I’m obviously a lot less concerned about this than the Russians apparently are — I’m perfectly happy to have their missiles be unreliable. I am concerned, though, how much this deterioration in their capabilities is bleeding over into their space capabilities, and the implications for Soyuz reliability and safety as we come to rely on them for rides to ISS.
6 thoughts on “The Norway Spiral”
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I think space and ICBMs are as completely different in Russia as they are in the U.S. In fact, in this country the ICBM and SLBM worlds are segregated from one another (I worked in the former, and was unable to learn anything about the latter). Friends of mine who go to Russia (or Kazakhstan) for launch campaigns are as impressed as can be by the almost eerie effortlessness of a Proton or a Zenit. Some of them are equally experienced with U.S. launch operations, and the Russians do a better job according to them.
We have lost the ability to develop an ICBM in this country. It isn’t a surprise that the Russians have done the same. But they’re learning how to do it all over, and what that means is that their new generation of people will be able to do what we cannot. I’d rather see us making some spirals in the sky than doing nothing whatsoever.
I liked this bit in Wikipedia:
In Soviet times, during the first stage of trials, dummy missiles were fired from a floating launch pad in Balaklava to test the underwater segment of the trajectory. After that, similar tests were conducted on board a re-equipped submarine. They were followed by a number of launches from a land-based launch pad in Nenoks in the Arkhangelsk region to test the flight range. There were no conditions to carry out tests at a floating launch pad in Balaklava, and there was no opportunity to conduct ground-based tests of the missile either, because the funds needed to build launch pads and a new silo were not provided.
Sounds familiar?
Did Russia ever really figure out solid fuel?
The can figure out how to make excellent O2 rich kero engines with the metallurgy not to combust itself but can’t figure out bottle rockets on steroids?
I’m perfectly happy to have their missiles be unreliable.
No you’re not. Unreliable missiles mean you build a lot of them and you launch them early, both so you can compensate for any last-minute glitches, and so the enemy has less chance to mess with them via EMPs, whatever. All bad news.
What you want the Russians to have, if they’re going to have any strategic missiles at all, are missiles in which they have 100% confidence*, so they can afford to wait until the very last moment to launch them. That is stabilizing.
Yes, it sounds backward. MAD game theory is like that.
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* It’s acceptable to hope that their confidence is misplaced, and the missiles will prove in actual combat to be far more unreliable than testing and development had suggested.
I agree with Carl here. The more confident a nuclear weapon holder is in the effectiveness of their weapons, the less weapons they’ll generally want to have around.
At the height of the Cold War, the United States deployed 50 Peacekeeper ICBMs having up to 10 RVs each. Those were our “big guns”, and they were extremely accurate, and quite reliable.
The Soviet “big gun” was the SS-18. It was more than twice the size of the Peacekeeper, and typically carried 10 RVs with much higher yield than the Mark 12A — though it had been tested with up to 40 RVs. It was fairly accurate, and very reliable.
The Soviets had 308 of those in the field when the Berlin Wall collapsed. That was on top of an arsenal of smaller missiles that far outnumbered our Minuteman fleet. I don’t think the rule of thumb you cite holds true, Carl…