Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) space missions

[hoku]

Just came across this 1977 BBC program. I was not aware of it. Lots of discussion about using lasers and particle beam weapons in space to shoot down stuff. Note that this was six years before Reagan and SDI.
<snip>

The "show" has some "Missile gap" vibes.

Do we know if the USSR ever got close to something like a working prototype for their alleged beam weapon at Semipalatinsk?

edit: John Pike in 1992 "The Death-Beam Gap: Putting Keegan's Follies in Perspective"
https://spp.fas.org/eprint/keegan.htm

[Blackstar]

I wrote:

"There's a table in there with Soviet ballistic missiles. It stated that they had 306 SS-18s with 8-10 reentry vehicles apiece, and 300 SS-19s with 1-6 reentry vehicles apiece. That's a minimum of 2748 reentry vehicles."

That was the minimum. The maximum would have been 4860 reentry vehicles.

Even if we assume a 97% success rate for interception, that means over 140 reentry vehicles get through. It's a tough problem.

[edzieba]

At the strategic level, even 'bad' systems that let a warhead through have utility.

Say you have a system protecting a missile field that as a 99% probability of interception. an adversary needs to dedicate 100 RVs to that location to 'guarantee' a hit, so that interception system has cost your adversary 100 missiles worth of economic production (let's call that 100 M_a). If it cost more than 100M_a for your interception system (call that 1I_f) then you have 'won' that exchange, otherwise you have 'lost' it by wasting more of your economic output than you have forced your opponent to waste (there will be a scaling factor between X_a and X_f values to account for differences in overall economic productivity, but we'll skip that for now. Now, if your system has a 99.9% interception probability, your 1 I_f now only needs to be lower than 1000 M_a.
At the strategic level, you want to bleed your opponent dry economically in order to force an economic collapse without either side ever actually launching any of these weapons. You can't do it too fast, or you might force an actual exchange. Your interception system never needs to be perfect and intercept all incoming warheads, only good enough to make it more expensive to target that location than the cost of the interception system. Even better, your interception system technically does not need to actually work at all, as long as you can reliably convince your adversary that it will work - having it actually work is generally the easiest way to achieve that convincing that in practice, though, and certainly helps you in getting the budget to build it!

But once the missiles start flying, that's now a tactical engagement and your interception system is judged by completely different metrics. There, you are now comparing the cost of interception success vs. the economic harm of a warhead getting through, and the economic harm of a successful strike tens to be absolutely massive, both in the short term and in the long term (and if too many get through, there is no long term). This also means that an interception system with a very high interception probability but a very very high economic cost is infinitely preferable to a slightly less effective system that is dramatically cheaper.

These two requirements are almost in opposition to each other: the strategic view favours the cheapest possible system because you need it to cost the adversary more in missiles and warheads than it does you to intercept them, regardless of the absolute interception probability. The tactical view demands the absolute highest interception probability it is possible to achieve regardless of the cost, because the cost of noninterception rapidly approaches "all your economic activity forever" so it is close to impossible to be 'too expensive'.

[Blackstar]

These two requirements are almost in opposition to each other: the strategic view favours the cheapest possible system because you need it to cost the adversary more in missiles and warheads than it does you to intercept them, regardless of the absolute interception probability. The tactical view demands the absolute highest interception probability it is possible to achieve regardless of the cost, because the cost of noninterception rapidly approaches "all your economic activity forever" so it is close to impossible to be 'too expensive'.

You can talk about "economic activity" but the reality is we're talking about lives.

[Robotbeat]

How much of it was real or just bluffing or smoke and mirrors, wasn't it a de-escalation and diplomacy tactic in the end?

Define "real."

People are able to convince themselves that things they know are not true are true. And other people are willing to simply cash the checks.

I think there were certainly some people who legitimately believed that missile defense could work at the level required. But I think that over time, even those people realized that it could not. A defense that was 95% effective would be really expensive to achieve, but would also allow dozens of nuclear weapons to strike the United States. That was pretty clear back then, and it's pretty clear even today.

And note that the calculation takes on a lot different meaning when you're dealing with nukes. Israel claims that its defense system was 99% successful. But weapons still struck Tel Aviv. If only one of them had a nuclear warhead, that 99% success rate would not matter.

