Henry Rollins had a bit in one of his spoken word performances, in which he ridiculed a pentagon spokesperson for talking about “the bunker buster bomb.” Rollins said it quickly, like “BunkerBusterBomb” and exposed the idea of calling a deadly weapon something so silly; pentagon brass sound like kids talking about putting dog shit in a paper bag and throwing it at eachother.
That was back in the good old days where the US was just looking stupid for invading Iraq. Now, we’ve achieved whole new soaring heights of stupid. (and I have stopped listening to Rollins so I don’t know what he’s got to say about it)
Donald Trump said: [cnn]
“We are building, right now, incredible military equipment at a level that nobody has ever seen before. We have no choice. We have to do it — with the adversaries we have out there. We have a — I call it the ‘super-duper missile.’ And I heard the other night, 17 times faster than what they have right now,” Trump said at a White House event to sign the 2020 Armed Forces Day Proclamation.
Naturally, the media freaked out that Trump so casually exposed what is, doubtless, a super duper tippitty top secret fist-bump classification level program. Nah, they don’t care about little stuff like that, anymore. But the pentagon did say, rather huffily, that they can’t talk about it. What they should have said is “we’d be incredibly super duper stupid to talk about it.” But reflection and honesty has never been their strong point. What is actually going on, undoubtedly, is that Lockheed Martin and probably Pratt and Whitney, and a few others, are prototyping scramjet engines that they can build hypersonic cruise missiles on top of. Imagine the engine from an SR-71, the mighty J-58, shrunk down a bit and turned into the power-plant for a missile. Something like that; a straight-up scramjet/ramjet gobbles fuel like I take down a ham sandwich, and the super duper missile will need at least an hour’s fuel supply, maybe more. This thing’s going to have severe design constraints; it’s going to take some very smart boffins, indeed. And (in case anyone has been paying zero attention to the modern world) that project will be riddled with Israeli, Chinese, and Russian spies. The super duper missile is going to be compromised eight ways to sunday, before its first test.
But when asked about the President’s apparent revealing of a new missile, the Defense Department declined to provide details or confirm that it could indeed travel 17-times faster than existing weapons.
17 being the number closest to the exit door of Trump’s anus. But, as they say “speed is just a matter of money; how fast do you want to go?” the crazy thing is: there are already solutions that do exactly that. They work just fine, and they go around 18,000mph (in Freedom Units) (that’s 29,000km/hr to you French people) so, what’s the problem? The problem, in a nutshell, is stupid. If the US launches a ballistic missile everyone’s going to see it coming and the only people likely to be on the receiving end are going to be, briefly, very upset. If they have missiles of their own, they’ll roll back the silo doors, too, and launch them and then global warming is suddenly a secondary concern for humanity. There’s that pesky old “mutually assured destruction” thing, again. See where this is going?
45 minute delivery guaranteed or your order is free
The super duper missile is a first strike weapon; it’s the end-step of the US’ stated desire for “Full Spectrum Dominance” [wik] which has been a pentagon stated goal for at least the last decade (probably longer). The idea is to be able to destroy anyone, anyplace, any time, and nobody can do anything to stop it. Thus, the super duper missile, which is designed to be launched from a submarine, scream into a target’s air-space and blow it up, with basically no warning at all. During the recent sort-of-showdown with North Korea, the US military was frustrated by the fact that it couldn’t reliably launch a first strike against the North Korean state, without risking a retaliatory strike against Seoul. If you recall the news at the time, it was full of stories about US carriers and submarines heading into the area, and B-1 Lancer bombers piling up at Diego Garcia and Guam, etc. – that was the US first strike force and they probably had some really unpleasant conversations with the First Ape about the margin for error (in Normal People that’s: “the chance we will fuck up and lose Seoul.”) and that it was unacceptably high. I find the whole imagined situation to be highly disturbing: doubtless there were some people in brassy uniforms saying “let’s do it!” and others counseling caution. Probably nobody was counseling humanism or compassion; if the day was won, it was caution that carried the field.
