- Why Defend Against Nuclear Weapons?
- History
- Modern Defenses Against Nuclear Weapons
- Simulating Defense Against Nuclear Weapons
- Post Scriptum
For our first quasi-technical paper in our series on nuclear strategy, you’ll have to forgive us for departing from our stated theme of an Indo-Pakistani war turned nuclear. Before we can talk about the wholesale immolation of millions and the inexorable overturning of the current world order, we have to talk about the opaque and extremely technical subject of how nuclear powers defend themselves against nuclear weapons, especially as those capabilities pertain to nuclear strategy.
Speaking broadly, almost in spite of humanity’s primal urge for security and sanctity, the notion that countries should adopt measures to defend themselves against nuclear onslaughts has always been the red-headed stepchild of the Western (indeed, global) national security enterprise. Over the past 70 odd years, for better or for worse, only the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, the Nordic countries and to a lesser extent (for utterly insipid, patently delusional reasons) Albania have adopted partially effective prophylactic measures to mitigate the damage wrought during nuclear exchanges.
For the United States’ defense industrial base in particular (speaking from the perspective of an American), “defense against nuclear weapons” has been treated with a level of scorn that borders upon open disdain – almost for as long as US technical specialists actually realized that there are in fact a large suite of tools which can be used to dampen the effectiveness of an adversary’s nuclear arsenal. The historical reasons why the United States has such a checkered relationship with preventing its citizens from having unexpected liaisons with cleansing apocalyptic fires are multifaceted, and we’ll touch upon them here, but the purpose of this piece is to draw-out a general theory of defense within and around the confines of nuclear war.
Before we discourse at length on this subject, I’d like to introduce a uniquely personal rule of thumb applicable to everyone on the planet rooted in a scientific and strategic understanding of nuclear weapons as well as the likely contours of any nuclear exchange. That is:
‘Take Bert the Turtle seriously! Yes, seriously!’
Despite the hype about nuclear weapons being Satan’s globe-ending phalluses of doom, they’re embarrassingly limited in their effectiveness by the laws of physics and human creativity. You, the reader, are unlikely to die in a nuclear exchange regardless of the number of weapons fired by the nuclear powers (unless you live in a relatively small country like Israel, Estonia or Singapore that takes a direct hit to its major metropolitan centers – in which case, my only advice is to reside in a building with a basement constructed out of concrete).
But, if you choose not to listen to official alerts out of misguided fatalism, and you wander outside to embrace your destiny, there’s a high probability that you will wind-up with substantial non-fatal burns and/or blindness – placing more strain on your country’s inevitably overtaxed healthcare system. At an individual level you, yes you the reader, need to take protecting yourself from nuclear weapons and war seriously, preferably without making paranoiac fantasies become your entire personality.
There’s a parallel observation here of course. Within the distinctly academic/theoretical context of nuclear strategy, analysts ‘are’ allowed to brush aside the impact that strategic defense measures can have on the dynamics of a nuclear exchange as well as a combatant’s threat calculus, for the sake of analytical simplification. Speaking plainly, it’s hard to riddle out the ramifications of some events without the aid of a supercomputer, and any hard limitations on what we’re capable of discerning will be pointed out in due course. Just to get in front of any accusations of “idle speculation” and “insufficient granularity” by especially perceptive specialists and non-specialists, defenses against nuclear weapons are one of those uncommon cases where it’s required to know quite a lot about a subject so that you can know what to more or less safely ignore.
Also, since I know everyone won’t read to the end (fair enough, I wouldn’t in most cases), I’m placing the flashier simulation component here. While I’d highly recommend watching it the entire way through and sharing it on your various social media apps, I know most people won’t. That’s why it includes a fun soundtrack you can listen to while you’re jogging or cleaning.
Why Defend Against Nuclear Weapons?
Outwardly, “why should a country defend itself against nuclear weapons?” is an incredibly stupid question, with a common-sensical answer of “because being incinerated is not very fun.” But, once you have more than a cursory understanding of nuclear strategic and deterrence theory, it’s not altogether obvious that defensive measures are either a net positive or a net negative.
Now, this isn’t a piece or series focused on deterrence or its related theories, for our purposes it will suffice to note that “deterrence theorists” (yes, that is a real subset of political science and international relations) on the whole tend towards the metacognitive, i.e. usually they’re not overly familiar with the physical dynamics of deterrence, or how nuclear weapons are likely to be employed. With that being said, noted “deterrence theorist” and Arms Control don Fred Iklé made the prescient observation that:
The scholasticism justifying our current policy is full of contradictions. On the one hand, we brush aside the immorality of threatening to kill millions of hostages, assuming that the threat will deter and that to deter means to prevent nuclear war. On the other hand, we argue that we must be poised to carry out “retaliation” swiftly and thus convey determination for irrational vengeance, since all rational purpose of retaliation would have disappeared when its time had come. We want to maintain a vague threat of using nuclear weapons first to deter massive conventional attack; yet, to stabilize mutual deterrence we must not threaten Soviet nuclear arms nor defend against them. . . .
Indeed, within the American/NATO context, the interminable debate about developing defenses against nuclear weapons within the Western national security community has stretched on for over 60 years. I’m not histrionic enough to pretense to summarize over half a century’s worth of intensive theorization and technical work, but before we can get to the “fun” part and show how these defensive measures impact nuclear strategy, I have to provide a brief encapsulation of this discussion. We’ll do it in a characteristically unsourced listicle format, as that should be suitably derisory.
How to Ruin a Nuclear War Planner’s Day in 5 Easy Steps
Destroying Nukes? Wow!!!
Nuclear war is bad ☹️ , but did you know that governments are capable of blowing up nukes before they break your tanning routine? Only an irresponsible government wouldn’t spend money to protect its citizens!
Stick it to the little guy!
Nobody likes an arms race (except for Raytheon 🙄), but with economic and diplomatic constraints on the size of nuclear arsenals (🧂🧂 and 🟢), powers that develop means to interdict or disrupt nuclear weapons can not only defend their citizens, but they can ensure that they have the strategic wherewithal to ignore the nuclear threats of weaker powers. Does that mean that nuclear powers may feel as if they can act with impunity? Who knows, who cares, and they were doing that already anyways.
What if They Just Buy More Nukes?
What are you, my mother? Ok, sure, strong nuclear powers can purchase more nukes to overwhelm active and passive defensive measures, and yes building a nuke is cheaper than building an anti-nuke, but why are you penny pinching when there are lives at stake???
What Happens if Other Nuclear Powers Develop Defense Systems?
Ok, no more cocaine for you. If some assholes in another country want to develop counters for our nukes, that’s their business. They’ll be dumping money into a famously defensive enterprise, which means less money and resources for them to threaten us with. Pay no attention to the Soviet Union and Russia’s development of top-of-the-line long-range conventional air defense systems, or how they’re being used during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
What if Other Nuclear Powers See Our Development of Defensive Measures as a Threat?
