti-ICBM systems that would be going off in the upper atmosphere/near-space. So...care to explain? That almost looks like the Konigstuhl Army tower in Heidelberg but then again radio towers on top of hills all generally look the same anyways.
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Aug 12, 2012 23:56
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grover posted:Fallout would be minimal, but these were still Nagasaki-sized bombs, and the radiation bursts would have caused a lot of civilian radiation exposure, and potentially a lot of civilian casualties. After all, it wouldn't be one bomb exploding, it would be multiple missiles with multiple warheads tearing into soviet bombers. The US public really didn't like this, and our allies abroad often didn't allow nuclear-armed Nike Hercules into their nations at all. By the point you are launching nuclear-tipped SAMs over your own cities you are firmly into "well, I guess 4 million deaths is a helluva lot better than 140 million" territory. Terrifying Effigies posted:While it wasn't much of a problem when they were deployed, it seems like the potential EMP effects from all those bombs going off would be pretty significant, especially with the anti-ICBM systems that would be going off in the upper atmosphere/near-space. Related to what I said above, by that point EMP is the least of your concerns because anything military related is going to be hardened and everything else is basically irrelevant since cities are getting nuked. Since we're talking nuclear tipped air defense missiles, worth mentioning that the A-135 system is still active around Moscow. iyaayas01 fucked around with this message at 04:29 on Aug 13, 2012 |
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Aug 13, 2012 00:46
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The problem is that in a MAD-level attack it's far easier to put more MIRVs in the air than it is to get ABMs up to hit them. And MIRVs were pretty quickly equipped with radiation hardening, stealth, decoys, evasive maneuvering etc as well. So not only are you going to need nuclear warheads on your ABMs, but you need increasingly fuckoff huge nuclear warheads (detonated over your own land) to actually guarantee effective kill rates - the Spartans packed 5MT warheads. And the ABM sites were pretty much guaranteed to get hammered in a first strike badly enough to ensure they were wiped out anyway. For instance: That's 115 megatons allocated just to wipe out anti-missile defense systems before untold horror rained down on softer targets, and if you're launching 130 warheads just to ensure the 131st gets to target, you're not going to stop there. The ABM system, by reducing the odds of a 'limited' strike of getting through, encourages immediate full commitment and world-ending mutually assured destruction. Since this was clearly a losing battle, ABM systems were offered up for sacrifice in the SALT talks and the ABM Treaty of '72 basically banned them, which is part of why they vanished so quickly.
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Aug 13, 2012 01:57
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iyaayas01 posted:By the point you are launching nuclear-tipped SAMs over your own cities you are firmly into "well, I guess 4 million deaths is a helluva lot better than 140 million" territory. I've been trying to work up an effortpost about the mentality of the guys who came up with some of these Cold War plans and who had their fingers on the launch buttons; to understand it, you have to look at what it took, or at least what most thought it took, to fight and end WWII. Whoever linked http://nuclearsecrecy.com/blog/ , I think I said it before, but thanks so much, this site is brilliant. Quite a few of the articles are about the philosophy and mentality behind the development and use of the A- and H-bombs, and for the 67th anniversary of the Japan bombings the guy has been posting contemporary articles on the bombings. One thing that I hadn't really known about was that Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't attacked in isolation - they were only two of sixty-nine Japanese cities that the US firebombed before wars end. Most of us know of Tokyo (and Dresden and Hamburg) but it never really hit me to what extent we had abandoned the ruse of hitting military targets and were focusing openly on terrorizing enemy populaces into surrender, or wiping them out trying. The Tokyo attack in particular is notorious for killing far more people than either A-bomb. But then we got the bomb and, well, just look at this image:  Now obviously we didn't have that many bombs for decades, but that's not the point - the image demonstrates a belief, expressed seriously in mainstream news, that it would be acceptable in the interests of peace to commit complete purge of the Japanese race from the face of the earth. The A-bomb didn't make this idea spring forth fully formed, it simply suggested an implementation that would take less time and fewer bomber sorties. Despite the larger domestic German population, it appears that the public attitude taken towards wiping out the Krauts in the absence of unconditional surrender was no less genocidal, and only complicated by their stubborn construction of sturdy concrete and cinderblock buildings instead of easily incinerated paper ones. From the Wikipedia page on the Dresden bombing, we get this quote from British Air Chief Marshall Harris: quote:I ... assume that the view under consideration is something like this: no doubt in the past we were justified in attacking German cities. But to do so was always repugnant and now that the Germans are beaten anyway we can properly abstain from proceeding with these attacks. This is a doctrine to which I could never subscribe. Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier. The feeling, such as there is, over Dresden, could be easily explained by any psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepherdesses. Actually Dresden was a mass of munitions works, an intact government centre, and a key transportation point to the East. It is now none of these things. It can seem absurd and horrible to the modern American, who recoils in shock and disgust at the 8,000 US dead of the Iraq and Afghan wars over more than a decade, but the veterans of WWII saw many times these losses in single beach landings. Efforts to limit the scope of the conflict (WWII, WWI or many preceding wars) had inevitably only extended the suffering. If a nation truly meant to wage aggressive war, then that nation was irredeemably evil, and the lives of its people were forfeit. The means of taking those lives then became irrelevant, be it the tip of a GI's bayonet, an antipersonnel artillery shell, an incendiary stick from a bomber's bay, or fusion-pumped holocaust at the tip of a hypersonic intercontinental rocket. The Germans suffered casualties in WWII of over 10% of their total population; the Soviets, 14%, the UK a fairly sparing 1%. Even the US lost more than 3 people for every 1000 men, women , and children in the country, and the war never seriously touched the American mainland. In this context, if total world war inevitably meant casualties in the 7-8 digit range anyway, then inflicting those casualties and ending the fighting in hours instead of years was a blessing to the living.
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Aug 13, 2012 03:14
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Snowdens Secret posted:... In this context, if total world war inevitably meant casualties in the 7-8 digit range anyway, then inflicting those casualties and ending the fighting in hours instead of years was a blessing to the living. quote:"What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?" The recruiting poster deserves ridicule and contempt, of course, but here its question is embarrassingly relevant, and the problem is one that touches on the dirty little secret of social class in America. Arthur T. Hadley said recently that those for whom the use of the A-bomb was "wrong" seem to be (Page 15) implying "that it would have been better to allow thousands on thousands of American and Japanese infantrymen to die in honest hand-to-hand combat on the beaches than to drop those two bombs." People holding such views, he notes, "do not come from the ranks of society that produce infantrymen or pilots."
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Aug 13, 2012 03:37
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HAWK also contributed greatly to the decline of Nike/Herc. A lot of guys started in Nike, switched to Herc, then to HAWK, then ultimately to Patriot.
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Aug 13, 2012 04:05
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Remulak posted:The great Paul Fussell's Thank God for the Atomic Bomb: Similarly: Winston Churchill posted:There are voices which assert that the bomb should never have been used at all. I cannot associate myself with such ideas. Six years of total war have convinced most people that had the Germans or the Japanese discovered this new weapon, they would have used it upon us to our complete destruction with the utmost alacrity. I am surprised that very worthy people, but people who in most cases had no intention of proceeding to the Japanese front themselves, should adopt the position that rather than throw this bomb, we should have sacrificed a million American, and a quarter of a million British lives in the desperate battles and massacres of an invasion of Japan.
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Aug 13, 2012 04:07
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Terrifying Effigies posted:While it wasn't much of a problem when they were deployed, it seems like the potential EMP effects from all those bombs going off would be pretty significant, especially with the anti-ICBM systems that would be going off in the upper atmosphere/near-space. Not much to explain that I haven't in my previous posts. This site was an auxiliary Gap Filler site (AN/FPS-14) networked to the Mt. Hebo AFS, which was in turn networked to the SAGE computers in Camp Adair, Oregon. Most of the remote radar facilities in my area have been long-since demolished, so it was nice to see something standing from that era, even if it has been completely repurposed for commercial/civil use.
