Slashdot Mirror
'Satan' Missile Now Launches Satellites
colonist writes "The Russian intercontinental ballistic missile known to NATO as SS-18 Satan was converted to a launch vehicle (called Dnepr) and is now launching American communications satellites for profit. 'The giant rocket boasted up to 10 Multiple Independently-Targeted Reentry Vehicles, or MIRVs, each of which would have a carried a hydrogen bomb thermonuclear warhead to incinerate a different North American or Western European city. Even more terrifying, some of them were believed to have been fitted with aerosol warheads to spray smallpox virus over their U.S. targets.' However: 'With the Space Shuttle still grounded, the new generation of American boosters still being developed, and demand for reliable launching rockets building up around the world, the prospect of having a huge already-constructed supply of giant boosters built by the most experienced and reliable rocket engineers on earth has been embraced around the world.'"
A vaccine exists, but IIRC, nearly nobody is actually vaccinated against smallpox, so the simple fact that the vaccine exists won't really help anyone much in an attack.
I also seem to remember the vaccine being a HUGE pain in the ass, and many soldiers complaining about the care it took and getting sick because of it.
I could be mistaken, but believe that NATO not the Pentagon, generates the name designations.
This is an interesting method to disarm rival countries - buy them out!!! Here's $10M - how 'bout you unscrew that nuclear warhead and attach our new On-Star sattelite? Would you turn that old T35 into a water fountain for $1000? $10k for a MiG crop-duster? This does extrapolate a little from Sun Tzu and Zhuge Liang's theories on conflicts. Get your enemies to see the benefits of working with you and the 'war' is won without firing a shot. A bit flamey, but if the billions used to 'pacify' Iraqi unrest were partially paid to the Iraqi citizens, would the current chaos be quelled? If only me magic 8-ball still worked!!.
Actually they wouldn't.
SS-## and the "S..." names are NATO shorthand from the cold-war era (for obvious reasons, the Soviet Union would rather not offer the specsheets for download at that time).
"Russian" designations for the same systems were R-## etc.
The USA does the same thing, Lockheed Martin converts old Titan missiles for satellite launching purposes. See this story for some pictures.
Michael Moore featured this plant in his movie, calling it a weapons factory that makes weapons of mass destruction. When someone challenged him about this, he said that such a rocket could launch a spy satellite that could be the one that starts a war, so he still thinks it's justified to call satellite-launching rockets "weapons of mass destruction".
> Sorry, am I the only one here who doesn't think a virus for which a vaccine exists is a worse
> threat than an H-bomb?
Well, if a vaccine exists you'd be right. There was an article in some magazine I read - Discover, Scientific American, IEEE Spectrum, or possibly Newsweek, a few years back about the USSR's now-defunct bioweapons program. There were some US scientists who visited one of the main labs where the work had taken place. They were looking at some large apparatus where they would test biological agents on various animals and the US scientist asked if he could take samples from inside of this thing. The Russian scientist giving the tour said something like "I would let you but your vaccinations would be no good on some of the strains of smallpox tested in there." The article also talked about how much of this stuff they had manufactured - I recall the measurement being in tons...
I suppose these missiles were made in the USSR days, and as even missiles probably have a limited 'shelf life' and they must be 15+ years old
I think it's just common sense to use them while they still are in working order, and make some hard needed cash in the process. I suppose Russia will them build some new ones for they still remaining WMD with the cash they earned this way, or have a completely different delivery system altogether.
Isn't this the same reason the USA are/were using redstone's as launch vehicules?
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
Is the first thing that comes to anyone else's mind when they see MIRV Scorched Earth? Man that was a fun game... now I'm going to have to dig it out & get it running again.
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So it would be time for cowpox again? Milkmaids used to catch cowpox, and then people noticed that they wouldn't come down with small pox. Threads from the sores of people with cowpox was used to infect others, which was the first vaccination.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Something I've been wondering for a while, who dreams up those oddball NATO designations? How the hell do we get from 'Flanker' (SU-27), 'Badger' (TU-16) and 'Fishbed' (Mig-21) to 'Satan' 'Havoc' and 'Foxbat'?!
