US Economy grows at fastest rate since 1984!!

[MKSheppard]

Yes, and it took bombloads numbering in the hundreds delivered by multiple squadrons of aircraft and timeframes of hours to accomplish those levels of destruction.

Actually, it was the inciendaries that did it. Firestorms are very nasty; most
of the damage done by a nuke is with the firestorm from the thermal pulse.

[MKSheppard]

most
of the damage done by a nuke is with the firestorm from the thermal pulse.

EDIT: "most of the damage done by a nuke in a city, is with the firestorm.."

[Patrick Degan]

Yes, and it took bombloads numbering in the hundreds delivered by multiple squadrons of aircraft and timeframes of hours to accomplish those levels of destruction.

Actually, it was the inciendaries that did it. Firestorms are very nasty; most of the damage done by a nuke is with the firestorm from the thermal pulse.

Despite the combined raids on Dresden by the 8th AAF and RAF Bomber Command, 77% of the city's industrial buildings and 50% residential survived the attacks. In the case of the Tokyo fire raids, it took three seperate attacks to destroy 51 km^2 of the Imperial capitol. A nuke accomplishes greater destruction through blast and thermal pulse with the one weapon; a very small number of warheads (4-8) dropped in an encirclement pattern magnifies these destructive effects geometrically.

[Patrick Degan]

EDIT: the numbers are 4-8 warheads in an encirclement cluster.

[MKSheppard]

Despite the combined raids on Dresden by the 8th AAF and RAF Bomber Command, 77% of the city's industrial buildings and 50% residential survived the attacks.

Funny definition of "survived", I didn't know burnt out blackened husks
whose outer walls were still standing but the interior was ash equalled
"survival".

Yeah, the A-Bomb dome in hiroshima survived the attack, but was it
of any use? No.

[MKSheppard]

EDIT: the numbers are 4-8 warheads in an encirclement cluster.

What kilotonnage? Simply saying "warheads" means nothing as they
could be as small as 1 kt or as big as 1 MT.

[Patrick Degan]

Despite the combined raids on Dresden by the 8th AAF and RAF Bomber Command, 77% of the city's industrial buildings and 50% residential survived the attacks.

Funny definition of "survived", I didn't know burnt out blackened husks whose outer walls were still standing but the interior was ash equalled "survival".

That was in the area of the incindiery attack and firestorm. The entire city was not "taken out".

Yeah, the A-Bomb dome in Hiroshima survived the attack, but was it of any use? No.

A wholly inapplicable comparison.

[Vympel]

Correction Shep:

And of course, the production line for the SS-24 SCALPEL and SS-18 SATAN were all in Ukraine, requiring the russians to have to start all over from scratch and build a totally new line for the TOPOL-M, which is not cheep, and they can only produce 10 to 15 TOPOL-Ms a YEAR.

The SS-18 and SS-24 design and production facilities were in Ukraine, but no new line was required for the Topol-M; the SS-27, like it's SS-25 predecessor, was designed by an institute in Moscow and built by the pre-existing Votkinsk Machine Building Plant (Russian Federation). Plant capacity is 80 missiles per year, production is cost-effective at 30 missiles per year. Current levels are around ~10 per year. The recent purchase from Ukraine of 30 UR-100NUTTKh (SS-19 STILETTO) ICBMs that were never combat deployed will probably offset a hike in Topol-M production levels for a while, as they are essentially as new as if they were built yesterday. The SS-19 has a very long practical service life, and can carry up to 6 warheads.

In regards to the SS-24, it seems that only 6 launchers were scrapped, leaving 36 START accountable SS-24 rail mobile launchers on the list as of mid-2002 (360 warheads)- wheras the 2001 levels had 42 SS-24 systems listed.

[MKSheppard]

That was in the area of the incindiery attack and firestorm. The entire city was not "taken out".

Funny, except that reading some sites, they say 85% of Dresden was for
all purposes effectively destroyed, meaning it had no more value at all.

Out of 28,410 houses in the inner city of Dresden, 24,866 were
destroyed. And a area of 15 square kilometers was totally
destroyed, comparable with a nukes effect. Either way, Dresden
was worthless as a center of industry and transportation after
the bombing.

A wholly inapplicable comparison.

It survived in it's heavily damaged state because it was NOT
made of flimsy as hell construction as found in most of Japan
at the time.

Modern concrete and steel buildings are far more resistant
to nuclear and conventional effects than houses which are
essentially paper plastered over a thin wooden frame.

[Patrick Degan]

That was in the area of the incindiery attack and firestorm. The entire city was not "taken out".

Funny, except that reading some sites, they say 85% of Dresden was for all purposes effectively destroyed, meaning it had no more value at all.

Out of 28,410 houses in the inner city of Dresden, 24,866 were destroyed. And a area of 15 square kilometers was totally destroyed, comparable with a nukes effect. Either way, Dresden was worthless as a center of industry and transportation after
the bombing.

http://www.airforcehistory.hq.af.mil/Po ... resden.htm

excerpt

The immediate and actual consequences of the Dresden bombings were destruction or severe damage to at least 23 per cent of the city’s industrial buildings; severe damage to at least 56 per cent of the city’s non-industrial buildings (exclusive of dwellings); destruction or severe damage to at least 50 percent of the residential units in the city’s non-industrial buildings (exclusive of dwellings); destruction or severe damage to at least 50 percent of the residential units in the city, and at least some damage to 80 per cent of the city’s dwellings; the total disruption of the city as a major communications center, in consequence of destruction and damage inflicted on its railway facilities; and death to probably 25,000 persons and serious injury to probably 30,000 others, virtually all of these casualties being the result of the RAF area raid.