Sure sure sure, and how much are Russian and Chinese intelligence paying you again? You silly little quisling, don’t you know that our nuclear weapons are meant to protect us against the big bad nefarious people “over there.” When we develop tools to defend ourselves and our arsenal, we won’t have to take their bullshit. I mean, ‘come on’, even Bismarck observed that “preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.” Why would our invulnerability be seen as a threat?????
Reader, did I mention that this debate has gone on for over 60 years? For our part, we’ll prioritize studying how defenses can and do shape the contours of nuclear strategy, as well as their efficaciousness.
History
I have to issue my apologies in advance as this next section isn’t terribly colorful or flashy; but, hopefully it will be one of the most amusing and informative things you’ll read all year. For the better part of the Cold War, efforts to develop defenses against nuclear weapons were distinctly vaudevillian in character. Every now and then, I’ll spontaneously recall some Soviet or US proposal/system and chuckle to myself because of its ridiculousness.
Because brevity and wit are kindred souls, and because we’re not necessarily interested in the programmatic history of each of these defensive enterprises for what we’re focusing on, here is a far from exhaustive enumeration of the various platforms, doctrines and methods that have at one point or another comprised defenses against nuclear attacks. There are three broadish intertwined categories of defensive measures against nuclear weapons of different costs and sophistication. They are:
- Civil Defense: is government speak for passive measures to defend people and infrastructure from a nuclear onslaught. These are pretty straightforward policies and recommendations. Teaching people not to stare at a small cone rocketing towards them at several times the speed of sound; telling people how to build fallout shelters; building hardened concrete structures capable of resisting the blast overpressure of a warhead detonating a few miles away, you know basic stuff.
- Conventional Active-Defense™©: is an umbrella term that I’ve just made up for destroying nuclear launch vehicles (be they bombers, boomers or ‘boomers‘) before they can fire off their payloads, as well as its obverse. During the Cold War, this would have looked like interceptor jets shooting down bombers carrying nuclear weapons, or nuclear surface-to-air missiles being fired at roving bomber formations; nowadays, this would likely look more like attack submarines or surface vessels hunting down and destroying ballistic missile submarines. This also includes the markedly more mundane subject of direct defensive measures for nuclear-capable platforms (think silo fields, and semi-random ballistic missile submarine patrols).
- Ballistic Missile Defenses (BMD): are what most national security analysts (read, über-nerds) think of whenever the topic of defending against nuclear onslaughts is broached in polite conversation. Technically, this includes platforms designed to intercept the full gamut of ballistic missiles — quasi-ballistic, short-range (SRBM), medium-range (MRBM), intermediate-range (IRBM), intercontinental (ICBM) — but for reasons we’ll touch upon later, we will focus on BMDs designed to shoot down ICBMs.
Civil Defense
Let’s start with inarguably the most mundane of the three… no, wait, don’t click away, I promise that it’s not as boring as it sounds. Now, we all have that one relative – let’s face it, it’s probably a kooky uncle – who’s watched ‘Threads‘ one too many times, and has colorful thoughts on “the elites” and fluoride. And who among us hasn’t had one of these interactions [see image] where some irate person is barraging us with hare-brained nonsense about cryptic government plans to imprison millions of citizens in “FEMA Camps” so that we can be sterilized and force-fed human meat?
Well reader, rest assured that said uncles and temporary relations are in fact crazy, but they’re not exactly entirely wrong. There are in fact government plans to house and feed millions of Americans, they’re just not very good.
For pretty much the entirety of its existence, the government of the United States has been characteristically lethargic in its efforts to defend the American populace during times of war, typically only enacting prophylactic policies in the wake of major attacks or incidents. Part of this behavior is a quirk of American arrogance — the US is after all a behemoth wedged between two oceans with a pronounced libertarian streak — but arguably a larger factor is sloth coupled with an inclination towards aggressively confronting problems abroad. In May of 1941 (well after World War 2 had started by the way), the US government established the Office of Civilian Defense. For the duration of the war, it consisted of 75 paid employees who helped coordinate municipal efforts like blackouts, and just random volunteer tasks like firefighting and air-raid preparedness. Suffice it to say that American civil defense efforts during the war were minimalistic to the point of professional negligence — and things immediately went downhill from there.
“Promptly” after the Soviet Union tested its first atomic (fission) bomb in 1949, president Harry Truman established the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) in ‘December’ of 1950 to oversea countermeasures designed to mitigate the potential damage the USSR could wreak on the United States in the event of a nuclear war. Despite its haughty sounding name and broad mandate, Congress never actually allocated sufficient funds for it to do… really anything, except for distributing pamphlets on how to dig your own shelters to avoid radioactive fallout, and fun media blurbs like ‘Duck and Cover’ as well as this video on how to survive a nuclear attack.
The FCDA, having achieved essentially nothing, was pulped as an institution in 1958, and its responsibilities were passed around to a multitude of agencies and departments, none of which were ever provided with a budget large enough to even justify corruption or graft. The largest superseding agency was the Office of Civil Defense, nestled within the Department of Defense — an institution famously cognizant of civilian casualties. In lieu of constructing purpose-built fallout or over-pressure resistant shelters, the OCD pretty much just sent its employees around the US looking for buildings in relatively centralized areas. Once there, they’d examine the materials out of which said buildings were constructed, and if they met some minimum requirement on fallout shielding OCD employees would slap a “Fallout Shelter” logo on the side. Were most of these buildings actually resistant to more than 5-PSI of blast overpressure (the standard parameter nuclear targeters from the US and USSR would use to maximize civilian casualties)? Nope. Did most of these structures meet the OCD’s minimum requirement to be considered relatively “safe” from fallout? Also no. Was there some secret web of shelters the US constructed to protect against a Soviet nuclear onslaught similar to the popular videogame ‘Fallout’ that none of us were told about as a precaution against Soviet mischief? Lol, definitely no. Is/was there a network of super secret command and control bunkers for senior politicians and defense officials so “the elite” could hide out and emerge with their harems of voluptuous survivors? Technically, yes. Practically, lol no. Because the USSR ran circles around the US in the espionage game, this handful of shelters was well known to Soviet planners and in any case they were visible from space — in all likelihood, these would’ve been some of the first targets struck by ground-bursting Soviet nuclear weapons.
In 1979, the Office of Civilian Defense was, much like its predecessors, squashed like a bug and rolled into the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA received more funding, but their primary mandate was and is to respond to catastrophic events, not to take measures to mitigate them in advance.
