There Will Be War Volume II

by Jerry Pournelle

  “No, sir, we won’t,” endorsed Burman. He did not add any more but his face shouted aloud, “You got me into this. You get me out of it.” He waited quite a time while McNaught did some intense thinking, then prompted, “What do you suggest, sir?”

  Slowly the satisfied smile returned to McNaught’s features as he answered, “Break up the contraption and feed it into the disintegrator.”

  “That doesn’t solve the problem,” said Burman. “We’ll still be short an offog.”

  “No we won’t. Because I’m going to signal its loss owing to the hazards of space service.” He closed one eye in an emphatic wink. “We’re in free flight right now.” He reached for a message pad and scribbled on it while Burman stood by, vastly relieved.

  BUSTLER to Terran Headquarters. Item V1098, Offog, one, came apart under gravitational stress while passing through twin-sun field Hector Major-Minor. Material used as fuel. McNaught, Commander. BUSTLER.

  Burman took it to the radio room and beamed it Earthward. All was peace and progress for another two days. The next time he went to the captain’s cabin he went running.

  “General call, sir,” he announced breathlessly and thrust the message into the other’s hands.

  Terran Headquarters for relay all sectors. Urgent and Important. All ships grounded forthwith. Vessels in fight under official orders will make for nearest spaceport pending further instructions. Welling. Alarm and Rescue Command. Terra.

  “Something’s gone bust,” commented McNaught, undisturbed. He traipsed to the chartroom, Burman following. Consulting the charts, he dialed the intercom phone, got Pike in the bow and ordered, “There’s a panic. All ships grounded. We’ve got to make for Zaxted port, about three days’ run away. Change course at once. Starboard seventeen degrees, declination ten.” Then he cut off, griped, “Bang goes that sweet month on Terra. I never did like Zaxted, either. It stinks. The crew will feel murderous about this and I don’t blame them.”

  “What d’you think has happened, sir?” asked Burman.

  “Heaven alone knows. The last general call was seven years ago, when the Starider exploded halfway along the Mars run. They grounded every ship in existence while they investigated the cause.” He rubbed his chin, pondered, went on, “And the call before that one was when the entire crew of the Blowgun went nuts. Whatever it is this time, you can bet it’s serious.”

  “It wouldn’t be the start of a space war?”

  “Against whom?” McNaught made a gesture of contempt. “Nobody has the ships with which to oppose us. No, it’s something technical. We’ll learn of it eventually. They’ll tell us before we reach Zaxted or soon afterward.”

  They did tell him. Within six hours. Burman rushed in with face full of horror.

  “What’s eating you now?” demanded McNaught, staring at him.

  “The offog,” stuttered Burman. He made motions as though brushing off invisible spiders.

  “What of it?”

  “It’s a typographical error. In your copy it should read ‘off. dog.’”

  “Off. dog?” echoed McNaught, making it sound like foul language.

  “See for yourself.” Dumping the signal on the desk, Burman bolted out, left the door swinging. McNaught scowled after him, picked up the message.

  Terran Headquarters to BUSTLER. Your report V1098, ship’s official dog Peaslake. Detail fully circumstances and manner in which animal came apart under gravitational stress. Cross-examine crew and signal all coincidental symptoms experienced by them. Urgent and Important. Welling. Alarm and Rescue Command. Terra.

  In the privacy of his cabin McNaught commenced to eat his nails. Every now and again he went a little cross-eyed as he examined them for nearness to the flesh.

  Editor's Introduction to:

  PEACEKEEPER

  by J. E. Pournelle, Ph.D.

  In the introduction to this book, I promised to give you the results of Project 75, and to explain the basic principles of the strategic dilemma.

  There’s nothing pleasant about the subject of nuclear war, and many prefer to leave it to the experts. They may be making a severe mistake when they do that. The experts—at least a group of “defense intellectuals” calling themselves experts—have brought us to the present situation.

  In plain language, here is the strategic dilemma.

  PEACEKEEPER

  by J. E. Pournelle, Ph.D.

  The United States currently faces the most serious threat to our national existence since the Civil War. The threat has long been foreseen, although the political authorities are just getting around to doing something about it.

  The issues, while complex, aren’t that hard to understand. The only reason it looks difficult is because of the strange terminology. The trouble is, there’s not enough information, so experts can legitimately disagree. When the experts can’t agree, but the problem has to be solved anyway, politicians get in the act. Some of them don’t bother to learn even the facts that the experts do agree on; being used to “soft sciences” like sociology in which there is no “right” answer, they think strategic problems work that way too.

  If our current leaders can’t cope with difficult problems, then it’s time we hired some who can. There must be a few citizens who are willing to put national survival ahead of politics. Maybe it’s time we elected them to Congress, before the current batch kills off the lot of us.

  First principles: when defensive systems are stronger than offensive ones, the situation is stable. When the offense dominates, it isn’t. Example: if it takes ten attacking missiles to reliably knock out one enemy bird, no one is going to be anxious to start the war. Why should they? If the attacking side launches everything, it disarms itself, leaving the other side with fire in its eye and 90% of its force intact.

