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10kBq Jaro


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" Rods From God "
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10section3a.t-9.html?_r=1&oref=slogin


Rods From God


By JONATHAN SHAININ


Published: December 10, 2006


In an age of rogue regimes and pre-emptive war, states developing clandestine nuclear programs know better than to leave them in plain sight. Anxious to ward off an American or Israeli attack, Iran, for example, appears to have buried its uranium-enrichment halls under 30 feet of earth and concrete. No doubt, canny proliferators will soon dig even deeper and better-armored holes.


But if they dig deeper, we can always go higher: hence the call for the "Rods From God." More properly known as hypervelocity rod bundles, these weapons would simply be slender solid tungsten cylinders, 20 or 30 feet long and one or two feet in diameter. The rods would be sent into space and fired from satellites at bunkers on the ground, which they would hit at speeds of more than 10,000 feet per second, penetrating deep into the earth without any explosives. The idea is far from new. Jerry Pournelle, a science-fiction writer and space-weapons expert, conceived it while working for Boeing in the late 1950s; he called the weapon Thor, and as he explained in an interview, "People periodically rediscover it."


Physicists have observed serious limitations to the idea, beginning with the high cost of lifting heavy tungsten poles into orbit. The rods were nevertheless included among "future system concepts" in a recent Air Force "Transformation Flight Plan," which envisioned their "capability to strike ground targets anywhere in the world from space." Even if Thor will not be hurling tungsten thunderbolts at suspected bunkers in Iran any time soon, the military has accelerated its pursuit of space weaponry; one study of nonclassified budgets released earlier this year indicated that spending on space-weapons research has grown by more than a billion dollars each year since 2000, with an eye toward establishing uncontestable "space superiority." In August, the Bush administration adopted a revised "National Space Policy" that rejects any arms-control agreements that might hinder "freedom of action in space."



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GoogleNaut


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"Rods from the Gods" also made its appearence albeit ficticiously in Larry Niven's and Jerry Pournelle's excellent scifi novel "Footfall"

The idea of hypervelocity projectiles from space is pretty interesting. I wonder how one might be able to terminally navigate such a device? A GPS reciever in the tail would be jammed by the plasma sheath of the rod's passage through the atmosphere--so some kind of integrating inertial navigation unit would likely be used using laser gyros and micro-accelerometors. Ceramic coated fins and paddles, electromechanically actuated, could provide terminal guidance for impact on target.

Of course, all this assumes a large amount of sophisticated material and equipment already deployed in space, which naturally assumes a robust lift capacity.

However, if one had the proper inclination, suitably large nickel-iron asteroids may be fairly easily located and 'enticed' (or coerced!) into trajectories that may intersect certain facilities on the ground...a ten meter wide nickel-iron would likely do more deep penetrating ground shock damage than a whole bundle of hypervelocity tungsten rods. The ten meter nickel-iron ought to produce a hole similar in size and shape to the Beringer Crater (Meteor Crater) in Arizona--the bottom of which is nearly 600 feet (200 meters) below the rim. Pulverizing ground shock (MegaBar pressure spikes) ought to penetrate for a kilometer or so beneath such a crater--insantly collapsing any bunker unlucky enough to be struck.

Those who live in glass houses should not throw asteroids!


-- Edited by GoogleNaut at 07:27, 2006-12-12

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10kBq Jaro


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GoogleNaut wrote:

Of course, all this assumes a large amount of sophisticated material and equipment already deployed in space, which naturally assumes a robust lift capacity.

Couldn't single rods be launched by large ballistic missiles ?

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Certainly single rods--even bundles of rods--could be boosted by ICBM's. No problem there...

However to penetrate the deepest bunkers would require the bigger rods described in the article. This implies that the weapons would already be deployed in a an orbit--probably a high orbit like geosynchronous orbit, or even higher...

The advantage of a high orbit, is that since the orbital velocity is less, the required injection velocity to put it onto a ballistic trajectory that intersects the desired target is less--requiring a smaller propulsion system. This implies 'clouds' of prepositioned weapons in various orbits to cover a good chunk of the earth's surface.


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10kBq Jaro


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Hmmm -- for sure maximum velocity, for maximum kinetic energy at impact, for deepest possible penetration....


....hence the need for just a single rod, on a big ICBM.


Orbiting rod bundles ?


....don't think so.


Too politically controversial, and difficult to change orbit, for targeting a particular spot on the earth.


Plus of course, more difficult to launch (to high orbit) in the first place.



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GoogleNaut


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...unless of course they were constructed from near earth asteroid materials...

but yes, a large single rod could easily be launched by a large launcher--no problem. They could put a nice sharp nosecone on it covered with an ablative ceramic material, swivel fins near the CG and near the back end, with a intertial navigation unit (laser gyros, integrating accelerometers, etc.) It would certainly be quite lethal...


