The Decisions of Robert S McNamara (Book Summary)

[MKSheppard]

Which were swiftly banned.(

I'm actually more amused at the possible yield; three gigatons.

But yeah, the times were fun.

"The soviets have more than 85 known Cosmos satellites with unknown payloads. How many of the Cosmos are orbital bombers, armed as General Powers warned they could be, with "multi-megaton nuclear weapons which could be released upon radio command from Russia?"

[K. A. Pital]

But that's fun. The real R-36O (a cool weapon in and of itself) never utilized warheads less than 2,3 Mt (could've utilized 20 Mt if we had a heavier rocket). The US really overestimated our abilities, even potential, with the the 3 gigaton claims. To launch a real 3-gigaton warhead, the USSR would probably have to utilize two Proton launches and assemble the weapon in orbit.

[MKSheppard]

But that's fun. .....To launch a real 3-gigaton warhead, the USSR would probably have to utilize two Proton launches and assemble the weapon in orbit.

Later on, the book says.....

"Proton I is capable of delivering a cluster of 100 megaton warheads. Informed Americans believe that the soviets have such weapons".

Now for an amusing side trip to another book I found -- "The Kremlin's Nuclear Sword" by Stephen Zaloga.

I found out about the greatest Soviet ICBM ever proposed, but never built.

Even though I don't like ICBMs, this one is just too AWESOME not to like:

The fourth and least successful requirement of the second-generation program called for the development of a super-heavy ICBM capable of lofting very large thermonuclear warheads, with a payload on the order of thirty tons......

(snip)

The super-heavy ICBM requirement was seized on with enthusiasm by all of the major design bureaus. This had less to do with the military requirement than with contemporary space efforts. With President John F. Kennedy's announcement of a planned manned lunar mission, the Soviet Union began a lunar program of its own. The Soviet lunar program was controversial, since if carried out, it would divert an enormous amount of funds and resources away from the second-generation ICBM program. Needless to say, it was viewed with considerable skepticism by the RVSN, which managed the Soviet civil space programs. The lead design bureau for the program was the Korolyov OKB-1, with its N-1 super-booster. In hopes of placating the military, Korolyov proposed military applications for the N-1. There had been a study conducted in the 1960s under the code name Raskat envisioning a missile that could carry seventy warheads and so be capable of destroying nearly every major U.S. city with a single missile. Korolyov offered a similar scheme, in which the N-1 could carry and deliver up to one hundred nuclear weapons against different cities. This system was never seriously considered, since it was doubtful that a guidance system could be developed with existing technology that would permit the weapon to accurately release such a large number of warheads.

The two other contenders were the Yangel R-46 design and the Chelomey UR-500. The R-46 design was pushed out of the competition quickly, because the military wanted the design bureau to concentrate on more sober requirements, such as the R-36 heavy ICBM. Chelomey's UR-500 actually reached the flight stage.

The program was tolerated by the RVSN, which recognized early on that such a rocket, even if not particularly suitable as a weapon, would be useful as a space booster for the increasingly heavy military satellites. The first test flight was conducted in July 1965. By this stage, the RVSN had largely given up on the need for a super-heavy ICBM, because the R-36 could loft a 25-megaton weapon. Furthermore, the basing for such a missile would be prohibitively expensive, especially if hardened. One of Chelomey's schemes was for an enormous underground revolver launcher that could fire six missiles in succession. The heavy-ICBM program officially ended in 1965, but a three-stage version of the UR-500 continued in development, later emerging as the highly successful Proton space booster, which remains one of the workhorses of the Russian space program to this day.

What's not to like about the N-1 as ICBM? It's just so.......absurd it's awesome.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

25MT... that is as good as throwing a quarter of a Tsar Bomba into orbit. I can't imagine if they tried lofting a nuke into orbit using an Energia rocket.

[Sea Skimmer]

But that's fun. The real R-36O (a cool weapon in and of itself) never utilized warheads less than 2,3 Mt (could've utilized 20 Mt if we had a heavier rocket). The US really overestimated our abilities, even potential, with the the 3 gigaton claims. To launch a real 3-gigaton warhead, the USSR would probably have to utilize two Proton launches and assemble the weapon in orbit.

It would take more then then that, as I recall the best a nuke can yield is about 6kt per pound, and you’d need more then three stages which doesn’t help efficiency, so such a device would be in the range of 250-300 short tons at the minimal. That'd mean a couple N-1 or Engeria launches to orbit it in pieces, or else and perhaps more realistically…. Physically build the nuke on a space station! Then you could use a whole slew of much smaller boosters taking up much smaller componets.