A wholly inapplicable comparison.

It survived in it's heavily damaged state because it was NOT made of flimsy as hell construction as found in most of Japan at the time.

Modern concrete and steel buildings are far more resistant to nuclear and conventional effects than houses which are essentially paper plastered over a thin wooden frame.

And Little Boy was a weak 12.5kt device and not at all comparable to modern strategic warheads.


Distance from Ground Zero

Peak overpressure

Typical Blast Effects


1.3 km

20 psi

Reinforced concrete structures are leveled.


4.8 km

10 psi

Most factories and commercial buildings are collapsed. Small wood-frame and brick residences destroyed and distributed as debris.


7.0 km

5 psi

Lightly constructed commercial buildings and typical residences are destroyed, heavier construction is severely damaged.


Data from information included in the study Effects of Nuclear Weapons; Office of Technology Assesment 1979 rating the destructive potential of a 1mt blast on a modern American city.

[MKSheppard]

The immediate and actual consequences of the Dresden bombings were destruction or severe damage to at least 23 per cent of the city’s industrial buildings; severe damage to at least 56 per cent of the city’s non-industrial buildings (exclusive of dwellings); destruction or severe damage to at least 50 percent of the residential units in the city’s non-industrial buildings (exclusive of dwellings); destruction or severe damage to at least 50 percent of the residential units in the city, and at least some damage to 80 per cent of the city’s dwellings; the total disruption of the city as a major communications center, in consequence of destruction and damage inflicted on its railway facilities; and death to probably 25,000 persons and serious injury to probably 30,000 others, virtually all of these casualties being the result of the RAF area raid.[/i]

And your point proves.....what? What are you trying to say? That
the Dresden bombing fucked over the city and destroyed/heavily
damaged about half the city? If so, Concession Accepted.

And next time you quote warhead blast radii, try to be a bit more
realistic, even the russians moved away from 1MT warheads
and are now down into the 500kt range, and moving
steadily lower, down into teh 300kt range.

Even the missiles that carry 1MT warheads can carry....drumroll
please...a single warhead per ICBM. Now, that's really a lot more
easy to defeat than a swarm of 200-300kt warheads MIRVing
from a single missile.

Once again, your point is.....what?

Oh yes, this reminds me of that anti nuke book by Teddy Kennedy
that used blast radii for 25 MT devices to "prove" the point that
nuclear war was a bad thing.

[Patrick Degan]

The immediate and actual consequences of the Dresden bombings were destruction or severe damage to at least 23 per cent of the city’s industrial buildings; severe damage to at least 56 per cent of the city’s non-industrial buildings (exclusive of dwellings); destruction or severe damage to at least 50 percent of the residential units in the city’s non-industrial buildings (exclusive of dwellings); destruction or severe damage to at least 50 percent of the residential units in the city, and at least some damage to 80 per cent of the city’s dwellings; the total disruption of the city as a major communications center, in consequence of destruction and damage inflicted on its railway facilities; and death to probably 25,000 persons and serious injury to probably 30,000 others, virtually all of these casualties being the result of the RAF area raid.

And your point proves.....what? What are you trying to say? That the Dresden bombing fucked over the city and destroyed/heavily damaged about half the city? If so, Concession Accepted.

Concession Denied. My point was that that the Dresden bombing, even as severe as it was, did not wreak the level of wholesale destruction charasteric of a nuclear attack which would have left not even ruins and resulted in far higher casualty figures. And you invoked the "85% of the city destroyed" bilge in an earlier reply, when the post-attack survey showed that a substantial portion of the city's industrial assets survived the attack.

And next time you quote warhead blast radii, try to be a bit more realistic, even the russians moved away from 1MT warheads and are now down into the 500kt range, and moving steadily lower, down into teh 300kt range.

What a pathetic nitpick. One megaton is used as a scaling example, and the data were clearly identified as coming from a 1979 report whem megaton-class warheads were still mounted on Soviet ICBMs. You tried saying that modern concrete and steel buildings are far more resistant to nuke blast effects. That may be true for reinforced structures, but most buildings are not so heavily constructed.

Even the missiles that carry 1MT warheads can carry....drumroll please...a single warhead per ICBM. Now, that's really a lot more easy to defeat than a swarm of 200-300kt warheads MIRVing from a single missile.

Which has nothing to do with this particular point of the discussion.

Once again, your point is.....what?

That you're down to bullshit nitpickery to try to evade the issues.

Oh yes, this reminds me of that anti nuke book by Teddy Kennedy that used blast radii for 25 MT devices to "prove" the point that nuclear war was a bad thing.

Since nothing mentioned in this discussion has anything to do with anything written by Ted Kennedy, your statement is irrelevant, incompetent, and immaterial.