Suppose something that masses 1000 kg, moving with a ground strike velocity equal to 75% orbital velocity (say about 5500 m/s) would deliver about 15.1 GJ or about the energy equivalent of about 3 metric tons of TNT. I don't know how far this would penetrate--but tungsten is very dense so I would expect it to penetrate pretty well. However, my limited knowledge of hydrodynamics suggests that "mechanically dispursive turbulance" may break apart the projectile and quickly convert its energy into heat--without any high performance supercomputer simulations I have no way of knowing for sure what the thing might do, other than deposit a lot of energy in a small area/volume in a very brief period of time: you would get a very strong ground shock, no doubt about that. How stong? I don't know--perhaps strong enough to clobber a deeply burried bunker...


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john fraz


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One important point is that what Pournelle has written about, the old "Project Thor", isn't so much "flying telephone poles", as this implies, but single small satellites, carrying bundles of "Flying Crowbars".
Each satellite was described as about 1.5 tons, (the SS-18 can carry about 4 tons-LEO), and had about 20 crobars, of about 10KG each.

Guidance dropped them all in a cluster, and after peak deceleration and heating was over, nose caps would pop off, and they'd have a few seconds for terminal targeting.
Each one hits as about a 500 pound bomb, but the entire explosive release of vaporized metals is a horrendously huge equivalent of the tiny jet of metallic vapor from a shaped-charge explosive. A few ounces of metal at a few km/sec burns throgh thick armor or concrete in a millisecond.
 With Thor, the whole 10KG mass is the jet, so it can penetrate deeply.
It doesn't need to be a flying telephone pole.

In the near future, they'll certainly get around to building a military version of a scaled-up X-prize plane (if Blackstar or Aurora isn't revealed as a real operational vehicle). Such a plane could put a cluster of rods into a near-orbital trajectory, and fly back to land, possibly flying a few sorties per day. This has been in the cards since the X-20, but if comercial space companies start lofting cargo packages for global fast shipping, then the military will certainly match it with hypersonic exo-atmospheric skip-glide interceptors/bombers.
A few squadrons based solely in the ConUS will give global rapid response tasking, anywhere. A 1-ton telephone pole, or a cluster of crowbars will be an afternoon's work, and no target on the planet is safe.

It's incomprehensible to me, that they don't have this already. We know that any such bureaucracy is a graft machine, where politicians vote to distribute money to their districts, but is the present conventional military force-rprojection infrastructure just more lucrative for the Military/Industrial Complex than a few squadrons of these?
 Does this capability "end warfare" as it's been practised, or is it just another machine gun submarin, or airplane, or ICBM (heck, the crossbow was one of these weapons in its day, let alone the arquebus...)

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GoogleNaut


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The Army is working on a highly accurate theatre ballistic missile system, I can't remember what it is called, but the launcher is a MLRS (Multiple-Launch-Rocket-System) which is the premier mobile rocket artillery system used by the US Army. This thing was premiered on the Discovery Channels interesting program: "Future Weapons." A single missile was to have a range of 300 km or so, and would impact the ground at about Mach 5 (1.6 km/s or so.) It was mentioned that the first generation system would use a warhead, but later systems would not. If something doesn't have a warhead--this implies to me atleast that they intend to use kinetic energy to the job. It might not be "Rods from the Gods" but it ought to do well...


Still, given effort and deep pockets, bunkers can be built to any depth that high tech mining operations could allow. It is entirely concievable that even now there are probably bunkers in existence around the world that cannot be penetrated or otherwise defeated by any current weapons systems on the planet--nuclear or not--from the surface. These bunkers--if they exist--are the most secure, secret places on Earth. It is doubtful that anything short of an asteroid impact might defeat something like that--especially if it is located deep beneath a granite dome or thick inclusion.



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10kBq Jaro


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Any guesses about how deep these things might go, if delivered by ICBM ?

Aviation Week & Space Technology, 04/02/2007, page 20
The U.S. Air Force is embarking on a program to quickly integrate the newly tested 30,000-lb. Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb on B-2s.

Albeit several months late, Boeing recently completed the first test of MOP under a $30-million Defense Threat Reduction Agency program. The program began in 2004. The test, at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., didn't evaluate penetration capabilities, but merely the blast potential of the weapon, as MOP was placed in a tunnel before being detonated. But MOP program manager Robert Hastie nonetheless says "this demonstration of the bomb's capability to defeat tunnels was a significant step in the development of this innovative concept."
The 20-ft.-long MOP is designed for use from B-2s and B-52s, and is filled with 5,300 lb. of explosives. The bomb is supposed to allow attacks on targets that now would require a nuclear bomb to destroy. When dropped from a high altitude, MOP should be able to reach targets 60 meters (197 ft.) below ground, and penetrate 5,000 psi. of reinforced concrete. If the concrete is stronger, around 10,000 psi., the weapon should still penetrate 8 meters.The Air Force already plans to give Boeing a sole-source contract to devise production plans and develop interfaces with the B-2 within nine months of the contract award. The massive casing to withstand the strains of impact is being built by the same company, Pennsylvania-based Ellwood National Forge, which helped create USAF's 5,000-lb. penetrator bomb as a quick reaction program for the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

-- Edited by 10kBq Jaro at 03:26, 2007-04-07

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