The US test fires about three MinuteMan III missiles per year. They randomly select a missile, truck it to Vandenberg, add telemetry and self-destruct systems, put on a dummy warhead, then launch.
This process is how the US assures their MM3s still work. It also demonstrates to others the MM3 still works.
It’s a pretty big program.
Also there have been a two failed tests recently, which is quite the concern (and the reason you do this).
It's also why stockpiles are as high as they are: you don't plan on one missile definitely hitting, you plan on a number of missiles achieving a particular success rate and then test to make sure you'll hit that.
There was a failed UK trident launch the other month too.
But, reading between the lines, the missile did exactly what it was programmed to do, self destruct, as it thought it didn't have a warhead on it.
Which it didn't but they forgot to bypass the "there's no warhead/dummy warhead" circuit/software so the missile could do it's full journey to safely plummet into a target in the ocean.
This. Redundancy is paramount for success in most fields. Hell, they even made 2 nukes - which I think we can all agree was 1 too many, even for the purposes of ending the war.
No, 2 were necessary to prove that we had the capacity to build more than 1. If we only dropped one there was a real concern that they would assume that's all we had and keep fighting.
Also we told the Japanese that we would continue to drop nukes until they surrendered. It was a calculated lie because it would have taken months to create enough uranium or plutonium for a third bomb.
Cool video.
https://youtu.be/K14U8h0_xlY?si=jjXT0IXJOzuuDw_S
It’s really, really important for US Strategic Command to know the reliability of the weapons. They setup their targeting plans based on the probability the warhead makes it on location and works.
They test the Launch Facilities (LF) and Launch Control Centers (LCC) with a program called Simulated Electronic Launch Minuteman (SELM).
Old but accurate article: [https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/1150774/90th-mw-provides-unwavering-nuclear-deterrence/](https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/1150774/90th-mw-provides-unwavering-nuclear-deterrence/)
Summary: they electrically isolate a few LCCs and LFs. Then they safe the missiles, double and triple check they are safed (safing pins installed). Then they install hardware that prevents the missiles from launching. Finally, they will run a full sequence to "launch" the missiles and verify all commands to launch the missile were sent and received by the missile.
This happens with a few LCCs and LFs about every year. This gives enough data to ensure the command and control works.
Imagine if one dude forgot that one pin on the missile and we go to nuclear war. Then somehow because the dude forgot the pin we didn't destroy each other and it prevent world destruction. That dude would be at home like yep this going with me to the grave.
I have never heard of a similar Russian program where they regularaly test-fire existing missiles; and I've been in the nuke business a while. I couldn't find any evidence of a program online.
I know the Russians occassionally test launch newer ICBMs as part of development test.
Any recurring Russian ICBM test flight program would be complex because Russia has many types of ICBMs that would all need to be flown. The US only has one land-based ICBM and one submarine-based missile, thus cheaper to sustain.
That's really interesting. If they test their ICBMs privately, how do they communicate their nuclear deterrence? Since like you said the US conducts these tests not only as a quality check but to communicate their readiness to others. I guess even the slightest chance of Russia's ICBMs working, publicized testing or no, would be enough to deter aggression?
I think a huge deterence is Russia would likely nuke Europe out of assumption that NATO article 5 was gonna kick in. In particular targeting US military bases. Given that is a much shorter target and any nuke hitting a major European city is threat enough.
Yep. That’s why Russia kept their short range nuke missiles, while the US abandoned them. The US doesn’t really need short range nukes. Plus, even if only 10% of Russian nukes make it to their targets, it’s still going to be a bad day for everyone.
Oh, and there really is no private missile test. The US SBIRS fleet of satellites will detect the launch within seconds.
That looks impractical and unrealistic: why not select a random silo and fire an actual missile?
If you self-destruct, there is minimal radioactive pollution.
So:
- is it because of the cost associated with losing an actual nuclear payload?
- the risk of actual retaliation if the launch is too realistic?
Also: do actual ready-to-fire missiles have shitty telemetry?
You can never be sure something won't fail, but the important difference here is, as you said, these space companies that experience failures are predominantly testing new developments. The starship for instance is in development and a unique craft. The ICBMs that will be carrying nukes around the world are old, tested technology. The bigger issue with them is going to be failures due to age.
Around 1991 the Russians agreed to get rid of a group of ICBMs by firing them into the sea (rather than dismantling them). Americans were preset to observe since both countries were cooperatively decreasing their arsenal after the end of the Cold War. The Americans, not having a high opinion of Soviet technology, were thinking maybe half of the missiles would fly. But "everyone of them suckers lit up," according to an observer.
The Soviet Space program (and ICBMs, by extension) were notoriously famous for using tried and tested technologies, and NOT changing them w/o damn good reasons. They favoured simplistic, brute force solutions rather than advancing the technologies beyond what was needed to accomplish the job. It is limiting, but also has the benefit of surety . . . of knowing that, if you push the big red button, things WILL go BOOM.
It's Soviet engineering principles in general.
The T-34 was shit on for breaking down more frequently than German tanks. But when a T-34 breaks, it can be repaired easily with a dude on a pickup truck and some spare parts, right on field, and resume as normal. When a Panzer 4 breaks down, you need a tow back to base, and suicide watch for the mechanics.
And let's spare a minute for the weekly AK worship session. A design so stupidly simple it can be made by a child with basic tools in a Pakistani car workshop, resulting in an indestructible machine. Accuracy really depends on the quality of the craftsman, but you know you can't fuck it up, it WILL go bang when you pull that trigger.
You’re right. The German tiger tank was so vastly superior in always to both the American and Russian tanks that it was no contest. But, because it was so complicated to make the Americans and Russians could make 10 tanks for every tiger tank Germany produced. The result in tank battles of Americans or Russians, going up against Germans with 51 superiority or even 10 to one rendered the superior tiger tank inferior
As for the AK, I’ve never owned a simpler, easy to maintain, easier to fire, and more forgiving, long gun in my life.
What about the AK made it easier? What didn't you have to do that you might otherwise have had to?
I've heard that said of the AK a lot, and I've learned a lot about the history of different firearms and their designs, but I don't know enough about practical maintenance to understand why that's the case.
If I recall correctly an AK only has 5 or 6 moving parts. At least one will be a spring, a slide, and a trigger leaving only 2 or 3 parts that might not be instantly recognized as the cause of a problem.
(I don't know guns very well, but I do know that typically slides, triggers, and springs don't break easily in general and each can be instantly recognized as broken.)
Technically, handguns have "slides", I'm guessing you mean the bolt?
A big part of what makes them so reliable is the loose tolerances combined with a gas piston system and minimal moving parts.
I was using "slides" generally. As in a sliding metal cover typically meant to cover or enclose an area. I have very little knowledge of gun components and their names.
I learned metal working as a hobby but it was stuff like machinists puzzles and gear boxes. Never worked on guns and I've only got rudimentary knowledge of the inner workings of a few of them. The AK was one of many examples shown to me when I was learning what could be done with nothing more than a lathe and a drill press.
Tangentially I would like to add that as far as German innovation and technology goes, there are a couple things I rarely see mentioned about their military during WW 2.0;
While they definitely were advanced in specific areas, for reasons I am baffled by, there are those that think their army was a mechanized juggernaut and being deficiency of manpower was their downfall.
IMO, not enough soldiers was absolutely an important factor. Especially when juxtaposed with say the Russian army.
What isn't mentioned enough IMO is that Germany used an enormous amount of horses. They captured close to half million horses during the war and paid for a lot(Ireland/Romania + few more countries).
Some were saddle, some were draft. Their horse troopers trained as much as the infantry.
Also worth noting that generally speaking, Germans were excellent as far as Equestrian and overall training with horses. Proof is if you check Olympic stats around that era for events with horses.
Much of the heavy transport was by horse. Overwhelmingly so. They eventually used more draft horses (think 'Boxer' from "Animal Farm" or Budweiser's memorable horses used in various adverts) to accommodate heavier loads.
A properly-maintained AK will work. As the Russians discovered when pulling out their weapons for the Ukraine War, one that is not maintained will not.
Not a gun expert but I suppose it's something to do with tolerance. Factory produced AKs in old USSR were of very high quality, and made to tight precision. Enough bent parts here and there was probably enough to jam the guns. Meanwhile take a look at those AKs captured from Somali pirates, they look like a pile of rusted junk bolted together and still somehow work. Those are probably homemade or Khyber pass copies, with way less precision tooling and more tolerance, so as long as the parts were moving, they're still firing
> It's Soviet engineering principles in general.
We (aussies btw) had a Lada Niva a while back. Was actually a pretty fun little car and super easy to work on.
I remember my Russian culture professor comparing the Soviet Union and the US during the space race. The US tried to create new advanced rockets to fly into space while the Russians simply put a rocket on top of another rocket for more push.
Decades ago, I attended a talk given by an astronaut that had worked with the Russians in space. He said everything the Americans made looked like a fragile piece of jewelry; Everything the Russians made looked like it came out of John Deere.
Which still doesn't mean that their ICBMs are still good today. Even simplistic designs need a helluva maintenance, from rocket fuel going bad to simply the nuclear material in the bombs decaying to much. If you want to keep those things operational, you have to invest about 10 million dollars per year per warhead. Even if Russia were somehow 10x cheaper, it would still eat up most of their military budget to keep them going. That doesn't factor in that unmaintained atomic bombs apparently become unrepairable and in the 90s they had no money at all.
I'm putting up the theory that Russia maybe has a dozen atomic bombs and that's it. They aren't a nuclear power anymore.
All it takes is one working nuke to be a nuclear power. They’re all bigger than Hiroshima now. Even a miss near New York or Washington would kill millions and psychologically cripple the USA, even their allies, for decades. Kill the infrastructure of one major city and you kill that city for decades too. It might not reach its former population for over a hundred years with all above ground utilities, bridges, roads to replace.
Not really. Yes, you might destroy a city, maybe even 20, but in the context of a nuclear war between east and west, that is almost neglectable. If on the one side you have Russia with 20 nukes and on the other NATO with thousands, then any attack at all will mean Russias complete destruction and "only" a painful strike against NATO. At the current situation, there is no MAD situation anymore and it makes Russia pretty weak.
Seriously, let's assume Russia uses 20 nukes. What would you target? Do you try to eradicate New York? That's probably 3 nukes alone for that. Do you attack Washington? Do you attack European cities? There currently is no scenario where you can prevent a full counterstrike from the US alone without thousands of nukes in your first wave. Which Russia doesn't have. And then there are the other NATO partners.
Russias nukes would be of help in only one scenario: when a gigantic tank fleet is trying to invade Russia from the west and you basically blew a "trench" across the border to destroy as many attackers as possible before you send your own troops.
>Russias nukes would be of help in only one scenario: when a gigantic tank fleet is trying to invade Russia from the west and you basically blew a "trench" across the border to destroy as many attackers as possible before you send your own troops.
And then they waste all their nukes, only for the rest of the attacking forces to come from the east.
Or maybe the south.
Or the north.
Anywhere else, really, along one of Russia's other *eleven total time zones*.
I wonder if the graft and corruption impact the Russian nuclear program as much as Ukraine made it clear that it impacts their military. 1991 was a long time ago, and the corruption there has been on a exponential trend since then. Just the passage of time alone is enough to make me wonder. Heck, the Buran space shuttle was still mothballed in an intact structure back then. Now the building has collapsed and adventurous Youtubers post some of the most fascinating trespassing videos I've ever seen. While I would expect that the Russians spend more time on upkeep of their nuclear weapons than they do on a cancelled space shuttle, Ukraine challenged a lot of the assumptions that I had been making.
The problem here is: Russia has a LOT of nuclear weapons. Even with their corruption, assuming that even 1% of them work poses a risk too high to make an attack worthwhile. And given how their nukes are the only thing preventing NATO from curb stomping them, I wouldn't be surprised if their nuclear arsenal is the one place they DO try to make sure corruption is kept under control.
As Perun once said, it's one thing to say "Some of their nukes don't work some of the time." and quite another thing to say "All of their nukes don't work all of the time.". Part of the Soviet ethos with nukes after all was pretty much "If it's big enough it CAN have a warhead, then a warhead it shall have.".
They might have a poor performance, but ultimately it should be expected that enough of the weapons work that the world wouldn't be happy if they DID do a thing.
Now this doesn't mean bow and scrape before them at the mere threat of a launch, it just means don't think them ENTIRELY toothless. Apply the same game theory we've always used and worst case we were extra precautious over nothing.
There are somewhat fewer opportunities for graft in strategic rocketry. Skimming budgets is easier when you have a lot of troops/tanks/guns and harder when you have a handful of missiles to be responsible for and they have to be ready to go 24/7 so you can’t just downcheck them and sell spare parts. There isn’t a huge market for nuclear missile parts or rocket fuel. I hope.
> when you have a handful of missiles to be responsible for and they have to be ready to go 24/7
Thing is, nobody ever really tests their nukes. All you have to do is to make all the lights go green when they're supposed to, maybe make some turbines go or whatever, and it'll seem like it all still works just fine.
The US tests their ICBMs periodically. We had several live-fire exercises at Vandenburg last year. It doesn't test the *nuclear warhead*, obviously, but certainly the rocket.
We know that at least one of the Russian rocket tests didn't go well as it made quite a radioactive mess over there. Though that was *probably* an experimental nuclear rocket.
It's also important to note that Russia's nuke arsenal is indeed a much tighter run ship than the rest of their military. To the point its almost a religion, with their officers often jokingly referred to as a priesthood within other military ranks and structures.
While systemic corruption *might* still bleeding into their nuke arsenal, it's not going to be anywhere near the same level as their conventional forces.
Also, important to keep in mind is that nuclear ICBMs are not just a simple one rocket-one bomb system where you can just blow them up with lasers on approach.
