From: Michael M. Butler (mmb@spies.com)
Date: Tue May 13 2003 - 03:44:33 MDT
On Tue, 13 May 2003 02:54:45 -0400, John K Clark <jonkc@att.net> wrote:
> Spudboy100@aol.com wrote:
>
>> unlike chemical explosives attacks, no collateral damage.
>
> I still don't get it. If you know exactly where the warhead is you can
> blow it up with a simple cruse missile, or if it's deep underground drop
> bunker buster bomb on it, there shouldn't be much collateral damage and
> it wouldn't bankrupt the world economy like a high power neutrino beam
> would.
0. My personal conclusion:
It really is pretty much of a "Lensman" or too-mega-engineering tool (maybe
around Planetrans (ballistic intercontinental railway) level); but I could
see the USA sparing 10 billion a year for ten years if that would actually
pay for a workable gizmo.
I will now proceed to riff further while pretending that someone were to
actually field this thing.
1. On weapons effects:
What depth of concrete, or granite, or even *halite* (think: salt mine)
hardening do you think a bunker buster can get through? Five bunker
busters? Ten? "Deep underground" in bunker-buster /conventional-penetrator
terms is on the order of ten meters of herringbone-cantilever-laid
concrete, AFAIK (that's a Fermi number). I'd guess that CEP makes it
unlikely that multiple hits would scale linearly (the ideal case for
perfect targeting, all down the same "chimney", as it were).
Cruise missiles wth conventional warheads don't carry a whole lot of punch.
How many were you planning on using for each of my 100 warheads, some
fraction of which are fakes?
I'm not disputing the expense, I'm not claiming cost-effectiveness, or
indeed defending the concept in any way. Just asserting that both the
conventional approaches you mention are more limited than you seem to be
making them out to be. Neither one of them does the locating, as the guys
who wrote the paper propose the neutrino beam could do. I'm not convinced
they're right about that, anyway.
2. On collateral damage:
These guys use a 3% yield figure of merit for a "fizzle". That sounds not-
way-out-of-line as a guess to me, but I don't know how it scales. I'm not
sure that doesn't count as some sort of collateral damage. SO for a bare
sphere 20 kT nominal yield, they'd expect 0.6 kT fizzle yield.
Worst-case, that 3% is far too conservative for any munitions that are
"salvage fused"--configured to do their best to detonate at max yield if
they sense shock/EMP/heat/radiation. But on the other hand, who in their
right minds would salvage fuse a warhead *before it's even armed* and *on
home soil*? That seems a bit too Strangelovian to me: "Look at all the
fallout you inflicted upon the world! If you hadn't been so
imperialistically trying to impose your hegemony, none of this would have
happened!" Then again, a really independent limited-edition/one-off nuke
might have very few safeguards and you might get a Chernobyl out of trying
to "pacify" it if, say, a lab near it lost containment or burned
"collaterally".
If you are using the beam against an incoming ballistic warhead (which
actually is mentioned straight-facedly in the paper), "salvage fusing" has
been a part of the cost of doing ABM business for a long while now.
Thanks for the gedanken,
MMB
-- I am not here to have an argument. I am here as part of a civilization. Sometimes I forget.
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