Did the old guys get fired for not taking it seriously enough?
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
Hmm. To me it seems a bit of revisionist history to credit Reagan with ending the cold war. It was Gorby who made all the peace overtures and changed things in the Soviet Union. Remember "Perestroika"?
Reagan, reluctantly, went along for the ride.
Here's an interesting article by Gorby in The International Herald Tribune. It's very generous to Reagan, but even in saying nice things about the late president, you can read between the lines that Reagan's attitude to the Soviets changed fundamentally between his first and second term. It was Gorby's reforms that forced the U.S. to acknowledge that the Soviets really wanted peace.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
No, the Russians do have the most experienced and reliable rocket engineers on earth. That's why NASA are working with them. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a number of Russian rocket engineers carried on perfecting the designs for extremely stable and powerfull rocket motors. This work has now been commercialised, and is used in both the Russian and American space industries. I'm sure a quick Google will turn up some suitable references.
The issue of the names assigned by NATO to the Soviet missles/planes/tanks/whatever raises a question in my mind:
What were the names assigned by the Soviets to our stuff, specifically the SR-71? They had to know of its existance long before the name Blackbird (or Habu) was made public.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I was born in West Germany in 1977 and I've got a vaccination certificate by the WHO.
(On the other hand, it made sense for the East Germans to vaccinate their people. My Ukrainian girlfriend, born in 1978, told me some of the horror stories about the West that were spread at school in the USSR. What they thought about the aggressive West is pretty much on par with our ideas about Ivan coming through the Iron curtain.)
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
Uh, hate to break it to you, but plenty of US satellites (and probably launch vehicles as well) use those exact same chemicals. They are the classic propellant mixture for high performance bi-propellant propulsion systems. There's been a push lately to move to so-called 'non-toxic storable propellants', such as high-concetration hydrogen peroxide. But there's a slight performance hit involved, plus a lot of cost in process changes, so it hasn't really caught on so far.
If only people over 40 live, that's kinda it... if all children die and you are left with only women over 40, repopulating the species is a bit tough...
Note: I don't AGREE with the Slashdot crowd, I think that we would survive a Smallpox attack, and I also think that the bio-engineered smallpox would never launch... it's not a USEFUL weapon (the goal of a weapon is to defeat the otherside), it's a doomsday weapon... i.e. If a US First Strike annihilates EVERYTHING (cities, military bases, missile silos, etc), but the Russians could launch 2 of these, the US still loses. Doomsday weapons are part of the MAD game theory, but not something that would actually launch.
HOWEVER, if you wipe out everyone under 40, then yes, that's all she wrote... even if the adults get to go around without kids and party for 50 years, that's still it for civilization.
Alex
All history builds on what has gone before, so I'm going to have to start this with a couple of statements that you'll have to accept as "givens" for the moment.
1) The Soviet Union did all the heavy lifting when it came to defeating the Nazis in WW2. That's not to say that the Western allies didn't contribute AT ALL, but the Soviets bore the brunt of it and did the lions share of destroying the German army. Accordingly, the Soviets got VERY good at large-scale land warfare, especially with tanks.
2) Communism had been on the US radar at least since 1917 and probably earlier. Pure-form Communism (the spontanious revolt of the working class against their opressors) had been the greatest fear of any US captain of industry since the first worker uprisings, and Soviet-style Communism was seen (by some) to be the fullest expression of the spirit of worker revolt as threat.
3) More than a few Western generals and intellectuals wanted to keep on going after the defeat of Germany and go after the USSR next. Patton in particular was a very vocal proponant of defeating the USSR NOW (in 1945) while they were weakened, and while the US Army was already there and fully equipped. After all, they were going to have to fight eventually, why not get it over with?