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Aug 13, 2012 06:02
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The Nike belt in Germany did of course survive well into the eighties, with a nuclear role to boot.
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Aug 13, 2012 12:53
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To add to the awesomeness of Kittinger, in addition to being the bad rear end that skydived from space he was also the original pilot of the Vomit Comet. There was a pretty good aside about it in Packing For Mars with him talking about cats and other animals floating into the cockpit during the 0g simulation portion.
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Aug 23, 2012 06:31
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Heads up for Brits; BBC Four have just shown the first of a two part documentary about the British aviation industry in the 50s and 60s. Jet! When Britain Ruled the Skies. Pablo Bluth fucked around with this message at 15:51 on Aug 23, 2012 |
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Aug 23, 2012 15:48
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danquixotic posted:I am a ridiculously big fan of this thread, and all who post within, and I thought I could contribute in a few areas through tales of my Pop.
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Aug 23, 2012 16:33
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Pablo Bluth posted:Heads up for Brits; BBC Four have just shown the first of a two part documentary about the British aviation industry in the 50s and 60s. UK only mate!
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Aug 23, 2012 18:32
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Koesj posted:UK only mate! "Heads up for Brits"
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Aug 23, 2012 18:55
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...and for everyone else, there's  .
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Aug 23, 2012 19:29
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Snowdens Secret posted:(emphasis mine, and remember, he's talking civilians) It's a well noted fact that Bomber Harris did not give two fucks. LeMay at least really was concerned about effectiveness; Harris was just bloodymindedly trying to prove the 'psychological' thesis of strategic bombing. Also I have to echo your praise of the nuclear secrecy blog. One article that caught my eye was on the Davy Crockett tiny bomb. You should just go over there and read the whole thing, but in addition to being able to be fired by artillery, the Crockett bomb was also man deployable, and had a egg-timer like device on the back to set the time delay after launch. An M113 could carry up to twelve at a time, and the yield was a tenth of a kiloton.  
Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Aug 23, 2012 |
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Aug 23, 2012 22:14
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cold-war.jpg
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Aug 23, 2012 23:01
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Snowdens Secret posted:Whoever linked http://nuclearsecrecy.com/blog/ Whoever linked it before, thanks for posting it again. This site is great, if just for http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/. Nothing like seeing what various weapons would do to my hometown! The (designed) Tsar Bomba is...  
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Aug 24, 2012 04:13
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Yes, nuke that fake Vancouver 
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Aug 24, 2012 04:45
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I approve of the previous two posts.
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Aug 24, 2012 04:58
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Nebakenezzer posted:It's a well noted fact that Bomber Harris did not give two fucks. LeMay at least really was concerned about effectiveness; Harris was just bloodymindedly trying to prove the 'psychological' thesis of strategic bombing. I did not know about the timer. I'd seen an unlabeled pic before, but I thought it was a early type of permissive action link. It was also deployed on the back of a Jeep, launched from a recoilless rifle. (!) Apparently the weapon was pulled from Army deployment sometime after it was realized that, in the Army hierarchy, the man in charge of a jeep was usually a sergeant, and everywhere else officers were in control of the nukes. After, y'know, hundreds of millions, maybe billions, were spent on development and deployment.
