Abstract
The German V1 buzz-bomb terrified London in World War II. The V1 was an air-breathing cruise missile, supported by lift forces from the air. The German V2 was the first ballistic missile that flew above the atmosphere without oxygen. The first of 3700 V2 flights took place on 2 October 1942. V2s carried 1000-kg conventional explosives some 300 km, similar to today’s Russian Scud B. The accuracy of the V2 was poor, only 35 % landed within 2 km of their targets. At this rate, ICBM accuracy, over its range of almost 10,000 km, would be 60 km. As ICBMs improved, the nuclear arms race shifted from slow, recallable bombers to fast, non-recallable, MIRVed (multiple, independently targetable reentry vehicles) ICBMs. Increased ICBM accuracy led to decreased weapon yields to attack silos, dropping from a megaton to one-third Mton. Huge warheads of 10 Mton (US) and 100 Mton (USSR) were deployed to produce electromagnetic pulses to shut-down military and civilian communication. To enhance leadership attacks, the US developed earth-penetrating warheads.
A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.
[President Ronald Reagan, 7 December 1987]
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The drag force is proportional to air density, the velocity squared and the effective cross-sectional area.
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The 2002 Nuclear Posture Review defined the new triad as consisting of nuclear weapons, conventional weapons, and an information-based transformed military.
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Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1992)
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Steinbruner et al. (1988).
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Hafemeister, D. (2016). Missiles and War Games. In: Nuclear Proliferation and Terrorism in the Post-9/11 World. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25367-1_4
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