In order to compensate for severe inferiority in guidance technology for its first generation ICBMs, the Soviets during the 60s and early 70s developed very high yield hydrogen bombs which didn’t need to land close to their targets to accomplish their mission.
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During the 1960’s, the United States chose to halt strategic missile production and deployment.
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Instead, the Soviets took the opportunity to achieve numerical parity but with much larger boosters; and when parity was achieved, showed little inclination to halt weapon development and deployment.
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With two or three times as many warheads on missiles as the U.S. has — all of them of substantially higher yield and comparable targeting accuracy as the U.S. ones — the Soviets will be able to wipe out all U.S. land-based forces (including all 4000 MX aim-points) with well under half of their ICBM order-of-battle.
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Nuclear reactor-powered Soviet naval reconnaissance satellite capability has posed a major threat to U.S. sea-power for most of the past decade. What is little-recognized is that these intensively powered (100 kilowatt level), massive military satellites also provide an ideal platform for rapid, entirely covert deployment of advanced anti-submarine warfare (ASW) systems, exploiting a wide variety of radar, optical, and other non-acoustic technological advances of the last several years. The U.S. has no analogous capabilities — either operational or in serious development.
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The U.S. cannot put a 10kW electric power supply of any kind into orbit until the mid-80s (and only if development begins promptly could we do so then), but the Soviets have had a routinely exercised order-of-magnitude greater capability since the mid-70s.
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There is no credible evidence which suggests that the Soviets would hesitate to use such demonstrated capabilities to wage space-directed nuclear war-at-sea against U.S. military forces, even if the geopolitical situation were substantially short of all-out-war; indeed, all available evidence supports the thesis that the Soviets consider U.S. Navy forces to be ‘pure’ military targets, useful for demonstrations of Soviet strength and resolution in times of crisis without generating the massive civilian casualties which would require a U.S. president to escalate or capitulate.
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Soviet anti-satellite capabilities also have no analog in U.S. capacities. As was widely publicized two years ago, the Soviets have demonstrated a capability to attack (or at least effectively confuse) our strategic warning satellites. These satellites give warning of a ballistic missile attack against the United States by detecting the very strong infrared radiation signals given off by the exhaust plumes of ICBMs rising through the atmosphere from their silos. According to open literature accounts, the Soviets were able to blind them and thus negate their warning capability.
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The Soviets have also repeatedly demonstrated the ability to use ‘killer satellites’ to intercept and destroy essentially any type of satellite in reasonably low Earth orbit.
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In-space attacks are likely as a prelude to war on not only U.S. strategic reconnaissance satellites, but also on command, control, communications, and intelligence satellites which are increasingly vital to the ability of the National Command Authority to direct U.S. forces in the event of hostilities. Unlike the Soviet Union, the U.S. has committed a critically large fraction of its war-waging assets to the space environment. However, we have not taken commensurate action to defend these assets from any but implausibly trivial types and levels of threats — and the Soviets know it.
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When operating in pulsed mode, beam weapons load the surfaces of their targets with destructive amounts of energy on time scales of a millionth of a second or less; the surfaces evaporate with forces far greater than that of a comparable thickness of TNT, usually destroying the structures under them in the process.
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Deployed in high Earth orbit, one such station could potentially burn down all the missiles launched from whatever locations by one side during an all-out nuclear war, and then leisurely burn down all enemy bombers for an encore.
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If such a space laser battle station could defend itself from all types of attack which enemies of its owners could direct against it, its ownership would confer the prize of a planet — just as soon as it was put into orbit.
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On the other hand, pulsed space lasers energized by nuclear weapons exploding nearby — lasers which have been demonstrated by the U.S. in underground tests and in whose development the Soviet Union is widely believed to be several years ahead — may be effectively impossible to countermeasure. They deliver too much energy of too penetrating nature in too short a period of time to defend against by any means known at present.
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These defensive weapons are kept in hardened silos, to be launched as soon as an enemy ICBM attack is detected.