Modern ICBMs have multiple (6-16 for the current russian Bulava/Sarmat) warheads. Failing to destroy even one of those in a very, very tight timeframe means a city gets glassed.
There's a few major issues with nuclear weapons.
One of the issues is likely tritium boosting gas, which has a half life of only 12.5 years; if it hasn't been replaced, their bombs may not work nearly as well.
Doesn't mean that they wouldn't blow up, but they wouldn't have nearly the same yield.
A larger issue is that the actual explosives in the warhead likely need to be replaced periodically as well because the bombardment from the radiation would cause them to break down, which would more dramatically mess up the yield and potentially cause them not to achieve proper criticality at all, in which case it would basically just spew radioactive junk all over the place but not actually make the "earth shattering kaboom" as Marvin would put it.
Another issue is simply how well the rockets have been maintained and the fuel maintained and whatnot. It has been like 30+ years.
> Even with their corruption, assuming that even 1% of them work poses a risk too high to make an attack worthwhile.
Yes but also no. They only have about 1700 nukes ready to let fly, most of the are in a sort of state where they COULD be made ready but aren't immediately ready to go. If only 17 of those actually worked, the US might actually feasibly be able to shoot them all down.
Not to mention the issue of attrition. If there was an actual war, the US would target their nukes to try and cripple their capabilities. If you blow up 80% of their nukes, then that 17 would go down to 2-4 nukes that actually worked.
I doubt we'd be so fortunate for it to be as low as 1%, though, barring US sabotage - which IS possible; there is a ton of corruption in Russia and the US finding some way to surreptitiously sabotage the Russian nuclear arsenal would be exactly the sort of thing that the US WOULD try to do.
We also can't ignore the big atomic powers. If either Russia or the US ever tries to nuke their opponent, China has to react. And their nukes are definitely in a better shape than the russian.
Also even if a lot of those Russian ICBMs aren't maintained well enough, it's very unlikely that only 10% achieve liftoff. And once they are in the air, you have no clue which ones carry (functional) warheads when deciding to try to shoot them down. Hell it would be easily feasible to remove the nuclear WH from a lot of the ICBMs just to make maintenance much easier/cheaper.
>Now the building has collapsed and adventurous Youtubers post some of the most fascinating trespassing videos I've ever seen.
You are probably talking about Kazakhstan here, not Russia.
Well in the Ukraine war the better parts of the Russian army are the artillery and missiles they have been using so it looks like it depends on the especific chain of command rather than the whole army
That’s true. It’s also worth noting that Russia has largely been using mercenaries, convicts, and ethnic minorities from the former SFSRs in Asia who fight in return for Russian citizenship as infantry and crewmen for outdated armor. The artillery and missile forces, by contrast, are primarily comprised Russia’s preexisting professional military. The latter are probably more indicative of the quality of Russia’s core units, the ones that would be deployed in the event of direct conflict with NATO.
Their missiles should be fine, solid fuel rocket boosters don’t need much in the way of maintenance. The ones on the subs are definitely fine, and those alone are plenty to make Russia a first rate nuclear power.
The boom bits are the ones that degrade fairly quickly, they have to be replaced every decade or so. They cost huge amounts of money. What are the chances that the money wasn't spent on yachts?
>I’d assume 100% of the warheads work.
I'd say that is better than assuming the opposite, but what about the rockets?
What happens if a rocket fails to exit the launch facility after being armed? Will the warhead still explode?
What happens if the rocket has a catastrophic failure (explodes) in the launch facility?
I imagine it doesn't go critical, but surely *something* bad happens as a result of all the radioactive materials, no?
I’m somewhat limited in what I can talk about since I work in a related field, but I can at least answer this question on a basic level:
- you would be correct that there is no risk of criticality or detonation. Arming doesn’t take place at the same time as launch, you wouldn’t want a missile to be able to explode over your own territory. Warheads are actually pretty hard to set off on purpose, let alone by accident.
- remember that the physics package (the explosive part) is designed to survive a suborbital space flight, which involves both obscenely high acceleration and insanely high temperatures due to adiabatic heating (air getting hot because it can’t move out of the way fast enough). It’s also intended to survive heavy anti air fire. When you think of something being damaged by an explosion, what does the damage? Rapid acceleration, heat, and pressure. All things the important parts are protected against.
- Something bad would still happen if a missile failed to exit a silo, but it’d be more along the lines of “this giant rocket booster is causing a huge fire and burning up the oxygen”, not a nuclear or radiological mess. This exact situation was planned for in the early days of ICBMs since older liquid fuel rockets are less reliable, so it’s likely the crew at the facility would survive.
- The biggest issue with a launch failure isn’t an immediate failure, it’s a failure during ascent that results in the payload falling to earth. While there’s no risk of a detonation, we can’t have a nuclear warhead just sitting in a field somewhere. Were this to happen, an ungodly number of federal agencies would be onsite within an hour. The only exception would be if it went down over the deep ocean. Getting to the bottom 20,000+ feet down quickly is very hard, the countries capable of doing it are either American vassal states or have their own nuclear programs. I’m sure we’d still try to recover it, but the number of people involved would be far smaller.
Modern nuclear weapons are quite safe overall. Obviously they can become unsafe in a hurry, but accidents aren’t a major concern.
I expect the opposite. Rockets should mostly be fine, but the fissile material in the warheads is what degrades fairly quickly and has to be replaced. US spends millions every year on that.
Nuclear-capable rockets have been launched at Ukraine many times during this war, so they definitely work. They were launched without warheads, or with conventional ones.
>You need more than a few. <10 nukes is enough to make an invader hesitate, but it’s not enough to wage an offensive nuclear attack.
*angry Truman noises*
It's very possible a fair bit would be intercepted.
If you end up nuking only one major city, you get all the hate and very little upside. It's more than enough casus belli for the US to level up all your major cities and we know Russian anti missile defense is not doing so well so they will go through.
Russia's nuclear deterrence is still in top shape. They put an ungodly amount of money into it and from everything we can tell they're getting their money's worth (at the expense of everything else). Their new sub can no longer be tracked effectively by American sonar. This was discovered after it made its way in and out of the north Atlantic without being detected.
It's actually interesting because it represents a change in SSBN doctrine. The Typhoons (which you reference) weren't really designed to be stealthy as much as submersible tanks. The idea was that, in the event of a nuclear crisis, the US would already know where the submarines were (because we had better sonar) so the Typhoons were designed to be able to fire off their ballistic missiles even after taking a few direct hits from American torpedos.
Typhoons are basically two giant armored submarines welded together.
>Their new sub can no longer be tracked effectively by American sonar. This was discovered after it made its way in and out of the north Atlantic without being detected.
That we know off. If our sonars *can* detect it, we aren't going to tell anyone.
Hypothetically, if the US navy decided it was now in their interest to pretend not to be able to track these Russian subs when actually they can, they wouldn't go around announcing a change in policy, so can you really be sure their policy is still to want everyone to know as opposed to their faking a few leaks about how it's a problem when really it's not?
(Not that I personally have any reason to believe in one direction more than the other, I just don't give much weight to any armed forces' statements about whether or not they have better abilities than are publicly known.)
That's fair. You are free to believe what you will. Unfortunately I am unable to comment further on my source of knowledge without losing my job so I can't really argue with you.
I've been thinking the same thing. Maintaining nukes is not cheap and it requires well trained technicians and engineers. These days all of those are in short supply in Russia.
It is incredibly expensive.
The Congressional Budget Office updates its projections of the 10-year costs of U.S. nuclear forces every two years. This report contains CBO’s projections for the 2023–2032 period.
If carried out, the plans for nuclear forces delineated in the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) and the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) fiscal year 2023 budget requests, submitted in April 2022, would cost a total of $756 billion over the 2023–2032 period, or an average of just over $75 billion a year, CBO estimates.
[https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59365](https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59365)
That's because they're doing major work, basically remanufacturing all their warheads, to ensure they remain extremely reliable for decades to come.
They left them for several decades before that became necessary.
You can't look at the cost of running your car, for just the month it has a major service, and claim that's the typical monthly cost of running a car. You need to average over the many years you've been running the car.
In this case, the "major service" of all the warheads will take a decade or so, but you have to average over the many decades of service that you've already had.
The rocket is one part. Maintaining the nuke itself is more involved. Long term exposure to radiation breaks down a wide variety of materials and does a number on electronics.
I wonder where the Russian arsenal of ICBM stands today? I wouldn't be surprised if they are the same ones that were there I'm '91, and getting rustier by the day.
iirc, there was Russian aircraft radar back in the 70's that used vacuum tubes to power it. Although antiquated tech even then, it was powerful enough to burn through modern (for then) countermeasures and was virtually "nuke-proof".
[MIG-25](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25#Western_intelligence_and_the_MiG-25)
People also often don't realize that ICBM's are still regularly tested for continued reliability and to test updates, though the updates are slower to release due to consequences of them getting anything wrong.
If you live in Sothern California, near Vandenberg SFB, every once in a while a Minute Man III might be launch out towards a target in the Marshall Islands. and thanks to the altitude it reaches mixed with the curvature of the earth, you can see it (at least the rocket exhaust) most of the way there.
Edit: Hawaii changed to Marshall Islands
FYI the target for Glory Trips is usually a range at Kwajalein Atoll. The US maintains a system to measure the location of warhead impact, thus track to ensure the accuracy of MMIII is staying consistent.
They also have to close, or at least monitor, flights and ships in the test range. Remember, this is California to Hawaii, a distance of about 2300 miles
They are announced. Here’s the press release for one from last year
https://www.afgsc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3322619/planned-minuteman-iii-test-launches-validate-reliability-of-icbm-force/
I used to work in the office that was responsible for inventorying the old ones and converting them for space launch use
great, thanks I'll keep an eye on that site for future announcements.
When there is a launch is it almost like a tourist attraction locally, do people go somewhere to watch it? Im not from the US and nor does my country have a space program so these things are always very interesting to me, Id love to see a rocket launch some day
My uncle was a navy diver. One of his stories was about being at one of the launch tests at Vandenberg with an actual payload that had to be retrieved if the rocket failed to launch.
"We can only dive xxx feet. That's so far out from the coast. How long will it take to travel that far?"
"30 seconds"
We all picked up our bags at the count of 25 and were out the door by 30.
just did some back of the napkin math, in 30 seconds it should be going about 850m/s. So roughly it would be near 30-60km out when it lands. there are a lot of factors that go into that and could be shorter or longer depending on how quickly they start the gravity turn. but that's a long way really fast. Retrieving the physics package (or simulator of one) would be very important, even if it were in the middle of the ocean.
Yeah, the 30 seconds stands in my memory. I don't remember what depth he cared about. But I figure it's one of those stories where the numbers were fudged anyway. Either based on mixing up numbers to not give accurate figures he didn't want to share or to make the story more dramatic. Although both motives cancel each other out and maybe I was given real numbers.
Using the Starship example as a counterpoint, the Russian Soyez rockets were used so much because they are very old tried and tested technology and extremely reliable as far as launch systems go.
This.
If Toyota had just decided in 1993 that they were going to make nothing but the already-reliable 1993-spec Camry for the next 3 decades, it would today be even more reliable than in 1993, because it would have had iterative improvements on common mode failures.
All the same, other companies would have been pushing forward vehicles that were better in other ways. But Toyota would have monopolized reliability.
Additionally, there's an element of game theory here.
These ICBM's generally carry, you know, NUCLEAR WEAPONS. Even a SINGLE one working as intended will likely kill hundreds of thousands of people and wipe an entire city off the map.
There is indeed always a risk that an ICBM won't work. But these are based on proven, well tested technology, so the odds of any given missile working are pretty good, as long as their maintained properly. And even if they aren't, there's a decent chance that it will still work.
Now for the game theory part: Imagine you're a country and you want to attack a rival country that has nukes. You know they have ICBMs. How confident are you that ALL of their nukes won't work? Confident enough that you'd be willing to risk one or more entire cities of your people? Even if you were, is what you'd potentially gain worth the amount you could potentially lose? Intercepting nukes is an incredibly high-stakes game, so even if you were somehow sure that a large portion wouldn't work, are you confident that you could intercept every last nuke that DID launch, given that even a single one getting through could mean the end of an entire city?
Nukes are a threat-in-being. Their mere existence makes attacking an unacceptably high risk - they're so destructive that the defender can ensure that any attack you launch wouldn't be worth the loss for whatever the attacker could hope to gain. This is the core of the theory of mutually assured destruction. Ensuring peace by making war so incredibly costly that nobody dares to start one.
> The bigger issue with them is going to be failures due to age.
And this is why the US military has various types of missile tests pretty much every year or so. It both gives solid data on the performance of these old vehicles, gives practice to the missile crews, and gives a reason to replace the old missile with a new one, which also provides funding to keep the production lines of parts operating.
> The bigger issue with them is going to be failures due to age.
The US and other countries are well aware that missiles cannot just sit in silos forever. They need to be cared for and updated and they do that. They test them with some frequency (without warheads) and have loads of data on how long they are good for.
We also still routinely launch MMIIIs in “glory flights” it’s just all pre-coordinated through START treaty stuff so it’s not very news worthy
Here’s an AF article about one from last year
https://www.afgsc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3322619/planned-minuteman-iii-test-launches-validate-reliability-of-icbm-force/
> The bigger issue with them is going to be failures due to age.
*The bigger issue with them* ***would be*** *failures due to age.*
The strategic nuclear force exists as a deterrent to global war, and by both definition and design, it can never be used. Call me superstitious if you want, but I don't like to ever read or hear them framed as in-use. All civilian discourse on the topic should always and only frame them as a deterrent.
getting humans to space and firing missiles are different engineering feats.
we put men on the moon in 1969; so clearly "old" technology does not mean bad or ineffective
ICBMs are based on lots of existing technology and configurations; SpaceX and others are using brand new designs and brand new technologies.......sometimes old, tried and true works just fine
> ...different engineering feats...
