The 107-country Outer Space Treaty signed in 1967 prohibits nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons from being placed in or used from Earth's orbit. What they didn't count on was the US Air Force's most simple weapon ever: a tungsten rod that could hit a city with the explosive power of an intercontinental ballistic missile.
During the Vietnam War, the US used what it called "Lazy Dog" bombs. These were simply solid steel pieces, less than 2 inches long, fitted with fins. There was no explosive — they were simply dropped by the hundreds from planes flying above Vietnam.
Lazy Dog projectiles (aka "kinetic bombardment") could reach speeds of up to 500 mph as they fell to the ground and could penetrate 9 inches of concrete after being dropped from as little as 3,000 feet.
The idea is like shooting bullets at a target, except instead of losing velocity as it travels, the projectile is gaining velocity and energy that will be expended on impact. They were shotgunning a large swath of jungle, raining bullet-size death at high speeds.
That's how Project Thor came to be.
Instead of hundreds of small projectiles from a few thousand feet, Thor used a large projectile from a few thousand miles above the Earth. The "rods from god" idea was a bundle of telephone-pole-size (20 feet long, 1 foot in diameter) tungsten rods, dropped from orbit, reaching a speed of up to 10 times the speed of sound.
The rod itself would penetrate hundreds of feet into the Earth, destroying any potential hardened bunkers or secret underground sites. More than that, when the rod hits, the explosion would be on par with the magnitude of a ground-penetrating nuclear weapon— but with no fallout.
Such a weapon could destroy a target with 15 minutes' notice.
Kinetic weapons from space have shown up in a number of scifi novels, specially "Footfall" a 1985 science fiction novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
ReplyDeleteWhich is an excellent story; as is Heinlein's 1966 masterpiece "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," where steel-clad rocks catapulted from the Moon bombarded Earth.
DeleteI would like to think every space shuttle mission delivered one to our orbital defense platform.
ReplyDeleteUsed in WWI also ...
ReplyDeletehttps://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/03/03/the-flechettes/
Great link. What's old is new again.
Deletethe economics of "rod from God" would rival the the B-29 program(most expensive weapon system in history)and the manhattan project combined. just how cheap do you think lifting one kilogram into medium earth orbit costs? for that fifteen minute response time you will need a lot of orbital sites. medium earth orbits are on the order of how much time to do one orbit? i for one would hope the politicians took more than fifteen minutes to think the employment of weapons of mass destruction thru before using them. and to change the re-entry vehicle vector costs how much fuel? then there is the matter of controls security? imagine some asshat hacker dropping a load of tungsten on you poor pale butt in the middle of the night. then there is the thought that any weapon which functions with the energy of a nuclear weapon would elicit a response in kind(ie. nuclear response). and according to law, it would violate the outer space weapons treaty if not in fact than at least in spirit. the "High Frontier" study done in the 1970s promulgated quite a number of weapons in orbit and on call. there is good reason we do not have them now.
ReplyDeletethere are already a bunch of tactical weapons available(MOAB, FABs thermobaric etc.) that are not nuclear. look at how difficult the political decision to deploy and use them are now. i believe making it easier for politicians to employ weapons of this class is not a good thing.
yes, the tech is there but in the final analysis, a weapon for which the will to use is lacking is a weapon that should not be built.