Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: U.S. missile defense: the facts of life

U.S. missile defense: the facts of life 
14:01 | 02/ 03/ 2007 
 
 
MOSCOW. (Yury Zaitsev for RIA Novosti) 
On December 13, 2001, George W. Bush declared that the United States would
unilaterally withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty,
and a year later he ordered the deployment of an anti-missile defense
system. The reaction of top-level officials in Russia was low-key. Some
voiced "regret," and Yury Baluyevsky, then first deputy chief of the
General Staff of Russia, said that steps by the United States to put a
global anti-missile shield in place by 2010-2015, or perhaps even 2020,
"posed no threat to Russia's security." 
Indeed, the next 10 to 15 years are going to be a political rather than a
military headache for Russia. The technology to develop an effective
intercept network, especially against individually targetable warheads,
does not currently exist. The only unpleasant note for Russia will be its
greater exposure to the system's components, which will be located in
Poland and the Czech Republic. 
The trajectory of an intercontinental ballistic missile can be divided
into four phases. The first is the boost phase: from launch to engine
burnout and jettisoning at an altitude of 200 to 300 kilometers. In the
case of solid-propellant missiles, this phase may last up to three
minutes, and with liquid-propellant ones up to five. The remaining missile
bus contains nuclear warheads, a control system, vernier engines and
devices to help the missile penetrate enemy defenses, called "penetration
aids." The latter include heavy and light decoys identical in temperature,
effective scatter area and flight velocity to live re-entry vehicles, and
hundreds of thousands of chaff pieces to confuse an enemy radar. 
In the second phase, when instructed by the control system, the bus
maneuvers into the first pre-calculated position and fires a warhead and
some of the penetration aids against target No. 1. Then it moves into the
second pre-calculated position, then the third, and so on, depending on
the number of nuclear warheads carried. Each maneuver takes 30 to 40
seconds. 
The third phase is the ballistic coasting of all elements released - real
and dummy - at altitudes of up to 1,200 kilometers. This phase lasts 15 to
20 minutes. 
The final and shortest phase is less than a minute long, with "clouds" of
elements entering the atmosphere at an altitude of 110-120 kilometers and
at speeds of around 7 km/sec. Air drag causes the dummy elements to fall
behind heavier combat units. Nevertheless, identifying a warhead
surrounded by a bevy of decoys is incredibly difficult in engineering
terms and is unlikely to be achieved in the near future. So no
anti-missile system will be effective unless it can destroy missiles in
the first, or boost, phase, which affords the best conditions for
pinpointing (from the infrared glow of their burning engines) and
targeting interceptors. 
The destruction of missiles is made easier by their large size and
relatively low mechanical sturdiness. But interception at this phase is
possible only if a ground-based interceptor is faster than the attacking
missile and not more than 500 kilometers away, in the case of
liquid-fueled ballistic missiles, or 300 kilometers in the case of
solid-propellant missiles. The Americans themselves concede that missiles
launched from Russia's hinterland would be impossible to intercept, which
explains their desire to move anti-missiles closer to the Russian border. 
The success of a counter-strike also depends on the sophistication of an
intelligence-gathering system, whose objective is to fix the moment of
launch, second-guess the flight path and guide an interceptor to its
target. The earlier the launch is detected, the better the chances of a
successful hit. 
Well before pulling out of the 1972 ABM Treaty, the United States took
concrete steps to deploy, along the Russian border, radars capable of
spotting missile launches and sending targeting data to interceptors. The
first such radar, code-named HAVE STARE, was stationed in Norway. If the
radars scheduled to be positioned in the Czech Republic have roughly the
same characteristics as the HAVE STARE, they will cover practically all of
European Russia, which extends as far as the Urals. 
Experts from an authoritative organization, the American Physical Society,
have reached some very interesting conclusions. These are contained in a
report issued by its working group and dealing with intercept systems for
national missile defense. The authors of the paper draw attention to the
fact that a successful intercept in the boost phase will prevent a strike
against planned targets, but the surviving warheads will fall on populated
areas along the flight trajectory and inflict a heavy death toll. 
So in the event of a nuclear conflict, the first strike will hit countries
which host elements of an American missile defense system. The experts
note that the remaining submunitions will under no circumstances fall on
the territory of a launching country. Their calculations show that if a
missile is hit when traveling at a speed of 3.9 km/sec, its warheads may
travel for another 2,000 kilometers, and at 5.5 km/sec, they will go a
further 5,000 kilometers. 
What counter-measures can be taken to reduce, if not neutralize, the
effectiveness of a future American missile interception system? 
Shortening the boost phase is considered to be the most radical way of
countering interception. That can be achieved by converting liquid-fueled
missiles to solid-propellant ones. Future plans envision cutting the boost
phase to one minute and ending it at an altitude of 80 to 100 kilometers. 
A missile's maneuvering in the track-out phase will also make interception
more difficult. Yury Solomonov, who designed Russia's newest missile, the
Topol-M, said that it can maneuver both in the vertical and horizontal
plane, which has been demonstrated in tests. Another trick is to use a
depressed trajectory that practically never rises above the dense layers
of the atmosphere. 
On balance, while recognizing that the United States' withdrawal from the
ABM Treaty was a mistake - one which, however, does not threaten Russian
security - it is still necessary to closely monitor developments in the
U.S. in this field and work out methods of disabling its anti-missile
systems. 
Another point to bear in mind is that with cuts in strategic offensive
weapons, the role of missile defense will grow considerably because its
combat effectiveness is inversely proportional to the number of attacking
missiles and warheads. So maintaining a sufficient potential for nuclear
deterrence over the next decades is one of Russia's key military and
political goals. 
Yury Zaitsev is an expert at the Russian Academy of Engineering Sciences. 
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 USA e l'Europa in caso di guerra.
ma questo e' ovvio. Le questioni sono altre se hai letto bene
l'articolo.

 dell'Iran non certo della Russia
Ovvero dove?
Palmiro Pangloss
-- 
Tarpaulin: Amarcord Cold War
http://tarpaulin.blogspot.com/

 Ovvero dove?
  l'Iraq ? 


 Ma di che cianci, analfabeta
ti sei ridotto a questo?


 Saddam.
il punto non e' impedire, il punto e' essere coscienti di cosa si va a
scatenare visto che la storiella dei missili contro i paesi "canaglia" (ma
 qualcuno dell'amm.bush metteva anche la Russia) e non contro la Russia fa
acqua.


 dell'Iran non certo della Russia
Sarebbe stupido e miope, fare una cosa del genere. Per dirne una,
anche la Nord Korea ha capacità nucleari ICBM. Ti pare più efficace ed
efficente piazzare intercettori vicino ad ogni possibile attaccante,
oppure piazzarli sul suolo patrio, e difendersi in un punto solo da
ogni possibile aggressore (con capacità nucleari paragnoabili a quelle
iraniane, ovviamente)?
Inoltre, come t'è già stato detto, il missile defense USA è del tutto
inutile contro Russia o Cina, in quanto senza una rete estremamente
estesa di intercettori di vario tipo (cinetici, ad energia diretta,
etc) non è possibile attualmente fermare la saturazione che potrebbero
eseguire le potenze nucleari.
Raffaele

 iraniane, ovviamente)?
non sapevo che Polonia e Rep. Ceca fossero suolo patrio per gli USA.
I governi in carica li hanno asserviti fino a questo punto?