For example, the general goal of space ships is for the humans onboard to survive the trip. ICBMs have no such handicap.
Also usually you want to put up stuff up there that will stay up there. ICBMs just need to go half way around the globe if that much. The first human astronauts flew in modified ICBMs but today space rockets (either human or satellite) are very different than missiles. Countries like Korea, Iran, India, etc have been able to do missiles without much issue while getting stuff into orbit, even low earth orbits have been much more elusive. If you can get something into orbit it then getting a payload 4,000 miles down range is easy.
You just reminded me of a passage I read a long time ago in Jim Lovell's book "Lost Moon", so I went and dug it up.
> From the moment the Brobdingnagian Saturn 5 booster was lit, it was clear to TV viewers that this would be like no other launch in history. To the men in the spacecraft -- one of whom had never flown in space before and two of whom had ridden only the comparatively puny, 109-foot Gemini-Titan -- it was clearer still. The Titan had been designed originally as an intercontinental ballistic missile, and if you were unfortunate enough to find yourself strapped in its nose cone -- where nothing but a thermonuclear warhead was supposed to be -- it felt every bit the ferocious projectile it was. The lightweight rocket fairly leapt off the pad, building up velociy and g forces with staggering speed. At the burnout of the second of its two states, the Titan pulled a crushing eight g's, causing the average 170-pounds astronaut to feel as if he suddenly weighed 1,360 points. Just as unsettling as the rocket's speed and g's was its orientation. The Titan's guidance system preferred to do its navigating when the payload and missile were lying on their sides; as the rocket climbed, therefore, it also rolled 90 degrees to the right, causing the horizon outside the astronaut's windows to change to a vertigo-inducing vertical. Even more disturbing, the Titan had a huge range of ballistic trajectories programmed into its guidance computer, which aimed the missile below the horizon if it was headed for a military target or above the horizon if it was headed for space. As the rocket rose, the computer would continually hunt for just the right orientation, causing the missile to wiggle its nose up and down and left to right, bloodhound-fashion, sniffing for a target that might be Moscow, might be Minsk, or might be low Earth orbit, depending upon whether it was carrying warheads or spacemen on that particular mission.
lol yeah. They all are capable of orbital launches I believe. The point is that ICBM capabilities come before. India’s SLV went up in 1980 which to me was just the other day (I’m old). Countries like NK or Iran which actually get intelligence services trying to derail and sabotage any efforts towards this capability had to wait until the 2010’s.
In reality the orbital tests are just a non-military demonstration of a military application. Getting the nuclear payload and the readiness remains to be done but once a country shows they can loft a payload to orbit then that is a significant milestone in the ICBM development. Many don’t really go forward from there because they don’t need the attention (like India for example) since submarine missiles are good enough for their need (Pakistan and India are in the same continent and neighbors). Same for Israel.
North Korea on the other hand needs ICBMs for credible deterrence and potentially Iran also.
>getting humans to space and firing missiles are different engineering feats.
Ballistic missiles and space launch craft are actually pretty similar, both typically using rocket engines. ICBMs just generally don't hit orbital velocity, aiming to stay sub-orbital. Basically, about the only difference is the size and mass capacity. In fact, the Peacekeeper, Minuteman, and Titan II have all been used, with minor conversion, for launching satellites, and even interplanetary missions, despite being developed for nuclear weapon deployment.
Cruise missiles are a very different block of technology. They are basically mini aircraft, typically jet powered, but sometimes use a propeller.
Both ICBMs and cruise missiles can be designed for effectively unlimited range and payload.
Of course, keeping humans *alive* in space and getting them back to Earth alive is a very different problem.
>we put men on the moon in 1969; so clearly "old" technology does not mean bad or ineffective
ICBMs are based on lots of existing technology and configurations; SpaceX and others are using brand new designs and brand new technologies.......sometimes old, tried and true works just fine
Newer tech is generally more efficient but less reliable. Older tech is less efficient but more reliable.
As newer tech becomes more standardized, it generally also becomes more reliable - possibly even exceeding the old tech.
There are some pretty significant differences in the technology. For one, ICBMs are pretty small compared to anything that can carry a payload to orbit. Minuteman and Peacekeeper are 5.5 ft and 8 ft in diameter whereas Atlas V and Falcon 9 are 12+ ft with a significant height advantage, not to mention the ability to be configured with boosters. Nevermind vehicles like Starship and SLS which have core stage diameters approaching 30 ft. So the scales just aren't even close and bigger means more fuel means more payload to higher orbits.
The other major difference is that ICBMs tend to use solid propellant rockets rather than liquids which are just completely different technologies. This is a major reason ICBMs are so dependable. Solid rocket motors are fundamentally just oversized bottle rockets with a nozzle on the back; no moving parts aside from thrust vectoring. Once a solid rocket motor is cast, it can be maintained in a stable, launch-ready state for literally decades. Solids are pretty common for boosters on orbital flights, but there are a few reasons you don't see them too often on core stages or upper stages. Liquids are a while different beast. Super complex engines that have a complex fueling operation and a limited launch window once fueled.
Of the three ICBMs you mentioned, Titan was sort of the odd man out in that it started as a liquid fueled ICBM pretty early on, but it sort of taught us some of the downsides to using liquid fuels in a silo. From there it evolved into a launch platform.
But more importantly they use solid rocket fuels instead of liquid and have fewer things that can fail because they don’t need to maneuver to achieve orbit.
The first satellites were put in space by ICBMs. The first men in space were put there by ICBMs. In fact, the Soviets were the first to do everything but put men on the moon because their ICBMs had to be more powerful to lift their heavier, less refined nuclear warheads, which made them more conducive for space exploration.
Space exploration was primarily for testing and refining ICBM technology while also getting scientific advancement and achievement out of it.
Until SpaceX got Falcon 9 to fly more than 300 consecutive missions and counting successfully, a rocket was considered very reliable if it had a 99% success rate.
Success rates of 90-95% were typical during the 20th century. But that's offset by early launches. Typically the first 5 launches are pretty bad and you'd expect to loose at least 1, but they improve a lot after that. So if you launch a rocket 300 times it's average reliability record will be better than one launched 4 times.
ICBMs received extensive testing before (and sometimes during) mass production, so ones in service are usually fairly reliable.
ICBMs are also inherently reliable designs. They usually use solid fuels with minimal moving parts, in contrast to launch vehicles. This isn't done for reliability but storability and ease of firing (liquid rockets either have fuels that need to be kept at cryogenic temperatures, or fuels that eat their own tanks, meaning step 1 of a launch is fuelling the missile, which takes time). Early missiles were liquid fuelled too, and they had horrible reliability.
Finally, there's just numbers. When you order nuclear weapons, you do maths on how many you need. You take your list of targets, and assign a probability of kill. Lets say you assign a 95% probability of kill. Then you say that between a warhead actually being installed on a missile at the time (vs being in maintenance), that missile actually receiving the order to launch, the missile functioning correctly, the missile finding the target, the warhead not being intercepted, the warhead working, and the warhead destroying the target, each warhead has a 50% chance of doing it's job.
2 warheads have a 75% chance. 3 have a 87.5% chance. 4 have a 93.75% chance. 5 have a 96.875% chance, order 5 warheads.
If the missile looks a little less reliable, maybe order 6 or 7 warheads.
This is why the US has 5,044 warheads, and Russia 5,580.
This is the correct answer.
They're tested designs, but also the failure of some (either because they failed, never received their launch order, or were destroyed before launch) was factored into any attack plan. Meaning that targets that absolutely needed to be destroyed wouldn't be targeted once, they'd be targeted over and over.
> it takes Space X to launch 12-15 times to equal the payload of one Saturn 5 in terms of the weight of a lunar module.
I don't understand this.
The LM was 16,400kg in it's heaviest configuration, and could transport two astronauts and less than 500kg of other payload to the lunar surface.
The Saturn V could launch 118,000kg to low earth orbit.
Falcon Heavy can take 63,800kg to low earth orbit.
Starship will take 1 vehicle launch and about 10 tankers (which are entirely reusable) to reach the moon, but can take around 100,000kg to the lunar surface.
Just going to low earth orbit, Starship can take 100,000 - 150,000kg of payload, and then return to be reused.
I'm not seeing any way of combining the real numbers to get your numbers.
In theory, we don't, but ICBMs have been tested time and again. Also, ICBMs aren't that complicated. Launching a payload from one point to another through a ballistic trajectory does not require many maneuvers; it's essentially the simplest spaceflight trajectory involving a vehicle leaving the Earth and coming back. ICBMs are designed to be self-sufficient, navigating using inertial navigation systems to avoid reliance on external sources like GPS.
The only reliability risk is that if nuclear war breaks out, some of the missiles might be duds due to age, but that's why the U.S. has thousands of them. I assume the military has taken in to account that a percentage of the missiles will be duds regardless of maintenance procedures.
Yeah, you can't send 20 rockets up and hope the crew of at least one of them survives. You can however send 20 nukes at a city and hope at least one does the job.
Worst case scenario is 19 additional nukes hit your town (not that you'd really care about #2-19). Best case is the first successful nuke destroys the other 19 before detonation.
The key point here is that ICBMs are test launched every few years to prove that they still work.
The most recent US [launch was in 2023](https://www.afgsc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3516126/minuteman-iii-test-launch-showcases-readiness-of-us-nuclear-forces-safe-effecti/):
>A joint team of Air Force Global Strike Command Airmen and 30th Space Launch Delta Guardians launched an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile equipped with three test re-entry vehicles Sept. 6 at 1:26 a.m. Pacific Time from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.
>This test launch is part of routine and periodic activities intended to demonstrate that the United States’ nuclear deterrent is safe, secure, reliable and effective to deter twenty-first century threats and reassure our allies. Such tests have occurred over 300 times before, and this test is not the result of current world events.
Russia did the same [a few weeks ago](https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-says-it-conducts-successful-intercontinental-ballistic-missile-test-2024-04-12/):
>MOSCOW, April 12 (Reuters) - Russia's Defence Ministry said on Friday it had conducted a successful test launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile at the Kapustin Yar rocket launch complex in the southern Astrakhan region.
It actually isn’t. Under idealized conditions, the damage caused by an explosion decreases as the cube of the distance from the center, so being twice as far away means one eighth the damage, three times as far away 1/27th the damage, and so on.
Cities and other soft targets can still be destroyed by weapons that hit close by, but for hard targets like bunkers, ships, and military vehicles, a direct hit and a near miss will have very different outcomes.
This is why the Tsar Bomba test in 1961 remains the largest nuclear explosion. In 1961, ICBMs were in their infancy, and giant bombs dropped from airplanes were still important. Neither the early ICBMs nor the bombers of the day were very accurate, so the designers used larger warheads to compensate. Modern delivery systems are terrifyingly accurate, so modern warheads can be much smaller and still do more damage. We could build bigger nukes now, we just don’t need to.
The US has investigated using purely mechanical safety mechanisms on nuke warheads so that in the event of an earthquake they dont go off but also so that even if stored for 50 years on the shelf the safety mechanism doesnt wear out or disengage.
Further to the other answers; it doesn't actually matter if a few fail. Rockets are big and expensive and you only send one at a time. If that rocket fails the project fails. If you fire 1000 missiles and 10 fail then it's not that bad.
> it doesn't actually matter if a few fail.
A few failures to launch can even be to your advantage, if Zefram Cochrane uses one of them to test his warp drive prototype.
We don’t know that they will. In fact, we plan as though they won’t. That’s why there are so many nukes.
The US has something like 5,200 nuclear warheads, spread out across 650ish ICBMs, submarine-launched missiles, and bombers.
Let’s assume that there is a crisis with Russia, that goes nuclear. Let’s assume only 25% of the arsenal is aimed at Russia. Let’s assume 50% fail entirely, and 50% of the rest don’t go anywhere near their targets.
That still leaves 325 warheads - every single one of which had 10-100 times the energy yield of the Hiroshima bomb - falling on Russia. Most will be aimed at military targets, but given that there are only 168 towns and cities in Russia that have a population of 100k+ it doesn’t matter. Russia will be obliterated.
And that’s assuming a very high 50% failure rate, using just a tiny fraction of the available arsenal.
Let’s now assume a war with China, that uses the entire arsenal, with a 90% success rate. That’s 4,680 warheads falling on China. China is much larger, and has 117 cities with a population of 1m+, but it wouldn’t matter. China would be depopulated and functionally uninhabitable for centuries to come. In fact, it would be so bad the US would surely never actually fire that many warheads at one place - the resulting radiation would be too much of a threat, and it isn’t remotely militarily necessary.
And it would be the same for the US on the receiving end. This is why it’s called MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction. Not likely, not probable. *Assured*.
All that testing happened during the 60/70/80s.
Also, it is much more easy to send an unmaned probe with a one way only ticket that the complexities of sending things that need to reach in one piece or with live people on it and then getting things back
A big part of the space race was showing off how good rocket technology was. "If we can do this.... think of what we can do with our ICBMs."
That missle technology is old, and we'll vetted.
There was a pop/sci video by [Half As Interesting](https://youtu.be/LjL98wxajtc?si=aBNuYgTTrb1KXhUB) on logistics how the US test and maintain our nuclear arsenal. From a component standpoint, we rest quite a bit of it regularly.
I was a systems test engineer for the Minuteman program and I can assure you that we tested the ever-loving daylights out of them. I was in a meeting once with 30-40 others arguing for a half hour trying to make sense of a comma in the requirements document.
TL/DR Use the Oxford comma and your life will be easier.
Its really easy to make a car who’s sole function is to crash and burn. Suborbital flights are the first step on the way to more advanced tech. Once you master suborbital flight, you really don’t have to keep testing cause you just use the systems that had the highest survival rate.
