Under the title ‘Physicists raise questions on EMR capabilities’ Janes, (a subscription only publisher) reports:
Two US physicists have claimed that the European Mid-course Radar (EMR), due to be installed in the Czech Republic in a planned expansion of the US ballistic missile defence system, is substantially underpowered, and will form part of “a defence system that is unable to provide any discrimination services against missiles launched from Iran to the eastern half of the continental United States”. George Lewis, associate director of the Peace Studies Program at Cornell University, and Theodore Postol, professor of science, technology, and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are both opponents of US missile defence plans.
Anyone who has followed military space systems should be quite familiar with the consistently negative and consistently incorrect claims of Dr. Postel. If one were to believe his writings in Scientific American and other publications in the 1980’s we should never have tried to build anti-missile systems because they are impossible.
One must wonder if Dr Postel is sullying the good name of Physics in defense of his political preference for a global OK Corral gunfight, a world seemingly frozen in a timeless instant before the first gunfighter makes a false move. With only two gunfighters that standoff might well last a very long time and thankfully did. With more players the chance of a miscalculation ending in a free for all grows exponentially.
Thankfully, the good doctor was wrong in his eighties predictions about what would be possible now, so we are rapidly moving away from his MAD dream world.
The first decades of the age of nuclear weapons were an historical anomaly, Our newly operational systems will mature rapidly over the next two decades and in so doing will re-instate the natural balance between offense and defense.
I like the OK Corral analogy Dale. I suspect this study is designed to be referenced as part of the ‘growing body of evidence’ by ‘world renowned scientists’ in a ‘prestigious journal’ that ‘refutes the viability’ of missile defence thereby countering all the successful tests that the US is carrying out.
Though personally I reckon that when the Iranians launch there first strike against the eastern continental United States, the delivery system will be container ships rather than missiles. Those will be saved for Tel Aviv and Baghdad.
Slightly Off Topic, but I thought ‘Studies’ departments were set up to criticise the subjects they study. For instance Science Studies sets out to show that Science is part of the patriarchal hegemony set up by dead white males to oppress the ‘other’ and History Studies sets out to show that History is part of the patriarchal hegemony set up by dead white males to oppress the ‘other’
Is Peace Studies the exception to this rule, or is it just that they didn’t want to call it War Studies?
No, it’s no exception. The object of Peace Studies is to prove that all wars are caused by Western Imperialist Hegenomic Aggression, kind of thing.
Nuclear weapons the size of artillery shells are a fact of reality so any missile defence system is already obsolete – unless you can seal the borders to smugglers – the only protection against nuclear terrorism is the elimination of the states that sponsor terrorism.
First of all let me correct a very basic mistake that many people make when discussing warfare. Weapon systems are not one to one. A battlefield does not consist of fighter planes vs fighter planes, ICBM’s versus strategic missile defense, short range missiles vs Patriot batteries, machine gunners vs machine gunners, etc. A battlefield is an interlocking set of offensive and defensive capabilities. A hole in any one of them will be exploited by the enemy. Thus talking about ICBM defense being obsolete ‘isn’t even wrong’ as one physicist stated about a theory.
A battlespace that includes nuclear weapons in the hands of the enemy requires a set of interlocking defensive methods that cover the full gamut of possibilities available to the opponent. From the opponents view, the various techniques might be used togother – feint on one and while we are engaged looking that way, drive home the attack by another method.
Now as to the shell sized nukes. Yes, they have been built. But they are not something we are going to face any time soon unless things get way out of hand in our relations to Russia… which I do not believe is going to happen. Small nukes are really, really hard to do. Relatively bulky fission only weapons on the other hand, are what we will probably see in the short term
I am aware that a couple small nukes may have ended up in Iran from Russia nearly 20 years ago. If they did, they are probably end of life unless someone knows how to service them.
Dale, is there a lower limit on how small you can make a nuclear explosion- critical mass and all that? Or can you get around that by compressing smaller amounts?
Critical mass is the weight usually talked about. That is the minimum mass assuming a symmetric sphere of material. What actually matters is the neutron cross section; whatever mass or shape the fissionables are in must be such that a neutron will on average cause the release of more than one other neutron before it escapes from the volume of the fissionable mass.
This lower limit can be finessed if you can supply some other means of injecting lots of neutrons by some other means or somehow reflecting neutrons back into the volume. That is the route to the subcritical mini-nuke, the proverbial and probably nonexistent nuclear hand grenade. I do not know if anyone has managed it and I seriously doubt anyone who really knew would talk about it.
I can pretty much guarantee this will not be done by any country without a very large nuclear physics community and billions of dollars or whatever burning holes in their State Treasury vaults.
An Iranian nuke does not have to be small and sufficiently robust to be fired from a howitzer – it only needs to be small enough to be easily smuggled.
The notion that the US can or should build a defence system that is able “to provide any discrimination services against missiles launched from Iran to the eastern half of the continental United States” is risible.
Building the defense against ICBM’s is indeed the easiest part of the defense. Defending against short range ship board missiles and smuggled weapons are other offensive modes available to the enemy that will be difficult to deal with from a defensive standpoint.