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A dozen such bomb-energized laser systems — each launched by a single booster — could shield their owner’s home territory from enemy attack for the half-hour period necessary for its owner’s ICBMs to be launched at, fly to, and destroy the enemy’s missile and bomber fields.
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Strategic-scale war in the closing sixth of this century is thus likely to conclude with the total and quite bloodless triumph by the nation owning the space laser system(s); the winner’s ICBM fields are part-empty, while the loser’s missiles and bombers are totally destroyed. The loser’s cities are held hostage for the surrender of his submarine force, whose remaining missiles are impotent against the space laser weapons of the winner in any event.
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The large present and near-term Soviet advantage in the ability to place large payloads into a variety of Earth orbits and to generate large amounts of electric power with space nuclear power systems may well be decisive in the on-going race to first deploy the first-generation space beam weapon battle stations.
I honestly had no idea that the Soviets had nuclear reactor-powered naval reconnaissance satellites:
Launched between 1967 and 1988 to monitor NATO and merchant vessels using radar, the satellites were powered by nuclear reactors.
Because a return signal from an ordinary target illuminated by a radar transmitter diminishes as the inverse of the fourth power of the distance, for the surveillance radar to work effectively, US-A satellites had to be placed in low Earth orbit. Had they used large solar panels for power, the orbit would have rapidly decayed due to drag through the upper atmosphere. Further, the satellite would have been useless in the shadow of Earth. Hence the majority of the satellites carried type BES-5 nuclear reactors fueled by uranium-235. Normally the nuclear reactor cores were ejected into high orbit (a so-called “disposal orbit”) at the end of the mission, but there were several failure incidents, some of which resulted in radioactive material re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere.
The US-A programmer was responsible for orbiting a total of 33 nuclear reactors, 31 of them BES-5 types with a capacity of providing about two kilowatts of power for the radar unit. In addition, in 1987 the Soviets launched two larger TOPAZ nuclear reactors (six kilowatts) in Kosmos satellites (Kosmos 1818 and Kosmos 1867) which were each capable of 6 months of operation. The higher-orbiting TOPAZ-containing satellites were the major source of orbital contamination for satellites that sensed gamma-rays for astronomical and security purposes, as radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) do not generate significant gamma radiation as compared with unshielded satellite fission reactors, and all of the BES-5-containing spacecraft orbited too low to cause positron-pollution in the magnetosphere.
The last US-A satellite was launched 14 March 1988.
“Strategic-scale war in the closing sixth of this century is thus likely to conclude with the total and quite bloodless triumph by the nation owning the space laser system(s); the winner’s ICBM fields are part-empty, while the loser’s missiles and bombers are totally destroyed. The loser’s cities are held hostage for the surrender of his submarine force, whose remaining missiles are impotent against the space laser weapons of the winner in any event.”
I’m not so sure that ‘hold cities hostage for the surrender of the submarine force’ gambit would have worked, even against the United States. If they’d tried that, that might have proved to be the Russians’ equivalent of Japan’s “let’s schmuck the US fleet by surprise and then they’ll lose the will to fight” plan. Admittedly, since US national survival of any kind would be on the table, the Russian scheme would be a little better founded. And many Americans at the time probably would have reasonably wanted their president to take that view. But that’s gambling a lot on the willingness of the US to not gamble.
That passage also reminds me of one of the old chestnuts of strategic theory and history, Clausewitz and his concept of Absolute War.
IIRC, since he was writing with the Napoleonic wars in mind, his idea that you had to break the enemy’s ability to wage war quickly and decisively had more to do with the idea of the decisive, calamitous battle that could strip away the military capacity, leadership, and will of an enemy for years, or a generation, in a day or two. Never quite managed in those wars, but when empires like Austria or Prussia could be knocked out for a few years at least by battles that took a day, killed only soldiers, and did no harm to their homelands or populations, much, one could see what Clausewitz was getting at.
Many in the 20th century assumed by this that Clausewitz was a prophet of total war as they learned it, and that had its logic at a time when grinding down the homeland and slaughtering huge swaths of manpower were the only way to achieve the same goal, the elimination of warmaking capacity.