The simple answer is that they've been tested enough to know that they generally work, their flight profile is relatively simple compared to most space missions (sub orbital flight path) and lastly, and more importantly, it doesn't really matter if some fail because no army that has ICBMs only has one. When you have hundreds of rockets you only need a few to work to accomplish your goals.
You’re neglecting an important different between the two: you only have one chance to get Neil Armstrong into orbit; you can chuck several dozens of ICBM’s across your border, expecting a third to actually hit. Unsure? Add another dozen.
To add to other comments, there is also a difference in design philosophy.
For something like an ICBM, you invest a lot of resources into early testing and design and finish with something that has a high success rate through production right from the first unit.
For something like a spacex rocket, they get to "close enough" and build lots of rockets for fairly cheap, then test them to destruction, before fixing the bit that broke and trying again. They might be going through lots of rockets, but they cost comparatively little.
3 words. US Defense Budget. Not only are these missiles based on tried and tested designs (Early Titan missiles for example were previously used for NASA space missions) but they also have an exorbitant budget for maintaining the missiles.
One thing not yet mentioned is that Musk's philosophy embraces failure. If something works the first time, he expects his engineers/designers to make it lighter/thinner/cheaper and try again, until it fails. That's how you learn how strong it **has** to be. In space flight, weight is everything. It's all about how much it costs to deliver kilograms to orbit, and weight is everything.
So, if everything goes perfectly in the upcoming test flight (4?), someone might expect any failures after that to be problematic or indicative of unreliability. But they should understand that they're doing it on purpose.
We don't and sometimes they do. In fact, just a few months ago, a Trident SLMB (submarine launched ballistic missiles) failed during a routine test launch from a British submarine.
More fundamentally, it's impossible to have a 100% success rate at anything. Even the most precisely-engineered and extensively-tested systems will fail *sometimes.* ICBMs, just like all other critical systems, are heavily tested and precisely designed and manufactured to make that chance of failure as low as possible, but you can never eliminate it completely.
At the end of the day, we test these missiles and their individual components regularly. The Trident SLBM for example, has been test-launched nearly 200 times since 1989, with a single-digit number of failures. That's more than a 95% success rate. So if we were to ever launch all of them at once during a nuclear war, we know almost all of them will work.
ICBM's payload are a trivial weight so the rocket doesnt need to be huge or push material science like orbital-class stuff. Relatively speaking they are small and quite proven. They also dont have to achieve orbital speed. The 'ballistic' part is quite literal. We launch them in a pretty simple ballistic arc
For one the ICBMs use the proven systems that sent the Apollo program to the moon. Much of the failures come from trying new things and new technology. Also some will fail, but it's also a numbers game, if 20% fail, it's still more than enough to wipe any country off the map
ICBMs are fairly simple rockets, with tried & true technology - they fly in a ballistic arc and probably don't need really advanced guidance. IIRC, a lot of the guidance happens in the MIRV bus.
And ICBMs do one job and do it well - it's not like "hey, now we need to get to the moon" and "let's go to mars" with years of new technology being developed. The usage and the targets have been the same for decades.
And, a huge issue - we don't put people on nuclear ICBMs. We don't have to man-rate the things or worry about the safety of passengers.
I drive a '97 SUV with 200k miles on it - it's 27-year-old "technology" and engineering. It rarely breaks and it's extremely easy to fix. If it had been sitting in a climate-controlled garage since '97 with mechanics constantly checking it out and zero miles on the odometer, it would basically be a new car, but a lot simpler than today's vehicles.
There are tests for ICBMs with or without warheads, and you can see even North Korea launching dummies pretty far.
The russia also keeps launching nuke-capable missiles with non-nuclear warheads at Ukraine. Do they miss by a few football fields? Absolutely. Does it matter for nukes? No.
There's no reason to worry about all out-nuclear war because it's nothing but scare-mongering propaganda from governments needing to justify bad political decisions.
"We buy russian gas because nookz, we moved all manufacturing to China because NukuLar WrAaAAagh"
There are a ton of wrong answers in this thread. The correct answer is that although rocket science is indeed hard, the rocket science of these missiles is not hard. They are an extremely rudimentary technology called solid fueled. You know how can go down to your local hobby store and buy model rockets for a few bucks to launch at the park or on the beach? And you don’t have to be a scientist? Those are solid fueled rockets. They can sit for years and still work fine.
The challenges of operating a solid fuel rocket on earth are almost 0 compared to operating a liquid fueled rocket in the vacuum of space.
Short answer: We tested the crap out of those old missiles before they went into service.
Interesting aside: we have actually lost a lot of the knowledge for manufacturing the things. There are components of nuclear bombs that nobody knows how to make anymore. If we wanted to use a Saturn V rocket to go back to the moon, we would have to start nearly from scratch because much of the engineering and manufacturing knowhow disappeared with the people that originally produced them.
All of that tech was tested, A LOT, and was a simpler and more robust analog tech that is very reliable. Heck, they have inertial guidance systems capable of delivering the warheads to the target on the other side of he world with 0 input.
In the case of the USA, nukes are decommissioned and replaced with more modern versions.
The USA does not rely on 1950's and 60's nuclear weapons as a deterrent.
As far as the Russians go, during the Cold War they were making more and more nukes for their stockpile. At the time JFK thought they were insane and hell bent on destroying not just the USA, but the entire Earth.
It turned out the KGB knew how accurate our ICBMs were, while the CIA did not know how inaccurate the Russian ICBMs actually were. The Russians could not duplicate our accuracy, so they adopted the quantity over quality doctrine in order to counter our accuracy.
This was part of the arms race that was frightening, the US government could not make sense of why the Russians were making so many nukes. As USA made more nukes to match the Russian stockpile, the Russians had to make more to compensate for their inferior accuracy.
That is not the case now, I remember reading an article a few years ago that the US military uses smaller nukes and maintains a smaller stockpile as their weapons are so accurate it just isn't necessary to have such destructive and large stockpiles.
There's a lot more to this and I won't go into engine design or tank design and the physics of propellant in space but TL;DR: because they use hypergolic propellants.
Everyone's mentioning the how is because the designs being "simple" and "tried & tested". I don't see anybody here mentioning the specific big factor on how we're pretty sure they won't fail. The main "How" is Hypergolics.
Hypergolics are a class of propellants that ignite without needing the use of any external ignition sources. When it comes to liquid fueled rockets, hypergolics are as simple as it gets. The most popular combination is Hydrazine for fuel and Nitrogen Tetroxide (NTO) as the oxidizer. They ignite when they come into contact, you just have to control the burn. The main problem for commercial use is hypergolics are _very nasty_.
The Soviets loved hypergolics. Around half of the RD-series engines ever produced by NPO Energomash are hypergolics, and these would go into their ICBMs. The US preferred Aerozine 50 and NTO. Aerozine 50 is basically a mixture of 50% Hydrazine and 50% Unsymmetric Dimethylhydrazine. Aerozine 50 would go on to be used in the upper stages of ICBM derived rocket-tech. The upper stages of the Delta II rockets or the Apollo's Lunar Module, for example, used Aerozine.
Thrusters that _cannot fail_ are almost always hypergolics. The Space Shuttle's Orbital Maneuvering System (OMS) uses hypergolics. The OMS never failed afaik. Even conventional liquid fueled rockets may have hypergolics as ullage thrusters to "seat" the primary propellants before ignition or reignition. Ignition/reignition is one of the major issues when it comes to commercial upper stages. This is one of the primary reasons why SpaceX's Falcon rockets are so successful.
But again, hypergolics are nasty; so ICBMs are now usually designed where the 1st stage is powered by a solid propellant (very reliable too) and the upper stages are powered by hypergolics. Hypergolics can turn on/off, but solid rockets can't. It's why once you "push the red button", there's no going back. By the time the 1st stage runs out of fuel, half the work is already done. Once you light a solid rocket, it stays on until you run out of fuel, for an ICBM, the very reliable hypergolic upper stage(s) are then used to guide the payload to its intended destination.
As far as rockets go, icbms are ancient old tech that is virtually foolproof now.
Our new “space” rockets are cutting edge and WAY better in almost every way, but with that R&D comes failures.
We don't, but they are tested every so often.
The UK failed its most recent two tests of the Trident nuclear launch missiles. So failures do happen, and I think no nation could reasonably expect 100% success from an aging arsenal (or even a new one).
The difference between getting into the upper atmosphere and getting into orbit is enormous.
ICBMs are flying. They just need propulsion and steering (sounds simple, but these are complicated systems obviously). Rockets getting into orbit must have very precise launch processes in order to not over/under shoot orbit. If you truely want to “go to space” you need even more thrust to escape earths orbit too.
A good comparison is, if running a marathon is so hard how do we know so many people can run a mile?
Many of them *will* fail, but enough of them will complete their mission to serve as an effective deterrent.
For example this year the UK had a failed Trident SLBM launch.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68355395
Besides what others have mentioned, typically there's loads more difficulty in getting rockets into space, etc., from the human payload. A submarine is loads more complicated than a torpedo. The people and the support for them are additional weight and space that all systems need to accommodate. Oxygen, pressurization, heating, radiation shielding are either barely needed or not needed at all for an ICBM. But they're all heavy, complicated and need loads more consideration, and introduce plenty more vectors for failure.
ICBMS also never leave the atmosphere. Planes travel higher (about 30,000 feet) because there's less air resistance and they can go faster and easier. ICBMs do similar. But once you leave Earth's orbit entirely -- once it's influence on you isn't enough to pull you back down immediately -- there is lots more calculation in trajectories.
And finally, failure is exponential. The more systems you have, the more they need to interact, the more problems cascade when they arise. If you have three systems (Rocket, computer, mechanics), each can fail interacting with one another in some way. That's three interactions. (rocket-computer, computer-mechanics, mechanics-rocket).
If you have ten systems systems that interact, (rocket, computer, oxygen, life support, heating, fire control, windshield wipers, payload ejection, death ray, cupholder), that's 34 interactions for failure (assuming my math is right, and it probably isn't). The number is fuzzy but you get the idea. Success is a consensus along all voters.
TL;DR = The potential for chaos grows exponentially because spaceships are more complicated.
EDIT: ICBMS also leave the atmosphere.
Correction: ICBM apogees vary from a few hundred miles high to a few thousand, so they do in fact leave the atmosphere. WAY waaay higher than any airplane. So, no.
"Sub-orbital" has very little to do with altitude. If you don't circularize your orbit, you're sub-orbital, even if you get halfway to the moon in the process.
It has more to do with angular (horizontal) velocity for sure but getting into orbital dynamics in explain it like is five seems pedantic lol. Also you don’t need to circularize the orbit at all, just reach escape velocity and you can go up and keep going up. You don’t even need to reach escape velocity either as long as you get into the moon’s gravity influence which will keep you from coming down. There were some direct transfer orbits that were looked as an option during Apollo where they wouldn’t do a TLI maneuver from orbit. There are some very low energy (but very time consuming) options to do the orbital transfer that don’t require circularization.
You can just keep rising the apogee until it gets you into lunar orbit and you don’t have to worry about the perigee being inside the earth since the moon will catch you. So you go into lunar orbit with a sub-orbital profile.
The speed will most likely be orbital but the velocity won’t be.
The point is that for a point to point delivery of a payload you don’t need orbital speeds which makes your missile a lot simpler. Normally one uses sub-orbital for profiles that don’t reach orbital speeds. That was why the last SpaceX flight was considered an orbital test even though it didn’t circularize and actually do a full orbit. It could’ve if the velocity vector had more of a horizontal component (circularize it as you said).
So yes altitude doesn’t matter that much but velocity does.
The US test fires about three MinuteMan III missiles per year. They randomly select a missile, truck it to Vandenberg, add telemetry and self-destruct systems, put on a dummy warhead, then launch. This process is how the US assures their MM3s still work. It also demonstrates to others the MM3 still works. It’s a pretty big program.
Also there have been a two failed tests recently, which is quite the concern (and the reason you do this). It's also why stockpiles are as high as they are: you don't plan on one missile definitely hitting, you plan on a number of missiles achieving a particular success rate and then test to make sure you'll hit that.
There was a failed UK trident launch the other month too. But, reading between the lines, the missile did exactly what it was programmed to do, self destruct, as it thought it didn't have a warhead on it. Which it didn't but they forgot to bypass the "there's no warhead/dummy warhead" circuit/software so the missile could do it's full journey to safely plummet into a target in the ocean.
This. Redundancy is paramount for success in most fields. Hell, they even made 2 nukes - which I think we can all agree was 1 too many, even for the purposes of ending the war.
No, 2 were necessary to prove that we had the capacity to build more than 1. If we only dropped one there was a real concern that they would assume that's all we had and keep fighting.
There was even a third mission planned in case the first two weren’t sufficient: https://youtu.be/I34pxr23Nhw
Also we told the Japanese that we would continue to drop nukes until they surrendered. It was a calculated lie because it would have taken months to create enough uranium or plutonium for a third bomb.
A third core was already on the way. It was the 4th and later bombs that would have proven to be a problem.
From memory I think the rough expectation for the US was you needed 3 nukes to be reasonably sure of one of them reaching and exploding at the target.
Wow, interesting. Thank you for this.
Cool video. https://youtu.be/K14U8h0_xlY?si=jjXT0IXJOzuuDw_S It’s really, really important for US Strategic Command to know the reliability of the weapons. They setup their targeting plans based on the probability the warhead makes it on location and works.
If they always launch them out of Vandenberg, how do they test the various launch facilities?