[Uraniun235]

What in christ would one do with a 3GT warhead??

[That NOS Guy]

What in christ would one do with a 3GT warhead??

What couldn't one do?

[JointStrikeFighter]

What in christ would one do with a 3GT warhead??

What couldn't one do?

Limit collateral damage?

[Uraniun235]

What in christ would one do with a 3GT warhead??

What couldn't one do?

The resources that went into building a 3GT bomb could have gone into building numerous smaller bombs.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

What in christ would one do with a 3GT warhead??

What couldn't one do? :twisted:

Anything useful. Seriously. Go to the Nuclear effects calculator on the main site. Plug in a 300 KT bomb, a 3 MT bomb, a 30 MT bomb, a 300 MT bomb, and a 3000 MT bomb into the calculator and see what happens.

Code: Select all

Yield (in GT):     Air blast radius (widespread destruction):         
0.0003 GT         4.9 km
0.003 GT          10.4 km
0.03 GT           22.2 km
0.3 GT            47.4 km
3 GT             101.4 km

Do you see the problem yet? The 300 kiloton bomb has a destructive radius that is about 1/20th that of the 3 GT bomb. In spite of releasing 1/10,000th the energy.

To destroy the same area as a 3 GT bomb, you'd need 429 three-hundred KT bombs . . . with a combined explosive yield of just 0.128 GT.

[MKSheppard]

So in the last couple of days, I've learned:

1.) You know the Army's Small Nuclear Power Plant Program? E.g. the small nuclear reactors for the DEW line and McMurdo? One of the major reasons it died was Vietnam's escalating costs. But I just found out a major cause. Seems that in like 1960 or so, OSD (one guess as to what that is), decided to no longer factor in the cost of shipping the fuel for a conventional power generation system to remote locations in deciding the cost/benefit ratio of SNPPs vs Fossil fuel plants.

As you might imagine, this of course made SNPPs look very uneconomical compared to their fossil fuelled counterparts....which was precisely the point.

2.) Remember how Stuart said that the ratio between offense and defense is actually for every dollar spent on defense, you need to spend four on defense, and how McNamara simply arbitrarily reversed those numbers?

It's actually worse.

The true ratio is between either 10:1 or 100:1; that is, for every dollar spent in ABM, the Soviets would have to spend between $10 or $100 to defeat that dollar.

[MKSheppard]

No wait, I made a boo boo from skimming the book concerning the defense ratios.

[MKSheppard]

You know guys, this is when being able to edit your posts beyond the 10 minute limit would be useful.

Basically, in about 1959-1962 according to what the book says, the attack/defense ratios were between 10:1 and 100:1, e.g. for between every $10 to $100 spent on defensive measures, the enemy would only have to spend $1 to overcome them.

By the time McNamara was SecDef, the ratio was (according to him) between 4:1 and 1:1; e.g. for between every $1 to $4 spent on defensive measures, the enemy would need to spend $1; in essence near parity.

This isn't surprising when you consider the changes that occured between Nike Zeus A and Nike Zeus XE (Spartan) in both missile architecture and C3I artitechture, going from highly-vunerable to blast mechanically scanned radars to blast resistant phased array blockhouses.

It's my fault for speed reading earlier and getting the ratios mixed up.

[Stuart]

You know guys, this is when being able to edit your posts beyond the 10 minute limit would be useful. Basically, in about 1959-1962 according to what the book says, the attack/defense ratios were between 10:1 and 100:1, e.g. for between every $10 to $100 spent on defensive measures, the enemy would only have to spend $1 to overcome them. By the time McNamara was SecDef, the ratio was (according to him) between 4:1 and 1:1; e.g. for between every $1 to $4 spent on defensive measures, the enemy would need to spend $1; in essence near parity. This isn't surprising when you consider the changes that occured between Nike Zeus A and Nike Zeus XE (Spartan) in both missile architecture and C3I artitechture, going from highly-vunerable to blast mechanically scanned radars to blast resistant phased array blockhouses. It's my fault for speed reading earlier and getting the ratios mixed up.

In dealing with these figures, it's essential to differentiate between total cost and aggregate cost. Not doing so was a favorite McNamara trick.

Total cost is when the whole cost of a system, complete down to the last detail, is assigned to that program. These figures are usually pretty terrifying and are much-loved by people who want to cancel programs. However, the total cost data ignores the situation where a lot of the components of that system are multi-use and would have to be built anyway for other purposes. Aggregate cost is the difference between what things would cost with the system in question and what it would cost without the system in question.

