Michael S. Lorrey writes:
> > Cruse Missiles.
>
> Attackable with conventional aircraft and surface to air missiles (even of the
> shoulder fired kind).
You have to know they're there. A relatively slow stealth delivery
vehicle with cool exhaust hugging the ground is quite difficult to
see, even from above.
> > Stealth technology.
>
> Submillimeter radar. new generation IR sensors.
Try spotting a helium-assisted electroflight delivery vehicle, which
contains essentially no metal, and is 99% translucent. Or, just
camouflage as private aircraft, using teleoperation.
> > Cheap balloon decoys.
>
> To do what? they have distinctly different ballistic characteristics and radar
> signatures.
It should be not so very difficult to engineer decoys which look like
a warhead. In a pinch, just make inflatable warhead-shaped metallized
baloons.
> > Armored warheads.
>
> Added weight reduces the total number of warheads you can carry, and makes the
> warhead either larger, and thus easier to hit, or else denser, and thus a much
> hotter and easier to spot target.
Of course you deploy decoys before atmospheric reentry. As soon as the
thing encounters enough atmospheric drag to develop a plasma coat,
you don't have very much time to hit it.
> > Warheads in orbit.
>
> Easily detectable with xray and gamma ray observation platforms. Allowing
Huh? A dormant, well-shielded warhead? From a distance of some 100 km?
Uh, don't think so.
> warheads in orbit automatically allows you to put warhead powered xray lasers in
> orbit, which are far far cheaper and more effective than any other laser
> technology. Every bomb you use as an xray pump can kill 50-200 targets at once.
Er, you can only align the bomb towards one target. Nuke for nuke,
that's quite expensive. Also, it is very, very difficult to destroy a
remote target which is shielded by, say, a few cm of tungsten. I
haven't heard of any successfull xRay laser tests in orbit (duh).
> > Electro Magnetic Pulse Bombs.
>
> SHielding.
Haha. Easily said. Try harden every electronical gadget in the western
hemisphere. See how long it takes. See design costs expand by order of
magnitude. Try enforcing it.
> > Suitcase Nukes.
>
> Definite concern, but detectable with satellite technology when unsheilded.
I haven't heard of a technology which can spot a slightly subcritical
piece of fissibles on earth ground from orbit. You sure as hell don't
see the radiation, and the IR signature is virtually nil.
> > And most
> > important of all, quantity.
I think shelters everywhere for everybody are much cheaper, and will
guarantee >90% survival. Of course, kickstarting everything again in a
nightmarish, heavily contaminated soot-covered UV-blasted landscape
does not appear trivial.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:13:17 MDT