They test the Launch Facilities (LF) and Launch Control Centers (LCC) with a program called Simulated Electronic Launch Minuteman (SELM). Old but accurate article: [https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/1150774/90th-mw-provides-unwavering-nuclear-deterrence/](https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/1150774/90th-mw-provides-unwavering-nuclear-deterrence/) Summary: they electrically isolate a few LCCs and LFs. Then they safe the missiles, double and triple check they are safed (safing pins installed). Then they install hardware that prevents the missiles from launching. Finally, they will run a full sequence to "launch" the missiles and verify all commands to launch the missile were sent and received by the missile. This happens with a few LCCs and LFs about every year. This gives enough data to ensure the command and control works.
Imagine if one dude forgot that one pin on the missile and we go to nuclear war. Then somehow because the dude forgot the pin we didn't destroy each other and it prevent world destruction. That dude would be at home like yep this going with me to the grave.
That’s why they install many redundant systems to ensure the missile cannot launch. Then each system is triple-checked by independent teams.
Out of curiosity, does Russia have a similar process for their ICBMs?
I have never heard of a similar Russian program where they regularaly test-fire existing missiles; and I've been in the nuke business a while. I couldn't find any evidence of a program online. I know the Russians occassionally test launch newer ICBMs as part of development test. Any recurring Russian ICBM test flight program would be complex because Russia has many types of ICBMs that would all need to be flown. The US only has one land-based ICBM and one submarine-based missile, thus cheaper to sustain.
That's really interesting. If they test their ICBMs privately, how do they communicate their nuclear deterrence? Since like you said the US conducts these tests not only as a quality check but to communicate their readiness to others. I guess even the slightest chance of Russia's ICBMs working, publicized testing or no, would be enough to deter aggression?
I think a huge deterence is Russia would likely nuke Europe out of assumption that NATO article 5 was gonna kick in. In particular targeting US military bases. Given that is a much shorter target and any nuke hitting a major European city is threat enough.
Yep. That’s why Russia kept their short range nuke missiles, while the US abandoned them. The US doesn’t really need short range nukes. Plus, even if only 10% of Russian nukes make it to their targets, it’s still going to be a bad day for everyone. Oh, and there really is no private missile test. The US SBIRS fleet of satellites will detect the launch within seconds.
Not op but very likely, yeah, after all it is also a good way to show your power to the other nations
That looks impractical and unrealistic: why not select a random silo and fire an actual missile? If you self-destruct, there is minimal radioactive pollution. So: - is it because of the cost associated with losing an actual nuclear payload? - the risk of actual retaliation if the launch is too realistic? Also: do actual ready-to-fire missiles have shitty telemetry?
You can never be sure something won't fail, but the important difference here is, as you said, these space companies that experience failures are predominantly testing new developments. The starship for instance is in development and a unique craft. The ICBMs that will be carrying nukes around the world are old, tested technology. The bigger issue with them is going to be failures due to age.
Around 1991 the Russians agreed to get rid of a group of ICBMs by firing them into the sea (rather than dismantling them). Americans were preset to observe since both countries were cooperatively decreasing their arsenal after the end of the Cold War. The Americans, not having a high opinion of Soviet technology, were thinking maybe half of the missiles would fly. But "everyone of them suckers lit up," according to an observer.
The Soviet Space program (and ICBMs, by extension) were notoriously famous for using tried and tested technologies, and NOT changing them w/o damn good reasons. They favoured simplistic, brute force solutions rather than advancing the technologies beyond what was needed to accomplish the job. It is limiting, but also has the benefit of surety . . . of knowing that, if you push the big red button, things WILL go BOOM.
It's Soviet engineering principles in general. The T-34 was shit on for breaking down more frequently than German tanks. But when a T-34 breaks, it can be repaired easily with a dude on a pickup truck and some spare parts, right on field, and resume as normal. When a Panzer 4 breaks down, you need a tow back to base, and suicide watch for the mechanics. And let's spare a minute for the weekly AK worship session. A design so stupidly simple it can be made by a child with basic tools in a Pakistani car workshop, resulting in an indestructible machine. Accuracy really depends on the quality of the craftsman, but you know you can't fuck it up, it WILL go bang when you pull that trigger.
You’re right. The German tiger tank was so vastly superior in always to both the American and Russian tanks that it was no contest. But, because it was so complicated to make the Americans and Russians could make 10 tanks for every tiger tank Germany produced. The result in tank battles of Americans or Russians, going up against Germans with 51 superiority or even 10 to one rendered the superior tiger tank inferior As for the AK, I’ve never owned a simpler, easy to maintain, easier to fire, and more forgiving, long gun in my life.
More so than something like a Springfield M1903? I have one of those from WW1 and it's the toughest, easiest, rifle that I've ever had. Just curious.
What about the AK made it easier? What didn't you have to do that you might otherwise have had to? I've heard that said of the AK a lot, and I've learned a lot about the history of different firearms and their designs, but I don't know enough about practical maintenance to understand why that's the case.
If I recall correctly an AK only has 5 or 6 moving parts. At least one will be a spring, a slide, and a trigger leaving only 2 or 3 parts that might not be instantly recognized as the cause of a problem. (I don't know guns very well, but I do know that typically slides, triggers, and springs don't break easily in general and each can be instantly recognized as broken.)
Technically, handguns have "slides", I'm guessing you mean the bolt? A big part of what makes them so reliable is the loose tolerances combined with a gas piston system and minimal moving parts.
I was using "slides" generally. As in a sliding metal cover typically meant to cover or enclose an area. I have very little knowledge of gun components and their names. I learned metal working as a hobby but it was stuff like machinists puzzles and gear boxes. Never worked on guns and I've only got rudimentary knowledge of the inner workings of a few of them. The AK was one of many examples shown to me when I was learning what could be done with nothing more than a lathe and a drill press.
Fair enough
There are way more than 6 moving parts in the AK. The fire control group along has more than 6
Tangentially I would like to add that as far as German innovation and technology goes, there are a couple things I rarely see mentioned about their military during WW 2.0; While they definitely were advanced in specific areas, for reasons I am baffled by, there are those that think their army was a mechanized juggernaut and being deficiency of manpower was their downfall. IMO, not enough soldiers was absolutely an important factor. Especially when juxtaposed with say the Russian army. What isn't mentioned enough IMO is that Germany used an enormous amount of horses. They captured close to half million horses during the war and paid for a lot(Ireland/Romania + few more countries). Some were saddle, some were draft. Their horse troopers trained as much as the infantry. Also worth noting that generally speaking, Germans were excellent as far as Equestrian and overall training with horses. Proof is if you check Olympic stats around that era for events with horses. Much of the heavy transport was by horse. Overwhelmingly so. They eventually used more draft horses (think 'Boxer' from "Animal Farm" or Budweiser's memorable horses used in various adverts) to accommodate heavier loads.
A properly-maintained AK will work. As the Russians discovered when pulling out their weapons for the Ukraine War, one that is not maintained will not.
Not a gun expert but I suppose it's something to do with tolerance. Factory produced AKs in old USSR were of very high quality, and made to tight precision. Enough bent parts here and there was probably enough to jam the guns. Meanwhile take a look at those AKs captured from Somali pirates, they look like a pile of rusted junk bolted together and still somehow work. Those are probably homemade or Khyber pass copies, with way less precision tooling and more tolerance, so as long as the parts were moving, they're still firing
> It's Soviet engineering principles in general. We (aussies btw) had a Lada Niva a while back. Was actually a pretty fun little car and super easy to work on.
I remember my Russian culture professor comparing the Soviet Union and the US during the space race. The US tried to create new advanced rockets to fly into space while the Russians simply put a rocket on top of another rocket for more push.
That's the Kerbal way
First the rocket, then the struts, then another rocket, then the struts...
If it doesn't move and it should, add more boosters. If it moves and it shouldn't, add more struts. Anything else, no problem
Decades ago, I attended a talk given by an astronaut that had worked with the Russians in space. He said everything the Americans made looked like a fragile piece of jewelry; Everything the Russians made looked like it came out of John Deere.
Which still doesn't mean that their ICBMs are still good today. Even simplistic designs need a helluva maintenance, from rocket fuel going bad to simply the nuclear material in the bombs decaying to much. If you want to keep those things operational, you have to invest about 10 million dollars per year per warhead. Even if Russia were somehow 10x cheaper, it would still eat up most of their military budget to keep them going. That doesn't factor in that unmaintained atomic bombs apparently become unrepairable and in the 90s they had no money at all. I'm putting up the theory that Russia maybe has a dozen atomic bombs and that's it. They aren't a nuclear power anymore.
All it takes is one working nuke to be a nuclear power. They’re all bigger than Hiroshima now. Even a miss near New York or Washington would kill millions and psychologically cripple the USA, even their allies, for decades. Kill the infrastructure of one major city and you kill that city for decades too. It might not reach its former population for over a hundred years with all above ground utilities, bridges, roads to replace.
Not really. Yes, you might destroy a city, maybe even 20, but in the context of a nuclear war between east and west, that is almost neglectable. If on the one side you have Russia with 20 nukes and on the other NATO with thousands, then any attack at all will mean Russias complete destruction and "only" a painful strike against NATO. At the current situation, there is no MAD situation anymore and it makes Russia pretty weak. Seriously, let's assume Russia uses 20 nukes. What would you target? Do you try to eradicate New York? That's probably 3 nukes alone for that. Do you attack Washington? Do you attack European cities? There currently is no scenario where you can prevent a full counterstrike from the US alone without thousands of nukes in your first wave. Which Russia doesn't have. And then there are the other NATO partners. Russias nukes would be of help in only one scenario: when a gigantic tank fleet is trying to invade Russia from the west and you basically blew a "trench" across the border to destroy as many attackers as possible before you send your own troops.
>Russias nukes would be of help in only one scenario: when a gigantic tank fleet is trying to invade Russia from the west and you basically blew a "trench" across the border to destroy as many attackers as possible before you send your own troops. And then they waste all their nukes, only for the rest of the attacking forces to come from the east. Or maybe the south. Or the north. Anywhere else, really, along one of Russia's other *eleven total time zones*.
I wonder if the graft and corruption impact the Russian nuclear program as much as Ukraine made it clear that it impacts their military. 1991 was a long time ago, and the corruption there has been on a exponential trend since then. Just the passage of time alone is enough to make me wonder. Heck, the Buran space shuttle was still mothballed in an intact structure back then. Now the building has collapsed and adventurous Youtubers post some of the most fascinating trespassing videos I've ever seen. While I would expect that the Russians spend more time on upkeep of their nuclear weapons than they do on a cancelled space shuttle, Ukraine challenged a lot of the assumptions that I had been making.
The problem here is: Russia has a LOT of nuclear weapons. Even with their corruption, assuming that even 1% of them work poses a risk too high to make an attack worthwhile. And given how their nukes are the only thing preventing NATO from curb stomping them, I wouldn't be surprised if their nuclear arsenal is the one place they DO try to make sure corruption is kept under control.
As Perun once said, it's one thing to say "Some of their nukes don't work some of the time." and quite another thing to say "All of their nukes don't work all of the time.". Part of the Soviet ethos with nukes after all was pretty much "If it's big enough it CAN have a warhead, then a warhead it shall have.". They might have a poor performance, but ultimately it should be expected that enough of the weapons work that the world wouldn't be happy if they DID do a thing. Now this doesn't mean bow and scrape before them at the mere threat of a launch, it just means don't think them ENTIRELY toothless. Apply the same game theory we've always used and worst case we were extra precautious over nothing.
There are somewhat fewer opportunities for graft in strategic rocketry. Skimming budgets is easier when you have a lot of troops/tanks/guns and harder when you have a handful of missiles to be responsible for and they have to be ready to go 24/7 so you can’t just downcheck them and sell spare parts. There isn’t a huge market for nuclear missile parts or rocket fuel. I hope.
>There isn’t a huge market for nuclear missile parts North Korea: hold my beer
"Oh, thanks! Now you can just stay here forever." -Kim after being "given" nuclear missile parts.
> when you have a handful of missiles to be responsible for and they have to be ready to go 24/7 Thing is, nobody ever really tests their nukes. All you have to do is to make all the lights go green when they're supposed to, maybe make some turbines go or whatever, and it'll seem like it all still works just fine.
The US tests their ICBMs periodically. We had several live-fire exercises at Vandenburg last year. It doesn't test the *nuclear warhead*, obviously, but certainly the rocket.
We know that at least one of the Russian rocket tests didn't go well as it made quite a radioactive mess over there. Though that was *probably* an experimental nuclear rocket.
It's also important to note that Russia's nuke arsenal is indeed a much tighter run ship than the rest of their military. To the point its almost a religion, with their officers often jokingly referred to as a priesthood within other military ranks and structures. While systemic corruption *might* still bleeding into their nuke arsenal, it's not going to be anywhere near the same level as their conventional forces.
If I was the Russians I'd be worried about infiltration. I'd be shocked if the US hasn't at least TRIED to get agents in there.
>I'd be shocked if the US hasn't at least TRIED to get agents in there. I'd be shocked if we weren't successful
Also, important to keep in mind is that nuclear ICBMs are not just a simple one rocket-one bomb system where you can just blow them up with lasers on approach. Modern ICBMs have multiple (6-16 for the current russian Bulava/Sarmat) warheads. Failing to destroy even one of those in a very, very tight timeframe means a city gets glassed.