[LadyTevar]

.........................

Okay, when did a discussion about US Economics desolve into a two-person rant over firebombs in Dresden Germany?

[Chardok]

could be worse. It could have degenerated into a discussion of lesbian nazi hookers abducted by space aliens and forced into weight loss programs.*





Oh, and sex.


*This useless crap brought to you by weird Al in UHF.

[LadyTevar]

could be worse. It could have degenerated into a discussion of lesbian nazi hookers abducted by space aliens and forced into weight loss programs.*





Oh, and sex.


*This useless crap brought to you by weird Al in UHF.

.............. WEird.

[Patrick Degan]

could be worse. It could have degenerated into a discussion of lesbian nazi hookers abducted by space aliens and forced into weight loss programs.*

Oh, and sex.


*This useless crap brought to you by weird Al in UHF.

[MKSheppard]

Yes, and evidently you still can't tell the difference between a testing programme and an operational weapon.

Pity you have trouble keeping track of what you said:

Except the plane-mounted laser is nowhere close to becoming reality either.

I'd call an airframe that was rolled out of Boeing in 2002, and the laser components
delivered for integration this year "close to reality". It's scheduled for tests next
year, not five or ten years from now.

Then THEL failed as a practical weapon.

Only because of the costs involved in shooting each volley and the fixed location,
the system itself worked and well at that. Course, practical to the US military is
an odd thing. They actually considered using a 914mm (36") mortar against
fixed Japanese bunkers during the invasion of Japan; and was called the
"Little David". Course, there were accuracy problems, it being originally
a bomb-launching mortar for the USAAF's bombs.

It's still around at Aberdeen Proving Ground. It took 12 hours just to set it up,
which involved the use of a bulldozer to dig a hole to put it in.

Patriot doesn't require three fucking semitrailers to haul its launcher around, and one Launch Control truck can control up to sixteen launchers. Whereas MTHEL makes for a big, fat, slow-moving target.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/patriot.htm

Patriot-unique equipment at the Headquarters and Headquarters Battery (HHB) includes the information and coordination central (ICC), communications relay groups (CRGs), antenna mast groups (AMGs), trailer mounted electric power units (EPUs), and guided missile transporters (GMT). The Patriot firing battery equipment includes the AMG, radar set (RS), engagement control station (ECS), truck mounted electric power plant (EPP), and up to sixteen launching stations (LSs). Both the battalion and firing batteries are equipped with a semitrailer maintenance center.

(3) The RS is a multifunction, phased-array radar mounted on an M860 semitrailer. The prime mover is an M983 10-ton heavy expanded mobility tactical truck (HEMTT) tractor.

(4) The LS is a remotely operated, fully self-contained unit, carrying integral on-board power. The launcher is mounted on an M860 semitrailer towed by a M983 HEMTT 10-ton tractor.

(7) The EPP consists of two 150-kw generator sets, a power distribution unit (PDU), cables, and accessories mounted on a modified HEMTT. The PDU is stored between the generators and contains a parallel powerbus and power contractors to supply prime power to the ECS and RS.

So you've got several Semi-trailers being towed around just to deploy a Patriot
Battery. Next time, do your fucking research, Deegan, rather than relying on "color in the
numbers" childrens books with lots of pretty pictures.

Wrong again [brilliant pebbles]

Well then, I stand corrected on Brilliant Pebbles.

If EKI's performance is identical, it will be worse than useless.

It seems to work, when the booster deploys correctly. The majority of
all GBI failures come from booster failures.

False Analogy fallacy. The difference between the B2 and NMD is that the latter is not cost-effective against cheaper countermeasures or a swarm attack. And there will be only one opportunity for the system to work as promised.

Done the math on the B-2

Which still does not answer the question regarding the system's overall cost and cost-effectiveness.

It's costing about $40 billion, so why

Yes, you certainly are.

I'm not the one who claimed SBIRS wasn't part of NMD, when it clearly is part of
the programme.

Once again, Deegan, do your goddamned work on what you're talking about.

SS-27 prices out at a unit cost of US$52 million, cheaper than Peacemaker was. Furthermore, it can be MIRVed to carry up to six warheads. And as yet, the Russians have no strategic need to procure more than 10-15 per year. Yet.

So the cost of countering each SS-27 with enough GBIs to give russian targeters a headache is a mere $30m.

Except Russia already has this nuclear infrastructure in place, as does China, and has done for 45+ years. Furthermore, mobile missiles eliminates the expense of refurbishing old silos or constructing new ones.

Denial of an argument does not refute it.

You've said over and over the technology doesn't work, when
as far back as the 1960s, we had successfully intercepted
RVs in space 13 times with Nike-Zeus. The boosters, sensors,
and kill vehicles are nothing exotic, they're proven technology which
needs to be integrated into a single system.

Attacking the Messenger fallacy.

When you read books by anti-nuke activists that use 25 MT airbursts as the basis for
showing how much destruction a city would take in WW3, never mind that the biggest
warhead that was mass deployed on ICBMs is 1MT and under, you become skepitcal
of their claims.

Only the final figure represents a grand total for a full-scale EC3 NMD system.

