WI: B-70 Valkyrie Enters Service

[brovane]

Again, you're looking only at OTL deployments; ATL missiles, because the B-70 exists, are likely to be more capable against it. Ramjet-powered missiles, for example, so they're powered all the way up and can get longer effective ranges.
And of course wires in the valleys only works if you know which valleys to string them in

If you push missile development for higher speed and higher altitude you get bigger missiles and your missiles and launcher costs go up. All of this would of course push the engagement envelop but it doesn’t make the B-70 a sitting duck. People equate the Powers U-2 being shot down with meaning that SAM’s make high altitude and high speed flight useless for avoiding them. Of course ignoring the point that there is a huge difference between a subsonic spyplane which is flying barely above it’s stall speed and a Mach 3+ Bomber. Yes you have to know what valleys to string them in. However all you have to do is know the approach route’s to the target you are defending and you have a fairly good idea were to put them.

Well, they only planned to procure 65 aircraft. I doubt they'll concentrate them all in a single raid, so any given site probably won't have to deal with more than one or two. You can keep lower-performance missiles around to deal with the B-52s and their cruise missiles.

It really depends on how you write the point of departure for the ATL in regards to numbers. The 65 number only came about after the cancelation and Congress tried to get the bomber produced. I suspect that we would see closer to at least the B-1B numbers which would be 100 if it went into production.

The thing is that there already weren't going to be that many to begin with. Once you factor in the inevitable operational losses, "cutting back" may quite effectively be equivalent to retiring them.
Concorde and SR-71 were certainly both quite expensive to operate, and the former was lower performance and the latter much smaller than the B-70. I think it's a good bet that the B-70 would be a maintenance hog and quite possibly a bit of a hanger queen.

The SR-71’s were essentially hand built by Lockheed and each one was a bit different from any other. The B-70 wouldn’t have been a SR-71 just because it was mach-3+. The extensive use of titanium in the SR-71 presented it’s own problems. The B-70 also didn’t leak fuel on the floor. Flying at low altitudes like a B-1B is actually more taxing on an airframe. We really don’t have enough data to determine if the B-70 would have a maintenance hog.

Hypersonic is just really, really hard, and never got anywhere much IOTL. Forgive me for being skeptical that an aircraft which isn't any more performant than the SR-71 will somehow drive forward a desire for it very much. And of course you have to consider what they'll be thinking in the 1970s, when they start this B-1 next bomber program: continue on this path that the B-70, not to mention the X-15, has shown to be very expensive and difficult, or this new idea that could be much cheaper and more effective (can't shoot what you don't see, after all)? They're not going to see, off the bat, the problems with stealthiness, nor its expense.

No they are not. I don’t disagree that looking at that they might go the Stealth route.

Well, say they switch to using AWACs (which they did have OTL: the A-50) to cue their SAM sites, rather than having the ground radars on all the time (or at all). What good is the anti-radar missile then? The Soviets are not static threats that will fail to adapt to the threat posed by the B-70 and whatever weapons it carries. The fact that the DoD felt that it was becoming more vulnerable and that the United States and Soviet Union both abandoned the high-speed, high-altitude approach suggests that, although existing defenses are not capable against them, they weren't really survivable if they had gone into full service and defenses had been built specifically against them.

No the Soviet’s are not a static threat. However the B-70 bomber is also not a static platform and would have also evolved. Just like the Soviet Union evolved to deal with bombers coming in low. The cancelation of the B-70 was more about McNamara’s obsession with pushing missiles over bombers than anything else.

 

[RLBH]

And interestingly enough, it, too, was a "high altitude, high speed" bomber Though by the standards of its time, of course.

The B-52 was also a high speed, high altitude bomber by the standards of its time.

The cancelation of the B-70 was more about McNamara’s obsession with pushing missiles over bombers than anything else.