My profs circa the 90s were interested in, while understanding that connection, reminding the students that this was a function of circumstance and conditions, not the only possible conclusion of Clausewitz’s idea. Absolute War was, Clausewitz being who he was and in the time he was, yet another German abstraction capable of being played out multiple ways. The decisive battle he imagined, the total war of industrial Europe, the overblown but in retrospect fascinating “Shock and Awe” concept [whatever else may be said of it as a pre-occupation strategy, it certainly disarmed the Iraqi state, twice...], an EMP attack that knocked out a modern technological state, or, oddly, this variant Pournelle offers.
They all require a certain political decision by the loser not to get ornery, or a loser with a mental framework that just accepts defeat and doesn’t change the game or can’t imagine how to change the game [can the Habsburgs go to the mattresses in 1805 or 1809 with guerrillas? probably not], or a US that doesn’t want to fire the “shot from the grave” as the last round of armageddon. But if you have understood the mindset of the enemy, you get as close to absolute war as possible.
Apropos of nothing, really. But that passage from Pournelle really put the whole issue back in my head, suddenly, as though by shock and awe.
The Soviets did have those RORSAT nuclear-powered anti-submarine radar satellites – one of them was Kosmos-954 which crashed over northern Canada and caused a major diplomatic scandal – and their nuclear reactors did have a power of 100kW, but it was 100kWt , i.e. thermal power. The electric power provided by the reactor was a rather more modest 3kW. The Soviets used thermionic converters – rugged and simple, but very inefficient, not much better than the thermocouples used in the more familiar RTEG (radioisotope thermal-electric generators) that power Voyagers and Pioneers. There are plans for combining satellite-based nuclear reactors with more efficient Stirling engine-based converters, but I haven’t heard that anybody has flown or built one.
“Strategic-scale war…missiles are impotent against the space laser weapons of the winner in any event…”
Not so damn fast. Lasers are not very efficient and photons have little mass. It takes a whopping shit load of photons, laser power, to down missiles. Being so inefficient how the hell are they going to dump the 50% lost heat of a 10 megawatt laser???????? Think of the size of the radiators. Massive. BIG TARGET! Think of what it would cost to launch these massive things and what it would cost to throw a bucket of 10 cent bolts at them to destroy them. Now if you could have a highly efficient laser system, maybe so, but we don’t have that.
Here’s a great article on laser weapons and their limitations. I’m not as skeptical as him about them but he lays out a lot of good facts on them.
http://www.g2mil.com/Laser_Scams.htm
1. Soviets at one time had deployed about 80,000 atomic warheads [mid-1980's]. Most USA ever had was 30,000 in the late 1960′s. Drastically fewer numbers of such weapons now. So significant progress has made in this regard.
2. Fractional Orbital Bombardment System [FOBS] too. No American analog to the Soviet model. American decision makers would have a grand total of five minutes to know a nuclear attack was occurring and take appropriate measures.
3. During the Carter administration it was reported Soviet lasers HAD blinded American early-warning satellites. Carter had warned the Soviets if they did that again it would be considered as an act of WAR!
Sam,
Recall NRO’s donation to NASA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_telescope_donation_to_NASA
Note especially this paragraph: “While NRO considers them to be obsolete, the telescopes are nevertheless new and unused. All CCDs and electronics have been removed, however, and NASA must add them at its own expense. When the telescopes’ specifications were presented to scientists, large portions were censored due to national security. An unnamed space analyst stated that the instruments may be a part of the KH-11 Kennen line of satellites which have been launched since 1976, but which have now been largely superseded by newer telescopes with wider fields of view than the KH-11. The analyst stated, however, that the telescopes have “state-of-the art optics” despite their obsolescence for reconnaissance purposes.”
When considering the technological capabilities of clandestine organizations, in general it’s probably a good idea to extrapolate two or three decades from what you think is state of the art.
There are some exceptions, of course. Robots, AI, and such are probably not much more advanced than what’s visible.