Funny, I cannot find any reference to EC3 other than that site full of anti nuke activists.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/nmd.htm

The highest proposed NMD system is C3, which is 250~ GBIs at two bases, not all
the stuff your "Article" claims is EC3.

At a savings of maybe $6 billion and providing no greater degree of protection. And with still unproven weaponry.

The Russians deployed the T-64 with an unreliable autoloader in the A model, and just
kept on working at it until it became reliable, ensuing their dominance in the gun/armor
race between NATO/Warsaw Pact until the Leopard 2, M1, and Challenger 1 came
online in the early 1980s. Missiles are cheap, the infrastructure for NMD isn't. Once
we have the infrastructure online, we can build GBI Mk 2 and replace GBI Mk 1.

[snip]

And is there any proof North Korea can weaponize it's nukes small enough to be MIRVed?

That's a great leap of complexity compared to aircraft-deliverable nukes, not to mention
actually getting the MIRV warheads to separate correctly without hanging up on the warhead
bus as happened repeatedly in early MIRV tests.

Golden Mean fallacy.

Why should I care about the cost of NMD, Deegan, when the cost of deploying it comes
out to the cost for the C-17 cargo airlifter program? It's not the trillion-dollar mess you make
it out to be.

And a potential enemy responds by ramping up production of missiles, warheads, and decoys. No buildup is one-way.

When a Topol-M costs $50 million, and we can build 10 GBIs for that cost, I'd say we're winning. And how are you going
to keep your decoys from being shredded by crystallized Jello, discovered by IR sensors, and found out through Laser
Radar?

If you want to stuff lots of decoys onto a warhead bus for an ICBM, they're going to have to be inflatible, and that means
they're going to be shredded and defeated easily by the jello method. If you want a decoy that's capable of actually
standing up to scrutiny long enough, you're going to have to decrease the warhead kilotonnage, and the number of
actual warheads on the ICBM to put in your realistic non-inflatible decoys, without building a bigger missile, which
would cost more.

Virtual attrition strikes again. Care to explain to me HOW you're going to do the decoy route? And I don't mean
other than saying "decoys will work", PROVE to me they work, PROVE to me that you can add them to
ICBMs without reducing warhead numbers or kilotonnage, or shut up.

Much to learn you still have. To label an arguement a fallacy, you must first actually disprove it.

We've proven that GBI's are cheeper than opposing force ICBMs by a factor of 10, we've proven that
the total costs of deployment, etc costs roughly as much as a big ticket program, so cost is not a problem,
we've shown methods by which decoys can be defeated easily, we've shown the math that if a NMD
program is just 33% effective, if you NEED to destroy 100 targets absolutely, you must then launch 51
warheads to assure target destruction for each single target. So it goes from just 100 warheads
to 5,100 needed to assure a pk of 1 against those 100 targets.

You on the other hand, haven't countered our stuff except for saying "decoys will work!" "the other side
will build more missiles!" etc, rather than working out exactly HOW the decoys will be carried on the
missiles without displacing said warheads to an extent that you will need MORE ICBMs to carry the
same amount of warheads as before.

You seem to be under the impression that ICBMs are incomplex machines that can be cranked
out by the hundreds. If it was so easy, then why are there so many turd world countries that can't even
produce workable short-ranged ballistic missiles except by doing SCUD knockoffs?

And for the kicker; if Ballistic Missile defense was as unworkable as you claim, why was Soviet
Premier Gorbachev so adamant that President Reagan abandon the SDI programme at Reykjavik?

Gorbachev even offered to eliminate all strategic weapons if only Reagan would
abandon SDI. Wouldn't it be simpler for the USSR, using your logic, to simply build more missiles
and decoys to overwhelm SDI instead and let the Americans waste untold amounts of money on a
system that could be easily countered?

Yet that wasn't what happened. Why was Gorby offering to dismantle the USSR's entire strategic
nuclear system to get rid of an "unworkable" system such as NMD rather than outbuilding it?

[MKSheppard]

Quote:
False Analogy fallacy. The difference between the B2 and NMD is that the latter is not cost-effective against cheaper countermeasures or a swarm attack. And there will be only one opportunity for the system to work as promised.

Done the math on the B-2

Strike that, I thought I had countered that one, I should go over my posts
twice before I post.

[MKSheppard]

AW crap, another one that ends in a end as I forgot to finish
that argument...

[MKSheppard]

Concession Denied. My point was that that the Dresden bombing, even as severe as it was, did not wreak the level of wholesale destruction charasteric of a nuclear attack which would have left not even ruins and resulted in far higher casualty figures. And you invoked the "85% of the city destroyed" bilge in an earlier reply, when the post-attack survey showed that a substantial portion of the city's industrial assets survived the attack.

That 85% destroyed figure came from a website I was reading in
my search, from Wikipedia, I believe.

I screwed up in reading your post and took you to be saying that
25% total of the city was destroyed, so I messed up on that upon
reading your USAAF report saying that the city was roughtly 50%
destroyed, causing me to claim "concession accepted".

, so conceeded on Dresden % of buildings destroyed.

It's worth noting however that 4.7 square miles of
Hiroshima were destroyed, compared to 1.8 square
miles at Nagasaki, 15.8 sqare miles in the Great Tokyo
Fire Raid, and 2.4 square miles in Dresden.

