Project Casaba-Howitzer was like a shaped charge, but nuclear. I could see a few of those floating in space in this TL.
Which, of course, is why you don't burn the retros right to entry - on the same theory as bombers having fail-safe points. You do your sabre rattling, and when things get serious the warheads are deorbited to the point where they're skimming the atmosphere. Say a periapsis of 150 kilometres, though that's an arbitrary number. At this point, the opponent is in the same situation as if a thundering herd of B-52s was heading their way. If they don't back down, you issue the order to attack, the final retro burn takes place, and the warheads drop on target. If they back down, no order to proceed is given, and the warheads loop on back out to high orbit, where a modest burn allows them to rendezvous with the launch platform for refuelling and servicing.I can think of half a dozen catastrophic ways that the long flight time model might fail that way. Not least of which is you have a thermonuclear weapon in flight toward your enemy which requires active intervention not to strike, and everyone knows it. Which simply has to be considered damned provocative. The target will just say "the moment those warheads get beyond their final abort point we will launch everything we have, and the world dies" and then the ball is back in the other guy's court. They have to abort, because not aborting is equivalent to trying a first-strike with ICBMs. Pointless. And the target certainly has all of the time he needs to fuel and ready his missiles, so they can launch on very short notice.
WhAt this point, the opponent is in the same situation as if a thundering herd of B-52s was heading their way.
Could we? Yes. Even with technology from the 70s.
Can we? No.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
This is why.
Oh, and as a supplementary counterargument: might there not be organisatory reasons that space was never militarised? In the case of the US, the military's attempt to get soldiers into space became a lot harder to justify not only because of its practicality vis-a-vis automated satellites, but also because a civilian agency was in charge of space exploration. Had Eisenhower not created NASA, spaceflight would have been a military enterprise in the US.
To this day the USAF has a mandate to perform any US space military missions that prove to be necessary. They just haven't been able to think of any.
Now, you seem to have anticipated this argument, as you state that the USSR did put spaceflight in the hands of the military, and nothing ever came out of that.
Yet I can see three points that might still speak up against this.
First, from what I know of USSR space history, the soviet design bureaus were notorious for their infighting. Yangel, Glushko, Korolev (later Mishin), Chelomei, having them all agree on something was impossible, and duplicated effort (or at least split effort) seems pretty common. This could explain part of the lack of militarisation.
Secondly, while the early Space Race had the US chasing the Soviets in setting spaceflight records, we know now that this was more of a show than a genuine lead. Not to discount the efforts of the Soviet space program, but IIRC the first satellite could easily have been American, and even during the Cuban missile crisis the US still believed in a missile gap (didn't that idea help Kennedy get elected?). Ironically, the one area where they underestimated the amount of missiles was Cuba itself, and even more ironically the entire crisis came about because the Soviets could pose a greater threat with medium-range missiles from Cuba than with ICBMs in the motherland, which they didn't have enough of. At least that is my understanding.
Now, why do I make this point? To show that in terms of militarising space, the USSR was in fact chasing the US's coattails, and a serious attempt at militarising space might not have been financially justifiable (soviet military budgets were inflated, but not infinite) unless the US was making an effort themselves. Something like this did in fact happen IOTL: the Soviet Buran shuttle came about 'because the US has one'. It might be anecdotal, but from what I've heard on here, the Soviets actually knew that the shuttle might not be as economical (certainly in its eventual state) as the projections would have them believe. However, they presumed that it must therefore have an additional application, one military perhaps, that would make it a threat to the USSR. So they had to respond. It's not a very nice thesis, and I don't subscribe to it myself outside of this retort, but the idea that the USSR was mostly reactionary (bad joke) in terms of military development has some things going for it.
Lastly, it might just have all been a case of bad timing. Not in terms of relative technological development, but in terms of speed of development. In this sense, developing the launch power necessary for orbital battle stations only became possible after several treaties had banned it. This not just refers to the USSR (who would only get a working superheavy rocket in the 80s with Energia), but also the US, whose big Saturn V was also late to the party (and was a civilian machine after all).
Now, I bet you can poke these arguments full of holes. This I'm anticipating. In fact, it was my plan all along!
Furthermore, were computers to be less advanced relative to spacecraft in an ATL, military-man-in-space seems inevitable, if only for the purposes you mentioned (intelligence and communications).
Well, I was going to say "sure, but that's just ASB!" But that is only so if the linkage between technologies and their states of the art is very strong. If you can't have a rocket engine that performs well enough to compete with an Atlas or R-7's suite of engines without also having solid state electronics--well, that is the assumption I was making. But every now and then I'd get drawn into an AH challenge along the lines of "could the Victorians have launched an orbital rocket" or the like, and find myself taking the idea seriously that just maybe, they could. Last time I did that I was recommending a pressure fed hybrid hydrogen peroxide oxidized paraffin wax solid fuel rocket. I figured the pumps would be the really hard part to do in say 1900, but that with enough brute force, yeah, why shouldn't a Victorian level enterprise be able to make such a rocket? Or a solid fuel one?
