Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!cbnews!military
From: convex!ewright@uunet.UU.NET (Edward V. Wright)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Ballistic missiles
Message-ID: <1990Aug18.182923.25243@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 18 Aug 90 18:29:23 GMT
References: <1990Aug8.030510.25946@cbnews.att.com>
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From: convex!ewright@uunet.UU.NET (Edward V. Wright)

henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:

>Of course, if you want it to be *accurate*, then things get harder. :-)
>Getting within a kilometer or two of a specified orbit is considered very
>good, but that's not impressive accuracy by ICBM standards.

Not if you're trying to take out an opponent's ICBM silos.  If all
you want to do is dump a thousand pounds of chemical weapons or a
small nuke onto New York City, one or two kilometers would be 
impressive enough for me.

>There are also rumors that a
>few of the existing ICBM/SLBM fleet normally sit with emergency comsats
>up top, rather than warheads.

I know the US Navy studied a proposal a few years back to make one
missile on each Trident SSBN an emergency-commsat launcher instead
of a warhead carrier, but officially at least the proposal was
never approved.  I also saw a reference once in a Congressional
budget document to something called (I think) the Emergency Rocket
Transponder System, which apparently is operational on a Minuteman
launch vehicle.  The name, however, implies to me that this might
not be a satellite but simply a temporary rely, launched on a
suborbital trajectory, to help ensure that SAC gets all its missiles
off at the start of a war.  This makes more sense since there have
never been any orbital tests of the Minuteman or Trident vehicles.