ABM is a case where the difference between total cost and aggregate cost is particularly critical. Most of the cost of the ABM system isn't the radars or missiles, its the cost of the C4ISR system that nets everything together. Now, the catch is that we had to build a lot of that system anyway. Some of it was used to run the SAGE air defense system, some of it was (and is) used to run the civil air traffic control system, more was used for the strategic early warning system. All of those had to be built anyway (and the current US air defense system - yes, we do have one - is buried within the civil air traffic control system). So the actual cost of the ABM system is the total cost less all those components we had to build anyway for other purposes. Multi-tasking systems is commonplace, even in the 1950s.

That puts these figures in their proper light. In 1959 the total cost balance was 100:1; in 1962 it was 4:1 (big caveats coming up later), So, what changed? The threat level hadn't changed - I concede that the Soviet ballistic missile threat was infinately greater in 1962 because in 1959 the Soviets had no ballistic missiles capable of hitting the US while in 1962 they has six (they had more being delivered but they weren't operational). Technically though the threat hadn't changed. Soviet sea-based missiles were so wildly inaccurate and so difficult to launch that they were equipped with high explosive warheads only. ABM technology was getting more expensive if anything, by 1962 we were to be replacing mechanically-scanned radars piggy-backing on the Nike-Hercules system with electronically scanned radars that were ABM-unique (although they did show up on Long Beach and Enterprise). So, say again, what changed? The answer is quite simple. By 1962 the expenditure on the SAGE air defense system, the civil air traffic control system and the strategic early warning system was all complete. Since ABM was piggy-backing on those systems, its cost was dropping dramatically - and would continue to do so.

In aggregate cost terms, the added cost of an ABM system as compared to the added cost of countermeasures to penetrate that system was indeed 4:1 in favor of the ABM system - and that balance has continued to swing in favor of ABM right up to the present day. What McNamara did was compare the total cost of teh ABM system with the aggregated cost of the counter-ABM expenditure to give the answer he wanted. Actually, he decided what answer he wanted then did teh maths to give him that answer. Samo-samo.

On other points, the bomber arriving late argument was worthless then and its worthless now. The critical point about the bombers was even the late-arriving aircraft could be retargeted so they could be assigned to hit targets that the missiles missed (McNamara assumed that his ICBMs would never go wrong and would never miss. In fact, they have a (classified) failure rate. Some open sources suggest that only about 60 percent of the ICBMs would have fired when somebody lit the blue touchpaper. I cannot confirm or deny that. The point is that, contrary to McNamara's expectations, a lot of missiles would have failed to fire, the targets they should have hit would have gone untouched so the late-arriving bombers were essential to take out those targets.

But would the bombers have arrived so late? This is where a critical thing is encountered. It's the fail-safe point. Bombers can be recalled once launched, missiles cannot. The firing of an ICBM is irrevocable. So, the fail-safe point of a missile is when its sitting in its silo. As soon as its fired, its passed its fail safe point and on its way. But bombers can take off at any time and fly to thier fail-safe points - which are FYI (note present tense) 1,000 nautical miles from their targets. It takes a B-52 one hour and 47 minutes to reach its target from the fail-safe point. It takes an ICBM 45 minutes to reach its target from its fail-safe point. So, the bombers arrive one hour after the missiles do, not several hours later.

But, hold on a second, what have we here? The B-70 Valkyries would also have been at their fail safe points, one thousand nautical miles from their targets. It would take them 27.5 minutes to reach their targets from their fail-safe points. So, the B-70s would have beaten the ICBMs by 20 minutes. On McNamara's own arguments, it would have been the ICBMs that were useless because they were bouncing the rubble. By the way, the bombers could be recalled at any time up to the second they actually carried out the laydown. Missiles cannot be recalled or aborted.

As to the "we survived" argument, it doesn't hold water. We did survive but it was by the skin of our teeth and the odds were against us. I can think of at least ten occasions (don't ask) when we were very, very close to a full nuclear exchange between 1965 and 1995. That we didn't do the exchange on any of those occasions was nothing short of a miracle. However that's not the point. Let's use an analogy. There's an oldish lady close to where I live who, three times a week, goes off to play bingo where she gets pie-eyed drunk. She then proceeds to drive home, so blasted her eyes are rotating in different directions like a stripper's nipple-tassels. She's driven off the road on several occasion, she tried to drive into her garage without opening the door and she's forgotten to stop when she reached the end of said garage. She's been doing that for 15 years and she's never been caught and booked for drunk driving. That doesn't mean that driving when driving while that drunk is safe or a good idea, it just means she is incredibly lucky and she would have been a lot safer if she didn't drink and drive. The fact we survived meant we were incredibly lucky, we would have been a lot safer if everybody had ABM systems.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