The super duper missile is the pentagon’s answer to that caution. Trump is too stupid to realize that it’s a bullshit answer and, unfortunately, the media is alternately saying “we need this!” or “it’s stupid!” What’s really depressing is that the whole situation is being played as another instance of a “missile gap” – we can’t let the Chinese or Russians get ahead of us because if they have them, then it’s a first strike weapon and surprise mushroom clouds on the Potomac are our future, so we need to have our own Freedom Strike Weapon that is totally not a first strike weapon, or something, first. It’s going to be stealthy and hard to detect, but as soon as one is launched, everyone who thinks they might be the target is going to roll back their silo doors and get ready to loft nukes at somewhere. This is exactly the reason why the US, and others, have avoided being so stupid as to use a Minuteman III loaded with conventional high explosives to hit a high value target: everyone who sees a Minuteman III go up is going to roll back their silo doors and get busy because they can’t afford to wait and see if they’re not the target. Presumably, there was some really interesting discussion surrounding launching a first strike on North Korea: who do we warn and when?
“Uh, Vlad? We have to ask you not to mention this to Kim but if you see launch-flash, we swear it’s not headed for you. Vlad? Vlad? Are you there, Vlad? Shit, he hung up on me!”
The super duper missile is no more usable than any other strategic weapon because there are only two classes of targets that it could possibly be used against:
- Insurgents cowering in foxholes, Medcins Sans Frontieres hospitals, and otherwise undefended high value targets.
- Technologically peer military powers with strong defenses and a retaliatory strike capability.
Nobody with a brain would use a super duper missile on a Medcins Sans Frontieres hospital; they’ll just use a conventional 1980s-technology tomahawk cruise missile or a 1950s-era B-52 bomber. And nobody with a brain would use a super duper missile on a nuclear power that has a second strike capability.
In other words, nobody with a brain wants or needs the super duper missile. But the US is going to build one, because you don’t want socialized medical care, do you? Nobody with a brain would want socialized medical care.
At least we did get a bit of honesty from the pentagon. [emphasis added]
“Fielding hypersonic weapons is a top technical research and engineering priority, and the United States has a robust program for the development of hypersonic weapon systems,” Carver said.The goal of such weapons is to be able to better pierce an adversary’s defenses and strike targets deep inside enemy territory.The Pentagon said it successfully tested “a hypersonic glide body,” a key component of a hypersonic missile in a flight experiment in March, saying that weapons provide “an ability to strike targets hundreds and even thousands of miles away, in a matter of minutes.”
I’m going to post this as an unsettling possibility in a comment, because I don’t think it’s worthy of going in the main posting.
Hypothetically, a second-tier power that had nuclear weapons, could achieve a pretty good retaliatory strike capability by smuggling a weapon into a US city and keeping it there, a closely-held secret, under guard. Hypothetically, an adversary could simply state that it has been their strategy to do this, and let the US spend vast amounts of money trying to find it. Naturally, it would be disassembled into several locations, etc, with redundant components and if any component was discovered then it would be assembled and detonated. Fortunately we won’t have to watch Kiefer Sutherland pistol-whip people into telling him where the components are.
Combine your (1) and the “matter of minutes” from the Pentagon and you may have another reason: Latency. Maybe the modern commander in chief is simply too impatient to wait for a B-52 to be armed with something illegal involving phosphorus and be sent against some red cross tent village. He wants to commit a war crime now.
Anyone want to bet those hypersonic defensive missiles of freedom and democracy come equipped with cameras so you can witness the destruction live? Cue stereotypical US soldiers in front of a TV screen hooting and high-fiving each other.
Here’s a good thing about Trump’s presidency: if there was ever a doubt, it’s now absolutely certain that US has not, ever, captured any alien tech from UFOs. There’s simply no way that incontinent fuckwit could have kept that secret for five minutes after the inauguration. Since he’s said nothing about it, it isn’t a thing.
Naturally, the media freaked out that Trump so casually exposed what is, doubtless, a super duper tippitty top secret fist-bump classification level program.
The catch-up program that has been being discussed in the various military journals for months or years? Sounds like the US media. They apparently just learned that Russia was tapping Angela Merkle’s phone, 5 years after President Obama said’ “Tough”.
I think, though, that these super duper missiles are the hypersonic missiles designed to close the [real] missile gap with the Russian Federation. With Trump, though, who knows what he thought he was babbling about?
https://www.google.com/search?q=russian+hypersonic+anti+ship+missile&oq=Russian+hypersonic+&aqs=chrome.3.0j69i57j0l6.13625j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8.
And (in case anyone has been paying zero attention to the modern world) that project will be riddled with Israeli, Chinese, and Russian spies.
Well, they need some light reading in Moscow and Beijing.
“let the US spend vast amounts of money trying to find it”
A few red herring parts intended to be found would help sell it.
sonofrojblake @ # 3: … it’s now absolutely certain that US has not, ever, captured any alien tech from UFOs. There’s simply no way that incontinent fuckwit could have kept that secret for five minutes …
Why do you think The Deep State® would have thought Dolt 45 had any “need to know” such a thing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA69Oh3_obY&t=2510s
Might Trump have watched this video?
