Concept of deterrence

[Ninurta]

Clinton sold or gave guidance hardware/software to China for their missiles.. Now they land on the moon. I read or saw how under Obama we 'swent from Merv war heads down to one war head per ICBM ?? and most of our stuff is 30 years old with a warranty of only 10 years !!

Maybe this is why there are not more ETs flying around... an advanced civilization manages to destroy themselves by their own tribal warcraft

Over and above the dumbassery of selling State Secrets to Chinese agents on portable hard drives, getting rid of MIRV in favor of one warhead per missile is the epitome of dumbassery. I'm almost shocked that the general staff allowed it, but when I consider our military state of readiness and the political nature of generalship, which ought to have a more martial nature, I can't say that it surprises me.

Here's why getting rid of MIRVs and going to one warhead per missile is as dumb as a box of rocks on a hog's ass, for the uninitiated -

"MIRV" stands for "multiple independent re-entry vehicle". A MIRV missile has up to 10 warheads per missile, rather than a single warhead. that means it can hit 10 targets instead of one. More bang for the buck.  But there is more to it than just more hits per launch.

Most MIRV warheads are around 100kt yield. That is the explosive force of 100 thousand tons of TNT. Sounds like a lot of boom, but then you hear about the once upon a time standard US nuclear missile of 1 to 3 MEGATONS yield. That is one to three MILLION tons of TNT, Now, that sounds like a really BIG boom compared to a mere 100 kt, but it's really not, either. Those were too big to pop into MIRVs, so one warhead per rocket. but a megaton at ten times the power of  100 kilotons ought to do the job, right?

Here's where physics comes into the equation and buggers up the fear factor they tried to push in the 1980's. 10 times the yield ought to give 10 times the damage in the public mind, but it ain't so. When stuff blows up, it blows up in 3 dimensions - the blast goes in all directions from the explosion. because of that, the power is distributed in a spherical volume... and the same power in the volume of a ball just doesn't go as far as if it went in a single direction in a straight line, or in only two directions in a flat plane.

So the destruction of a 3 dimensional explosion varies as the cube root of the yield, not linearly. In our example of 100 kt vs, 1mt, the 1 mt bomb tears up about 3 times as much shit, not 10 times as much shit. So, with a MIRV with 10 re-entry warheads, you can hit 10 targets and tear up the full compliment of stuff. With  a single 1 MT warhead, you tear up about 1/3 as much stuff (only 3x of a single MIRV warhead, but you've got 10 MIRVs and only one single megatonner, so the MIRVs multiply destructive power three fold - 1/3 the damage, but times 10 warheads) , and only on a single target. Most of the stuff decimated in that single strike ain't even target, it's just collateral damage.

It's like the difference between shooting a bear with a .22 rimfire and shooting it with a 12 gauge shotgun.

So, yeah, getting rid of the MIRVs was a very fine bit of dumbassery from a strategic standpoint. Most strategists try not to weaken their position. They'd prefer to strengthen it, so that their babies grow up into adults.

ETA: I did some math. The cube root of 10 (for 10 times the yield) is 2.015 times the destructive range. Just over twice the boom for 10 times the yield. If we postulate a 27my bomb vs a 1 mt bomb for 27 times the megatonnage of 1 mt, THAT is only 3x the destructive power. My math above was off, as I was trying to do it from memory instead of with a calculator.

PLUS - you can only hit 1/10 of the targets, leaving a whole lot of real estate untouched and still ready for business.

We can't hurt them nearly as bad as they can hurt us.


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