I think it would matter because Iran, if it developed nukes right now, wouldn’t have thousands of warheads but maybe like 4 or 5, and if they sent one and it didn’t work, they’d risk total destruction. Israel already tolerates a level of societal destruction that we wouldn’t politically tolerate. For them, the calculus is different. They probably COULD tank like one nuke and still survive as a state. Ukraine certainly survives that level of destruction pretty regularly by Russia’s artillery and missile strikes. They lost on the order of 100,000 or more, plus many cities reduced to rubble.

I think your analysis of the political costs of an only 95% effective shield in the US may be accurate, but not sure that translates well to other countries and against enemies with far smaller arsenals.

[Robotbeat]

There’s the very real point that Russia has been able to wield their nuke arsenal as a threat to cower the West.

I, unfortunately, think nuclear war some time this century, perhaps not on the scale feared of in the Cold War but still terrible, is a very real possibility. And I don’t think the absence of a missile defense system would reduce that possibility. The binary logic of MAD I think is no longer applicable. We live in increasingly dangerous times. Such is the end of Pax Americana which so many wanted for so long… well, that’s where we’re headed and that’s where we /are/ today. Be careful what you wish for, and God help us all.

[thespacecow]

Talking about ballistic missile defense only under the context of nuclear war is extremely shortsighted. As we just witnessed a few weeks ago, ballistic missile defense has a lot of utility during conventional war too. And in-space interceptor by its nature has global coverage, same as Starlink, you get missile defense "for free" globally. There're several global hotspots where ballistic missile may start flying in the near future which US may want to defend against, for example look up DF-21D.

[edzieba]

These two requirements are almost in opposition to each other: the strategic view favours the cheapest possible system because you need it to cost the adversary more in missiles and warheads than it does you to intercept them, regardless of the absolute interception probability. The tactical view demands the absolute highest interception probability it is possible to achieve regardless of the cost, because the cost of noninterception rapidly approaches "all your economic activity forever" so it is close to impossible to be 'too expensive'.

You can talk about "economic activity" but the reality is we're talking about lives.

At a tactical level, yes: the bombs are already on their way, the sole overarching goal is survival.

At a strategic level, no. The underlying assumption of MAD is that all the missiles are never, ever, fired. The economic warfare there is forcing the diversion of GDP from useful aims (feeding your citizens, etc) to useless ones (building missiles that will sit and do nothing). Silos are holes in the ground that you convince your opponent to throw money into by yourself throwing money into, and the winner is the one that runs out of money last.

It's this dichotomy that makes BMD so difficult to actually implement regardless of the TRL of the interception method chosen:
- The strategic level - that ensures nobody ever fires a missile in the first place - heavily favours the absolute lowest cost system that is just barely effective enough. Or rather, has all appearances of being just effective enough but never needs to demonstrate it in practice because if it has to operate in practice everyone has already lost.
- The tactical level seen by everyone who actually has the missiles aimed at them and really does not want to be nuked - and have the exact visceral and entirely justifiable reaction to the idea of strategic economic warfare through threatening with weapons of mass destruction - has the exact opposite design requirements: maximum effectiveness, in the real world, regardless of cost, because the cost is lives.

The problem comes in that satisfying the second requirement (that everyone wants, and so everyone votes for the people who promise to deliver it) is stupendously and unavoidably expensive. The people who promise to deliver it then see the strategic system proposals, with their far lower cost, and demand those systems perform the tactical role but at the strategic cost. That's how you end up time after time with BMD systems funnelled into chasing very high interception probabilities, but that then are never funded to the level needed to roll out to nationwide coverage.

[LittleBird]

I haven't watched all of it. Those that do, post your thoughts, please.

I've only watched the first part, and it's clearly got two threads. The one about beam weapons  may not have aged very well but is interesting. In fact the bit that I found most interesting was the other thread about the reality of military space in the mid 70s, and  the rather unusual collection of venues that the Panorama team managed to visit: NORAD, TRW in Redondo Beach, Rockwell, AFRL in Albuquerque, White Sands, and Vandenberg's SLC 6.  They filmed some interesting hardware on the factory floor in a couple of cases, the DSCS II comsat at TRW, and Navstar GPS at Rockwell.

I also thought that Ray Cline (spelt Kline throughout but surely this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_S._Cline ) was an interesting interviewee, and appeared to casually remark on the use of satcoms in the field by spies at one point-I need to rewatch.