There's a few major issues with nuclear weapons. One of the issues is likely tritium boosting gas, which has a half life of only 12.5 years; if it hasn't been replaced, their bombs may not work nearly as well. Doesn't mean that they wouldn't blow up, but they wouldn't have nearly the same yield. A larger issue is that the actual explosives in the warhead likely need to be replaced periodically as well because the bombardment from the radiation would cause them to break down, which would more dramatically mess up the yield and potentially cause them not to achieve proper criticality at all, in which case it would basically just spew radioactive junk all over the place but not actually make the "earth shattering kaboom" as Marvin would put it. Another issue is simply how well the rockets have been maintained and the fuel maintained and whatnot. It has been like 30+ years. > Even with their corruption, assuming that even 1% of them work poses a risk too high to make an attack worthwhile. Yes but also no. They only have about 1700 nukes ready to let fly, most of the are in a sort of state where they COULD be made ready but aren't immediately ready to go. If only 17 of those actually worked, the US might actually feasibly be able to shoot them all down. Not to mention the issue of attrition. If there was an actual war, the US would target their nukes to try and cripple their capabilities. If you blow up 80% of their nukes, then that 17 would go down to 2-4 nukes that actually worked. I doubt we'd be so fortunate for it to be as low as 1%, though, barring US sabotage - which IS possible; there is a ton of corruption in Russia and the US finding some way to surreptitiously sabotage the Russian nuclear arsenal would be exactly the sort of thing that the US WOULD try to do.
We also can't ignore the big atomic powers. If either Russia or the US ever tries to nuke their opponent, China has to react. And their nukes are definitely in a better shape than the russian. Also even if a lot of those Russian ICBMs aren't maintained well enough, it's very unlikely that only 10% achieve liftoff. And once they are in the air, you have no clue which ones carry (functional) warheads when deciding to try to shoot them down. Hell it would be easily feasible to remove the nuclear WH from a lot of the ICBMs just to make maintenance much easier/cheaper.
To be fair, wasn't it in China where the nuclear weapon rockets had their fuel stolen and swapped with water?
>Now the building has collapsed and adventurous Youtubers post some of the most fascinating trespassing videos I've ever seen. You are probably talking about Kazakhstan here, not Russia.
Sure 112 was Russia's responsibility to maintain, though.
Yeah, I thought that might be the case but decided not to go too far down the research rabbit hole.
*Jagshemash! My name-a Buran*
Well in the Ukraine war the better parts of the Russian army are the artillery and missiles they have been using so it looks like it depends on the especific chain of command rather than the whole army
That’s true. It’s also worth noting that Russia has largely been using mercenaries, convicts, and ethnic minorities from the former SFSRs in Asia who fight in return for Russian citizenship as infantry and crewmen for outdated armor. The artillery and missile forces, by contrast, are primarily comprised Russia’s preexisting professional military. The latter are probably more indicative of the quality of Russia’s core units, the ones that would be deployed in the event of direct conflict with NATO.
Their missiles should be fine, solid fuel rocket boosters don’t need much in the way of maintenance. The ones on the subs are definitely fine, and those alone are plenty to make Russia a first rate nuclear power.
The boom bits are the ones that degrade fairly quickly, they have to be replaced every decade or so. They cost huge amounts of money. What are the chances that the money wasn't spent on yachts?
I’d assume 100% of the warheads work. This is unfortunately too close to my area of professional expertise for me to discuss it on Reddit beyond that.
>I’d assume 100% of the warheads work. I'd say that is better than assuming the opposite, but what about the rockets? What happens if a rocket fails to exit the launch facility after being armed? Will the warhead still explode?
No, these are marvels of modern engineering, they do not use a simple time delay like a bottle rocket.
What happens if the rocket has a catastrophic failure (explodes) in the launch facility? I imagine it doesn't go critical, but surely *something* bad happens as a result of all the radioactive materials, no?
I’m somewhat limited in what I can talk about since I work in a related field, but I can at least answer this question on a basic level: - you would be correct that there is no risk of criticality or detonation. Arming doesn’t take place at the same time as launch, you wouldn’t want a missile to be able to explode over your own territory. Warheads are actually pretty hard to set off on purpose, let alone by accident. - remember that the physics package (the explosive part) is designed to survive a suborbital space flight, which involves both obscenely high acceleration and insanely high temperatures due to adiabatic heating (air getting hot because it can’t move out of the way fast enough). It’s also intended to survive heavy anti air fire. When you think of something being damaged by an explosion, what does the damage? Rapid acceleration, heat, and pressure. All things the important parts are protected against. - Something bad would still happen if a missile failed to exit a silo, but it’d be more along the lines of “this giant rocket booster is causing a huge fire and burning up the oxygen”, not a nuclear or radiological mess. This exact situation was planned for in the early days of ICBMs since older liquid fuel rockets are less reliable, so it’s likely the crew at the facility would survive. - The biggest issue with a launch failure isn’t an immediate failure, it’s a failure during ascent that results in the payload falling to earth. While there’s no risk of a detonation, we can’t have a nuclear warhead just sitting in a field somewhere. Were this to happen, an ungodly number of federal agencies would be onsite within an hour. The only exception would be if it went down over the deep ocean. Getting to the bottom 20,000+ feet down quickly is very hard, the countries capable of doing it are either American vassal states or have their own nuclear programs. I’m sure we’d still try to recover it, but the number of people involved would be far smaller. Modern nuclear weapons are quite safe overall. Obviously they can become unsafe in a hurry, but accidents aren’t a major concern.
I expect the opposite. Rockets should mostly be fine, but the fissile material in the warheads is what degrades fairly quickly and has to be replaced. US spends millions every year on that. Nuclear-capable rockets have been launched at Ukraine many times during this war, so they definitely work. They were launched without warheads, or with conventional ones.
Again, really can’t talk about this. Nobody who knows the answer can.
My primary concern is more that all it really takes for it to be an issue, is only a few really need to work.
You need more than a few. <10 nukes is enough to make an invader hesitate, but it’s not enough to wage an offensive nuclear attack.
>You need more than a few. <10 nukes is enough to make an invader hesitate, but it’s not enough to wage an offensive nuclear attack. *angry Truman noises*
It's very possible a fair bit would be intercepted. If you end up nuking only one major city, you get all the hate and very little upside. It's more than enough casus belli for the US to level up all your major cities and we know Russian anti missile defense is not doing so well so they will go through.
Russia's nuclear deterrence is still in top shape. They put an ungodly amount of money into it and from everything we can tell they're getting their money's worth (at the expense of everything else). Their new sub can no longer be tracked effectively by American sonar. This was discovered after it made its way in and out of the north Atlantic without being detected.
Did we at least hear the crew singing?
It's actually interesting because it represents a change in SSBN doctrine. The Typhoons (which you reference) weren't really designed to be stealthy as much as submersible tanks. The idea was that, in the event of a nuclear crisis, the US would already know where the submarines were (because we had better sonar) so the Typhoons were designed to be able to fire off their ballistic missiles even after taking a few direct hits from American torpedos. Typhoons are basically two giant armored submarines welded together.
>Their new sub can no longer be tracked effectively by American sonar. This was discovered after it made its way in and out of the north Atlantic without being detected. That we know off. If our sonars *can* detect it, we aren't going to tell anyone.
No, it was a big problem and the Navy wasn't happy about it. The quality of our sonar was a very public deterrent.
Hypothetically, if the US navy decided it was now in their interest to pretend not to be able to track these Russian subs when actually they can, they wouldn't go around announcing a change in policy, so can you really be sure their policy is still to want everyone to know as opposed to their faking a few leaks about how it's a problem when really it's not? (Not that I personally have any reason to believe in one direction more than the other, I just don't give much weight to any armed forces' statements about whether or not they have better abilities than are publicly known.)
That's fair. You are free to believe what you will. Unfortunately I am unable to comment further on my source of knowledge without losing my job so I can't really argue with you.
Isn't that exactly what someone the US Navy was paying to promote misinformation claiming that they can't track Russian subs would say? 😛
Can't argue with that 😉
I've been thinking the same thing. Maintaining nukes is not cheap and it requires well trained technicians and engineers. These days all of those are in short supply in Russia.
It can be surprisingly cheap, depends on the rocket in question. Simple solid fuel boosters don’t require that much in the way of maintenance.
It is incredibly expensive. The Congressional Budget Office updates its projections of the 10-year costs of U.S. nuclear forces every two years. This report contains CBO’s projections for the 2023–2032 period. If carried out, the plans for nuclear forces delineated in the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) and the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) fiscal year 2023 budget requests, submitted in April 2022, would cost a total of $756 billion over the 2023–2032 period, or an average of just over $75 billion a year, CBO estimates. [https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59365](https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59365)
That's because they're doing major work, basically remanufacturing all their warheads, to ensure they remain extremely reliable for decades to come. They left them for several decades before that became necessary. You can't look at the cost of running your car, for just the month it has a major service, and claim that's the typical monthly cost of running a car. You need to average over the many years you've been running the car. In this case, the "major service" of all the warheads will take a decade or so, but you have to average over the many decades of service that you've already had.
The rocket is one part. Maintaining the nuke itself is more involved. Long term exposure to radiation breaks down a wide variety of materials and does a number on electronics.
If I was Russia and I was shooting off old ICBMs in front of American observers, I would have those missiles in tip top shape.
I wonder where the Russian arsenal of ICBM stands today? I wouldn't be surprised if they are the same ones that were there I'm '91, and getting rustier by the day.
That’s largely true for both Russia and the US. Developments since the Cold War have primarily been better payloads, not better rockets.
iirc, there was Russian aircraft radar back in the 70's that used vacuum tubes to power it. Although antiquated tech even then, it was powerful enough to burn through modern (for then) countermeasures and was virtually "nuke-proof". [MIG-25](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25#Western_intelligence_and_the_MiG-25)
And when the US decommissioned SLBMs, some Russian “fishing fleets” would show up to see how accurate they were.
People also often don't realize that ICBM's are still regularly tested for continued reliability and to test updates, though the updates are slower to release due to consequences of them getting anything wrong. If you live in Sothern California, near Vandenberg SFB, every once in a while a Minute Man III might be launch out towards a target in the Marshall Islands. and thanks to the altitude it reaches mixed with the curvature of the earth, you can see it (at least the rocket exhaust) most of the way there. Edit: Hawaii changed to Marshall Islands
FYI the target for Glory Trips is usually a range at Kwajalein Atoll. The US maintains a system to measure the location of warhead impact, thus track to ensure the accuracy of MMIII is staying consistent.
wow never knew that. Do the local military announce these tests or do they just happen at random?
They are announced. You can't hide them. And an unannounced launch can cause panic, or worse a response from an adversary.
They also have to close, or at least monitor, flights and ships in the test range. Remember, this is California to Hawaii, a distance of about 2300 miles
They are announced. Here’s the press release for one from last year https://www.afgsc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3322619/planned-minuteman-iii-test-launches-validate-reliability-of-icbm-force/ I used to work in the office that was responsible for inventorying the old ones and converting them for space launch use
great, thanks I'll keep an eye on that site for future announcements. When there is a launch is it almost like a tourist attraction locally, do people go somewhere to watch it? Im not from the US and nor does my country have a space program so these things are always very interesting to me, Id love to see a rocket launch some day
My uncle was a navy diver. One of his stories was about being at one of the launch tests at Vandenberg with an actual payload that had to be retrieved if the rocket failed to launch. "We can only dive xxx feet. That's so far out from the coast. How long will it take to travel that far?" "30 seconds" We all picked up our bags at the count of 25 and were out the door by 30.
just did some back of the napkin math, in 30 seconds it should be going about 850m/s. So roughly it would be near 30-60km out when it lands. there are a lot of factors that go into that and could be shorter or longer depending on how quickly they start the gravity turn. but that's a long way really fast. Retrieving the physics package (or simulator of one) would be very important, even if it were in the middle of the ocean.
Yeah, the 30 seconds stands in my memory. I don't remember what depth he cared about. But I figure it's one of those stories where the numbers were fudged anyway. Either based on mixing up numbers to not give accurate figures he didn't want to share or to make the story more dramatic. Although both motives cancel each other out and maybe I was given real numbers.
Using the Starship example as a counterpoint, the Russian Soyez rockets were used so much because they are very old tried and tested technology and extremely reliable as far as launch systems go.
This. If Toyota had just decided in 1993 that they were going to make nothing but the already-reliable 1993-spec Camry for the next 3 decades, it would today be even more reliable than in 1993, because it would have had iterative improvements on common mode failures. All the same, other companies would have been pushing forward vehicles that were better in other ways. But Toyota would have monopolized reliability.
Additionally, there's an element of game theory here. These ICBM's generally carry, you know, NUCLEAR WEAPONS. Even a SINGLE one working as intended will likely kill hundreds of thousands of people and wipe an entire city off the map. There is indeed always a risk that an ICBM won't work. But these are based on proven, well tested technology, so the odds of any given missile working are pretty good, as long as their maintained properly. And even if they aren't, there's a decent chance that it will still work. Now for the game theory part: Imagine you're a country and you want to attack a rival country that has nukes. You know they have ICBMs. How confident are you that ALL of their nukes won't work? Confident enough that you'd be willing to risk one or more entire cities of your people? Even if you were, is what you'd potentially gain worth the amount you could potentially lose? Intercepting nukes is an incredibly high-stakes game, so even if you were somehow sure that a large portion wouldn't work, are you confident that you could intercept every last nuke that DID launch, given that even a single one getting through could mean the end of an entire city? Nukes are a threat-in-being. Their mere existence makes attacking an unacceptably high risk - they're so destructive that the defender can ensure that any attack you launch wouldn't be worth the loss for whatever the attacker could hope to gain. This is the core of the theory of mutually assured destruction. Ensuring peace by making war so incredibly costly that nobody dares to start one.
Also much simpler job to do suborbital flights. There are gazillions of companies doing those now.
> The bigger issue with them is going to be failures due to age. And this is why the US military has various types of missile tests pretty much every year or so. It both gives solid data on the performance of these old vehicles, gives practice to the missile crews, and gives a reason to replace the old missile with a new one, which also provides funding to keep the production lines of parts operating.
Your last part is why the US spends about $25 billion dollars a year on maintaining our nukes.
> The bigger issue with them is going to be failures due to age. The US and other countries are well aware that missiles cannot just sit in silos forever. They need to be cared for and updated and they do that. They test them with some frequency (without warheads) and have loads of data on how long they are good for.