The Nagasaki bomb was 21kt, but the mountainous
terrain around Nagasaki prevented the bomb from
being as effective as at Hiroshima, which was just
15kt.

Also, even though the Hiroshima Bomb was
15 kt, it destroyed only twice as much buildings as the
3.3 kt of bombs dropped on Dresden. This suggests that
a lot of smaller bombs may be more efficient than
one whacking big warhead, hence the move away from
1MT and larger warheads to smaller ones.

You tried saying that modern concrete and steel buildings are far more resistant to nuke blast effects. That may be true for reinforced structures, but most buildings are not so heavily constructed.

Compared to the tinderboxes that made up most of Japan, yes. Traditionally, commercial
and industrial construction is much stronger than residental, using steel girders instead of
wooden frames, making them much more fire resistant. And seeing as older brick housing
and steel framed commercial construction make up our large urban areas, they're more
blast resistant than the suburbs. Course, anyone near the windows of said buildings
is dead.

Which has nothing to do with this particular point of the discussion.

Except less warheads make it easier for them to be intercepted by
NMD.

That you're down to bullshit nitpickery to try to evade the issues.

You're the one evading the issue, can you seriously tell us how decoys
can be used without causing virtual attrition? I note you haven't countered
Phong's point that with a pk of just 0.33, it would take 51 warheads to kill
a single target with certainity.

Since nothing mentioned in this discussion has anything to do with anything written by Ted Kennedy, your statement is irrelevant, incompetent, and immaterial.

His book was "NUCLEAR FREEZE! How you can help prevent nuclear war", and is
indicative of the same mindset that opposes ABM/NMD.

[MKSheppard]

I must say deegan, I do like this thread and your responses, because they're
making me think and research, and I find things out that I wouldn't have found
out any other way.

[Sea Skimmer]

Also, even though the Hiroshima Bomb was
15 kt, it destroyed only twice as much buildings as the
3.3 kt of bombs dropped on Dresden. This suggests that
a lot of smaller bombs may be more efficient than
one whacking big warhead, hence the move away from
1MT and larger warheads to smaller ones.

Aircraft bombs are generally at most 50% explosive by weight. So 3,300 tons of bombs is only about 1,650 tons of explosive power.

[Patrick Degan]

Yes, and evidently you still can't tell the difference between a testing programme and an operational weapon.

Pity you have trouble keeping track of what you said:


Except the plane-mounted laser is nowhere close to becoming reality either.

I'd call an airframe that was rolled out of Boeing in 2002, and the laser components delivered for integration this year "close to reality". It's scheduled for tests next year, not five or ten years from now.

A pity you have an evident reading-comprehension problem. You keep trying to equate a testing programme with an actual, deployable weapon. And the ABL test is already lagging two years behind its original schedule due to technical problems.

Then THEL failed as a practical weapon.

Only because of the costs involved in shooting each volley and the fixed location, the system itself worked and well at that. Course, practical to the US military is an odd thing. They actually considered using a 914mm (36") mortar against fixed Japanese bunkers during the invasion of Japan; and was called the "Little David". Course, there were accuracy problems, it being originally a bomb-launching mortar for the USAAF's bombs.

Which means exactly jack and shit. More bullshit nitpickery on your part.

It's still around at Aberdeen Proving Ground. It took 12 hours just to set it up, which involved the use of a bulldozer to dig a hole to put it in.

My, what a portable weapon.

Patriot doesn't require three fucking semitrailers to haul its launcher around, and one Launch Control truck can control up to sixteen launchers. Whereas MTHEL makes for a big, fat, slow-moving target.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/patriot.htm

Patriot-unique equipment at the Headquarters and Headquarters Battery (HHB) includes the information and coordination central (ICC), communications relay groups (CRGs), antenna mast groups (AMGs), trailer mounted electric power units (EPUs), and guided missile transporters (GMT). The Patriot firing battery equipment includes the AMG, radar set (RS), engagement control station (ECS), truck mounted electric power plant (EPP), and up to sixteen launching stations (LSs). Both the battalion and firing batteries are equipped with a semitrailer maintenance center.

(3) The RS is a multifunction, phased-array radar mounted on an M860 semitrailer. The prime mover is an M983 10-ton heavy expanded mobility tactical truck (HEMTT) tractor.

(4) The LS is a remotely operated, fully self-contained unit, carrying integral on-board power. The launcher is mounted on an M860 semitrailer towed by a M983 HEMTT 10-ton tractor.

(7) The EPP consists of two 150-kw generator sets, a power distribution unit (PDU), cables, and accessories mounted on a modified HEMTT. The PDU is stored between the generators and contains a parallel powerbus and power contractors to supply prime power to the ECS and RS.

So you've got several Semi-trailers being towed around just to deploy a Patriot Battery. Next time, do your fucking research, Deegan, rather than relying on "color in the numbers" childrens books with lots of pretty pictures.

A Patriot battery —not a single weapon. Yet more of your bullshit nitpickery.

Wrong again [brilliant pebbles]

Well then, I stand corrected on Brilliant Pebbles.

Noted.

If EKI's performance is identical, it will be worse than useless.