If we did know there was about to be an attack and we knew where and whom was going to carry it out, then offensive means would be part of the interlocking defensive techniques. We are moving into an era where orbital and suborbital capabilities will be ubiquitous and by the end of the century as common as air operations are today. Nuclear weapons technology is now over six decades old and at some point there will be methods of building nukes that are both common industrial technology and nearly impossible to monitor.
Defense against missiles is going to be as necessary in the world that is coming to be as the ability to stop bomb laden aircraft has been for the last century.
Get used to it. It’s coming.
John, the only thing “risible” in this thread is your assumption that in order to be worthwhile a defense system has to be perfect, and provide a complete defense against any conceivable method of attack. What arrant nonsense. ICBM’s are a threat which must be defended against now that we have the technology to do so. Ship-based and smuggled nuclear weapons are different threats which will require different defenses. The two are not mutually exclusive; they are complementary.
Dale, I really appreciate the technological expertise you bring to this site. Thank you.
The notion that we should somehow to come terms with an Iranian theocracy armed with nuclear weapons is risible in the extreme.
If we are to take Postel and Lewis at their word – then we should attack Iran at once, using atomic weapons to destroy their deep underground bases if need be.
For that is the logical consequence of holding that building defences against Iranian nuclear missiles is not practical.
Oddly enough I do not think that either Dr Postel or Dr Lewis would suppor the logical policy consequence of their own position.
As for “deterrence” what worked with Marxist athiests is unlikely to work with people (not just the President of Iran, but also the Supreme Leader and the Council of Guardians) who believe it is their religous duty to attack Israel (and other places) with nuclear weapons – in order for the 13th (or hidden) Iman to come out into the open on his white horse and rule the world.
The arguments advanced against developing a ballistic missile defense miss the point, for the most part.
Ballistic missile defense is going to be a reality, sooner or later. The United States will work at it until there is a viable system capable of mounting a defense for air bases, formations in the field, and fleets at sea. The U.S. will not stand by and allow a threat to develop which will put our forces in the field at risk–it would be an intolerable state of affairs.
Once we have a defensive system which has a reasonable chance of providing our troops protection from incoming warheads, so will our allies (at least our allies had damned well better get it, also–that’s a job for American voters). Once American and Allied forces have a fighting chance to defend themselves from incoming warheads, then so will American and Allied cities.
BMD is on the way, despite the fondest hopes and best efforts of the Deeper Enemy.
Paul,
Lewis does not advocate nukes, see Jihad Watch: ‘To answer another persistent point, we do not, in my opinion, need nuclear weapons in the Middle East (although I am not a military tactician). But we do need to demonstrate the will to remove such a government because it is a threat, without apologizing every time a civilian is hurt. This demonstration would sweep across borders, to be seen by every government in the world, thus transcending the stateless nature of Islam, and eliminating any equality between supporting us and the Islamists.’
Ian B, to answer your question, the lower limit on a nuclear weapon’s yield is for all practical purposes in the tens of tons TNT equivalent. It’s virtually impossible to make a reliably functioning warhead below that level. Many modern warheads have a system called FUFO (full fusing option), colloquially known as ‘dial-a-yield’. This allows the yield of the weapon to be selected over what can be quite a large range. For example the B61 gravity bomb has variants that can be configured to yield as little as 0.3 kT or as high as 340 kT (albeit not in the same warhead version). The precise means of achieving this are classified, but presumably involve techniques to alter the timing of the detonation of the explosive lenses in the fission trigger so that the fusion fuel is disrupted before it has a chance to provide a contribution to the bomb. The lowest yields are posited to be that of the unboosted primary itself. This is very advanced technology.
Probably the lowest yield for a weapon that was actually deployed was 10 tons TNT equivalent, which was the lower of the two yields available for the XM388 projectile used in the Davy Crockett recoilless rifle launcher. This was a system fielded mainly in the 60’s in the European theatre of operations. A modified W54 warhead was mounted on a recoilless rifle, which could send the projectile up to 4000m. As yield on a nuclear weapon goes down, the corresponding effects from prompt radiation become a greater part of its total effectiveness. The Davy Crockett’s explosive yield was only about an order of magnitude bigger than a large conventional bomb, but the effects on exposed personnel within a half-mile-wide area of its detonation would have been very considerable, with those on the periphery gravely sickened with radiation, and those closer given a fatal and almost immediately incapacitating dose. It would have been very effective, for example, in blunting a regiment-sized attack by Soviet armour. It also left the area heavily radioactively contaminated for a couple of days, so it functioned as an area-denial weapon. Neutron activation of tank armour meant that the hulls would be lethal to replacement crews for some time afterwards.
I have to agree with John that building SDI is folly, especially since Russia, N Korea, China, and Iran are no longer testing missiles.
/sarc
JerryM,
Perhaps you should cut out the sarcasm and try reading what I have actually written. Russia, N Korea, and China, are not sponsoring terrorism and are not of a suicidalist mentality.
Iran, on the other hand, is.
The very idea that we should allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons, whatever the state of our defences, is, quite frankly, insane.