In the context of McNamara as efficiency expert, missiles are a cheaper way of delivering nuclear weapons than supersonic bombers, given a benign environment. In a defended environment, missiles are horribly vulnerable - so missile defences had to go. With missiles that can't be recalled and no defences, MAD is the result.

 

[Thoresby]

In a defended environment, missiles are horribly vulnerable - so missile defences had to go. With missiles that can't be recalled and no defences, MAD is the result.

Missiles are horribly vulnerable? Please tell that to the last 5 US Administrations who have spent the 30 years trying to develop a practical missile defence system.

 

[Uli_Stoiber]

Missiles are horribly vulnerable? Please tell that to the last 5 US Administrations who have spent the 30 years trying to develop a practical missile defence system.

I guess, he meant cruise missiles. Only way for his statement to make some sense. Still, he would be wrong, especially for terrain-folowing low flight profile cruise missiles.

 

[brovane]

Missiles are horribly vulnerable? Please tell that to the last 5 US Administrations who have spent the 30 years trying to develop a practical missile defence system.

In all fairness because of the ABM treaty the real research on ICBM interception has only been occurring since the 2002. So I am not really sure were you get 30 years from. We also had to relearn a lot that was lost when the original ABM development came to a halt in the 1960's.

 

[Aelita]

In all fairness because of the ABM treaty the real research on ICBM interception has only been occurring since the 2002. So I am not really sure were you get 30 years from. We also had to relearn a lot that was lost when the original ABM development came to a halt in the 1960's.

We also have transistors, microprocessors and far more advanced radars. Back then, the only reliable way to shoot down ballistic re-entry vehicles was to tip your missiles with nuclear warheads.

 

[brovane]

We also have transistors, microprocessors and far more advanced radars. Back then, the only reliable way to shoot down ballistic re-entry vehicles was to tip your missiles with nuclear warheads.

Well using a nuke certainly makes it easier.

What was really lost was all the knowledge from continuous development and testing over multiple decades. They essentially had to rebuild all that institutional knowledge. You then put with this the requirement to achieve a essentially a kinetic kill ( no nukes) which makes things harder.

 

[pdf27]

Missiles are horribly vulnerable? Please tell that to the last 5 US Administrations who have spent the 30 years trying to develop a practical missile defence system.

Not really - both the US and Soviets have had a system quite capable of shooting down ballistic missiles. Have a read of this, it's fairly clear the system was killed for political reasons (cost, ideology or a mixture of the two). This is also worth a read - I know it's on Carlo Kopp's site, which is usually a bad sign, but it seems to be a decent article for all that.

In all fairness because of the ABM treaty the real research on ICBM interception has only been occurring since the 2002. So I am not really sure were you get 30 years from. We also had to relearn a lot that was lost when the original ABM development came to a halt in the 1960's.

Realistically the parameters and restrictions of the two systems are also very different - the old systems were designed to use nuclear weapons and function in the face of a massed missile attack. The new ones are designed to use conventional warheads (very much more challenging - many of the earlier designs used multi-megatonne warheads), and are expected to deal with very small numbers of missiles coming in.
Actually, most of the ABM work right now is probably happening in or for Israel - Iron Dome is after all a working and efficient ABM system, and with the various Arrow systems plus David's Sling they're working up towards a full on anti-ICBM system.

We also have transistors, microprocessors and far more advanced radars. Back then, the only reliable way to shoot down ballistic re-entry vehicles was to tip your missiles with nuclear warheads.

Given what is likely to be on the missile coming your way (and that this was the era when designing and equipping an army division so that it couldn't fight without using nuclear weapons was considered a good idea!), I really don't think that's a major reason against it. The world has changed and nuclear-armed ABMs aren't politically acceptable any more - but back in the 1960s attitudes were very different.

 

[NothingNow]

I really doubt that the B-70 would be that useful for SAC. It's just gonna be a massive, highly visible system to deploy SRAMs and other stand-off missiles at speed.

