ICBM, SLBM , IRBM with conventional warheads

Never been done, AFAIK.

However, it occurred to me that if a nation was cutting back its nuclear forces and had leftover ICBMs... Why throw them away? Put high-explosive warheads on them for very quick precision strikes on high-value targets. A bridge, a headquarters, a dictator's residence. If the impact is close enough, the target won't know the difference.

But I suppose maintenance costs were a factor; also, I suppose one would have to develop the HE warhead, with active homing (GPS?).

So too expensive, I guess.
 
ICBM and IRBM tend to end their lives as SLV, which is a far more effective use of them than as the world most expensive artillery piece.

A good rule of the thumb is that ballistic missiles with range of less than 500 km have at least some conventional uses, either as battlefield support or for strikes in theatre. Any longer than that is nuclear
 
I've heard natterings from former RN boomers that the UK at least had a Prompt Global Strike proxy in one of the silos (Trident II) during the Blair era to allow a non-nuclear strategic strike on Iran.

I'm sure the Yanks who pioneered PGS concept would have a few kicking about but given the capability of the USAF and no peer opponents in the 90s it's clear that the project in it's SLBM/ICBM phase was an answer looking for a question.
 
From the North Sea to Iran, a Trident II needs to travel a trajectory which takes it over Russian missile fields.........yeah, I doubt it.
The RN did after the WE177 retirement place some low yield warheads in a substrategic role on some missiles, but never conventional.
 
Just to illustrate the difference, a modern cruise missile launched from off say Bilabao tageted at London's Wembly statium (a distance of about a 1000 km) can e place itself within the goal posts. Even the best Ballistic missile cannot do more than 50 meters, (i.e it might be able to hit the stadium) or fall in the carpark.

Adding to that, building longer range cruise missiles is (reletivley) simple matter. Longer range Ballistic missiles are much more complex. Someone mentioned Scuds upthread, the Scud is a short range missile, several thousand were built. The number of ICBMS built tend to be in the few hundreds.
 

Khanzeer

Banned
Never been done, AFAIK.

However, it occurred to me that if a nation was cutting back its nuclear forces and had leftover ICBMs... Why throw them away? Put high-explosive warheads on them for very quick precision strikes on high-value targets. A bridge, a headquarters, a dictator's residence. If the impact is close enough, the target won't know the difference.

But I suppose maintenance costs were a factor; also, I suppose one would have to develop the HE warhead, with active homing (GPS?).

So too expensive, I guess.
That would have been ussr in the 70s and 80s
They had the reasonably decent yankee class subs with their SLBM if converted to carry conventional munitions may have been a new lease of life for them.
But were wasted as yankee notch conversions which I'm sure even were fully operational by 1990
 

trurle

Banned
Because ballistic missiles are a bitch to intercept
War in Iraq and Yemen shown the Scuds can be semi-reliably intercepted even by MIM-104 (Russian equivalent is S-300). RIM-161 or S-400 intercepts a single ballistic missile with near certainty (well, if supported by powerful enough surveillance radar - 1MW+ class).
 
War in Iraq and Yemen shown the Scuds can be semi-reliably intercepted even by MIM-104 (Russian equivalent is S-300). RIM-161 or S-400 intercepts a single ballistic missile with near certainty (well, if supported by powerful enough surveillance radar - 1MW+ class).

The ability to reliably hit theater ballistic missiles is very much a recent development. Our side track into their planned use by the USSR was a bit of a conversation drift.
 
Just looked it up; a Trident DII has a throw weight of 2800kgs.

That's more than I thought and I could see the value of Prompt Global Strike if 2 1/2 tonnes of hypersonic steel and high energy explosive was heading your way.
 
I've often wondered if this was a viable use for German V2s in WW2, especially as they became more accurate later on. Bomber bases in particular were packed like aircraft-carrier decks.

“More accurate” is a relative term. They went from being able to hit somewhere in a massive city like London to being able to hit somewhere in a smaller city like Rotterdam.
 
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