It seems to work, when the booster deploys correctly. The majority of all GBI failures come from booster failures.

"Seems" to work doesn't count for anything if the tests for the thing are conducted under highly "idealised" conditions.

False Analogy fallacy. The difference between the B2 and NMD is that the latter is not cost-effective against cheaper countermeasures or a swarm attack. And there will be only one opportunity for the system to work as promised.

Do the math on the B-2

I have, and your point still fails. A B-2 is at least a proven practical weapon with an operational record to demonstrate its evident utility, and was clearly going to be one even in the prototype testing phase of the programme. That adds up to a positive cost/benefit ratio for the B-2.

Which still does not answer the question regarding the system's overall cost and cost-effectiveness.

It's costing about $40 billion, so why

Because of how many missiles and warheads necessary to swamp the system which can be bought with $40 billion.

I'm not the one who claimed SBIRS wasn't part of NMD, when it clearly is part of the programme.

Oh really, and where did I claim that?

Once again, Deegan, do your goddamned work on what you're talking about.

Try taking your own advice.

SS-27 prices out at a unit cost of US$52 million, cheaper than Peacemaker was. Furthermore, it can be MIRVed to carry up to six warheads. And as yet, the Russians have no strategic need to procure more than 10-15 per year. Yet.

So the cost of countering each SS-27 with enough GBIs to give russian targeters a headache is a mere $30m.

I see were back to your favourite red herring.

Denial of an argument does not refute it.

You've said over and over the technology doesn't work, when as far back as the 1960s, we had successfully intercepted RVs in space 13 times with Nike-Zeus. The boosters, sensors, and kill vehicles are nothing exotic, they're proven technology which needs to be integrated into a single system.

You mean this:

http://www.paineless.id.au/missiles/HNikeZeus.html

excerpt

In addition to the dollar problem there were also concerns over the technical feasibility of Nike Zeus. The ability to acquire the target RV, and to even discriminate between a RV and decoys was a concern. Also, it was felt that the system could be easily saturated due to the mechanical radars, thus rendering the entire system ineffective. The effects of nuclear explosions and the resulting electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) could render the huge radars required for the Nike Zeus system utterly useless. The other major concern for Nike Zeus was its accuracy and the fact that the TTR and MTR radars could only perform one intercept at a time.

Attacking the Messenger fallacy.

When you read books by anti-nuke activists that use 25 MT airbursts as the basis for showing how much destruction a city would take in WW3, never mind that the biggest warhead that was mass deployed on ICBMs is 1MT and under, you become skepitcal of their claims.

And your evidence that I've read any of these books comes from where? Oh, that's right —pulled out of your own ass.

Only the final figure represents a grand total for a full-scale EC3 NMD system.

Funny, I cannot find any reference to EC3 other than that site full of anti nuke activists.

Which has exactly what to do with figures provided by the Congressional Budget Office? I smell another Attacking the Messenger fallacy.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/nmd.htm

The highest proposed NMD system is C3, which is 250~ GBIs at two bases, not all the stuff your "Article" claims is EC3.

Sigh...

http://www.aip.org/enews/fyi/2000/fyi00.053.htm

excerpt

According to CBO, the Administration's plan lays out three possible phases: Expanded Capability 1 would ultimately comprise 100 interceptors at one launch site in Alaska, intended to defend against missiles with simple countermeasures. Capability 2 would be able to handle more sophisticated countermeasures, and Capability 3 would add more interceptors and a second launch site, most likely in North Dakota. The Administration has only given a cost estimate for Expanded Capability 1, of $25.6 billion through the year 2015. CBO estimates that this first phase would cost $29.5 billion over the same period, and explains that its estimate includes more replacements and spares, more additional testing in the system's early years, and an assumption of 20 percent cost growth (comparable to similar programs), rather than the Administration's assumption of 5 percent growth. The paper also predicts greater operating costs than the Administration. CBO projects that moving from Expanded Capability 1 to Capability 2 would cost an additional $6.1 billion, for a total system cost of $35.6 billion, and proceeding to Capability 3 would cost $13.3 billion, bringing the total cost to $48.8 billion. CBO notes that the Administration gives no cost estimates for the follow-on phases, and that the current defense plan for future years does not at this time include enough funding for those later phases.

Capability 3 is the 250 GBI package, plus EKI and all electronic support.

At a savings of maybe $6 billion and providing no greater degree of protection. And with still unproven weaponry.

The Russians deployed the T-64 with an unreliable autoloader in the A model, and just kept on working at it until it became reliable, ensuing their dominance in the gun/armor race between NATO/Warsaw Pact until the Leopard 2, M1, and Challenger 1 came online in the early 1980s. Missiles are cheap, the infrastructure for NMD isn't. Once we have the infrastructure online, we can build GBI Mk 2 and replace GBI Mk 1.

And this ludicrous sidetracking onto the T-64 supports your argument how, exactly...?

And is there any proof North Korea can weaponize it's nukes small enough to be MIRVed?

This requires some special, arcane knowledge? It's an engineering problem, nothing more.

That's a great leap of complexity compared to aircraft-deliverable nukes, not to mention actually getting the MIRV warheads to separate correctly without hanging up on the warhead bus as happened repeatedly in early MIRV tests.