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Aug 24, 2012 05:30
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Tenth of a kiloton = 100000 kg of explosives? Would that really take out the portable launcher as claimed? Pimpmust fucked around with this message at 05:58 on Aug 24, 2012 |
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Aug 24, 2012 05:45
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Pimpmust posted:Tenth of a kiloton = 100000 kg of explosives? Well, the listed max range for the "light" version is 2km. So, if there's no headwind, you're talking about being a bit more than a mile from a 100-ton bomb. That's survivable, but not a good time. The radiation would probably be a bigger issue. Most of the small nukes were designed to kill tanks with radiation; armored vehicles are pretty good at surviving blasts, but gamma and neutron radiation don't give no fucks 'bout armor. If it's putting out enough radiation to incapacitate or outright kill the Soviet tankers directly under the blast, your future children* aren't going to be happy about you chilling just a mile away. Particularly if you're lighting off half a dozen of those things. If you set that timer to a second or two, it's "goodbye, cruel wor-" time. But, hey, most nukes let you do unsafe things with them. I believe there's at least one nuclear bomb in the US arsenal that can be delivered at a minimum altitude of 50 feet. *in the admittedly unlikely scenario that anyone tasked with defending the West German front lines in a cold-war-goes-hot WW3 scenario would have lived to be a parent
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Aug 24, 2012 08:18
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Pimpmust posted:Tenth of a kiloton = 100000 kg of explosives? I think I made a mistake. The blog says the yield was 0.01-0.02 of a kiloton, 10 to 20 tons of TNT. Is that a hundredth of a kiloton? Still not too bad, considering its size.
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Aug 24, 2012 14:52
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Arrath posted:Whoever linked it before, thanks for posting it again. This site is great, if just for http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/. Nothing like seeing what various weapons would do to my hometown! Edit: holy crap, the damage rings for Castle Bravo overlaid on DC looks more like a map of the DC commuting area... grover fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Aug 24, 2012 |
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Aug 24, 2012 15:55
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mikerock posted:I approve of the previous two posts. Just jealous there was a Vancouver before yours.
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Aug 24, 2012 17:22
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Nebakenezzer posted:I think I made a mistake. The blog says the yield was 0.01-0.02 of a kiloton, 10 to 20 tons of TNT. Is that a hundredth of a kiloton? I hosed up the numbers too, but 1/10th of a kiloton should be 1 000 (kilo) 000 (ton) kg /10 = 100 000 kg While 0.01 of a kiloton should be 10 000 kg, or 10 tons of TNT (which is like 10xMK84 or FAB 1000 bombs).
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Aug 24, 2012 18:37
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Pimpmust posted:I hosed up the numbers too, but 1/10th of a kiloton should be No massive tampers, ultra-light construction, seems like an early way to be an enhanced radiation nuclear explosive rather than something using it completely as a blast-heat warhead.
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Aug 24, 2012 20:32
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NosmoKing posted:No massive tampers, ultra-light construction, seems like an early way to be an enhanced radiation nuclear explosive rather than something using it completely as a blast-heat warhead. In a sense. At that small a yield the lethal radius from radiation is considerably larger than the lethal radius due to the blast. At 20-ton yield, the radiation will fry you beyond 300 meters, but the thermal pulse and blast aren't lethal nearly as far out. At 10-ton yield, the difference is even greater.
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Aug 24, 2012 21:47
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US also fielded a number of W48 nuclear 155mm artillery shells which has a yield of about 72 tons (vs 10-20 for Davy Crockett). The problem with the nuclear artillery shells was their expense; it took about 3x more plutonium to squeeze it into a 6" diameter artillery shell than a more optimal design like was used in Davy Crockett. About 1000 were built. It also stayed in service far longer, up until the early 90s. The W33 8" artillery shell had a yield of as much as 40kt. US had 2000 of them up until the early 90s. 40kt with a max range of maybe 10 miles meant these were pretty damned dangerous to the troops firing them, too.  
grover fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Aug 24, 2012 |
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Aug 24, 2012 22:11
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How does a variable-yield nuclear warhead work? That is, what is going on inside to keep the warhead from detonating at full power?
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Aug 25, 2012 15:42
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Oxford Comma posted:How does a variable-yield nuclear warhead work? That is, what is going on inside to keep the warhead from detonating at full power? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dial-a-yield
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Aug 25, 2012 16:35
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I was very disappointed to see Carey Sublette's Nuclear FAQ chapter on variable yield designs was blank, as his writeups on other nuclear weapons areas is simply fascinating. Plenty more info on the physics of nuclear weapons, though: http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html
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Aug 25, 2012 16:50
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Neil Armstrong is dead.
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Aug 25, 2012 20:43
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