Being brutally honest, it'd likely be cheaper and more effective to develop a depressed trajectory version of Skybolt and launch that from existing bombers as a first-strike weapon. That's pretty much the best of both worlds and would get you an effective counter to any Soviet ABM system or just the PVO Strany in general.

Well using a nuke certainly makes it easier.

What was really lost was all the knowledge from continuous development and testing over multiple decades. They essentially had to rebuild all that institutional knowledge. You then put with this the requirement to achieve a essentially a kinetic kill ( no nukes) which makes things harder.

Vastly harder, since we're talking about figuring interception courses for objects converging at well north of 6km/s in seconds, where both objects may be actively maneuvering.

A Nuclear ABM system has a distinct advantage in that a near miss from an intercept is still a hit. Plus between the EMP and blast effects, while a detonation might fail to completely neutralize a warhead, knocking it off course is still a possibility.

TBH though, we're probably not going to see practical and green Terminal-phase ABM systems until we get solid state lasers powerful enough to quickly compromise targets over 100km away.

 

[Michael B]

I really doubt that the B-70 would be that useful for SAC. It's just gonna be a massive, highly visible system to deploy SRAMs and other stand-off missiles at speed.

Exactly. You can not rattle a sabre by opening a missile silo; the enemy might not see it. Flying bombers near their border? Unless they shut down their radar they can not fail to get the hint.

Being brutally honest, it'd likely be cheaper and more effective to develop a depressed trajectory version of Skybolt and launch that from existing bombers as a first-strike weapon. That's pretty much the best of both worlds and would get you an effective counter to any Soviet ABM system or just the PVO Strany in general.

Fair comment, but the B70 would give you a second strike weapon and in the military climate of the time you want one.

 

[RLBH]

Missiles are horribly vulnerable? Please tell that to the last 5 US Administrations who have spent the 30 years trying to develop a practical missile defence system.

They know. The US had one fifty years ago, and didn't deploy it. The Nike-Zeus system and its' successors were perfectly capable of defending against a massed ICBM attack; there would be leakers, but the system designers saw the tens of millions of people that would be protected, not the millions who'd be killed in any event. In the harsh calculus of all-out central nuclear war, that is an acceptable tradeoff.

The current ABM paradigm sees leakers as unacceptable, while requiring kinetic kills. Nike could do that, but not reliably. This is a much harder problem than that solved by Nike, and without the benefit of the institutional experience from that program.

 

[Thoresby]

In all fairness because of the ABM treaty the real research on ICBM interception has only been occurring since the 2002. So I am not really sure were you get 30 years from. We also had to relearn a lot that was lost when the original ABM development came to a halt in the 1960's.

Reagan's SDI was the real restart in development and when proportionately US ABM spending was at it's peak. Now we know it was mostly wasted effort and money and provided basically nothing usable but it still counts.

They know. The US had one fifty years ago, and didn't deploy it. The Nike-Zeus system and its' successors were perfectly capable of defending against a massed ICBM attack; there would be leakers, but the system designers saw the tens of millions of people that would be protected, not the millions who'd be killed in any event. In the harsh calculus of all-out central nuclear war, that is an acceptable tradeoff.

Realistically the parameters and restrictions of the two systems are also very different - the old systems were designed to use nuclear weapons and function in the face of a massed missile attack. The new ones are designed to use conventional warheads (very much more challenging - many of the earlier designs used multi-megatonne warheads), and are expected to deal with very small numbers of missiles coming in.

The thing is we have been discussing the ability of Conventional SAM missile's to intercept an incoming B-70 so it's only fair to compare it with modern non-nuclear ABM systems. Which broadly don't work and the Israeli's are only just beginning to develop a system which can handle the easiest type of missile threat, comparatively slow IRBM's.
We can all agree that intercepting anything travelling at supersonic speeds is really difficult with conventional weapons but much easier with nukes so if we compare like with like it's clear missile's are more difficult to stop by the simple fact that there were conventional systems capable of stopping high-speed aircraft back in the 60's but no conventional system capable of stopping ICBM's.