  On the other hand, if one attacking bird has a high probability of knocking off ten of the other side’s missiles, the situation is highly unstable. Each side has an incentive to launch, because the one who strikes first has a good chance at a clean win. Thus any tense situation can “escalate” rapidly, as President and Chairman think to themselves, “He may not want to attack, but he knows that if I attack first I’ll win, and he’s not going to allow that.” It’s then only a question of time before someone reaches for the Gold Phone.

  Unfortunately, a long time ago a Secretary of Defense named McNamara adopted a national policy known as “Assured Destruction”. This doctrine says that you’ll never have to fight a war; you just make sure that if the other guy kills you, you can kill him back. This later got refined and was called “Mutual Assured Destruction”, more properly known as MAD. The MAD doctrine says that defensive systems are destabilizing.

  That logic goes as follows: as long as war is too destructive to fight, nobody will start a war. Therefore, anything that will decrease the destruction is a step toward war.

  Under this doctrine, Civil Defense and fallout shelters were considered an act of aggression by the United States against the Soviet Union: by trying to protect our citizens, we’d be making it more possible to go to war with the Soviets. This argument was once very popular among sophisticated people on university campuses.

  One result was that we lost a splendid opportunity to construct a nationwide chain of fallout shelters at low cost. Civil Defense structures were originally planned as part of the Interstate Highway System. There were to be fallout and partial blast shelters under most of the approach ramps. This would have been easy to do as part of the construction, and a few model shelters were actually built as a demonstration.

  Then the full logic of MAD was accepted, and the project was abandoned. After pouring all the concrete for the Interstate System, we currently have fewer shelter spaces than we did in the ’60’s.

  To this day a great many “defense intellectuals” either reject active defense, or never think of it.

  In 1968, Stefan Possony and I argued for the concept of “Assured Survival” to replace “Assured Destruction” as the strategic doctrine
of the US. We argued that it made sense, and that being based on defensive systems, posed a lower threat to both mankind and western civilization. The doctrine was opposed by most “defense intellectuals.” Congress explicitly rejected ballistic missile defenses, and MAD remained the doctrine of the US. Whatever one thinks of the MAD doctrine, though, one thing is clear: if our strategic offensive forces can’t survive, we’ve nothing at all, since we already gave up strategic defenses including civil defense.

  Next: what determines system vulnerability, and how can you tell what will happen if a nuclear war starts? After all, nobody ever fought one before.

  First, you can’t know. Not for certain, and indeed one of the best ways to keep the missiles in their silos is to increase the uncertainty; generals and marshals just hate it when they have to gamble without a reasonable estimate of what’s likely to happen. However, you can make some calculations, and if you have enough overkill capability you can have fairly high confidence in your predictions.

  The United States bases its intercontinental strategic offensive forces, the SOF, on three independent branches, which we called the “Triad”. Each leg of the Triad is supposed to be independent of the other two, meaning that whatever can kill one leg ought to be able to knock out either of the other two. The Triad is composed of manned bombers, submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBM), and land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM). Prior to the ICBM leg we had Snark, an air-breathing pilotless aircraft capable of flying intercontinental distances—an early “cruise missile.”

  Each leg, then, depends on a different mechanism for survival. The manned bomber is very soft; it can be killed on the ground by nukes landing a long way off. It depends for early survival on warning: unlike the other two legs of the Triad, the manned bombers can be launched at an early stage of alert and still be recalled.

  Without warning the manned bomber is a dead duck, but even if it gets warning it still has to penetrate the enemy’s air defenses. Those may be pretty formidable.

  We try to get around them with stand-off missiles, and electronic counter measures (ECM), and such like; but whatever we do isn’t going to change the fact that the B-52 was designed in the 40’s and early fifties, with the first aircraft rolled out in 1956. (I helped work on updates to the B-52 as my first aerospace job.) While it’s not strictly true that the planes are older than the pilots who fly them—at least not older than the senior pilots— they’re pretty old. One USAF colonel recently described a B-52 as “a mass of parts flying in loose formation.”

  The Soviets have had more than 20 years to design defenses against the B-52, and while Soviet civilian science and engineering may lack something, they’re willing to devote a lot of resources to their military. I wouldn’t care to bet my family’s life on the ability of that grand old girl to get deep into Soviet territory.

  Even if the bombers can penetrate, they’re not useful for fighting a nuclear war. You can’t send the bombers to attack Soviet missile bases; there’d be nothing to hit but empty holes by the time a subsonic bomber got to the target.

  And that’s what’s wrong with cruise missiles: they can’t be recalled, so they have to be survivable, something not so easy for a soft thing like a pilotless aircraft; they still have to penetrate; and they take quite a while to reach their targets after they’re launched.

  Cruise missiles can be an excellent supplement to the strategic force, but they are certainly not a potential leg of the Triad. They are vulnerable to everything that kills airplanes (on the ground or in the air) without the recall advantages of manned aircraft.

  The second leg of the Triad is the submarine. Its survival depends entirely on concealment. If you can locate a submarine to within a few miles, it can be killed by an ICBM carrying an H-bomb. Bombardment of the ocean won’t be good for the fish, but the Soviets aren’t much on environmentalism.