In case the question has popped into any of your minds, no I’m not exaggerating America’s cartoonish inadequacy in this domain — technically I’m downplaying the gulf between America’s civil defense ideal and its reality. In the FEMA study linked above, they cite the General Accounting Office (now known as the Government Accountability Office —they kept the acronym) which observed:
“No authority existed ‘to construct or pay for the construction of special-purpose public fallout shelters in any location, including areas with a deficit of public spaces.’”
and
“Our review indicates that the Nation lacks, and under current programs will continue to lack, a sufficient number of properly dispersed, adequately equipped fallout shelters in homes, schools, and other buildings and facilities to accommodate the population in the event of a nuclear attack.”
pg. 393
The Soviet Union for its part — as a quirk of maintaining a political-economic system effectively carved out of a mountain of paranoia, skullduggery and generational trauma — actually established its own formal civil defense institutions and procedures in the 1920s, long before the onset of the atomic-era. The USSR, in similar fashion to other countries that underwent… how should we put it, traumatic experiences during the Great War, embraced civil defense as a counter to the threats posed to its society by the prospect of expansive conventional war. Given the laughable limitations of aircraft in the ’20s, it’s fair to suggest that these institutions matured well before their time. As opposed to the United States’ lackluster civil defense showing, the USSR actually made a concerted effort to defend its citizens from the hazards of nuclear war. Even before the nuclear era, public housing was designed to have concrete reinforced basement air-raid shelters. Soviet literature and actions were also careful to delineate a variety of shelters and facilities capable of resisting the different verities of nuclear detonations.
We’ll leave it up to the reader to decide whether the Marxist scientific approach or the American “fuck ’em we ball” approach towards civil defense is preferable.
Civil Defense in the Context of Conventional War
Now, I’m sure you’re all wondering, does civil defense actually matter? Well, we actually have quite a few examples bequeathed to us by the calamitous events others experienced during conventional wars. By the time Nazi Germany ushered in the era of strategic bombing with the infamous ‘Blitz’ of WW2, for a significant part of the “Western world”, civil defense had emerged into a sort of science in and of itself. Two historical examples are rather illustrative of the strategic efficacity of civil defensive measures.
During the aforementioned Blitz, which, to the uninitiated, was a massive bombing campaign targeting Great Britain’s industrial capacity and national morale as part of Nazi Germany’s preparation for an eventual amphibious assault on the British isles, 41,000 British citizens were killed and approximately 2 million households were damaged or destroyed between September of 1940 and May of 1941. With some scratch-math, we find a ratio of 1 citizen killed per 50 bombed households. As we mentioned above, the United Kingdom by this time period had established a robust civil defense system, with an expansive and well coordinated network of volunteers and officials.
But just a few years later in February of 1945 during the allied bombing of Dresden (which took place over 3 days and hit a similar suite of primarily industrial targets), conservatively 22,700 German citizens were killed and approximately 170,000 households were damaged or destroyed. Using the same methodology, we find a ratio of 1 citizen killed per 7.5 bombed households in one eightieth of a the Blitz’s timeframe. Unlike the UK, Nazi Germany had declined to establish a robust civil defense system.
You can replicate these results through looking at the various bombing surveys produced by wartime powers, as unbearably boring as civil defense is the data about it is quite clear, adopting a proactive approach towards civil defense can in fact save tens of thousands of lives in wartime.
Conventional Active-Defense
Describing the history of conventional active-defense as “complicated” would perhaps be the understatement of the century, as it pretty well runs the gamut of every conceivable facet of warfare since 1945. Special forces saboteurs parachuting behind NATO, Soviet or Chinese lines to detonate tactical nuclear weapons outside of strategic bomber bases? Check — Michael Vickers, the famous CIA liaison with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan trained to do that as a green beret. Using fighter/interceptors to shoot down bomber aircraft after having been alerted to their presence by forward-positioned radar stations. Also check, indeed that’s 90% of the reason NORAD and the Northern Warning System exist.
Rather than listing off a litany of evolving force structures and postures, squadron locations and assorted technological developments in aeronautical and submarine warfare, we’ll take a gander at a pair of highly technical yet simultaneously hilarious problems.
The Wohlstetter Basing Study
When he was a stripling senior economist at the RAND Corporation in the early 1950s, Albert Wohlstetter set about calculating the optimal sortie rates and patterns for American bombers tasked with bombing the Soviet Union in the event of a large scale nuclear war. While he was conducting said studies, he stumbled upon a particularly embarrassing oversight on the part of Strategic Air Command. You see, Strategic Air Command (SAC) had a habit of locating its strategic bomber bases in relatively close proximity to the Soviet Union to facilitate access to Soviet territory and maximize their time aloft. Outwardly, that approach was logical if not sensible, bombers of the early Cold War were not exactly known for their endurance flying. But, there was a problem that might seem obvious in hindsight, which the Air Force failed to notice at the time.
You see, in placing their bomber bases so close to the Soviet border, SAC had effectively rendered the morass of the US’ arsenal vulnerable to even a half-hearted Soviet first strike. In laymen’s terms, for the first decade of the Cold War, if the USSR had wanted to, it could’ve crippled the US’ capacity to wage nuclear war in under an hour without breaking a sweat, World War 3 would’ve ended in a pathetic American whimper.
The MX Basing Problem
In the latter years of the Cold War, the US government found itself facing the sticky problem of how to replace its aging Minuteman III ICBMs. Normally, when there’s a vivacious debate over the merits of a successive weapons system, most of the discussion is oriented around the hypothetical replacements’ physical characteristics/attributes as well as the operational/strategic purposes said platform is meant to serve.
It was not so with the MX Peacemaker (DoD would’ve went with “Peacekeeper”, but it concluded that a biblical reference to machines meant to incinerate millions of people would be a tad bit on the nose). By the mid-1970s, the MX was the clear and obvious successor to the Minuteman: it was substantially larger, it could carry more re-entry vehicles, it had a smaller circular-error probability, it was a cost-efficient delivery system, by all accounts it was just a superior ICBM. But, the program was beset by a categorically idiotic problem — how would the MX be based?
You see, per the US Air Force’s (and others) calculations, the US’ ICBM silo fields were too exposed to Soviet ICBM or SLBM strikes. This was admittedly a fair concern, as said vulnerability created an incentive on the part of the US to launch its ICBMs before they could be destroyed on the ground (this is reminiscent of the so-called launch-under-alert or launch-under-attack force postures that we’ll cover in the counterforce part of our series). But, for the moment, we’ll ignore that this over-cognization essentially boiled down to an effort to procure land-based SLBMs (with respect to vulnerability and second-strike capacity).