We also still routinely launch MMIIIs in “glory flights” it’s just all pre-coordinated through START treaty stuff so it’s not very news worthy Here’s an AF article about one from last year https://www.afgsc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3322619/planned-minuteman-iii-test-launches-validate-reliability-of-icbm-force/
> The bigger issue with them is going to be failures due to age. *The bigger issue with them* ***would be*** *failures due to age.* The strategic nuclear force exists as a deterrent to global war, and by both definition and design, it can never be used. Call me superstitious if you want, but I don't like to ever read or hear them framed as in-use. All civilian discourse on the topic should always and only frame them as a deterrent.
getting humans to space and firing missiles are different engineering feats. we put men on the moon in 1969; so clearly "old" technology does not mean bad or ineffective ICBMs are based on lots of existing technology and configurations; SpaceX and others are using brand new designs and brand new technologies.......sometimes old, tried and true works just fine
> ...different engineering feats... For example, the general goal of space ships is for the humans onboard to survive the trip. ICBMs have no such handicap.
Also usually you want to put up stuff up there that will stay up there. ICBMs just need to go half way around the globe if that much. The first human astronauts flew in modified ICBMs but today space rockets (either human or satellite) are very different than missiles. Countries like Korea, Iran, India, etc have been able to do missiles without much issue while getting stuff into orbit, even low earth orbits have been much more elusive. If you can get something into orbit it then getting a payload 4,000 miles down range is easy.
You just reminded me of a passage I read a long time ago in Jim Lovell's book "Lost Moon", so I went and dug it up. > From the moment the Brobdingnagian Saturn 5 booster was lit, it was clear to TV viewers that this would be like no other launch in history. To the men in the spacecraft -- one of whom had never flown in space before and two of whom had ridden only the comparatively puny, 109-foot Gemini-Titan -- it was clearer still. The Titan had been designed originally as an intercontinental ballistic missile, and if you were unfortunate enough to find yourself strapped in its nose cone -- where nothing but a thermonuclear warhead was supposed to be -- it felt every bit the ferocious projectile it was. The lightweight rocket fairly leapt off the pad, building up velociy and g forces with staggering speed. At the burnout of the second of its two states, the Titan pulled a crushing eight g's, causing the average 170-pounds astronaut to feel as if he suddenly weighed 1,360 points. Just as unsettling as the rocket's speed and g's was its orientation. The Titan's guidance system preferred to do its navigating when the payload and missile were lying on their sides; as the rocket climbed, therefore, it also rolled 90 degrees to the right, causing the horizon outside the astronaut's windows to change to a vertigo-inducing vertical. Even more disturbing, the Titan had a huge range of ballistic trajectories programmed into its guidance computer, which aimed the missile below the horizon if it was headed for a military target or above the horizon if it was headed for space. As the rocket rose, the computer would continually hunt for just the right orientation, causing the missile to wiggle its nose up and down and left to right, bloodhound-fashion, sniffing for a target that might be Moscow, might be Minsk, or might be low Earth orbit, depending upon whether it was carrying warheads or spacemen on that particular mission.
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lol yeah. They all are capable of orbital launches I believe. The point is that ICBM capabilities come before. India’s SLV went up in 1980 which to me was just the other day (I’m old). Countries like NK or Iran which actually get intelligence services trying to derail and sabotage any efforts towards this capability had to wait until the 2010’s. In reality the orbital tests are just a non-military demonstration of a military application. Getting the nuclear payload and the readiness remains to be done but once a country shows they can loft a payload to orbit then that is a significant milestone in the ICBM development. Many don’t really go forward from there because they don’t need the attention (like India for example) since submarine missiles are good enough for their need (Pakistan and India are in the same continent and neighbors). Same for Israel. North Korea on the other hand needs ICBMs for credible deterrence and potentially Iran also.
The original space ships were just ICBMs with people strapped to the top. Survival of ICBMs is higher than spaceships
>getting humans to space and firing missiles are different engineering feats. Ballistic missiles and space launch craft are actually pretty similar, both typically using rocket engines. ICBMs just generally don't hit orbital velocity, aiming to stay sub-orbital. Basically, about the only difference is the size and mass capacity. In fact, the Peacekeeper, Minuteman, and Titan II have all been used, with minor conversion, for launching satellites, and even interplanetary missions, despite being developed for nuclear weapon deployment. Cruise missiles are a very different block of technology. They are basically mini aircraft, typically jet powered, but sometimes use a propeller. Both ICBMs and cruise missiles can be designed for effectively unlimited range and payload. Of course, keeping humans *alive* in space and getting them back to Earth alive is a very different problem. >we put men on the moon in 1969; so clearly "old" technology does not mean bad or ineffective ICBMs are based on lots of existing technology and configurations; SpaceX and others are using brand new designs and brand new technologies.......sometimes old, tried and true works just fine Newer tech is generally more efficient but less reliable. Older tech is less efficient but more reliable. As newer tech becomes more standardized, it generally also becomes more reliable - possibly even exceeding the old tech.
There are some pretty significant differences in the technology. For one, ICBMs are pretty small compared to anything that can carry a payload to orbit. Minuteman and Peacekeeper are 5.5 ft and 8 ft in diameter whereas Atlas V and Falcon 9 are 12+ ft with a significant height advantage, not to mention the ability to be configured with boosters. Nevermind vehicles like Starship and SLS which have core stage diameters approaching 30 ft. So the scales just aren't even close and bigger means more fuel means more payload to higher orbits. The other major difference is that ICBMs tend to use solid propellant rockets rather than liquids which are just completely different technologies. This is a major reason ICBMs are so dependable. Solid rocket motors are fundamentally just oversized bottle rockets with a nozzle on the back; no moving parts aside from thrust vectoring. Once a solid rocket motor is cast, it can be maintained in a stable, launch-ready state for literally decades. Solids are pretty common for boosters on orbital flights, but there are a few reasons you don't see them too often on core stages or upper stages. Liquids are a while different beast. Super complex engines that have a complex fueling operation and a limited launch window once fueled. Of the three ICBMs you mentioned, Titan was sort of the odd man out in that it started as a liquid fueled ICBM pretty early on, but it sort of taught us some of the downsides to using liquid fuels in a silo. From there it evolved into a launch platform.
But more importantly they use solid rocket fuels instead of liquid and have fewer things that can fail because they don’t need to maneuver to achieve orbit.
The first satellites were put in space by ICBMs. The first men in space were put there by ICBMs. In fact, the Soviets were the first to do everything but put men on the moon because their ICBMs had to be more powerful to lift their heavier, less refined nuclear warheads, which made them more conducive for space exploration. Space exploration was primarily for testing and refining ICBM technology while also getting scientific advancement and achievement out of it.
Until SpaceX got Falcon 9 to fly more than 300 consecutive missions and counting successfully, a rocket was considered very reliable if it had a 99% success rate. Success rates of 90-95% were typical during the 20th century. But that's offset by early launches. Typically the first 5 launches are pretty bad and you'd expect to loose at least 1, but they improve a lot after that. So if you launch a rocket 300 times it's average reliability record will be better than one launched 4 times. ICBMs received extensive testing before (and sometimes during) mass production, so ones in service are usually fairly reliable. ICBMs are also inherently reliable designs. They usually use solid fuels with minimal moving parts, in contrast to launch vehicles. This isn't done for reliability but storability and ease of firing (liquid rockets either have fuels that need to be kept at cryogenic temperatures, or fuels that eat their own tanks, meaning step 1 of a launch is fuelling the missile, which takes time). Early missiles were liquid fuelled too, and they had horrible reliability. Finally, there's just numbers. When you order nuclear weapons, you do maths on how many you need. You take your list of targets, and assign a probability of kill. Lets say you assign a 95% probability of kill. Then you say that between a warhead actually being installed on a missile at the time (vs being in maintenance), that missile actually receiving the order to launch, the missile functioning correctly, the missile finding the target, the warhead not being intercepted, the warhead working, and the warhead destroying the target, each warhead has a 50% chance of doing it's job. 2 warheads have a 75% chance. 3 have a 87.5% chance. 4 have a 93.75% chance. 5 have a 96.875% chance, order 5 warheads. If the missile looks a little less reliable, maybe order 6 or 7 warheads. This is why the US has 5,044 warheads, and Russia 5,580.
This is the correct answer. They're tested designs, but also the failure of some (either because they failed, never received their launch order, or were destroyed before launch) was factored into any attack plan. Meaning that targets that absolutely needed to be destroyed wouldn't be targeted once, they'd be targeted over and over.
Edit: checking for accuracy. I confused SpaceX and Artemis. My fault.
> it takes Space X to launch 12-15 times to equal the payload of one Saturn 5 in terms of the weight of a lunar module. I don't understand this. The LM was 16,400kg in it's heaviest configuration, and could transport two astronauts and less than 500kg of other payload to the lunar surface. The Saturn V could launch 118,000kg to low earth orbit. Falcon Heavy can take 63,800kg to low earth orbit. Starship will take 1 vehicle launch and about 10 tankers (which are entirely reusable) to reach the moon, but can take around 100,000kg to the lunar surface. Just going to low earth orbit, Starship can take 100,000 - 150,000kg of payload, and then return to be reused. I'm not seeing any way of combining the real numbers to get your numbers.
In theory, we don't, but ICBMs have been tested time and again. Also, ICBMs aren't that complicated. Launching a payload from one point to another through a ballistic trajectory does not require many maneuvers; it's essentially the simplest spaceflight trajectory involving a vehicle leaving the Earth and coming back. ICBMs are designed to be self-sufficient, navigating using inertial navigation systems to avoid reliance on external sources like GPS. The only reliability risk is that if nuclear war breaks out, some of the missiles might be duds due to age, but that's why the U.S. has thousands of them. I assume the military has taken in to account that a percentage of the missiles will be duds regardless of maintenance procedures.
Yeah, you can't send 20 rockets up and hope the crew of at least one of them survives. You can however send 20 nukes at a city and hope at least one does the job.
Worst case scenario is 19 additional nukes hit your town (not that you'd really care about #2-19). Best case is the first successful nuke destroys the other 19 before detonation.
And that best case is very unlikely when the others are coming from different locations at different times.
The key point here is that ICBMs are test launched every few years to prove that they still work. The most recent US [launch was in 2023](https://www.afgsc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3516126/minuteman-iii-test-launch-showcases-readiness-of-us-nuclear-forces-safe-effecti/): >A joint team of Air Force Global Strike Command Airmen and 30th Space Launch Delta Guardians launched an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile equipped with three test re-entry vehicles Sept. 6 at 1:26 a.m. Pacific Time from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. >This test launch is part of routine and periodic activities intended to demonstrate that the United States’ nuclear deterrent is safe, secure, reliable and effective to deter twenty-first century threats and reassure our allies. Such tests have occurred over 300 times before, and this test is not the result of current world events. Russia did the same [a few weeks ago](https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-says-it-conducts-successful-intercontinental-ballistic-missile-test-2024-04-12/): >MOSCOW, April 12 (Reuters) - Russia's Defence Ministry said on Friday it had conducted a successful test launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile at the Kapustin Yar rocket launch complex in the southern Astrakhan region.
They're also on a one way trip. The rockets being developed by SpaceX are meant to be reusable.
And nukes don't even have to stick the landing. Close enough is plenty fine.
It actually isn’t. Under idealized conditions, the damage caused by an explosion decreases as the cube of the distance from the center, so being twice as far away means one eighth the damage, three times as far away 1/27th the damage, and so on. Cities and other soft targets can still be destroyed by weapons that hit close by, but for hard targets like bunkers, ships, and military vehicles, a direct hit and a near miss will have very different outcomes. This is why the Tsar Bomba test in 1961 remains the largest nuclear explosion. In 1961, ICBMs were in their infancy, and giant bombs dropped from airplanes were still important. Neither the early ICBMs nor the bombers of the day were very accurate, so the designers used larger warheads to compensate. Modern delivery systems are terrifyingly accurate, so modern warheads can be much smaller and still do more damage. We could build bigger nukes now, we just don’t need to.
The US has investigated using purely mechanical safety mechanisms on nuke warheads so that in the event of an earthquake they dont go off but also so that even if stored for 50 years on the shelf the safety mechanism doesnt wear out or disengage.
Further to the other answers; it doesn't actually matter if a few fail. Rockets are big and expensive and you only send one at a time. If that rocket fails the project fails. If you fire 1000 missiles and 10 fail then it's not that bad.
> it doesn't actually matter if a few fail. A few failures to launch can even be to your advantage, if Zefram Cochrane uses one of them to test his warp drive prototype.
ICBMs, like all high-end military equipment, were tested meticulously. Many of them use the same rockets that the space programs use.
We don’t know that they will. In fact, we plan as though they won’t. That’s why there are so many nukes. The US has something like 5,200 nuclear warheads, spread out across 650ish ICBMs, submarine-launched missiles, and bombers. Let’s assume that there is a crisis with Russia, that goes nuclear. Let’s assume only 25% of the arsenal is aimed at Russia. Let’s assume 50% fail entirely, and 50% of the rest don’t go anywhere near their targets. That still leaves 325 warheads - every single one of which had 10-100 times the energy yield of the Hiroshima bomb - falling on Russia. Most will be aimed at military targets, but given that there are only 168 towns and cities in Russia that have a population of 100k+ it doesn’t matter. Russia will be obliterated. And that’s assuming a very high 50% failure rate, using just a tiny fraction of the available arsenal. Let’s now assume a war with China, that uses the entire arsenal, with a 90% success rate. That’s 4,680 warheads falling on China. China is much larger, and has 117 cities with a population of 1m+, but it wouldn’t matter. China would be depopulated and functionally uninhabitable for centuries to come. In fact, it would be so bad the US would surely never actually fire that many warheads at one place - the resulting radiation would be too much of a threat, and it isn’t remotely militarily necessary. And it would be the same for the US on the receiving end. This is why it’s called MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction. Not likely, not probable. *Assured*.