  Note, by the way, that all the subs in harbor—up to a third of them, sometimes more—are dead the day the war starts. You can be sure that nuclear submarine bases are very high on the enemy’s target priority list. The rest, though, can make it if they can hide.

  Unfortunately, the submarine’s concealment isn’t what it used to be. Subs can be located in at least two ways. First, by tracking them from their bases; every submariner can tell you stories about playing tag with the Russkis when they leave Holy Loch.

  Worse, though, the oceans aren’t nearly so opaque as we thought. Not long ago we took a look at some radar pictures made from a satellite. “Look at that,” one of the engineers said. “You can see stuff down in the ocean! Deep in the ocean.” And sure enough, using “synthetic aperture” radars, the oceans have become somewhat transparent down to about fifty meters. While the subs can go deeper than that, they can’t launch from deeper than that. Moreover: anything that accidentally—and it was accidental, nobody expected this at all—makes the oceans transparent to fifty meters is unlikely to be limited to that. Now that the principle is known, you can expect satellite surveillance of the oceans to get much better.

  Incidentally, as I write this, a Soviet naval surveillance satellite is about to fall. It carried a 100 kilowatt nuclear power plant. The United States has yet to put a ten kilowatt satellite into orbit.

  So. The subs are getting more vulnerable. They’ve also got another problem: they’re useful for deterrence, but they’re not so good for fighting a nuclear war. Submarines have to launch their missiles from unpredictable places (by definition; imagine what the KGB would pay to find out where our subs would launch from), and this drastically limits their accuracy. I’ll get back to that when I explain what accuracy means.

  That leaves the third leg of the Triad, land-based missiles. These depend for their survival on their basing mode, and that’s the question up for debate. Before we get to that, though, there’s a prior question: do we need land-based missiles at all? Maybe it would be better to put all our birds on subs, or ships, or somewhere like that, where we don’t invite the Soviets to wreck US real estate.

  There are two answers to that. First, if you don’t have land-based missiles, you have pretty well given up your warfighting capability. You’ve bet it all on deterrence; that the other guy is rational, and that he sees things the way you hope he sees them.

  But does he? Suppose one morning the Soviets knock out our Minutemen installations (not too difficult, as we’ll see in a bit) and many of our subs. They still have quite a few birds left. The Red Army is marching into Germany. The hot line chatters, and the message is pretty simple: “You haven’t really been hurt. Most of your cities are in good shape. Cool it, or we launch the rest of our force.”

  At that point it would be useful to have something capable of knocking out the rest of their strategic force.

  To have that capability, you need land-based missiles. To be exact, you need MX. MX, and only MX, has both the accuracy and the Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVS, and they’re different from multiple warheads; MIRVS can attack targets much farther apart) that might give some counterforce capability. True, it won’t be a lot of counterforce capability; but it’ll be all we’d have.

  But can MX survive?

  That depends on the basing concept. Before we get into that, we have to explain vulnerability.

  If you attack a target with an ICBM, your “single shot probability of kill” (PKSS) depends on three major factors: attacker’s yield, attacker’s accuracy, and hardness of target.

  Yield is the size, in kilotons or megatons, of the attacking warhead. Yield to weight ratios are pretty thoroughly classified, but nobody really doubts that you can pack ten one-megaton warheads onto one big ICBM. Hardness is generally measured in “pounds per square inch overpressure” (PSI), which means how much pressure the target can withstand before it’s made useless.

  Accuracy depends on a lot of things. Some of the most important are: weather at launch site; winds over target; gravitational anomalies under the flight path; how good your gyros
are; how good your computers are; how good your mathematicians are; and location errors (where are you when you launch, and where is the other guy in relation to you?). We measure accuracy in Circular Probable Error (CEP), which is the size of the circle that half your shots will fall inside.

  Given those three factors, we can calculate the PKSS, and given that we can calculate the overall vulnerability of the force. While there are classified refinements, all the numbers you really need have long since been published in the US Government Printing Office’s “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons”. They’ve even been put on a circular slide rule that the RAND Corporation used to sell for about a dollar in the 60’s.

  And now, at long last, we can get down to cases. The Minutemen Missile lies in a soil that’s officially hardened to 300 PSI. When we put in Minutemen—the last one was installed in the 60’s—it was no bad guess that the Soviets could throw a megaton with a CEP of about a nautical mile. This gave them a PKSS of about .09, and it would take more than 20 warheads to give better than .9 kill probability. That was obviously a stable situation.

  They can up the yield, but it doesn’t help as much as you might think. Going to ten megatons puts the PKSS to about 35%, and it still takes more than five attackers to get a 90% chance of killing one Minuteman; still not a lot to worry about.

  Changes in accuracy, on the other hand, are very significant. Cutting the CEP in half (well, to 2700 feet) gives one megaton the same kill probability as ten had for a mile. Cutting CEP to 1000 feet is more drastic yet: now the single shot kill probability of one megaton is above 90%.

  If you can get your accuracy to 600 feet CEP, then a 500 kiloton weapon has above 99% kill probability. Now all you need is multiple warheads, and you’re able to knock out more birds than you launched. Clearly this is getting unstable.