To mollify this vulnerability concern, the Department of Defense, the Air Force and the broader defense community went into a proverbial frenzy, generating dozens of potential solutions, many of which were carefully studied and scrutinized. They examined the traditional ICBM basing modes; hardened silos, mobile trucks/transport erector launchers, and the rarer rail-mobile configuration; but the Air Force also looked at a bunch of approaches pilfered straight from the ACME cartoons these officers grew up watching. They considered stashing the MX on random cargo planes that would fly around the country until they were ordered to attack, at which point their carrying planes would land at the nearest airport, disembark the ICBM and its crew would begin the launch sequence. Another alternative would see the MX being dropped out of cargo planes and launched while it was still airborne. Some enterprising official considered slapping them on oversized ATVs, and having them roam the American countryside Mad Max style. Still another approach suggested was to stash them under sizable lakes or canals. Yet another option would see DoD digging thousands of silos for the handful of ICBMs we expected to procure, with an eye towards conducting a so-called “shell game.” The Air Force itself was partial to the option which entailed constructing a series of covered trench systems with rail-lines stretching thousands of kilometers, where the MXs would travel around at random until it was time to launch. That approach was only junked when Air Force officials were presented with the anticipated price-tag. DoD officials were partial towards the “shell game”, or “Racetrack” approach, which in itself was (obviously) prohibitively expensive (apparently no one suggested that developing a network of silos more expensive than the ICBMs themselves was perhaps not the best idea).
Despite over a decade of deliberations and an incalculable amount of effort by the US’ brightest minds, the US ultimately declined to make a decision. In 1982 under Reagan, the Air Force made the choice to stash a few dozen MX missiles (christened the LGM-118 Peacekeeper) in existing Minutemen silos, and by 1986 a few dozen LGM-118s were deployed. Because of all of this bureaucratic gridlock, Congress capped the number of deployed Peacekeepers at 50 in 1986, and the collapse of the USSR in 1991 made all of that work a moot point. Ironically enough, the MX/LGM-118 which, mind you, was meant to replace the Minuteman III, was phased out completely in 2005, while the US still maintains some 400 Minutemen.
Ballistic Missile Defenses
Early American and Soviet developments in missile defense (specifically to counter the threat posed by ICBMs) were, in a word, meretricious.
Nike-Zeus/A-135
The American-made Nike-Zeus and the Soviet-make A-35 and subsequent A-135 anti-ballistic missile systems were, or rather, are quite similar platforms. Both used baroque computer systems integrated with early long-range radar networks to identify inbound ICBMs, at which point these batteries would launch interceptor missiles carrying low-yield nuclear warheads flying at comically high speeds towards the approximate locations of whatsoever missiles/re-entry vehicles. Once these interceptors reached within a few dozen to a few hundred meters of their targets, their warheads were to be remotely detonated, in theory destroying said inbound objects.
This “close-enough” methodology was superseded in the US by so-called “hit-to-kill” ballistic missile defenses, an approach which can succinctly be described as “trying to hit a bullet flying at Mach 20 with another bullet flying at Mach 15.” Russia on the other hand, still employs the A-135.
Historically, neither the US government or the Soviet government placed much faith in the efficacy of their old-timey ABM systems due to their relatively low simulated/estimated reliability and hit probabilities, but that didn’t prevent the nuclear war planners on both sides from factoring them into their calculations.
To be perfectly honest, with the benefit of hindsight American war-planners went a bit overboard with their redundancy measures. Using their own physics acumen as well as public statements/observations from various US Federal government sources, noted analysts on all matters nuclear war Hans Kristensen and Drs. Robert Norris along with Matthew McKinzie calculated that in 1968 the US Strategic Air Command likely would have allocated 8 warheads per A-35 missile site emplaced around Moscow, or roughly 66 1-megaton nuclear warheads in total (another 20 or so 1-megaton warheads would’ve been allocated to strike A-35 sites around St. Petersburg/Leningrad, but we’ll set that aside for simplicity’s sake). On its own, allocating 66 high-yield warheads to a handful of targets should pretty obviously be considered ‘overkill’, but such an allotment of sheer firepower is simply gratuitous when you learn that after the Cold War when Soviet archives opened up, we learned that the Red Army estimated that all of its A-35 interceptors ‘might’ have been able to intercept one inbound American ICBM in total.
I suppose the lessons there are two-fold. Yes, early ballistic missile defense systems were clownishly inefficient when examined in isolation, but they played a seriously distortionary role on the targeting schemas of both nuclear powers. If, speaking hypothetically, American intelligence had been able to determine the technical inadequacy of the USSR’s regional BMD systems, in the event of nuclear war those 66 warheads either would have been allocated to Soviet military bases or cities, or they would’ve have been preserved for later usage. Put another way, the Red Army in pursuing a local defense for Moscow effectively teed-up the Third Rome to fall on its own sword in quite spectacular fashion, potentially saving the lives of countless millions of Soviet citizens around the USSR in the process.
The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), AKA ‘Star Wars’
Many Americans will remember the development of ‘Star Wars’ as the coke-addled fever dream of rightwing America’s favorite pre-demential founding father Ronald Reagan. The actual history around SDI is… how should we put it, a wee bit more complicated.
To the popular imagination, SDI was a suite of mind-numbingly complex defensive systems that the US government hoped would push well beyond the frontiers of technical feasibility to, in the words of one expert, build a “Maginot Line” in space to defend against nuclear weapons.
Now, I’m entirely too lazy to list off the circus of programs that were nominally and actually put into development under SDI, and since this isn’t really supposed to be a full-blown technical paper, I’ll link this precis on the program below.
This probably goes without saying for anyone who lived through the 1980s, but the general and expert consensus was that SDI was a monumentally stupid idea that was not only wildly expensive and technologically unrealistic, but it made the US look like a gaggle of clowns to the entirety of the world. Even the United States’ ride-or-die Anglo partners believed SDI to be a cataclysmically moronic program, and they told the US government as much directly to its face.
But, as few people know (even amongst US government personnel who actually worked on the program), SDI’s announcement and development was an extraordinarily shrewd and well calculated policy decision that was cooked-up by a handful of brainiacs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon, and fed to President Reagan and the American populace in quite a sneaky fashion, akin to giving a hyperactive puppy crushed up sleeping pills cleverly hid inside of a cupcake.
The Nexus between Unreality and Bureaucracy
Before we can explicate the rationale behind investing in SDI, we have to talk some fast-facts pertaining to America’s defense bureaucracy and its long-running drivers of policy.
The patron saint of modern American (and later global) strategy Director Andrew Marshall of the Office of Net Assessment, in some of his über-classified reports prepared for the Secretary of Defense made a handful of striking, and as it turns out fatal observations. Bear with me on this, as I’m working in large part from extrapolation and unclassified writings made by his colleagues as his actual reports are, believe it or not, the most classified documents in the history of mankind (only two people at a time at most were ever allowed to posses a copy of his ‘Net Assessments’, himself and whoever the US Secretary of Defense was at the time of publication, and each SECDEF had to return their copies immediately after they finished reading them — I’m effectively deducing the thoughts of the only human whose brain was classified top-secret).
Director Marshall was a relatively short and extremely quiet man, he never got to finish his undergraduate education as he came from a working-class background, and he wasn’t allowed to volunteer to serve in the US Army during the Second World War because he had a heart murmur. Nevertheless, if you speak with big-wig generals and senior Federal employees who’ve worked in the Pentagon, White House or Intelligence Community over the years, they refer to Mr. Marshall in hushed tones, as if he was America’s only living deity. If you speak with the rare individuals who had the opportunity to work for him, they invariably sound either humbled or afraid when they speak of him. As deluded as conspiracists are, even many of the people in charge of cryptic so-called “all-powerful” organizations (such as the Bilderberg Group) we all grew up hearing about either worked for him at one point, or were pupils of his best friends.
