Re: Comet deflection

From: John Schilling (schillin_at_spock.usc.edu)
Date: 07/13/04 

Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 14:04:54 -0700
To: sci-military-moderated@moderators.isc.org

dburch7672@cs.com (DBurch7672) writes:

>Would hitting such an object with existing ground/sea based IM/CBM's help;
>(on a launch when object and highest point of missle trajectory are the
>same!)?

No. The most you could do is blow it to bits, which with a sufficiently
large number of properly targeted and fuzed ICBMs might be possible. But
that's no help at all.

By analogy, assume someone has just fired a shotgun slug at you.
Will a magic talisman that converts the slug to an equivalent charge
of birdshot as soon as it comes within six inches of your body be of
any help? If you could do that at six *feet*, you might convert a
lethal injury to a peppering of minor ones. At sixty feet, you might
escape entirely unscathed. But at six inches, a charge of birdshot
will do *more* damage to an unarmored target than a single slug.

Military ballistic missiles do not have the energy to escape, or even
climb particularly high in, Earth's gravitational field. Lofting them
on the highest possible trajectory would only allow intercepting the
incoming celestial object a few thousand miles out, and a few thousand
miles is to a planet what six inches is to a person. Earth gets the
point-blank charge of birdshot.

Nuclear weapons can be an effective means of planetary defense against
celestial impactors, but they need to make intercept millions of miles
out and months in advance. That means they need to be mated to dedicated
spacecraft and space launch vehicles; stock or even modified ICBMS are
inadequate.

The good news is, if you *do* intercept the object millions of miles out,
you don't need to blow it to bits; just giving it a calculated nudge to
the side will suffice to make it miss the Earth altogether. This can be
accomplished with a rather smaller number of nuclear weapons than the
last-ditch, blow-it-to-bits solution. 

-- 
*John Schilling                    * "Anything worth doing,         *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP       *  is worth doing for money"     *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner *    -13th Rule of Acquisition   *
*White Elephant Research, LLC      * "There is no substitute        *
*schillin@spock.usc.edu            *  for success"                  *
*661-718-0955 or 661-275-6795      *    -58th Rule of Acquisition   *

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