4) There was a certain amount of Soviet resentment over how long it took to get the Western allies into the fight, and I think (given the anti-Soviet statements that kept turning up) a lingering suspicion that the delay was purposeful, with the intent that the USSR should bleed its strength off against Germany so that the West could come in and finish the Soviets off. Certainly Stalin felt that way, at least for a little while.
So then, at the end of WW2 you've got a Soviet Union with a lot of waretime experience, that feels threatened by the West, and which paid a HORRIFIC cost in lives and is VERY much determined to never go through that experience again.
They may or may not have had expansionist goals as well. Certainly at the time we expected them to come pouring through the Fulda Gap at any second. I know *I* certainly expected them to attack first. Now I'm no longer sure.
But anyway, the Soviets know armoured warefare, right? And one of the tenets of fighting an armoured battle is the concept of "defense in depth". You cannot just line up all your soldiers along the border, WW1-style, because the enemy will mass his forces at a single point, punch through, and now he's running amok in your rear while all your soldiers are up on the border.
So instead, you put a screen on the border, and you keep massed maneouver units some distance behind the border. When the screen locates the centre of axis of the attack, you counterattack the main thrust with your own thrust.
But this caused a couple of problems for the West.
First, the Soviet army was VERY much larger and more powerful than the Western armies. Unit for unit, the West was better, but the Soviets made up for the quality gap with quantity in spades. "defense in depth" wasn't going to be enough - the West needed "force multipliers" like chemical weapons and nukes. Accordingly, it was NATO policy to "go nuclear" IMMEDIATELY.
Quick aside: In the late 80s, Canada bough CF18 fighters, which are really lovely aircraft, but it retained a couple of squadrons of CF104 Starfighters as "ground attack" planes. The F18 is a great ground attack plane, while the F104 is about the worst ground attack plane you could possibly imagine. The 104 goes really, really fast in a straight line, and not much else.
Canada is all about "do more with less", but this always struck me as being singularly unwise.
Well it turned out that the REAL mission of these planes was NUCLEAR ground attack. Load up an American nuke bomb, and then go like hell towards whatever massed formation got discovered and nuke it.
Anyway, the combination of "defense in depth" and "nuke first" did not sit too well with the West Germans, because, well, West Germany
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The problem is that smallpox spreads, whereas H-bombs generally do not (ignoring such things as fallout, which do spread, but which greatly decrease in potency with distance).
Ewige Blumenkraft.
Actually most people born before 1980 in the US got smallpox vaccines, but it was a new, weaker vaccine after ~1970, and it didn't leave that scar on your arm.
I had a friend who used to use the smallpox scar to date girls. If they had it, they were ok to date. If they didn't, chances are he wouldn't have enough in common with them for a LTR. I remember he was bummer when he met an Eastern European girl who didn't have it, until he discovered that it was in a different place on her body...
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
1) See Biohazard (1998 - Ken Alibek, I think now at Batelle Labs in OH) The Soviets had generated a variety of variants, including plague and smallpox strains that were immune to most antibiotics. The strains of smallpox used would circumvent vaccines made with previous strains - thus new vaccines would have to be produced very rapidly to stop them. In addition to smallpox, plague, and anthrax, they had a variety of other goodies, most of which have no treatments. They might not kill everything, but 90% is probably "good enough".
2) To toast lots of people with nukes, you have to hit lots of targets at once. Bioweapons don't require that - one shot in a high-population area is enough. Your targets spread the devastation for you, which lowers your requirements - instead of hundreds of warheads, you only need a few to have the same effect. Even if they warheads miss their targets, most of the payload agents are weaponized and will survive for long periods of time outside, so wherever they hit is going to be uninhabitable Bioweapons have the potential of widespread (worldwide, perhaps) damage because of their ability to be amplified, while nukes (with no such ability) will cause mainly localized damage.
3) Bioweapons are there to generate fear, just like city-buster nukes. They are intimidation weapons, rather than weapons to disable enemy soldiers. Most of the species on those warheads can't be stopped by anyone, so they don't make good weapons for anything but fear and mass murder.