This surprised me a bit but when I look it up I realise that the Pyramider project had been talked about publicly as a result of the Boyce and Lee spy trial  of 1977 a year or so before the BBC doc in October 1978 and although it was never implemented this would have made the subject public in some sense even if it hadn't been before.

[Blackstar]

I haven't watched all of it. Those that do, post your thoughts, please.

I've only watched the first part, and it's clearly got two threads. The one about beam weapons  may not have aged very well but is interesting. In fact the bit that I found most interesting was the other thread about the reality of military space in the mid 70s, and  the rather unusual collection of venues that the

One notable thing about this was that this was 1977. Reagan announced SDI in 1983. There was growing advocacy for space-based defense in the late 1970s. I've written a little bit about that, but others have written more. It's interesting to see who was advocating for this stuff at that time. Keegan was playing up the Soviet laser threat. There was also Lt. General Daniel O. Graham, who founded High Frontier.

[Blackstar]

At a tactical level, yes: the bombs are already on their way, the sole overarching goal is survival.

At a strategic level, no. The underlying assumption of MAD is that all the missiles are never, ever, fired. The economic warfare there is forcing the diversion of GDP from useful aims (feeding your citizens, etc) to useless ones (building missiles that will sit and do nothing). Silos are holes in the ground that you convince your opponent to throw money into by yourself throwing money into, and the winner is the one that runs out of money last.
 

When I was in college in the 1980s I read a lot of strategic deterrence literature--Brodie, Kahn, Wohlstetter, etc. I was thinking about going into that field in grad school. But I shifted to space policy instead. That was the wise choice, not only because the Cold War ended and that field vanished, but because by the 1990s there was a lot of reexamination of the strategic deterrence literature during the Cold War, now that authors had access to actual Soviet sources. What they discovered was that a lot of the deterrence theory was bunk. It was based upon false assumptions about how the Soviets would actually behave. We had built up these big models of things like ladders of escalation, etc. that were not based on reality.

[LittleBird]

I haven't watched all of it. Those that do, post your thoughts, please.

I've only watched the first part, and it's clearly got two threads. The one about beam weapons  may not have aged very well but is interesting. In fact the bit that I found most interesting was the other thread about the reality of military space in the mid 70s, and  the rather unusual collection of venues that the

One notable thing about this was that this was 1977. Reagan announced SDI in 1983. There was growing advocacy for space-based defense in the late 1970s. I've written a little bit about that, but others have written more. It's interesting to see who was advocating for this stuff at that time. Keegan was playing up the Soviet laser threat. There was also Lt. General Daniel O. Graham, who founded High Frontier.

1978 in fact, though indeed well before SDI. In fact programme was broadcast only a few weeks after Carter’s speech acknowledging spy satellites, a clip from which is included.


Interested to see in the document that hoku pointed to upthread that even Graham was sceptical of some of Keegan’s claims.

“ The former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, LTG Daniel O. Graham concluded that Keegan's analysis was built on too many assumptions:(6)

" ... one worst case analysis may be right, but something that depends on a whole group of them never is."”

[Blackstar]

Interested to see in the document that hoku pointed to upthread that even Graham was sceptical of some of Keegan’s claims.

“ The former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, LTG Daniel O. Graham concluded that Keegan's analysis was built on too many assumptions:(6)

" ... one worst case analysis may be right, but something that depends on a whole group of them never is."”

What document is that?

I think Keegan really pushed three things:

-the Backfire bomber range estimate
-the Soviet Union was building massive bunkers to protect their leadership in nuclear war
-the Soviet Union had an extensive laser program aimed at shooting satellites and ballistic missiles

I'm writing about the first one, but the last one is most relevant to this thread. (The second one could be covered in the reconnaissance threads.) Keegan really pushed that hard, claiming that there were a number of new laser test sites inside the Soviet Union. A key one was labeled PNUTS.

At the end of the Cold War, American scientists gained access to one or more of these sites and discovered that the Soviet laser program was not as big or advanced as people like Keegan claimed. In fact, I think the Soviet Union may have been trailing the United States in laser technology.

[hoku]

I haven't watched all of it. Those that do, post your thoughts, please.

<snip> They filmed some interesting hardware on the factory floor in a couple of cases, the DSCS II comsat at TRW, and Navstar GPS at Rockwell.
<snip>

I found it very considerate of TRW to clearly mark the SECRET components of DSCS II ... 

[hoku]

Interested to see in the document that hoku pointed to upthread that even Graham was sceptical of some of Keegan’s claims.