Problems which have been solved and for which there is more than a wealth of technical information to work from.

Why should I care about the cost of NMD, Deegan, when the cost of deploying it comes out to the cost for the C-17 cargo airlifter program? It's not the trillion-dollar mess you make it out to be.

It's more an issue of cost/benefit and utility. A C-17 is at least a useful piece of hardware. NMD on the other hand is a very dubious proposition which will not protect the country from a serious nuclear attack, and not at all against any form of attack delivered by means other than ICBMs, and is more likely to touch off an arms race rather than prevent one. That makes it a pure waste of money which can be better spent on more C-17s, or aircraft carriers, or NSSNs.

And a potential enemy responds by ramping up production of missiles, warheads, and decoys. No buildup is one-way.

When a Topol-M costs $50 million, and we can build 10 GBIs for that cost, I'd say we're winning.

Then you're being very simplistic. Those Topols can be MIRVed rather easily.

And how are you going to keep your decoys from being shredded by crystallized Jello, discovered by IR sensors, and found out through Laser Radar?

http://www.physicstoday.org/pt/vol-53/iss-12/p36.html

excerpt

Countermeasures

The planned NMD system involves many technological and engineering challenges, as reflected by the interceptor test record to date: In two of the three tests, the interceptor has failed to hit its target.7 Still, it seems reasonable to assume that, with enough time and effort, NMD interceptors can be made to reliably hit cooperative targets on the test range. However, clearly this hurdle does not mean the system would work in the real world, against a realistic threat. Ultimately, the effectiveness of the NMD system will depend primarily on its ability to deal with the countermeasures that an attacker might take to defeat the defense.


It may seem surprising that an emerging missile state such as North Korea could overcome the huge technological and financial advantages of the US to successfully counter an NMD system. However, countermeasures require far simpler technology than does a missile defense. Furthermore, an attacker has inherent advantages in confronting any NMD system. An attacker can design countermeasures to defeat a specific system, because the defender must commit in advance to a specific architecture, the construction of which will take many years. In contrast, the defender may know little about the countermeasures of potential attackers, because countermeasures programs are easily concealed. In addition, an attacker with limited objectives, such as an emerging missile state, needs only a low level of effectiveness to pose a credible threat, whereas any useful NMD system must achieve very high levels of effectiveness and reliability.

The technical issue of countermeasures is thus at the heart of the NMD debate. Given the expressed goals of the NMD system, the key questions to be addressed are 1) What kinds of countermeasures could an emerging missile state deploy and when could it deploy them? 2) How effective would such countermeasures be against the planned NMD system?

The Rumsfeld Report, in its analysis of the missile threat, employed two principles that might also be applied to an assessment of possible countermeasure capabilities in emerging missile states. First, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence--that is, a failure to detect such programs does not necessarily mean that they don't exist. Second, because such programs could exist without being observed, any threat analysis should include consideration of what systems a potential adversary is capable of building, based on its technical capabilities. Subsequent to the Rumsfeld Report, a September 1999 consensus report of the US intelligence agencies8 stated that emerging missile states could use "readily available" technology to develop countermeasures and could do so "by the time they flight test their missiles." The report listed a number of such countermeasure technologies. However, this important statement has had limited effect on the debate because the report contained few details.

The issue of countermeasures was addressed in detail by a recent panel formed for this purpose by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and the Security Studies Program at MIT. The panel, in which we participated, was chaired by APS past president Andrew Sessler and included 11 physicists and engineers, some with direct experience in ballistic missile defense and countermeasures issues. The panel assessed the effectiveness of countermeasures against an ideal version of the planned NMD system--one limited only by the laws of physics--thereby sidestepping the difficulty of obtaining the often-classified details of real-system performance. In its April 2000 report,9 the panel evaluated three particular countermeasures that could be implemented by an attacker with limited technical resources and could possibly defeat the planned NMD system:

*
Reentry heating of a bomblet
Figure 3
Biological weapons in submunitions. A lethal biological agent delivered by a ballistic missile could be divided into 100 or more small bomblets, or submunitions, which would be released shortly after the boost phase. This strategy would overwhelm the planned NMD system with far too many targets to intercept. It would also be an effective way of dispersing the agent over a wide area, and so would likely be adopted regardless of NMD concerns. In its analysis, the panel found that such technical issues as dispersal of the bomblets, reentry heating, and the release of the biological agent did not present serious difficulties. (See figure 3.)

*
Antisimulation decoys
Figure 4
Nuclear warheads with antisimulation balloon decoys. A nuclear warhead could be hidden within an aluminum-coated mylar balloon and released together with a large number of empty balloons, as illustrated in figure 4. Such "antisimulation"--making a warhead look like a decoy--could be easier and more effective than making decoys look like warheads. The technique is particularly useful against the exoatmospheric interceptors planned for the NMD system: Because light and heavy objects travel on the same trajectories above the atmosphere, large numbers of effective decoys could be added to a missile without a prohibitive weight penalty. Simple techniques can be used to deny the defense system sensors any distinguishing physical signal that would show which balloon contains a warhead. For example, balloons could be given slightly different temperatures, either passively, by using surface coatings with different emissivities (figure 5), or actively, by using small battery-powered heaters.