So what I’m saying is this that this next section is an imperfect distillation of knowledge; I’m a humble peon explaining brilliant 5th-dimensional chess moves by America’s da Vinci like the Apostle Luke trying to recall the teachings of Jesus from memory.
Saint Marshall and his brilliant colleagues, in a bid to “reel-in” the Cold War which was essentially functioning on autopilot, made the astute observation that the economy of the Soviet Union was terminally broken. The US Central Intelligence Agency along with pretty much the entirety of the US government believed that the USSR could keep up its massive glut of defense “spending” essentially forever, and they genuinely believed that the Cold War would churn forever-onwards until the Apocalypse. In the early 1970s, Marshall and his genius economist friend Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger took one look at US government estimates (classified and unclassified) of the size of the Soviet economy and its defense outlays, looked at one another like…
… and promptly concluded that almost the entire US Federal and every allied government, plus most of academia were vaguely stupid, and their figures were dogshit. I’m pulling my punches here of course since smart people respond less negatively to being insulted than they do to a wholesale dismantling of their socio-economic conceptions of reality.
Marshall and ‘Schlesh’ made the, in retrospect obvious educated guess that because the Soviet Union’s economic structure was visibly less efficient and wildly distorted, not only was the USSR’s GDP substantially smaller than virtually every other estimate contended, but that Soviet defense “spending” (I have to use that word loosely, in reality the Soviet government didn’t really “buy” military equipment, it just allocated resources and made production demands) was also substantially larger than almost every Western estimate. They also backed up their observations through conversations with Soviet expats who’d worked in the USSR’s economic and defense ministries (many of whom were written off as crazy by the broader Federal government and intelligence community which was busy navel-gazing at official figures and shiny satellite imagery of tanks rolling out of factories every other hour). This was a critical observation, as, not to get too wonky, if the USSR was consistently spending 10% of its… let’s say $1 trillion GDP on defense spending vis-a-vis the US spending 7% of its $2 trillion GDP on defense spending (those are hypothetical figures, and the actual numbers were moving targets anyways), then there wasn’t anything the US/West could do to “stave off” the “Red Menace” except carefully prepare for a centuries-long struggle. But, if the USSR was actually allocating… let’s say, 30% of its $500 billion GDP to national security, then the USSR’s economy and society was quite vulnerable to activistic, so-called “competitive” Western strategies.
Now, it’s widely recognized that the Red Army and Soviet government shelled out resources on national security like a crackhead looking for their next fix, and conscious of the Politburo’s deep sensitivity to their own sanctity, Marshall and company arrived at the calculated realization that they could sucker the Soviet Politburo into realizing that it was playing a losing game with the US. They developed and quietly pushed a suite of stratagems to this effect.
The first coy trick of note was… and we’ll touch upon this more in Nuclear Strategy 411’s Counter-force and Counter-value sections… Marshall and his friends nudging the US Department of Defense into procuring stealth bombers at scale. This calculus was simple: after the ‘Great Patriotic War’, the Red Army and Politburo were simply paranoid about the possibility that foreign bombers would rain down hell on Soviet soil. So, logically, they’d feel compelled to make massive investments into modernizing their Air Defense coverage over the ‘entire’ Soviet Union (for the geographically and economically challenged among us, pouring money into air defense systems destined to defend every inch of the largest political landmass in human history is mind-numbingly expensive). And that’s exactly what happened — and we can still see the legacy of this stratagem in Russia’s massive stockpile of highly sophisticated air defense platforms. As an added bonus, air defense platforms are of less offensive utility than, say, fleets of tanks or short-range ballistic missiles.
The second major, and arguably more brilliant realization Marshall and company made, is that they could directly target the strategic calculus of the USSR’s political leadership by signaling the possibility that the US ‘might’ be able to plausibly neuter the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal through a program like SDI. Whether or not SDI’s development was actually financially/economically/technologically viable was completely and utterly besides the point per this modus of calculation, the USSR just had to believe that it was. Ironically enough, Marshall personally assessed that this particular facet of its impact would likely be relatively uninteresting, he was more analytically fascinated with the effect a parallel American and Soviet crash-development would have on strategic stability.
But, the Politburo of the Soviet Government on the other-hand had an entirely separate interpretation of the US’ development of SDI, it was principally one of panic. To be perfectly clear here, the USSR’s defense industrial base saw the US developing SDI and began foaming at the mouth. The Defense Ministry and its affiliated directorates promptly began their own crash development of SDI-like programs and they began the process of churning out hitherto mothballed anti-satellite platforms in earnest. But, it was not lost on men such as President Mikhail Gorbachev that these systems are quite expensive and the Politburo was increasingly concerned about the resource burden the USSR’s defense efforts were placing on Soviet society. The inimitable Russian defense analyst Pavel Podvig puts it thus:
By all accounts the Soviet leadership was extremely concerned about the level of nuclear confrontation with the United States, and the burden military spending put on the Soviet economy. However, those in the political and military leadership who had serious reservations about the potential destabilizing effects of missile defenses could not present a viable alternative to the course of actions proposed by the defense industry and approved by the July 1985 decision. An alternative to a military buildup began to emerge only after evaluations of the technical prospects of missile defenses and countermeasures and after the U.S.–Soviet arms control dialogue, which was relaunched at the summit meeting in Geneva in November 1985, grew strong enough to become a viable force in the internal debate.
Even more stridently, Gorbachev observed to the Politburo prior to the Reykjavik summit of 1986, referring to the US government’s public embrace of SDI as well as American proposals to place MRBMs in Europe that:
Our main goal now is to prevent the arms race from reaching a new stage.
If we don’t do that the danger will increase. If we don’t back down on some specific, maybe important issues, if we don’t budge from the positions we’ve held for a long time, we will lose in the end. We will be drawn into an
arms race that we cannot manage. We will lose, because right now we are
already at the end of our tether.
In effect, the US’ government’s “evidently” hare-brained but hard-nosed development of SDI, coupled with President Reagan’s affable and conciliatory private demeanor gave President Gorbachev both motivation and an opening to embark on his own internal crusade of perestroika.
In case that wasn’t ironic enough, the Office of the Secretary of Defense actually had a hard time selling SDI as a useful tool to its bosses in the White House (again, because it was from a technical standpoint as stupid as it sounded). So defense officials roped in science fiction authors to “church it up” so that President Reagan in his waxing senility would latch onto this wunderwaffen like a toddler gazing at lightning bugs.
