NephyrS wrote:
I don't think you really have a good grasp of what doctoral training in the sciences is about if that's your perspective.
I don't think the issue here is actually one of being an expert or not. ICBM flight paths are not excessively complicated at the macro level; they're a very large arc. At the micro level of how you make the complicated device that an ICBM is actually work, sure, it's a lot more difficult, but the back-of-the-envelope math Coro did really can be done by anyone who has a high school education and puts their mind to doing it carefully. I could have done the same calculations - it just would have taken me significantly longer; I imagine it took Coro a few minutes while I'd have to get out some books and check myself very carefully and it would take several hours. I don't think there's any reason to quibble with the actual math that's been done here.
The thing to quibble with is the selection of data points. We have been provided with 3 basic pieces of information:
- A range achievement of about 578 miles
- A flight time of 37 minutes
- An apogee of greater than 1550 miles (in other words, 2x or more than a normal ICBM flight profile)
Now, the proposition put forth was that that anti-nuclear whackos at the Union of Concerned Scientists either jacked up or intentionally lied about the altitude achieved, which was based on the math done in this thread and the known normal altitude reached for ICBMs on a more normal attack flight path.
The problem with this proposition is that the numbers are not inconsistent with a "loft" flight path, such as the WRAL article discusses. Yes, an altitude of 1550 miles or even higher is highly inconsistent with a normal ICBM shot; it is not at all inconsistent with an ICBM flying in an unusually short-range, high-altitude arc for purposes that are consistent with North Korea's tracking capabilities and desire to conduct an ICBM demonstration for the world.
These measurements are also not coming from the UoCS; they are coming from the military. The UoCS does not have the network of radars and satellites that observe missile launches around the world - the military has that.
Let's look at the wral.com article, which does indeed provide a more skeptical analysis - but it is not skeptical that this missile did indeed fly 578 miles to an altitude of around 1550 miles for 37 minutes. It is skeptical that this demonstration flight represents and operational ICBM, which is a much more valid line of skepticism.
As the article points out early, test flights are special events. They can be carefully prepared for and the conditions highly controlled. This is not the case for a crew attempting to employ an ICBM (or any other weapon for that matter) in combat. The weapons needs to be reliable enough to sit in a silo or TEL for years with routine maintenance being done by technicians, not engineers or PhDs, keeping it operational, and in numbers.
The test didn't demonstrate that; no one has ever conducted such a mass test of ICBMs, and likely no one ever would. It would be expensive, and a mass launch simulating combat conditions would look very much like an actual attack. It also did not demonstrate that North Korea can actually reach CONUS with a missile - although the continued attempts to treat Alaska and Hawaii as less serious targets than CONUS are alarming in themselves; these are U.S. states and the fact that they are not contiguous is completely irrelevant.
Historically, this situation is somewhat similar to pre-Cuban Missile Crisis assessments of the soviet threat. The Soviets had the
SS-6 missilewhich used the same booster system as the rocket used to put Yuri Gagarin into orbit. This was a wildly impractical system as an operational weapon; there were only 4-6 launchers, they cost an incredible amount, and they took some 20 hours to ready for firing - bombers could reach and destroy them before they could launch. The
SS-7 was experiencing a lot of technical difficulties and was not ready for use. Nevertheless, the SS-6 did in fact
work. If fired, it would indeed carry a 3-megaton warhead to the U.S., with atrocious accuracy (but it also didn't need to be that accurate; it just had to hit a city with a 3-megaton device; the idea of discrete targeting of facilities was out of the question with such a weapon).
10 years later, however, in 1969, the Russians had the SS-11, SS-13, and most importantly, the SS-9 (predecessor of the SS-18, which remains operational today and has a truly fearsome payload) in operational service, all of which were full-fledged ICBMs suitable for use as actual weapons, and the SS-7 was fully operation since well before than once its problems were worked out.
The Russians, in 1959, were very much in the state of North Korea now - they had conducted a few impressive demonstrational events, but they did not really have a working weapon system that was practical for combat use. The SS-7, however, is instructive. While North Korea is not Russia, North Korea is also not trying to build an ICBM in 1959 when ICBMs were a new, experimental concept for everyone world-wide. North Korea is much closer to building an ICBM force that 10 years; in 1969 the Russians had a workable ICBM force of several hundred missiles, not just their first ICBM.
In other words:
- It is, in fact, true that ICBMs do not normally fly to altitudes of 1550 miles; that does not mean they can't. It means the ICBM will come down much closer to its launch point than it would in an actual attack, which makes perfect sense if we are talking about NK conducting a test. While the suspicion of that figure and the supporting math are perfectly valid for a normal ICBM flight, this was not a normal ICBM flight.
- It is also true that North Korea did not demonstrate it has a practical, working ICBM as a weapon system. What it has demonstrated is that it has a prototype weapon that has a non-trivial level of reliability (i.e. it can, in fact, successfully fly) and that it could in fact fly at least 4,000 miles from its launch point assuming that it worked properly on future flights
- It may very well be true that the anti-nuke whackos at UoCS don't know what the hell they're doing, but there are better explanations for the unusual flight profile than "the numbers are all wrong" or "the altitude is bullshit".
In other words, everyone here is right and everyone is wrong. Coro and Nephyr were right to call into question the suspicious altitude figure, and do the math. RD was also right to call into question whether that expertise applied. The clue lies in the range figure; if the altitude is way to high, the range is equally way too short for an ICBM. The only figure that was in the right ballpark was the flight time. Taken altogether, they indicate a heavily modified trajectory used for testing purposes.
This example clearly illustrates the importance of understanding the enemy, from their own perspective. North Korea wants to prove to itself and the world that it has ICBMs; it also does not want to get nuked in the process of demonstrating that. Coro's back-of-the-envelope math is perfectly fine, it just does not incorporate reasons to fire an ICBM on a non-standard trajectory. The math Coro did was based on an assumption of normal behavior in a situation where normal behavior was actually undesirable, for reasons that have nothing to do with the accuracy of his calculations. The last sentence of Coro's post referred to "some absolutely ludicrous flight path." That, in fact, is exactly what happened - for reasons that are not at all ludicrous when looked at from the perspective of the North Koreans themselves.
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