Less insanely, would it really have been impossible to make an orbital rocket in the 1930s?
EDIT- I'm pretty sure that you do NOT have to "stop a Thor directly over its target" to hit something on Earth. You just have to deorbit it, which is not nearly as expensive as stopping it dead in its tracks to drop straight down. (Frex, Apollo did not take nearly as much energy to deorbit as it did to launch into orbit.) Of course, then it takes about 90 minutes to hit its target on the opposite side of the world on a minimum-energy solution, but that's another issue. And the guidance problems remain.
Hm. It was actually the inferiority of early control systems that got ICBMs delayed in favor of cruise missiles (until hydrogen bombs were invented, anyway). If you could delay advanced computers a few years, perhaps the case for a boost-glide or piloted orbital bomber might finally make some sense?
I was trying to be pithy. Hopefully I explained in sufficient detail, above. I can post a 23-page diatribe if you insist.![]()
There's the example of the ABM treaty which the US withdrew from, (as allowed) not because of a whim but because the treaty specifically ONLY allowed the US to deploy a limited ABM system to protect its missile fields but not its cities. (Where as the Russians are only allowed to protect Moscow with their ABM system under the treaty)
NO you don't buster, "novel-length-response-posts-but-can't-gen-up-a-time-line" is MY stich and I've already applied for the AH.com patent, so no stealing![]()
Actually that was the whole point in that you dropped the 'rod' from almost directly over-head for maximum kinetic impact value and minimum response time. The enemy might be able to 'see' the satellite and the 'drop' would have almost no time to maneuver or deploy counter measures. The problem with a more 'gentle' (and longer range) de-orbit is you lose significant kinetic energy AND you now have a longer distance to cover in the same time frame.
This is one of the reasons for research into hypersonic (Mach-5+) weapons in that they are travelling so fast there is less time to react. And kinetic weapons really need higher impact speeds than Mach-5 to be effective.
You have indeed, but it's the shift from high orbit to low orbit that conveys escalation. You can de-escalate or strike quite conveniently.And if you send the warheads on a "close approach" and require a proceed signal to nudge them to deorbit and have the strike, well, then you have just recapitulated the low orbital bombsat in a much more complex and expensive form.
US&USSR could have done two sites (city and Missile Field) per original wording, but since neither country had more than one site operable in 1974, was amended to the existing Moscow and North Dakota sites, as the US Montana Safeguard complex at Malmstrom AFB had work abandoned by then.
Can't I claim prior use and thus void your patent, RC?
If you think that was a novel, Brother, then you have yet to see my finest work...I can be verbose at times.
I'm not parsing this- maybe we're talking about different points, here. That's exactly the opposite of reality as I understand it. If you "stop a rod directly above a target" then that's the one that's going slow. It just drops straight down. This is why those incredibly high-altitude parachutists don't burn up on re-entry. If you just deorbit it, though, it is still screaming along at supersonic speed, though admittedly it takes it a while for the orbit to intersect the Earth. But that's precisely because it is still going at near-orbital speeds. (And reaction time from when it appears over your horizon until impact is still rather small.)
Essentially, most of the rod's kinetic energy comes from the rocket that orbited it. Not from just falling straight down. In fact the latter isn't very impressive at all, kinetically.
Or you could stop messing around with orbital nuclear weapons entirely, use bombers for the sabre-rattling exercises and missiles in hardened siloes for assured retaliation, and spend the vast amounts of money you've saved on schools, hospitals, roads... anything useful, really!
This is one reason why I had always doubted that the Soviets were just innocent leftists quivering in fear of an attack from the West, and only thinking defensively rather than planning to over-run Europe.
Siting your ABM system to protect your missile fields implies that you are trying to defend them from a first-strike. You want the missiles to survive your enemy's first-strike so that you can retaliate. This is a deterrent.
Siting your ABM system to protect your center of government implies that you're not worried about surviving a first-strike because that's exactly what you plan to do. Why protect empty missile silos? So instead they protected their own asses.
There have been a lot of interviews of ex-Soviet authorities since the dissolution of the USSR that demonstrate that, yes, at the very least early in the nuclear age the Soviets for ideological reasons thought that a limited nuclear war was possible, and that it could be "won." But later on (perhaps around 1970 or so) they shifted more to the Western view- that a nuclear war was likely an all-or-nothing affair and would lead to nigh universal destruction