A brief aside to introduce a throughline that pervades close to all of American strategy-making. I won’t go as far as directly stating that employing the famous sci-fi author Jerry Pournelle to make this case was Andy Marshall’s idea, but I will point out that Pournelle’s son Phillip wound up joining the Office of Net Assessment (a tiny and highly exclusive outfit with about 15 civilian and uniformed analysts) as one of Mr. Marshall’s military staffers. The younger Pournelle is brilliant in his own right, but this really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that DoD — like all large bureaucratic enterprises — operates with its own patronage networks.
Analyzing the dynamic interplay of ideas and concepts is especially difficult with organizations like the Department of Defense and its surrounding ecosystem, as not only are they largely classified informatic black-boxes, people steal ideas from one-another constantly in a desperate bid to seem more promotable (yes, even people who are already in such haute positions as ‘Secretary of Defense’ engage in this practice). To be perfectly honest, this sort’ve jockeying is a smidgin depressing, and it’s almost certainly a cognitive sink that stifles innovation, but I’m told (perhaps unconvincingly) that this all has some utility. In case you’re wondering, yes the people in high-ranking bureaucratic sinecures recognize this childish behavior, to their endless amusement no less, truly high school never ends.
Taking this data and anecdata together, we arrive at the fascinating conclusion that despite maintaining a rotely and obviously dysfunctional bureaucracy that had to resort to trickery in order to implement a procurement program everyone knew to be comically inviable, the US government enacted a policy that wound up being one of the death-knells of the USSR.
Modern Defenses Against Nuclear Weapons
Civil Defense
Before we get into the more fun kinetic defenses against nuclear onslaughts, let’s take a quick gander at the extant civil defense infrastructure of the nine nuclear powers…
United States
“We don’t do that here” — I wish I were joking, but I legitimately cannot find any Federal documents or analyses on Civil Defense in the event of nuclear war written after 2007. FEMA doesn’t even have a handbook for what to do during nuclear war in its publications library.
Russia
Unlike the US government, the Russian government at least pretends to take the problem of Civil Defense as a counter to nuclear war seriously. It’s unclear if modern Russian housing is constructed along the same parameters as Soviet buildings and infrastructure with respect to resistance against blast overpressure, but many if not most old Soviet public apartments still exists, meaning there’s a plethora of shelters.
France
France, like the US and the UK also maintains a negligible civil defense infrastructure, though unlike the UK it actually has a directorate to handle civil defense problems in its Interior Department (perhaps I’m being too generous, it has ‘hundreds’ of fallout shelters for 60 million plus people, but at least they have a plan to distribute iodine tablets).
Israel
Contrary to expectations given the Israeli government’s general hawkishness in the martial sphere and the periodic bouts of tit for tat bombings and rocket strikes the IDF has with its Palestinian cousins, Israel also lacks a robust civil defense institution or the necessary infrastructure to protect its citizens from a nuclear attack.
China
The Chinese government refers to Civil Defense in the more verbose phrase “Civil Air Defense“, and while this might just be the byproduct of bureaucrats trying to look busy, there’s an increasingly robust discourse on the prophylactic measures that can be employed in the event of a nuclear war. It’s being suggested to architects that new high-rises include air-raid shelters in basements, and the Chinese Communist Party is going through pains to highlight that subways can be used as potential shelters.
India
The Indian government has numerous state and national civil defense organizations designed to help cope with the aftermath of a war with either India or China. They lack adequate funding to and resources to deal with a disaster as cataclysmic as a nuclear war, but these organizations do in fact exist.
Pakistan
Ignoring for the moment the fact that the Pakistani Directorate of Civil Defence cribbed its motto from Schindler’s List, Pakistan appears to have the best organized Civil Defense apparatus out of all of the 9 stated nuclear powers, though it lacks the finances to fund enough shelters to comfortably absorb a nuclear exchange.
North Korea
North Korea ‘has’ a network of air-raid shelters, don’t ask me if they work or if they were built to code, I simply don’t know — this is North Korea we’re talking about.
… alright, I think we’ve seen enough.
Conventional Active Defense
Air-Defense:
Modern conventional active defense, especially in the aerial domain is… well… it’s complicated. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, this all depends on who’s attacking who, how attacks are being conducted, the status of myriad airbases and airwings (e.g. whether or not squadrons have been destroyed on the ground, how much radar and communications interference there is in the atmosphere from nuclear detonations, whether or not carriers are still operational, etc…), where strikes are taking place, what the targets of various assaulting aircraft (or ships) are.
I’m not going to lie and say that I have the answers on this problem, at best I can hand out a rule of thumb: the larger and more technologically advanced a country’s radar network, fighter aircraft and tanker fleet, and surface-to-air missile network is, the better positioned a country will be to shoot down nuclear-armed bombers, cruise-missiles and attack aircraft.
Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW):
Technically, ASW has fewer moving parts than air defense, but it makes up for its numerical ease with a mind-numbing degree of technical complexity and official obfuscation. It’s not for nothing that that famous phrase everyone uses, i.e. I can “neither confirm nor deny” rose to prominence after the CIA used it to try to quash investigations into an American salvage operation of a sunken Soviet submarine (this is the infamous ‘Glomar’ response).
The only thing more difficult than running an ultra-marathon is trying to get a straight answer out of an American or NATO submariner as to what their capabilities are and how they stack up against Russia and China’s surface fleets and submarines. We’re not going to delve into the nitty gritty of modern submarine and anti-submarine warfare here, partially because I’m woefully ill-qualified to commentate on this subject, but mostly because this piece is clocking in at a 40 minute plus read-time (and we haven’t even gotten to the interesting stuff yet), but it’d probably be worthwhile to mention a few facts and observations. Firstly, an outsized share of ASW revolves around the quietness of submarines and the ability of surface ships and other submarines to track them. I’m not going to explain how the science of ‘Acoustic Warfare’ works, because I can’t — it’s extremely complicated and very physics heavy, and it’s subject to quite a large number of variables including such fascinating data as; how deep a body of water is, what’s the salinity of said body of water, how much marine life is flopping around in a given body of water, how warm that body of water is, what that body of water is doing (e.g. how is the weather), and what’s the earth doing beneath that body of water. Here’s an introduction to the science of acoustics if that’s the sort’ve thing you’re interested in, but that’s not strictly relevant for what we’re doing here. Generality will suffice.
As you can tell from this old chart without a label on the y-axis, the average amount of noise a given submarine emits while underway is heavily classified — but there’s a clear trendline here. US/NATO subs perform better than Russian subs, Russian subs perform better than Chinese subs, and everyone else’s subs fall somewhere higher.
That’s all well and good, but why do we care? Well, if ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) can be identified or tracked while asea (or while they’re in port), they can potentially be destroyed before they unleash their magazines of submarine-launched ballistic missiles. To make matters worse (or better, depending on your perspective), every nuclear power runs at most 3 classes of SSBNs, the US runs one class. While SSBNs tend to receive fairly regular upgrades to their internal hardware and software, their hulls (and sound dampening materials) tend to more or less stay the same until a new class of SSBN is introduced. Now this poses a perennial problem, as if — by some miracle or calamity — specific schematic or technical data on even one submarine of any of the nuclear powers were to be leaked to one of their adversaries, that could pose a systemic problem for a country’s entire ballistic missile submarine fleet.