 

[pdf27]

The thing is we have been discussing the ability of Conventional SAM missile's to intercept an incoming B-70 so it's only fair to compare it with modern non-nuclear ABM systems. Which broadly don't work and the Israeli's are only just beginning to develop a system which can handle the easiest type of missile threat, comparatively slow IRBM's.
We can all agree that intercepting anything travelling at supersonic speeds is really difficult with conventional weapons but much easier with nukes so if we compare like with like it's clear missile's are more difficult to stop by the simple fact that there were conventional systems capable of stopping high-speed aircraft back in the 60's but no conventional system capable of stopping ICBM's.

Err... not quite. ABMs with nuclear warheads were reasonably capable against incoming ICBMs in the 1960s, but SAMs with nuclear warheads were much less capable against supersonic targets. That's a mixture of warning time (ICBMs are visible at very long ranges as soon as they come over the horizon, even at 70,000 ft the horizon isn't so far away) and the reduced kill radius of a nuclear SAM compared to a nuclear ABM (mix of atmospheric effects and bigger warheads).

There isn't any one solution here - a GNOM/Skybolt hybrid, for instance, might well be more capable than either the B-70 or an ICBM. It's clear to me at least that many of these decisions were deeply political and formed by far more than simply what system was most immune to interception.

 

[NothingNow]

Exactly. You can not rattle a sabre by opening a missile silo; the enemy might not see it. Flying bombers near their border? Unless they shut down their radar they can not fail to get the hint.

Unnecessary provocation is extremely bad in the circumstances being discussed.

Fair comment, but the B70 would give you a second strike weapon and in the military climate of the time you want one.

As would loading SRAMs in the bomb bays of whatever system is carting a few Depressed-Trajectory Skybolts around, or through using a significantly cheaper and smaller platform that can avoid interception through multiple methods, instead of just relying on pure speed.

 

[ObssesedNuker]

Not really - both the US and Soviets have had a system quite capable of shooting down ballistic missiles. Have a read of this, it's fairly clear the system was killed for political reasons (cost, ideology or a mixture of the two).

75% success rate in test circumstances. Given that these kind of weapons systems have generally always performed worse in actual combat conditions (if SAMs performed as well in combat as they did in tests then there are a gobsmacking number of veteran pilots who shouldn't be alive today), we can extrapolate that to something like 40-60%. Insufficient when we are talking about a nuclear environment with an incoming warhead count of nearly 10,000 weapons.

Also, your second article explicitly stated that the Soviet system could not effectively deal with MiRVs. Which indicates that it played a part in what killed the ABM programs... and given the timing probably also played a part in killing the B-70.

 

[pdf27]

75% success rate in test circumstances. Given that these kind of weapons systems have generally always performed worse in actual combat conditions (if SAMs performed as well in combat as they did in tests then there are a gobsmacking number of veteran pilots who shouldn't be alive today), we can extrapolate that to something like 40-60%. Insufficient when we are talking about a nuclear environment with an incoming warhead count of nearly 10,000 weapons.

50% sounds about right. You need to remember however that there is a hierarchy of targets (and both sides only reached 10,000 long range warheads with around 2,000 launchers in the 1980s). The top priority tier will get as many weapons thrown at them as they need to in order to destroy them. They will already have multiple weapons of different types targeted on them because the reliability of ICBMs in the face of nuclear attack cannot be assumed to be great. That is at least doubled, and actually probably more so (you can't assume only one interceptor per incoming missile, or that the Pk is indeed only 50%).

