Winston Smith
Banned
Hou would you maintain the bomber as the main deliver of strategic nuclear weapons, have the Fairy Rotordyne enter service and a whole load of other post-1945 "what ifs?" (My 1st thread!)
Bombers, Rotordynes and a fistful of Buccaneers
- Thread starter Winston Smith
- Start date
Rogue Shadows
Banned
I don't think bombers could ever outpace missiles. The missiles are just too fast in comparison to planes - too difficult to shoot down. Mostly because there's no need for a pilot.
You'd have to handwave away missiles entirely.
What about a treaty banning ICBM's, or limitations in the numbers any signatory could have?
Winston Smith
Banned
Not that I wish to end futher discussion, but surely a bomber, which is able to change its position in three dimensions, as well as institute jamming is a lot more difficult to shoot down then a ICBM following a ballistic arc?
Riain
Banned
Not even close sorry, the problem is very different. Nuclear bomber defence is just the evolution of the classic problem, USAF Adcom, RAF Fighter Command and PVO Strany were assumed to be able to shoot down some 20% of attacking bombers. What's more the fighter and SAMs were dual use, they could profitably be employed all over the world doing lots of things.
Ballistic missile defence was a whole new ball game against a whole new target. An ICBM RV is a tiny thing screaming in at hypersonic speeds with minutes of warning and engagement time. The difficulty in organising a decent ABM network, comparable in effectiveness to the fighter/SAM networks was the reason why the ABM treaty was struck and adhered to.
Ballistic missile defence was a whole new ball game against a whole new target. An ICBM RV is a tiny thing screaming in at hypersonic speeds with minutes of warning and engagement time. The difficulty in organising a decent ABM network, comparable in effectiveness to the fighter/SAM networks was the reason why the ABM treaty was struck and adhered to.
Dan Reilly The Great
Banned
the closest thing you might get is if PLUTO got approved somehow. It's sort of a hybrid between an ICBM and a bomber, you just need the Pentagon to not care about sprinkling radiation and fissile material all across the countryside along the flightpath. It may be possible that strategic planning at the USAF may become fatalistic enough that the top brass don't care so much about the negative effects because fallout would be expected to be so widespread that it wouldn't really matter in the grand scheme.
pluto has the advantage that it is recallable and at the same time far more difficult to shoot down than any bomber due to its significant durability and considerably higher speed. Also the ability that it possesses to loiter over the ocean before being ordered to finally make a final attack makes it harder to take them out on the ground.
pluto has the advantage that it is recallable and at the same time far more difficult to shoot down than any bomber due to its significant durability and considerably higher speed. Also the ability that it possesses to loiter over the ocean before being ordered to finally make a final attack makes it harder to take them out on the ground.
You are talking about hitting a bullet with a bullet. It is possible now, barely, but the system can saturated fairly easily with decoys since the decision gate is so small.
Actually it has been possible for the last half-century. The Americans were able to get skin to skin hits on ballistic missiles as far back as the '60s. Compared to a bomber a ballistic missile is a very predictable target that does not take evasive action, or react to attack. Conversely a bomber can come at its target from a variety of directions, use jamming and deception and use weather and terrain to mask its approach to a target.
The bomber is also much more flexible. It can carry both nuclear and conventional weapons, an ICBM can't do that.
Decoys don't work, to an ABM system they look like decoys. If you build a decoy that looks like a warhead it is as heavy as a warhead so you might as well put an additional warhead on it. That is what most users have done.
Interestingly just using maths and no guidance system the Indians have managed to shoot down an ICBM.
The decision to abandon ABM systems in the past was not technical, but political. The US very briefly had a working ABM system and the Soviets chose to build a limited local system, they also cheated on the treaty.
Winston, Stu Slade really knows his stuff. He's worked in this sort of area for a long time, so you can take what he says as being very accurate.
If you want to keep bombers as the main deterrent and get rid of ICBMs I'd recommend three things:
1: Have someone other than JFK as POTUS and Robert Strange McNamara as SECDEF.
2: Have the B-70 enter service.
3: Have Polaris rather than Skybolt cancelled.
A side effect of that would be that the RAF Vulcan fleet would be our main nuclear delivery platform. The proposed Vulcan B.3 would probably be in service today.
Memorandum to the President on the Program for Deployment of Nike-Zeus said:
Source
Memorandum on the Limited Deployment of NIKE-ZEUS said:
Source
JN1 said:
No they haven't. They don't even have an ICBM to shoot down. The best that they've down is to knock down a 2,000km ranged modified Prithvi ballistic missile. An ICBM is about twice as fast on a maximum range trajectory.
JN1 said:
It's technical and economic. ABM is absurdly expensive and still easily swamped as long as you aren't going after ICBM fields. If memory serves, even the upgraded Moscow ABM system can't deal with more than about fourteen targets.