*
Reducing target visibility
Figure 6
Nuclear warheads with cooled shrouds. An attacker could enclose a nuclear warhead within a double-walled cone containing liquid nitrogen to hide it from the EKV's infrared sensors (see figure 6). Cooling the outer cone to 77 K would reduce the infrared radiation emitted by the shrouded warhead by a factor of at least a million. While the shrouded warhead would still be seen by the NMD system's X-band radars, the kill vehicle would be unable to detect the warhead in time to maneuver to hit it.

The panel concluded that these three countermeasures could either completely defeat or seriously degrade the effectiveness of the planned NMD system. Furthermore, it found that such countermeasures were within the capability of emerging missile states such as North Korea or Iran, and could be built by the time the planned NMD system was operational.

Critics of the UCS/MIT countermeasures report say that the study underestimates the difficulty of developing and deploying countermeasures and that an emerging missile state will take many years to do so. They also argue that counter-countermeasures could eventually be developed by the US. However, a counter-countermeasure program would require extensive development and flight testing, giving potential attackers the opportunity to adjust their countermeasure strategies. For the same reasons discussed earlier, the attacker would have a good chance of maintaining its ability to defeat the defense.

If you want to stuff lots of decoys onto a warhead bus for an ICBM, they're going to have to be inflatible, and that means they're going to be shredded and defeated easily by the jello method. If you want a decoy that's capable of actually standing up to scrutiny long enough, you're going to have to decrease the warhead kilotonnage, and the number of actual warheads on the ICBM to put in your realistic non-inflatible decoys, without building a bigger missile, which would cost more.

No you don't, actually.

Virtual attrition strikes again. Care to explain to me HOW you're going to do the decoy route? And I don't mean other than saying "decoys will work", PROVE to me they work, PROVE to me that you can add them to ICBMs without reducing warhead numbers or kilotonnage, or shut up.

See above.

Much to learn you still have. To label an arguement a fallacy, you must first actually disprove it.

We've proven that GBI's are cheeper than opposing force ICBMs by a factor of 10,

Which is a Red Herring.

we've proven that the total costs of deployment, etc costs roughly as much as a big ticket program, so cost is not a problem

Which ignores cost/benefit considerations in any comparison analysis.

we've shown methods by which decoys can be defeated easily

Based on faulty data and "cooked" tests.

we've shown the math that if a NMD program is just 33% effective

Which makes it 66% useless.

if you NEED to destroy 100 targets absolutely, you must then launch 51 warheads to assure target destruction for each single target. So it goes from just 100 warheads to 5,100 needed to assure a pk of 1 against those 100 targets.

I'm afraid it doesn't quite work that way. The more variables the system has to contend with introduces increased degredation of defensive accuracy. And 1000 MIRVed Topols can deliver up to 6000 warheads.

You on the other hand, haven't countered our stuff except for saying "decoys will work!" "the other side will build more missiles!" etc, rather than working out exactly HOW the decoys will be carried on the missiles without displacing said warheads to an extent that you will need MORE ICBMs to carry the same amount of warheads as before.

See above.

You seem to be under the impression that ICBMs are incomplex machines that can be cranked out by the hundreds.

Man of Straw.

If it was so easy, then why are there so many turd world countries that can't even produce workable short-ranged ballistic missiles except by doing SCUD knockoffs?

Because Third World countries don't have the financial resources to do any better than SCUD knockoffs. And thanks for introducing yet another irrelevancy into this discussion.

And for the kicker; if Ballistic Missile defense was as unworkable as you claim, why was Soviet Premier Gorbachev so adamant that President Reagan abandon the SDI programme at Reykjavik?

Whatever Gorbachev may have perceived has nothing to do with whether SDI was actually viable —which the uncovering of fraud in the testing programme disproved. Furthermore, therer were legitimate concerns over SDI prompting a more aggressive posture from the US.

Gorbachev even offered to eliminate all strategic weapons if only Reagan would abandon SDI. Wouldn't it be simpler for the USSR, using your logic, to simply build more missiles and decoys to overwhelm SDI instead and let the Americans waste untold amounts of money on a system that could be easily countered?

Gorbachev was trying to back Reagan into a corner.

Yet that wasn't what happened. Why was Gorby offering to dismantle the USSR's entire strategic nuclear system to get rid of an "unworkable" system such as NMD rather than outbuilding it?

Learn the difference between diplomatic posturing and technological reality before you dig a hole for yourself.

[Darth Wong]

Shep, while it may seem futile to try and bring you back to Earth, only a lunatic can tally up millions of projected short-term deaths and consider that a successful defense system. I know you're accustomed to reading war books and thinking of dead people as mere statistics, but they're not.

[Sea Skimmer]

Shep, while it may seem futile to try and bring you back to Earth, only a lunatic can tally up millions of projected short-term deaths and consider that a successful defense system. I know you're accustomed to reading war books and thinking of dead people as mere statistics, but they're not.

So of course having no defence and even more dead in the now more likely even't of an attack is a better solution? Anyway the point of the US ABM system is to defeat a limited attack from a nation with limited resources, the inability of such a system to totally defeat something it's not meant to is not very surprising.