Say you have:

• 1,000 primary targets, each with 3 missiles aimed at them (87.5% destroyed)
• 3,000 secondary targets each with 2 missiles aimed at them (75% destroyed)
• 1,000 tertiary targets each with 1 missile aimed at them (50% destroyed)

The table is an obvious rectal extraction, but you see what I mean. The 3 missiles for the primary targets are what is considered to be required to guarantee a kill at say a 90% level in the face of a counterforce strike plus mechanical unreliability killing half your incoming missiles. If you add an ABM system that kills 50% of the incoming missiles at random and keep the same target kill probabilities for the target list, you get:

• 1,000 primary targets each with 7 missiles aimed at them (86.6% destroyed)
• 600 secondary targets, each with 5 missiles aimed at them (76.2% destroyed)

So an ABM system with a 50% probability of killing an incoming ICBM reduces the target list from 5,000 to 1,600. Now it utterly fails to defend any of those 1,600 any better than not being there at all - but the remaining 3,400 targets are not attacked at all as a result.

Also, your second article explicitly stated that the Soviet system could not effectively deal with MiRVs. Which indicates that it played a part in what killed the ABM programs... and given the timing probably also played a part in killing the B-70.

Well, one of them could not. The fact that the Russians still have an operational ABM system rather indicates that at least part of the system is considered valuable in the face of MIRVs - quite possibly because of the reduced number of incoming RVs meaning that they can make a big difference simply by engaging the warheads individually.

 

[RLBH]

50% sounds about right. You need to remember however that there is a hierarchy of targets (and both sides only reached 10,000 long range warheads with around 2,000 launchers in the 1980s). The top priority tier will get as many weapons thrown at them as they need to in order to destroy them. They will already have multiple weapons of different types targeted on them because the reliability of ICBMs in the face of nuclear attack cannot be assumed to be great. That is at least doubled, and actually probably more so (you can't assume only one interceptor per incoming missile, or that the Pk is indeed only 50%).

Say you have:

• 1,000 primary targets, each with 3 missiles aimed at them (87.5% destroyed)
• 3,000 secondary targets each with 2 missiles aimed at them (75% destroyed)
• 1,000 tertiary targets each with 1 missile aimed at them (50% destroyed)

The table is an obvious rectal extraction, but you see what I mean. The 3 missiles for the primary targets are what is considered to be required to guarantee a kill at say a 90% level in the face of a counterforce strike plus mechanical unreliability killing half your incoming missiles. If you add an ABM system that kills 50% of the incoming missiles at random and keep the same target kill probabilities for the target list, you get:

• 1,000 primary targets each with 7 missiles aimed at them (86.6% destroyed)
• 600 secondary targets, each with 5 missiles aimed at them (76.2% destroyed)

So an ABM system with a 50% probability of killing an incoming ICBM reduces the target list from 5,000 to 1,600. Now it utterly fails to defend any of those 1,600 any better than not being there at all - but the remaining 3,400 targets are not attacked at all as a result.

This is what I mean about the harsh calculus of nuclear war. The Cold Warrior sees 3,400 targets that don't get attacked, and considers it an improvement on 5,000. That's several tens of millions of people saved.

By comparison, B-52s operated in 1973 against the most capable air defence system anywhere on the face of the planet - at the time of Linebacker II, Hanoi was better defended than Moscow. The defenders had the S-75 missile system, which massively overmatched the B-52, with experienced crews. The attackers were required for political reasons to fly in line astern formations, at regular spacing and without manoeuvring, on the same courses for the first two days. On the first day, losses were 3 out of 129 (2.3%); on the second day, they were 7 out of 93 (7.5%).

It's difficult to imagine the defences having a better chance against a manned bomber than on the second day of Linebacker II. The defences would only have a slightly better chance on a sterile target range, come to that. B-70s attacking the USSR would, by comparison, see a less dense SAM environment, with missiles less capable against them than the S-75 against the B-52 and retaining the element of surprise. Moreover, the speed of the B-70 would give it tactical as well as strategic surprise. They'd suffer far less than the B-52s in the first phase of Linebacker II, but they would be very expensive.