JN1 said:
And the enemy can predict what sort of avenues the bomber may come through and deploy batteries and interceptors accordingly. Plus, there's always the possibility (nay, the probability with certain commands) that the mission planners will be pants on head retarded and make things a duck shoot for the air defense folks (see Linebacker II until SAC stopped planning things themselves).
Ah, I see you've been taken in by the anti-ABM propaganda. The US military were actually quite satisfied with the Nike-Zeus system. A certain RSM and his 'Whizz Kids' OTOH were not. Both sides in the Cold War took a political decision to largely abandon ABM systems (though the USSR cheated) because frankly they are very expensive and at the time it was cheaper to go for MAD.
Yes, I was wrong about the Indians. It was a simpler ballistic missile they shot down, but the principle still holds good. No matter how fast a ballistic missile goes it flies on a very predictable trajectory. Once you can track it then you can predict that trajectory with ease and shoot it down.
Ryan should be amused that you are using his site to back-up an anti-ABM argument.
I would also add that no interceptor, or SAM system has yet been built that can reliably shoot down an aircraft capable of Mach 3.4, like say the production standard B-70, or SR-71.
Yes, I was wrong about the Indians. It was a simpler ballistic missile they shot down, but the principle still holds good. No matter how fast a ballistic missile goes it flies on a very predictable trajectory. Once you can track it then you can predict that trajectory with ease and shoot it down.
Ryan should be amused that you are using his site to back-up an anti-ABM argument.
I would also add that no interceptor, or SAM system has yet been built that can reliably shoot down an aircraft capable of Mach 3.4, like say the production standard B-70, or SR-71.
Last edited:
On-topic, I'm not sure what sort of market the Fairey Rotodyne was supposed to try and claim. The areas where it works out better than regular air travel (downtown to downtown travel at heliports) are already well-served by rail (although it is faster, doing Brussels to Paris in 58 minutes while even the fastest TGV connection right now is 1:20), though in the military world it might do well competing against the CH-47.
A useful POD for the Rotodyne, however, would be either Rolls-Royce not taking over Napier or RR being more supportive of the Eland(?) having done so, so that there isn't a delay in engine development and cost for the Rotodyne. That triggered the death spiral of lost orders if I skimmed my book on the Rotodyne correctly.
Not propaganda, merely their own statements about the weapons system. An ABM system could have dealt with fears about a crippling first strike upon our own ICBM fields, but given that said fears were around even though we still had a secure retaliatory force in the SSBNs, I don't think you'd have any benefit there. ABM just doesn't give you anything useful for all the money expended upon it. By the time you could deploy any ABM force, the Soviets had a sufficiently large force that even a perfect ABM system would have been overwhelmed by weight of numbers. 1967: 820 warheads; 1970: 1,434; 1975 (Spartan/Sprint are deployed) 1,797 warheads; 1979: 4,126. Those are all ICBM incidentally, add another 143, 400, 858, and 1,282 for SLBM warheads.
That's the root of the destabilization arguments, incidentally, about ABM. It's a worthless system for defending against countervalue strikes on its own (and redundant for defending against counterforce; if the enemy has flushed his silos, what does it matter if your hard target capable missiles survive, you've nothing but soft targets which the SSBN force could take care of anyhow). But if you manage a successful enough first strike, it becomes possible, for a certain maniacal definition of "acceptable losses" (hurrah, only 15% of American voters died!), for ABM systems to have value (assuming that they defeat penetration aids). In turn, that could make the other side uneasy enough to attack preemptively in some manner to get rid of the system. I don't think it's all that good of an argument myself, the assumptions that have to be made for the effectiveness of the ABM and first-strike are rather unrealistic (although, it's a sort of devil's advocate argument, "If everything works as fine and dandy as you want, then you've caused problem X..."), but there you have it.
Which, of course, is why you hide it amongst decoys, chaff, and low power jammers. Although Hypersonic Glide Vehicles as MARVs do counteract that problem. If memory serves, the current NMD program isn't designed to be capable of dealing with advanced RVs or decoys anyhow.
B-70 was not capable of Mach 3.4 and SR-71 wasn't all that hot on it. It's certainly an unofficial capability for it since it exceeds their official flight speed record by .1 Mach. And really, it depends on who you talk to. SR-71 folks will swear up and down that they were untouchable. PVO folks will swear up and down that they had intercepted multiple times, they just didn't pull the trigger was all. Since one SR-71 mission was scrubbed rather than directly overfly a Vietnamese SA-2 battery due to fears of being shot down (and there's no reason to think that an S-200 or better was incapable of knocking one down), I lean towards the PVO folks, even if they did show remarkable incompetence when it came to shooting down a civilian airliner.
