How long would it take missiles other than ICBMs to arrive?
You Might Want to Know: How long would it take guided missiles other than ICBMs to arrive?
Before ICBMs, there were the IRBMs-Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles. They had a range not of 6000+ miles but of 1,864–3,418 miles. Also MRBMs, Medium Range Ballistic Missiles, with a range of 620-1,860 miles. Those were the specs used but the lines between them are not as clear as those numbers make it seem. Let’s just call it 1500 miles or so for both. Three quarters of the way across our country, east to west, that would be.
IRBMs and MRBMs were developed in the the 50’s, before we had an ICBM that worked. Two were developed—the “Thor” by our Air Force and the “Jupiter” by our Army, Navy, and Air Force (it’s a complicated story). Both were able to be deployed in 1959, the Thors in the UK and the Jupiters at two sites in the heel of Italy and another site in Turkey.
From those sites, both missiles could reach Moscow. On both was a nuclear warhead, the W49, that yielded 1.44 megatons, a hundred Hiroshimas. After these missiles were launched, they would have taken maybe fifteen minutes to get to Moscow.
We learned how the Soviets must have felt about this when, in 1962, our CIA discovered that the Soviets had managed to get some of their medium-range missiles into Cuba without us knowing. From Cuba, those missiles would have been able to reach anywhere in the US, we thought, except maybe the far Pacific northwest. Certainly they would have been able to reach my home town of Tucson where Titan II missile silos were under construction, and the college I was attending in Massachusetts, Amherst College, which was twenty miles from one of our major B-52 bases, Westover.
The CIA’s belated discovery precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis, the two-week period during which, it is widely thought today, we came closer to a general nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union than at any other time during the Cold War. We came close at other times, just not as close.
One of President Kennedy’s chief military advisors, Curtis LeMay, wanted to invade Cuba, using nuclear weapons even, if that seemed useful. General LeMay seems to have assumed that while the Soviets had successfully sneaked their missiles into Cuba, they hadn’t yet brought in the nuclear warheads for the missiles. We learned later that LeMay was wrong about that. Not only had they brought in the strategic warheads for the missiles. They had also brought in tactical nuclear weapons, the ones intended for use against invading forces.
We came closer to a nuclear exchange then than we even knew. While President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were still trying to figure out what to do, an operator at one of our Ballistic Missile Early Warning Sites whose radar had just been turned around and pointed south at Cuba saw the rising track of a missile. Just as he was about to hit the alarm, he noticed that the missile was heading not north but away from us and out to sea. Turned out we had conducted a test launch of a Titan missile from Florida that we had neglected to tell the BMEWS operators about. Our military then neglected to tell the rest of us that this had happened during the Crisis.
Instead of invading Cuba, President Kennedy put into place a naval blockade of Cuba. He called it a “quarantine” since under international law a “blockade” is considered an act of war.
The crisis ended when President Kennedy agreed to take our Jupiter missiles out of Italy and Turkey if the Soviets would take their missiles out of Cuba. President Kennedy asked Khrushchev not to tell anyone about their deal. Khrushchev didn’t. I guess Kennedy wanted us to think the Soviets had taken their missiles out of Cuba because of how tough he’d been. Or maybe he thought we were who needed to be made to think that.
President Kennedy had been cagey. We were planning to retire the Jupiters anyway. We’d already begun to deploy our first ICBM, the Atlas, at home. Much better to have our missiles and nuclear warheads at home, I’m sure you’ll agree.
But could his concealing this deal with Nikita Khrushchev have led presidents who came after him to make a faulty inference? To think the best way to get results with the Soviets was to be tough? To make ‘em blink?
We quickly brought back the Jupiters. By 1965, we had taken the Thors out of the UK as well. By then we had a second ICBM that was operational, the Titan. Better than the Atlas. The Soviets might still want to have IRBMs to keep off the European countries that had invaded them more than once, and China. But we no longer needed IRBMs.
By 1965, we had deployed something maybe even better than ICBMs. When the Navy pulled out of working on the Jupiter IRBM, they began to concentrate on developing a missile that could be launched from a submerged submarine. Imagine being able to do something like that. They got it done too, pretty quickly. The Polaris Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile (SLBM) was deployed in 1961. It was only an IRBM but even so would have been able to reach Moscow if launched from a submarine in, say, the North Sea or the Baltic Sea, or maybe even the Mediterranean. Imagine being out in a boat in the wine-dark Aegean on a nice day and having one of those jump up off your bow.
The Soviets had also developed an SLBM by 1961 but their submarines had to surface to launch theirs. Also theirs, which did have megaton-range warheads, could reach only our coastal cities, like New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle. Whew. That’s was a relief. We were still ahead of them there.
Our Polaris SLBMs carried the W47 warhead. It came in two models. The “clean” one had a yield of six hundred kilotons, forty Hiroshimas. The “dirty” one had a yield of twice that. If it worked. This warhead, which had been developed not by Los Alamos but by the Livermore laboratory, turned out to have serious reliability problems.
The SLBMs, ours or theirs, would have taken less than thirty minutes to arrive. Maybe a lot less, depending on where the submarines were.
Starting in the 1990’s and today, we have out on patrol submarines armed with Trident D5 SLBMs. These amazing SLBMs have an ICBM range. They can also carry several W88 warheads, each of which yields hundreds of kilotons and can be sent to a different target. What’s more, they are very accurate.
What more could you want? (More about missile accuracy in upcoming entries.)
Other nations have now developed SLBMs. France first, then China. India is working on one. We’ve given the UK some of our Tridents. The Russians have SLBMs now that could reach anywhere in the United States.
All of these SLBMs could arrive at their targets in half the time it would take an ICBM. Those drills we’d done during the Cold War where we showed we could launch our land-based ICBMs within thirty minutes of theirs being launched? Had they been meaningless?
Another nuclear capable missile we developed, and the Soviets also did, was the “cruise” missile. Cruise missiles are powered not by rockets but by jet engines so they fly much slower and would take longer to arrive. But they can hug the terrain as they fly so it would be very difficult, all but impossible, to shoot them down with anti-missile missiles. Cruise missiles can be launched from submerged submarines, from Navy ships, and from bombers that are are “standing off” a long way from their targets. They are much cheaper than ballistic missiles and very accurate. You can put conventional explosives on them if you want and, it is said, fly them in someone’s window.
Next: How accurate are our guided missiles?