I’ve just started reading James Carroll’s House of War which purports to explain exactly this American need for the most powerful weapons in the world, and how the U.S. stopped being content with having the 19th largest army in the world (in 1939, smaller than Portugal!). I’m not far enough in to say anything authoratative about it, but so far it’s been very enlightening, and seems to be presenting a systemic argument explaining how a wide brew of forces brought America to where it is, rather than any one or two things.
Sounds very complicated.
I remember Jerry Pournelle’s simpler solution: project Thor.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment)
“The Pentagon said it successfully tested ‘a hypersonic glide body'”
So they put a brick in a very expensive wind tunnel, and successfully got some data before it broke up = successful test. That was enough to succeed in getting funds for the next phase = truly successful test.
That’s about how the UK government hired 18000+ contact tracers. They (actually, the private companies they contracted for this) put that many people on payroll = successful hiring of contact tracers. They actually went a bit further than this minimally elegant success criterion, and pretended to give them some training. From what I’ve read, that did not go well, to the point that some of the new hires still have no idea what their jobs are going to be. They are getting paid, though. Success!
Hypothetically, a second-tier power that had nuclear weapons, could achieve a pretty good retaliatory strike capability by smuggling a weapon into a US city and keeping it there, a closely-held secret, under guard.
That was the premise in ECOTOPIA, the 1970s novel in which the Pacific Northwest secedes from the United States. “Let us go, or Boom!”
Oh, come on now. Is this any worse than the plan worked up in the 50s but abandoned for obvious reasons, but possibly now being taken up by the Russians, to field highly radioactive unmanned hypersonic bombers driven by nuclear ramjet engines and carrying scores of nuclear bombs. A bomber that would fly for days and thousands of miles on the way to deliver the bombs but leaving an increasingly radioactive trail and having no provision for landing beyond using itself as a final dirty bomb by flying into a target. Such a robotic bomber would, once launched, would be nearly impossible to recall, picture a highly radioactive air-frame too hot to approach but loaded with dozens of live nuclear weapons on board that require removal and disarming. Assuming you remove and disarm the bombs the site is going to be a nuclear waste dump for a century or more. I picture it as Chernobyl with wings that flies for days or weeks at 2100 mph.
So ‘Super Dupper’ missile. I’ll add that to the list of idiotic weapons. Right above the nuclear hand grenade.
Back in the 50 there was a cartoon that made fun of this kind of stuff: The Flintstones. The character Gazoo was sentenced to prehistoric earth as punishment for developing a button that that, when pushed, would destroy everything. Gazoo’s idea being that everyone would want one so he could sell them and make a fortune.
In other words, the US has, once again, crossed the line from development to farce.
@lorn – according to Richard Feynman, he held a patent on nuclear propulsion for aircraft (and use of nuclear water-jet for submarines and ships). I can’t recall where he told that story but it’s somewhere in my Feynman archive.
For those interested.
Elementary Google-fu gets us:
A short synopsis of Project Pluto:
https://blog.seattlepi.com/americanaerospace/2010/07/12/the-missile-from-hell/
There is little doubt it could have been built back then. I suppose it would be technologically easier now. The project was not entirely a waste as material research and engineering advances were instrumental for other projects.
Further reading includes a wiki page and an article from Air & Space Magazine, April/May 1990, Volume 5 No. 1, page 28 that includes drawings of the proposed weapon and photos of engine testing.
Feynman on “The patents and the submarine.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc9gwPB78lk
I’m not sad to see that youtube has finally become a dumping-ground for rare audio and video, which somewhat supercedes my collection. I’ve been tempted, a few times, to upload my archives but mostly I dread the time it would require. I suppose I could see if youtube hasn’t got some of the material, and upload to fill the gaps.
Feynman’s “lost lecture” where he analyzes orbital dynamics as a problem in Euclidian geometry is pretty darned fun. Also the “Los Alamos from below” talk is fascinating. He did a series of talks on creativity at Esalen Institute when he was nearly dead of cancer, and they’re pretty quirky. Also his explanation of computers as very fast filing cabinets goes a long way toward making one feel that AI is a pipe dream. I actually have Ralph Leighton’s source tapes, from which he edited “Surely you’re joking Mr Feynman” which hit the market briefly when he died. If any of you are particularly desperate to have an archive of Feynman stuff, poke me offline and tell me how to get a USB stick to you.