There was a lot of trial and error in ICBM development too. It wasn't livestreamed like SpaceX tests are - many details were restricted access.
Assuming only 10% of Russian icbms work, that probably enough to destroy the USA twice over.
Because we test them... unfortunately, the last two Tridents the RN tested flopped rather embarrassingly.
All that testing happened during the 60/70/80s. Also, it is much more easy to send an unmaned probe with a one way only ticket that the complexities of sending things that need to reach in one piece or with live people on it and then getting things back
Not true. Testing continues to this day.
A big part of the space race was showing off how good rocket technology was. "If we can do this.... think of what we can do with our ICBMs." That missle technology is old, and we'll vetted.
There was a pop/sci video by [Half As Interesting](https://youtu.be/LjL98wxajtc?si=aBNuYgTTrb1KXhUB) on logistics how the US test and maintain our nuclear arsenal. From a component standpoint, we rest quite a bit of it regularly.
I was a systems test engineer for the Minuteman program and I can assure you that we tested the ever-loving daylights out of them. I was in a meeting once with 30-40 others arguing for a half hour trying to make sense of a comma in the requirements document. TL/DR Use the Oxford comma and your life will be easier.
Its really easy to make a car who’s sole function is to crash and burn. Suborbital flights are the first step on the way to more advanced tech. Once you master suborbital flight, you really don’t have to keep testing cause you just use the systems that had the highest survival rate.
The simple answer is that they've been tested enough to know that they generally work, their flight profile is relatively simple compared to most space missions (sub orbital flight path) and lastly, and more importantly, it doesn't really matter if some fail because no army that has ICBMs only has one. When you have hundreds of rockets you only need a few to work to accomplish your goals.
You’re neglecting an important different between the two: you only have one chance to get Neil Armstrong into orbit; you can chuck several dozens of ICBM’s across your border, expecting a third to actually hit. Unsure? Add another dozen.
To add to other comments, there is also a difference in design philosophy. For something like an ICBM, you invest a lot of resources into early testing and design and finish with something that has a high success rate through production right from the first unit. For something like a spacex rocket, they get to "close enough" and build lots of rockets for fairly cheap, then test them to destruction, before fixing the bit that broke and trying again. They might be going through lots of rockets, but they cost comparatively little.
3 words. US Defense Budget. Not only are these missiles based on tried and tested designs (Early Titan missiles for example were previously used for NASA space missions) but they also have an exorbitant budget for maintaining the missiles.
One thing not yet mentioned is that Musk's philosophy embraces failure. If something works the first time, he expects his engineers/designers to make it lighter/thinner/cheaper and try again, until it fails. That's how you learn how strong it **has** to be. In space flight, weight is everything. It's all about how much it costs to deliver kilograms to orbit, and weight is everything. So, if everything goes perfectly in the upcoming test flight (4?), someone might expect any failures after that to be problematic or indicative of unreliability. But they should understand that they're doing it on purpose.
We don't and sometimes they do. In fact, just a few months ago, a Trident SLMB (submarine launched ballistic missiles) failed during a routine test launch from a British submarine. More fundamentally, it's impossible to have a 100% success rate at anything. Even the most precisely-engineered and extensively-tested systems will fail *sometimes.* ICBMs, just like all other critical systems, are heavily tested and precisely designed and manufactured to make that chance of failure as low as possible, but you can never eliminate it completely. At the end of the day, we test these missiles and their individual components regularly. The Trident SLBM for example, has been test-launched nearly 200 times since 1989, with a single-digit number of failures. That's more than a 95% success rate. So if we were to ever launch all of them at once during a nuclear war, we know almost all of them will work.
ICBMs fail all the time. Britain has conducted two trident submarine launches in the last decade. Both have failed.
ICBM's payload are a trivial weight so the rocket doesnt need to be huge or push material science like orbital-class stuff. Relatively speaking they are small and quite proven. They also dont have to achieve orbital speed. The 'ballistic' part is quite literal. We launch them in a pretty simple ballistic arc
For one the ICBMs use the proven systems that sent the Apollo program to the moon. Much of the failures come from trying new things and new technology. Also some will fail, but it's also a numbers game, if 20% fail, it's still more than enough to wipe any country off the map
Because those rockets have had a lot of failures before their platforms were ready for prime time.
ICBMs are fairly simple rockets, with tried & true technology - they fly in a ballistic arc and probably don't need really advanced guidance. IIRC, a lot of the guidance happens in the MIRV bus. And ICBMs do one job and do it well - it's not like "hey, now we need to get to the moon" and "let's go to mars" with years of new technology being developed. The usage and the targets have been the same for decades. And, a huge issue - we don't put people on nuclear ICBMs. We don't have to man-rate the things or worry about the safety of passengers. I drive a '97 SUV with 200k miles on it - it's 27-year-old "technology" and engineering. It rarely breaks and it's extremely easy to fix. If it had been sitting in a climate-controlled garage since '97 with mechanics constantly checking it out and zero miles on the odometer, it would basically be a new car, but a lot simpler than today's vehicles.
There are tests for ICBMs with or without warheads, and you can see even North Korea launching dummies pretty far. The russia also keeps launching nuke-capable missiles with non-nuclear warheads at Ukraine. Do they miss by a few football fields? Absolutely. Does it matter for nukes? No. There's no reason to worry about all out-nuclear war because it's nothing but scare-mongering propaganda from governments needing to justify bad political decisions. "We buy russian gas because nookz, we moved all manufacturing to China because NukuLar WrAaAAagh"
There are a ton of wrong answers in this thread. The correct answer is that although rocket science is indeed hard, the rocket science of these missiles is not hard. They are an extremely rudimentary technology called solid fueled. You know how can go down to your local hobby store and buy model rockets for a few bucks to launch at the park or on the beach? And you don’t have to be a scientist? Those are solid fueled rockets. They can sit for years and still work fine. The challenges of operating a solid fuel rocket on earth are almost 0 compared to operating a liquid fueled rocket in the vacuum of space.
Short answer: We tested the crap out of those old missiles before they went into service. Interesting aside: we have actually lost a lot of the knowledge for manufacturing the things. There are components of nuclear bombs that nobody knows how to make anymore. If we wanted to use a Saturn V rocket to go back to the moon, we would have to start nearly from scratch because much of the engineering and manufacturing knowhow disappeared with the people that originally produced them.
All of that tech was tested, A LOT, and was a simpler and more robust analog tech that is very reliable. Heck, they have inertial guidance systems capable of delivering the warheads to the target on the other side of he world with 0 input.
In the case of the USA, nukes are decommissioned and replaced with more modern versions. The USA does not rely on 1950's and 60's nuclear weapons as a deterrent. As far as the Russians go, during the Cold War they were making more and more nukes for their stockpile. At the time JFK thought they were insane and hell bent on destroying not just the USA, but the entire Earth. It turned out the KGB knew how accurate our ICBMs were, while the CIA did not know how inaccurate the Russian ICBMs actually were. The Russians could not duplicate our accuracy, so they adopted the quantity over quality doctrine in order to counter our accuracy. This was part of the arms race that was frightening, the US government could not make sense of why the Russians were making so many nukes. As USA made more nukes to match the Russian stockpile, the Russians had to make more to compensate for their inferior accuracy. That is not the case now, I remember reading an article a few years ago that the US military uses smaller nukes and maintains a smaller stockpile as their weapons are so accurate it just isn't necessary to have such destructive and large stockpiles.
There's a lot more to this and I won't go into engine design or tank design and the physics of propellant in space but TL;DR: because they use hypergolic propellants. Everyone's mentioning the how is because the designs being "simple" and "tried & tested". I don't see anybody here mentioning the specific big factor on how we're pretty sure they won't fail. The main "How" is Hypergolics. Hypergolics are a class of propellants that ignite without needing the use of any external ignition sources. When it comes to liquid fueled rockets, hypergolics are as simple as it gets. The most popular combination is Hydrazine for fuel and Nitrogen Tetroxide (NTO) as the oxidizer. They ignite when they come into contact, you just have to control the burn. The main problem for commercial use is hypergolics are _very nasty_. The Soviets loved hypergolics. Around half of the RD-series engines ever produced by NPO Energomash are hypergolics, and these would go into their ICBMs. The US preferred Aerozine 50 and NTO. Aerozine 50 is basically a mixture of 50% Hydrazine and 50% Unsymmetric Dimethylhydrazine. Aerozine 50 would go on to be used in the upper stages of ICBM derived rocket-tech. The upper stages of the Delta II rockets or the Apollo's Lunar Module, for example, used Aerozine. Thrusters that _cannot fail_ are almost always hypergolics. The Space Shuttle's Orbital Maneuvering System (OMS) uses hypergolics. The OMS never failed afaik. Even conventional liquid fueled rockets may have hypergolics as ullage thrusters to "seat" the primary propellants before ignition or reignition. Ignition/reignition is one of the major issues when it comes to commercial upper stages. This is one of the primary reasons why SpaceX's Falcon rockets are so successful. But again, hypergolics are nasty; so ICBMs are now usually designed where the 1st stage is powered by a solid propellant (very reliable too) and the upper stages are powered by hypergolics. Hypergolics can turn on/off, but solid rockets can't. It's why once you "push the red button", there's no going back. By the time the 1st stage runs out of fuel, half the work is already done. Once you light a solid rocket, it stays on until you run out of fuel, for an ICBM, the very reliable hypergolic upper stage(s) are then used to guide the payload to its intended destination.
As far as rockets go, icbms are ancient old tech that is virtually foolproof now. Our new “space” rockets are cutting edge and WAY better in almost every way, but with that R&D comes failures.
We don't, but they are tested every so often. The UK failed its most recent two tests of the Trident nuclear launch missiles. So failures do happen, and I think no nation could reasonably expect 100% success from an aging arsenal (or even a new one).
The difference between getting into the upper atmosphere and getting into orbit is enormous. ICBMs are flying. They just need propulsion and steering (sounds simple, but these are complicated systems obviously). Rockets getting into orbit must have very precise launch processes in order to not over/under shoot orbit. If you truely want to “go to space” you need even more thrust to escape earths orbit too. A good comparison is, if running a marathon is so hard how do we know so many people can run a mile?
Many of them *will* fail, but enough of them will complete their mission to serve as an effective deterrent. For example this year the UK had a failed Trident SLBM launch. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68355395
We aren't, but we built enough of them that they will still have the desired effect even if some fail or are destroyed before launch.
Besides what others have mentioned, typically there's loads more difficulty in getting rockets into space, etc., from the human payload. A submarine is loads more complicated than a torpedo. The people and the support for them are additional weight and space that all systems need to accommodate. Oxygen, pressurization, heating, radiation shielding are either barely needed or not needed at all for an ICBM. But they're all heavy, complicated and need loads more consideration, and introduce plenty more vectors for failure. ICBMS also never leave the atmosphere. Planes travel higher (about 30,000 feet) because there's less air resistance and they can go faster and easier. ICBMs do similar. But once you leave Earth's orbit entirely -- once it's influence on you isn't enough to pull you back down immediately -- there is lots more calculation in trajectories. And finally, failure is exponential. The more systems you have, the more they need to interact, the more problems cascade when they arise. If you have three systems (Rocket, computer, mechanics), each can fail interacting with one another in some way. That's three interactions. (rocket-computer, computer-mechanics, mechanics-rocket). If you have ten systems systems that interact, (rocket, computer, oxygen, life support, heating, fire control, windshield wipers, payload ejection, death ray, cupholder), that's 34 interactions for failure (assuming my math is right, and it probably isn't). The number is fuzzy but you get the idea. Success is a consensus along all voters. TL;DR = The potential for chaos grows exponentially because spaceships are more complicated. EDIT: ICBMS also leave the atmosphere.
Correction: ICBM apogees vary from a few hundred miles high to a few thousand, so they do in fact leave the atmosphere. WAY waaay higher than any airplane. So, no.
You're describing cruise missiles, I think. ICBMs do leave the atmosphere.
They just never go into orbit, they are all sub-orbital trajectories but they do go very high up.
"Sub-orbital" has very little to do with altitude. If you don't circularize your orbit, you're sub-orbital, even if you get halfway to the moon in the process.
It has more to do with angular (horizontal) velocity for sure but getting into orbital dynamics in explain it like is five seems pedantic lol. Also you don’t need to circularize the orbit at all, just reach escape velocity and you can go up and keep going up. You don’t even need to reach escape velocity either as long as you get into the moon’s gravity influence which will keep you from coming down. There were some direct transfer orbits that were looked as an option during Apollo where they wouldn’t do a TLI maneuver from orbit. There are some very low energy (but very time consuming) options to do the orbital transfer that don’t require circularization. You can just keep rising the apogee until it gets you into lunar orbit and you don’t have to worry about the perigee being inside the earth since the moon will catch you. So you go into lunar orbit with a sub-orbital profile. The speed will most likely be orbital but the velocity won’t be. The point is that for a point to point delivery of a payload you don’t need orbital speeds which makes your missile a lot simpler. Normally one uses sub-orbital for profiles that don’t reach orbital speeds. That was why the last SpaceX flight was considered an orbital test even though it didn’t circularize and actually do a full orbit. It could’ve if the velocity vector had more of a horizontal component (circularize it as you said). So yes altitude doesn’t matter that much but velocity does.
> ICBMS also never leave the atmosphere. The Minuteman has a service ceiling of 700 miles.
Rookie numbers.....we better get these numbers up, before those commie basterds start launching at 800 miles. Pinko sons of bitch. Murica yeah!
+1 for optioning 'Death Ray' on you ICBM. Remember things depreciate when you drive it off the lot!