A useful POD for the Rotodyne, however, would be either Rolls-Royce not taking over Napier or RR being more supportive of the Eland(?) having done so, so that there isn't a delay in engine development and cost for the Rotodyne. That triggered the death spiral of lost orders if I skimmed my book on the Rotodyne correctly.
Not propaganda, merely their own statements about the weapons system. An ABM system could have dealt with fears about a crippling first strike upon our own ICBM fields, but given that said fears were around even though we still had a secure retaliatory force in the SSBNs, I don't think you'd have any benefit there. ABM just doesn't give you anything useful for all the money expended upon it. By the time you could deploy any ABM force, the Soviets had a sufficiently large force that even a perfect ABM system would have been overwhelmed by weight of numbers. 1967: 820 warheads; 1970: 1,434; 1975 (Spartan/Sprint are deployed) 1,797 warheads; 1979: 4,126. Those are all ICBM incidentally, add another 143, 400, 858, and 1,282 for SLBM warheads.
That's the root of the destabilization arguments, incidentally, about ABM. It's a worthless system for defending against countervalue strikes on its own (and redundant for defending against counterforce; if the enemy has flushed his silos, what does it matter if your hard target capable missiles survive, you've nothing but soft targets which the SSBN force could take care of anyhow). But if you manage a successful enough first strike, it becomes possible, for a certain maniacal definition of "acceptable losses" (hurrah, only 15% of American voters died!), for ABM systems to have value (assuming that they defeat penetration aids). In turn, that could make the other side uneasy enough to attack preemptively in some manner to get rid of the system. I don't think it's all that good of an argument myself, the assumptions that have to be made for the effectiveness of the ABM and first-strike are rather unrealistic (although, it's a sort of devil's advocate argument, "If everything works as fine and dandy as you want, then you've caused problem X..."), but there you have it.
JN1 said:
Which, of course, is why you hide it amongst decoys, chaff, and low power jammers. Although Hypersonic Glide Vehicles as MARVs do counteract that problem. If memory serves, the current NMD program isn't designed to be capable of dealing with advanced RVs or decoys anyhow.
JN1 said:
B-70 was not capable of Mach 3.4 and SR-71 wasn't all that hot on it. It's certainly an unofficial capability for it since it exceeds their official flight speed record by .1 Mach. And really, it depends on who you talk to. SR-71 folks will swear up and down that they were untouchable. PVO folks will swear up and down that they had intercepted multiple times, they just didn't pull the trigger was all. Since one SR-71 mission was scrubbed rather than directly overfly a Vietnamese SA-2 battery due to fears of being shot down (and there's no reason to think that an S-200 or better was incapable of knocking one down), I lean towards the PVO folks, even if they did show remarkable incompetence when it came to shooting down a civilian airliner.
Last edited:
I believe that one of the reason that the bomber is supreme in the Stuart Slade Big one world is that the US has no competition,Russia is an alie and the biggest treat is Chipan which in the books simply does not have the ressources to compete.Plus of course the pledge and backing to the open skies policy of SAC.If you do not comply SAc will nuke you to the stone age.The Us of the books is not afraid or constrained in using nukes,it has a police of not waging war against an enemy,it is simplier to destroy the enemy,nuking them to oblivion.
Riain
Banned
I've read that in 1986 PVO Strany set up an interception with 4 Mig25s that the targetted SR71 would not have been able to escape from, wherever it turned it would have eaten a snap-up missile. I assume that if the need was urgent enough this capability would have been reached years earlier. In addition if the need was great enough a version of the mid/late 60s SA-5 SAM would have been produced to drill B70s/SR71s.
The comment that ABMs don't do enough to justify their vast cost is accurate. While it is possible for ABMs back in the 70s to intercept ICBM RVs it was an uphill battle for the ABM, always vulnerable to things like ionospheric nuke bursts, FOBs attack on radars, depressed trajectory SLBM shots etc.
A word on decoys, decoys do look like decoys to an ABM system, but only after a good look and when atmospheric drag separates then from the RVs. In engagments where every second counts the time taken to discriminate between RVs and decoys counts as a win for the ICBM as it will increase the number of warheads which will successfully penetrate the ABM system.
The comment that ABMs don't do enough to justify their vast cost is accurate. While it is possible for ABMs back in the 70s to intercept ICBM RVs it was an uphill battle for the ABM, always vulnerable to things like ionospheric nuke bursts, FOBs attack on radars, depressed trajectory SLBM shots etc.
A word on decoys, decoys do look like decoys to an ABM system, but only after a good look and when atmospheric drag separates then from the RVs. In engagments where every second counts the time taken to discriminate between RVs and decoys counts as a win for the ICBM as it will increase the number of warheads which will successfully penetrate the ABM system.