By John Warnock, Warrior Senior Fellow
How long would it take an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile to get there? “There” was the Soviet Union during the Cold War, And Eastern Europe. And China. The communist countries. Today it could be North Korea and maybe other “rogue states,” if you know what those are.
Unless you lived in those places. Then “there” would be “here.”
It would take an ICBM about the same amount of time to get from all those places to here, or from here to all those places.
We’re talking a long way. To qualify as an ICBM, we say a missile has to be able to fly its with guidance system, warhead and re-entry vehicle at least six thousand miles. “There” could be anywhere beyond that range. Some of our ICBMs, and some of the Russian and Chinese ICBMs, and now, maybe, North Korea’s ICBMs, have ranges longer than six thousand miles.
So how long would it take? Does it help to know that the flying time by passenger jet from Denver to Moscow is listed today as something over twelve hours? Probably not.
Does it help to know that when the warheads come in, they are traveling at maybe 17,000 miles an hour, several times faster than the fastest bullet? That means they will be far ahead of their sound. The first you’ll know they’ve arrived is when you see the flash. You’ll see it, even if you have covered your eyes with your hands. The flash will be many times brighter than the sun. You would be able to see the bones in your hands.
For an ICBM, the flying time is thirty minutes. Give or take. Guaranteed delivery.
Now consider: that’s how much time the military people of whoever was being attacked would have to do some pretty challenging things.
First, detect the launch. Today we, Russia, and China all have infra-red (heat) detecting satellites that can do that. If they are working and pointed right.
Then figure out whether your detectors are giving a false alarm. Which during the Cold War they did on several occasions, on both sides, and are still doing, most recently in Hawaii, in 2018. As far as we know.
If you decide an actual launch has taken place, you still need to decide whether the launch was a test or maybe an accidental launch, not an attack. You’d look at the radar track if you had one to look at: Did the missile or missiles seem to be coming at you or were they headed somewhere else? Where? Can you tell? Hurry!
If you decide an attack has started, there are other things to decide. To be absolutely sure this isn’t a false alarm, do you want to wait for a detonation here ? Or do you want to go ahead and launch without being absolutely sure? “Launch on warning” that was called. As opposed to “launch under attack” or “launch on rideout.” If you still could. That was the question there.
“You” wouldn’t be deciding this, of course. This would be decided by our President and the head of our Strategic Command, which, during the Cold War was our Strategic Air Command. If, after their “threat conference,” the president and the Commander in Chief of our Strategic Command decided to launch on this particular warning, there would be at most fifteen minutes to get the launch codes to the missileers in the many underground Launch Control Centers in the ICBM fields in the western part of our country. And for the missileers to authenticate the codes. And for the two missileers in each Launch Control Center to get keys out of their separate lock-boxes, and insert the keys in their consoles. And for them to count down and, together, turn the keys.
After that, the missileers wouldn’t have to decide anything else. ICBMs can’t be called back or destroyed in flight. Thirty minutes after launch, they would get wherever they were going. Maybe to their targets, maybe not exactly. The missiles would be flying more than six thousand miles after all. Wherever they got to, when they came down, the warheads would detonate. Nuclear warheads are very reliable.
Before launch, one option everyone in the chain would have would be to decide that since our nuclear weapons had failed in what many said was their only legitimate mission—deterrence–we wouldn’t launch back. This option can’t be discussed, however, or even thought about. That would undermine the presumed action of deterrence, right? That’s where we are with that.
We’ve made the process as automatic as possible but it’s still not entirely automatic. Deciding not to launch is an actual option. The missileers and even the President and the generals could decide that retaliation—revenge–is not an acceptable reason to kill millions of innocent people even if it looked like millions of us were about to be killed.
We’d have thirty minutes to decide and do, or not do, all that–less really, because we would want to have our “birds in the air,” as we say, before theirs arrived.
In the first days of ICBMs, we weren’t sure we could get all this done in the time we would have. In our first ICBMs, liquid oxygen was one of the fuels. It had to be pumped into the ICBM just before launch. That by itself took at least fifteen minutes.
We practiced. The Soviets did too. We both announced that our drills showed that if we detected an attack on ourselves, we’d have enough time. Deterrence required that belief by the other side, whether or not it was justified.
We both wanted the other side to believe the belief was justified. Otherwise, our leaders thought, the other side might try a first strike. A surprise first strike with nuclear weapons would be much worse than, say, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, which had been very bad. A successful surprise attack with nuclear weapons would be “decisive.” Meaning it would end the war.
It would end more than that of course.
That was the difference nuclear weapons made.
Right now, as you read this, we have ICBMs on Cold War alert and launch-able on this schedule in three missile fields in the United States, in Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota. If launched, the ICBMs would get wherever they were going about thirty minutes later. Then we’d see what kind of world we had.
