Safeguard

There has been a lot of nuclear saber-rattling coming out of Russia. It's hard to watch any recent news program without hearing Russian leaders threatening to use nuclear weapons. That would be the end of the world, certainly as we know it. Survivors would have to live a Stone Age lifestyle. 

Today's nuclear threats remind me of those days when I was a kid. We school children were taught to "Duck and Cover" and there were designated nuclear fallout shelters. We got used to living under the threat of nuclear annihilation, but we didn't believe it would happen. Of course, it could have happened, but it didn't.

After college, I worked on missile guidance systems for a while. (I blogged about that here in a post written in 2010, when everyone knew that the threat of nuclear war was an artifact from the 1950s that was now long gone.)

The guidance system I remember with some degree of irony was the Safeguard ABM (anti-ballistic-missile) System. We had two missiles called Spartan and Sprint. Let me quote from my previous blog post:

“Safeguard used two types of missiles to protect us from incoming nuclear warheads. The first line of defense was the Spartan missile. If our country was attacked, Spartan missiles would be guided to an intercept with incoming missiles high above the atmosphere. Any warheads that got past the Spartan missiles would be close to their detonation points, so the aptly-named Sprint missiles would be launched for a last-chance intercept. A Sprint missile streaked across the sky almost too fast for the eye to follow. The guidance system had to function after being hit with gamma rays and neutrons from an exploding atomic warhead. That made the design more interesting and more complicated.”

My company sent me to the Air Force Weapons Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for three weeks to learn about the effects of nuclear explosions on solid-state electronics. That was very enlightening. In addition to the education I received, I enjoyed Albuquerque—visiting Old Town, riding the Sandia Peak Tramway to a restaurant on the top of Mt. Sandia. That last link is worth looking at; it shows great views of the tramway going to the top of Mt. Sandia and it shows pictures of the restaurant.

But let me get back on topic. We engineers had developed a great ABM (anti-ballistic-missile) system. It worked. All it needed was funding from Congress to deploy it and have it protecting us from Russia's ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles). 

But Congress would not fund it. And here's why. Quoting from my blog again:

“The Safeguard system worked, but our country’s political leaders decided it worked too well. They determined that Safeguard, if fully deployed, would upset the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). MAD was based on an assumption that the only way to maintain peace with the Soviets was to ensure both our populations would be vulnerable to the other’s weapons. So Safeguard was scrapped before it could be deployed. Goodbye Safeguard.”

But the weakness with the notion of MAD was that it assumed both the US and Russia were led by rational, sane leaders. What if one country had a leader with an iron-grip on his military, and that leader became irrational, to the point that he prefers to destroy the world rather than admit defeat. Oh, if that happens, won't we be wishing we had that Safeguard ABM system to protect us. But I guess Congress knew that scenario would never happen. They knew that we would never be faced by an irrational dictator leading a nuclear state. Well, they may have been correct, but with each day it becomes a little bit less certain that they made the correct decision. And Russia would now be a lot more hesitant to launch nuclear warheads toward us if they knew we could knock those warheads out of the sky long before they reached their targets.