I’d be remiss in leaving any interested readers empty-handed, here’s a link to a 400 page précis on submarine and anti-submarine warfare written in the 1980s. If you’re interested in learning about the bleeding-edge advancements in submarine warfare, you can learn more about it here at the (quite expensive) Naval Submarine League (NSL), which holds annual conferences, though I have to caution that many topics of discussion will, of course, be classified. The NSL also publishes a journal (though editions written after a certain point are only available to active NSL members), and while it’s endlessly fascinating to read about the lives of people who spend their careers navigating sunken coffins through a watery abyss, the ‘Submarine Review’ is characteristically light on useful technical information.
Ballistic Missile Defense
The American Ballistic Missile Defense Network
Now we get to the cool stuff, shooting bullets with even smaller bullets flying at mach Jesus. The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has a robust fleet of systems designed to intercept the entire band of ballistic missile threats, but for our purposes we’ll focus on the systems designed to tackle ICBMs. All 8 of the other nuclear powers ‘do’ maintain stockpiles of MRBMs and IRBMs, but since those are mostly pointed at their immediate neighbors, they’re functionally irrelevant.
Below you is a map of every shooter and sensor in the US’ “big-boy” ballistic missile defense network (minus the US’ space based sensors such as SBIRs, a giant floating radome in the Pacific, and the Northern Warning System mentioned above). In total, there are 8 long-range radar arrays: three based in Alaska, one in California, one in Greenland, one in the UK, one in Massachusetts and the floating one (the Sea-based X-band radar SBX-1). These sensors are paired with the 44 Ground-Based Interceptors that comprise the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense System, 40 of which are based in Alaska and another 4 are based in California.
Shooters
The current iteration of the Ground-Based Interceptor (or GBI) is essentially a ballistic missile the carries a kinetic kill-vehicle (i.e. instead of using a conventional or nuclear warhead to destroy whatever it’s being shot at, it relies on a maneuvering interceptor to physically strike either an ICBM or an ICBM’s re-entry vehicle). You can access an invaluable Selected Acquisition Report covering the procurement and development process of the GBI and GMDS system using this link here.
Sensors
Here’s a map of the purported coverage of the earlier PAVE PAWS early warning radars, all of the sites have been upgraded from AN/FPS-123/126 radars to AN/FPS-132 radars in recent years. Do I know what the differences between the two are? Nope!, but I will take Raytheon and the Department of Defense’s word at it that those upgrades did in fact improve them (I’m presuming this has something to do with providing missile defense functionality per this unclassified budget document). This map does not include the Cobra Dane radar, SBX-1, or the Long Range Discrimination radar which is also based co-located with an AN/FPS-132 at Clear Space Force Station.
While I strongly endorse learning as much as you realistically can about whatever subjects tickle your fancy, I simply can’t be assed to crack open some of the quite expensive engineering textbooks and papers on the science of radar to explain what’s obviously a quite complicated mathematical/chemical/physics based subject – the only sin waves I care about are at the beach. If you want an engineer’s overview on the science of over-the-horizon (OTH) high-frequency radar, you can read or skim chapter 20 of this ‘Radar Handbook.’ For the purposes of nuclear strategy, you only need a rough idea how efficient OTH radars are at tracking targets, how efficient their facilities are at relaying that data to their attendant ‘shooters’, what their effective ranges are and where they’re located. Everything else is “not my elephants, not my circus” as it were.
The Russian Ballistic Missile Defense Network
Russia’s ballistic missile defense network is… how should we put it… a smidgin more complicated. As you can see from the map below, Russia has about 15-18 total over-the-horizon radar sites based primarily around its borders, with 3-ish sites potentially located in allied countries (I have to throw in a “potentially” caveat as its unclear if one of the sites in Belarus and the site in Azerbaijan are operational). Most of these are primarily early warning radars, and they’re not actually paired with Russia’s 68 A-235 nuclear-tipped interceptors, which are entirely positioned to defend Moscow. This map doesn’t include Russia’s space-based sensor network.
Shooters
Russia’s A-235/135 anti-ballistic missile system is essentially the modern iteration of its older A-35 system, and it (supposedly) is equipped with 53T6 interceptors with low-yield nuclear warheads. As wildly cool as “destroying a nuke with another nuke” sounds, the Soviet and Russian governments, as mentioned above, are not exactly bullish on their ability to reliably intercept inbound ICBMs.
The work on a replacement system, an improved A-135 Moscow ABM system, will be completed in 1987 to provide protection from a strike of 1-2 modern and prospective ICBMs and up to 35 Pershing 2-type intermediate-range missiles. The A-135 system includes a new acquisition and tracking radar, Don-2N (near Pushkino-Sofrino). In accordance with the Decision of the Central Comittee and the Council of Ministers of 15 July 1985, the work has began on further modification of the Moscow ABM system – the A-235 system (intercept of 8-12 complex ballistic targets and up to 40 Pershing-2-type missiles).
A quick aside, “complex ballistic targets” is apparatchik speak for ICBM. The current progression of Russia’s development of the A-235 is entirely unclear to me, though they’ve been testing the interceptors designed to be fielded with this system extensively.
https://twitter.com/bgmilitary/status/1598673248383803394?s=20
Sensors
Nominally, Russia maintains a formidable mixture of older Soviet and fully modern large over-the-horizon radar arrays, in practice… well…
Here’s a map of the nominal coverage arcs of Russia’s early warning radars from a Russian source (number 9 shows up on Google earth’s latest imagery as something of a desolate hellscape, and number 7 appears to still be under construction).
And here are high definition satellite images of each radar array, with (rough) images of what each class of radar installation is supposed to look like.
The Israeli, Indian, French and Chinese Ballistic Missile Defense Networks
As things stand, to public knowledge, only the US and Russian governments maintain ABM systems that are at least theoretically capable of intercepting ICBMs, with that being said, at least 4 other countries are making steady strides towards fielding their own upper-echelon ABM systems.
The Israeli government’s Arrow 3 ABM system, while not yet proven to be capable of intercepting targets with ICBM-like speeds or trajectories, is probably the most obvious example of developments in that direction.
The Indian government, definitely with the cooperation of the Israeli government and potentially with the cooperation of the US government is at a point in the design process roughly analogous to the Arrow 3 with its Prithvi Defence Vehicle (PDV) Mk2. As of 2020, the PDV Mk2 is ready for limited manufacturing, though the number of interceptors procured is also unclear (to me).