As to the "we survived" argument, it doesn't hold water. We did survive but it was by the skin of our teeth and the odds were against us. I can think of at least ten occasions (don't ask) when we were very, very close to a full nuclear exchange between 1965 and 1995. That we didn't do the exchange on any of those occasions was nothing short of a miracle. However that's not the point. Let's use an analogy. There's an oldish lady close to where I live who, three times a week, goes off to play bingo where she gets pie-eyed drunk. She then proceeds to drive home, so blasted her eyes are rotating in different directions like a stripper's nipple-tassels. She's driven off the road on several occasion, she tried to drive into her garage without opening the door and she's forgotten to stop when she reached the end of said garage. She's been doing that for 15 years and she's never been caught and booked for drunk driving. That doesn't mean that driving when driving while that drunk is safe or a good idea, it just means she is incredibly lucky and she would have been a lot safer if she didn't drink and drive. The fact we survived meant we were incredibly lucky, we would have been a lot safer if everybody had ABM systems.

Wait, there were two? What was the second one, of which I am guessing the Cuban crises was probably the first.

[Lonestar]

Wait, there were two? What was the second one, of which I am guessing the Cuban crises was probably the first.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was before '65. I can think of a handful of "public" Instances where we almost had an exchange...in one case a Russian Colonel on watch at the Soviet Version of NORAD decided against launching even when it seemed as if the USA had launched an attack(turned out to be a computer error on Russia's part).

ABLE ARCHER also supposebly scared the Russkis into think an attack was immient.

Finally, there was an instance of a Satellite launch near Russia(I want to say Norway did it) that resemble a launch of an SLBM that scared Russia, this was during the Yelstin era.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Wait, there were two? What was the second one, of which I am guessing the Cuban crises was probably the first.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was before '65. I can think of a handful of "public" Instances where we almost had an exchange...in one case a Russian Colonel on watch at the Soviet Version of NORAD decided against launching even when it seemed as if the USA had launched an attack(turned out to be a computer error on Russia's part).

ABLE ARCHER also supposebly scared the Russkis into think an attack was immient.

Finally, there was an instance of a Satellite launch near Russia(I want to say Norway did it) that resemble a launch of an SLBM that scared Russia, this was during the Yelstin era.

Oh those. For a moment I thought Stuart was referring to some massive diplomatic crises of the same proportion as the Cuban one.

[Lonestar]

He may have. I'm only mentioning some open source ones, and I've heard RUMINT from buddies in CO Springs of other instances that I won't repeat.

[Stuart]

He may have. I'm only mentioning some open source ones, and I've heard RUMINT from buddies in CO Springs of other instances that I won't repeat.

That's the sort of incident I have in mind. There were ten such incidents to my knowledge and there may have been more. Not repeating what happened is a very good idea if you value the skeletal integrity of your fingers

One of the smaller advantages of ABM is that it takes the heat out of the decision-making process when something like that happens. Another public domain near-shoot was when a flight of Canada Geese got misidentified.

The Norwegian launch was a Black Brandt sounding rocket. That shows just how hairy everything was, the Russians had been warned of the launch but the warning got lost. One reason why the Colonel in question hung fire was that he knew if it was a single launch, the Moscow ABM system could handle it.

[That NOS Guy]

Anything useful. Seriously. Go to the Nuclear effects calculator on the main site. Plug in a 300 KT bomb, a 3 MT bomb, a 30 MT bomb, a 300 MT bomb, and a 3000 MT bomb into the calculator and see what happens.

Code: Select all

Yield (in GT):     Air blast radius (widespread destruction):         
0.0003 GT         4.9 km
0.003 GT          10.4 km
0.03 GT           22.2 km
0.3 GT            47.4 km
3 GT             101.4 km

Do you see the problem yet? The 300 kiloton bomb has a destructive radius that is about 1/20th that of the 3 GT bomb. In spite of releasing 1/10,000th the energy.

To destroy the same area as a 3 GT bomb, you'd need 429 three-hundred KT bombs . . . with a combined explosive yield of just 0.128 GT.

I'm well aware of the significant problems with a 3 GT weapon, I posted that comment in a mocking manner. It's just a 3 gigaton device, nothing screams "insane overkill" quite like that. Thanks for the reminder though.