“ The former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, LTG Daniel O. Graham concluded that Keegan's analysis was built on too many assumptions:(6)

" ... one worst case analysis may be right, but something that depends on a whole group of them never is."”

What document is that?
<snip>

Wade, Nicholas, "Charged Debate Erupts over Russian Beam Weapon," Science, 27 May 1977, pages 957-959.

edit: 2 more paragraphs from Wade's article attached

[leovinus]

Interested to see in the document that hoku pointed to upthread that even Graham was sceptical of some of Keegan’s claims.

“ The former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, LTG Daniel O. Graham concluded that Keegan's analysis was built on too many assumptions:(6)

" ... one worst case analysis may be right, but something that depends on a whole group of them never is."”

What document is that?
<snip>

Wade, Nicholas, "Charged Debate Erupts over Russian Beam Weapon," Science, 27 May 1977, pages 957-959.

The intelligence community always has it own view. Disagreement with the rest of the world on BDA is a regular occurrence. Desert Storm 1991 anyone? Iran recently? They just have their own view based on their experience.

[LittleBird]

Interested to see in the document that hoku pointed to upthread that even Graham was sceptical of some of Keegan’s claims.

“ The former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, LTG Daniel O. Graham concluded that Keegan's analysis was built on too many assumptions:(6)

" ... one worst case analysis may be right, but something that depends on a whole group of them never is."”

What document is that?

I think Keegan really pushed three things:

-the Backfire bomber range estimate
-the Soviet Union was building massive bunkers to protect their leadership in nuclear war
-the Soviet Union had an extensive laser program aimed at shooting satellites and ballistic missiles

I'm writing about the first one, but the last one is most relevant to this thread. (The second one could be covered in the reconnaissance threads.) Keegan really pushed that hard, claiming that there were a number of new laser test sites inside the Soviet Union. A key one was labeled PNUTS.

At the end of the Cold War, American scientists gained access to one or more of these sites and discovered that the Soviet laser program was not as big or advanced as people like Keegan claimed. In fact, I think the Soviet Union may have been trailing the United States in laser technology.

Hoku has kindly quoted the original article now, but the one he had previously quoted was John Pike's interesting summary https://spp.fas.org/eprint/keegan.htm

I enjoyed this in particular

The confusion about Semipalatinsk was not limited to the American side. It was suggested that, on the basis of Western reports:(18)

" ... many young Russian scientists in the 1980s were thrilled to be sent to Semipalatinsk, where they assumed they would be working on "Keegan's beam" ... Apparently they were disappointed that it did not exist. Consequently, morale suffered."

[LittleBird]

Probably the most interesting memo I've seen on ABMs and how the other side would react is the attached one by Kissinger in early 1969 explaining why in his view banning ABMs would be more to the Soviets' advantage than US's. 

   I came across it reproduced in a general readership book on the cold war
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cold-War-Experience-Norman-Friedman/dp/1844424898
  and is  online at https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/LOC-HAK-484-15-1-7.pdf
see grabs from beginning below.

It'd be interesting to know if anything analogous exists about spaceborne ABMs/beams/lasers from the SDI era or from the 1978 precursor moment under discussion.

[Apollo22]

Ok so this forum moderation has reached a new low.
One can't even say anymore that, this man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn
a) is relevant to the ABM discussion
b) was a nuclear war hawk with somewhat sinister ideas about sacrificing hundred of millions americans
c) and as such, inspired Kubrick for Dr Strangelove (also Sidney Lumet for Fail safe)

Seriously, learn your history before supressing posts.

[Blackstar]

It'd be interesting to know if anything analogous exists about spaceborne ABMs/beams/lasers from the SDI era or from the 1978 precursor moment under discussion.

I'm not well-read on the SDIO literature. Aaron Bateman has a recent book on that, and he's an outstanding scholar. Alas, I have not yet read it.

What became clear during the 1990s was that rather than the Soviet Union seeking to develop their own SDI/Star Wars system, they looked at various ways of destroying the American system. They investigated numerous ASAT systems. In fact, the Polyus-Skif system (mentioned elsewhere in this forum) was a big laser for shooting at American satellites, not missiles.

What I don't know is if the Soviets also considered other rather obvious countermeasures, like adding decoys to their ICBMs, and/or increasing their number of reentry vehicles. The Cold War ended before that stuff progressed very far.