The PDV Mk2 is also capable of intercepting satellites (as is a trend with many interceptors of this size it seems), though for the sake of simplicity, we’ll ignore anti-satellite systems (ASATs) for our examinations of nuclear strategy until or unless they prove themselves to be strictly relevant for a given scenario. One might argue that that’s analytically neglectful, to which I’d point out that ICBMs have had inbuilt redundancy measures since before the development of Global Positioning Satellites (GPS). Some long-range ballistic missiles, such as the Trident II SLBM (which also happens to be an ICBM, but the fact that it’s launched from submarines supersedes that descriptor) rely on a combination of inertial navigation (i.e. they quite literally uses this method) and celestial navigation — yes, you read that correctly and it means exactly what it says. If you’re struggling to recall anything from this article in two decades time, remember this poetic noesis: ICBMs, when they embark on their lofty journey across the skies, follow the stars until they become their own suns.
China’s People’s Liberation Army (if you’re willing to suspend disbelief) is potentially even further along with their developments of upper-echelon ABM systems, recently “successfully” testing its own mid-course interceptor. Though, it’s worth pointing out that their exact words were that it’d achieved “the desired test objective.” That’s classic bureaucratese for “whatever we were expecting to happen, happened”, essentially that could mean anything — from an interceptor successfully communicating with a radar station on the ground, to a successful intercept, or even something as silly as “yeah, we missed, but it didn’t accidentally flatten that village near the test range, so we’re calling it a win.”
France’s pretenses are less lofty than the other powers mentioned above, but it is currently developing the Aster 30 Blk 1NT alongside Italy. The 1NT is purportedly capable of intercepting SRBMs and MRBMs launched from distances of up to 1500km.
Simulating Defense Against Nuclear Weapons
Now we’ve arrived at the entrée to this demented spectacle of a course. This video is self-encapsulated, and could arguably comprises a separate piece on its own, but there are some limitations and observations that are worthy of discussion. You can access the broad contours of this scenario/simulation here, though it was tweaked for this video.
Observations
Let’s start by pointing out the large grey four hoofed pachyderm in the room. I discussed this chart and data briefly in the attendant video, but it’s probably worth reiterating what is shows here (40 minute videos are quite long after all). Despite having a relatively favorable intercept window and fairly advanced notification of inbound ICBMs originating from east-Asia, the US’ GMD system performed rather poorly, shooting down an average of less than one ICBM in a ten ICBM salvo.
This rate improved somewhat, dropped off, then improved again (for reasons about which I can only speculate), but the overall picture is visibly grim. As anyone involved in the profession of Air Defense will tell you, engaging targets that are flying directly at a launcher is substantially easier than downing missiles flying at an orthogonal to one’s position — that’s a simple matter of physics, optics and ability, shooting something running across from you is far more difficult than shooting something running at you. When your target is an ICBM flying at Mach 20 across the other side of a continent ‘through space’, obviously that makes things a smidgin difficult.
Bearing that in mind, and having watched this simulation, it should be abundantly clear that the US’ GMD simply isn’t calibrated to engage inbound threats originating west of Beijing targeting any part of the Continental United States east of California.
Limitations
Now, you could probably substantially improve on this methodology by breaking the US down into sectors (e.g. like this image), repeating the entire above process for each sector individually, while scrupulously recording the hit probability of each interceptor (and arriving at some average), but that sounds an awful lot like a job for some poor schlub at the Missile Defense Agency or some DoD committee with access to a super-computer like the ones at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
It’s also worth noting that when these simulations were run, the Long-Range Discrimination Radar at Clear SFB was not actually included within the public-facing database of Slitherine Studios’ Command: Modern Operations. Seeing as it’s also unclear if the LRDR is currently fully operational (and as of December 2022, it wasn’t), I feel comfortable in excluding it. That being said, it might substantially increase the Missile Defense Agency’s ability to track and defeat ICBMs launched from Iran, China and the Korean Peninsula, though it’s not in fact a substitute for mass (i.e. the number of interceptors available to the MDA).
The Department of Defense is also working on actively riddling out some of GMD’s acknowledged problems, for example, the next iteration of the GBI’s are slated to carry multiple exoatmospheric kinetic kill-vehicles (presumably) increasing their ability to intercept inbound ICBMs. Nominally, the presence of multiple kill-vehicles per interceptor is ‘supposed’ to increase the number of ICBMs and re-entry vehicles (RVs) each interceptor can carry, but in practice (given the above results), they likely will be used to increase the pK (kill probability) against a single ICBM or RV. The MDA and DoD plans on purchasing 20 of these NGIs (Next Generation Interceptors) to fill out the silos at Fort Greely.
Post Scriptum
Expert Rolodex
As always at Analytica Camillus, we’d like to encourage our readers to imbibe expert commentary from a multitude of sources, to that effect I’m highlighting two analysts who’ve written and commentated extensively on the problems and travails of Missile Defense (at least within an American context). These short bios or cribbed directly from the institutions which they work for, don’t sue us, we’re just lazy.
Matthew Costlow
Matthew R. Costlow is Senior Analyst at the National Institute for Public Policy. He was formerly Special Assistant in the Office of Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy at the Pentagon.
‘A Curious Criterion: Cost Effective at the Margin for Missile Defense’
Thomas Karako
Thomas Karako is the director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where he arrived in 2014. In 2010–2011, he was an American Political Science Association congressional fellow, working with the professional staff of the HASC Subcommittee on Strategic Forces on U.S. strategic forces policy, nonproliferation, and NATO.
‘Missile Defense in Israel: A Conversation with Moshe Patel’
Conclusion
Just as I was finishing up this piece, it came to my attention that a Youtuber going by Magnus Division published his own exploration of the US’ missile defense network (which you can see below). It’s more of a casual examination than a detailed analysis (the differences should be pretty straightforward: he ran his simulation one time; he included systems that strictly speaking aren’t rated to handle ICBM-like threats; he used double the number of GBIs in existence; MDA’s OTH radar in Greenland is absent, as are SBIRS; for the Red Team, he made use of the PLARF’s older ICBMs instead of using ones launched from their new silo-fields in Central China, etc…), but his video is still worth a watch, and he attained similar results.
It’s also been brought to my attention that an enterprising young Chinese student has also completed a similar missile defense scenario for Command Modern Operations, which you can access at this link here.
We… uhh… didn’t work on these at the same time, and we didn’t crib information from one another. I finished running the simulation component around December of last year, and have spent the past five months working on the written component with the intent of releasing them concurrently.
Having said (errr, written) my piece, I wish you all a well ado. But, in the words of a terminally online OSINT bro, ”’Watch This Space!!!”’, in a few weeks Analytica Camillus will be revealing its cooperative fundraiser to raise money to purchase, digitize and share all manner of classified documents for our patron-only library. Just a $1 monthly donation will grant you access to all manner of privileged documents that aren’t publicly available (such as: manuals for the M109 Paladin, M1 Abrams MBT, Bradley IFV; unavailable DoD doctrine published over the years, and all manner of fun stuff!; plus a curated library of defense and national security material from around the world).
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