LGM-35A Sentinel - Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) program

RanulfC said:
Missiles NEVER just 'sit' in the silos!
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We even swapped out a few birds in the Georgia and Kentucky while I was onboard. And that was before Georgia was confirmed for an SSGN conversion and completely offloaded.

It was a standard thing. Done in a place that I swear had all the wind in the world blowing through it...
 
sferrin said:
"Who needs more than 640k?" Anybody who doesn't want to have to spend a significant portion of their arsenal on area targets. I'd rather spend one warhead hitting Beijing with 25 Mt than using a dozen ICBMs to accomplish less.
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Funny, most people involved in nuclear planning would tell you that the better way to do it is a number of 100kt warheads. Drop most in a circle or a concentric circles to cover all the ground you need burned. IIRC 3x 100kt have a larger surface blast area than 1MT.
 
Poseidon was basically a countervalue system and achieved this through a large number of 40kt warheads. The cancelled option of a smaller number of greater yield warheads was intended for counterforce.

Not sure what is with the obsession with using large multi-megaton warheads on urban conurbations, such warheads were always intended for hardened counterforce targets, and seem to have been unnecessary, given that the US switched to warheads in the high hundred of kilotons to be delivered by high-accuracy systems like Trident D5 and Peacekeeper at exactly the time when counterforce strategies like NSDM-242 and PD-59 were drawn up. If the 350kt W-87, 475kt W-87-1 and W-88 and abortive warhead designs like the 5-600kt CALMENDRO and 800kt MUNSTER suffice for counterforce work, then why are 20Mt+ warheads required? The US didn't even bother to develop such warheads during the Reagan era, in spite of Team B massively overestimating the hardening of Soviet ICBM silos.
 
RyanC said:
There are 14 x Ohio SSBNs, and if we use the 1/3 rule of thumb, that leaves us with 4 at sea at any one time. At 24 missiles per boat, that's 96 SLBM, and if we ignore New START and reload them to their full throwweight of 14 x RVs, that's 1,344 nukes we can throw back.

That doesn't also count that there would be a few more SSBN that would be in port or returning/transiting to their operational areas fully loaded and they'd be capable of firing their missiles either pierside or from where they are now. At 336 warheads per SSBN, that's a bunch more we can add to the tally.
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Ohios operate at closer to 3/4 always deployed, due to having two crews. Out at sea for 3 months, in port for 1, then the other crew takes the boat out for 3 months while the first crew does schools and whatnot. (Roughly speaking)

Makes for one hell of a personnel optempo, though, and relies on planned replacing of components before they are expected to fail.
 
Josh_TN said:
There isn't a warhead or pit shortage in the near or medium term, though I agree the means of production needs to be re-established. If nothing else, weapons grade uranium is necessary for the USNs reactors. I think currently they are raiding the material in storage from retired weapons.
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(quoted you so that the whole conversation makes sense)
sferrin said:
God, that's absolutely pathetic if true.
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How so? Why make new when you have spare materials in stock?

Though it probably is time to run another bunch of uranium through the centrifuges to build up the stock of DU, which by the nature of the process also makes EU.


Kat Tsun said:
The Trident force typically deploys with fewer than three or four warheads on a missile, and several have a single warhead for the hard target optimized (read: old, outdated, and unreliable) W-76-1. The majority of the US's 14 SSBNs are not on patrol at any one time either. I think they actually rotate the warheads around the ships, with incoming ships swapping warheads with the outgoing ones, which is part of the job the USN's Missile Technician rating.
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No, they do not swap birds as one boat returns to port!

Each boat is at sea roughly 75% of the time, and doing a missile move takes too long to pull 1-2 missiles, let alone the whole set. Boats would need to go to the Explosives Handling Wharves (the big concrete buildings on the waterline at Bangor and King's Bay) and spend a good week or more there.

Swapping warheads between birds happens at SWFPAC and whatever the East Coast facility is called, I'm guessing SWFLANT. That's one of the main Missile Tech shore duty stations, the others are the Trident Training Facilities and MT A school.
 
A Tentative Fleet Plan said:
Poseidon was basically a countervalue system and achieved this through a large number of 40kt warheads. The cancelled option of a smaller number of greater yield warheads was intended for counterforce.

Not sure what is with the obsession with using large multi-megaton warheads on urban conurbations, such warheads were always intended for hardened counterforce targets, and seem to have been unnecessary, given that the US switched to warheads in the high hundred of kilotons to be delivered by high-accuracy systems like Trident D5 and Peacekeeper at exactly the time when counterforce strategies like NSDM-242 and PD-59 were drawn up. If the 350kt W-87, 475kt W-87-1 and W-88 and abortive warhead designs like the 5-600kt CALMENDRO and 800kt MUNSTER suffice for counterforce work, then why are 20Mt+ warheads required? The US didn't even bother to develop such warheads during the Reagan era, in spite of Team B massively overestimating the hardening of Soviet ICBM silos.
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The story we gave tourists was to picture the Kingdome in Seattle. Or your local professional-level sportsball stadium, if you don't have a baseball stadium handy. Polaris could be expected to land somewhere within the parking lot/property lines. Poseidon could be expected to land somewhere inside the stadium. Trident 1 could be expected to land somewhere in the infield. Trident 2 could be expected to land on the pitcher's mound. And each missile generation more or less doubled the range.

Trident 2 we jokingly said could cover the strategic targets tied up at the pier, but launching a missile would likely weld some hatches shut.
 
Scott Kenny said:
(quoted you so that the whole conversation makes sense)

How so? Why make new when you have spare materials in stock?

Though it probably is time to run another bunch of uranium through the centrifuges to build up the stock of DU, which by the nature of the process also makes EU.



No, they do not swap birds as one boat returns to port!

Each boat is at sea roughly 75% of the time, and doing a missile move takes too long to pull 1-2 missiles, let alone the whole set. Boats would need to go to the Explosives Handling Wharves (the big concrete buildings on the waterline at Bangor and King's Bay) and spend a good week or more there.

Swapping warheads between birds happens at SWFPAC and whatever the East Coast facility is called, I'm guessing SWFLANT. That's one of the main Missile Tech shore duty stations, the others are the Trident Training Facilities and MT A school.
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Oh, I was wrong then. Thanks for the correction.

Anyway the good news is that DOE's new pit production plant at LANL has been fully funded, which gives something like 80 plutonium pits/year, so eventually the W76s can be retired and replaced with a fresh set and new IM explosives. Eventually, of course.
 
Kat Tsun said:
Oh, I was wrong then. Thanks for the correction.

Anyway the good news is that DOE's new pit production plant at LANL has been fully funded, which gives something like 80 plutonium pits/year, so eventually the W76s can be retired and replaced with a fresh set and new IM explosives. Eventually, of course.
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Should be what the W93 is for hopefully all goes well with design engineering and manufacturing. It’s been roughly 35 years since an “all new” warhead came off the assembly line.
 
Kat Tsun said:
Anyway the good news is that DOE's new pit production plant at LANL has been fully funded, which gives something like 80 plutonium pits/year, so eventually the W76s can be retired and replaced with a fresh set and new IM explosives. Eventually, of course.
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Nothing wrong with recycling pits, the fragile component is the tritium. And it's perfectly possible to make an Insensitive implosion lens that should fit in the same volume as the W76 lens. CL20 was one of the candidates for that IM lens, but it's a bit too sensitive.
 
Scott Kenny said:
Nothing wrong with recycling pits
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Correct but eventually those pits will need to be melted down and chemically purified to remove decay-products* altering the metallurgical and nuclear composition of the pit before being remanufactured into a new pit.

*Plutonium-238 has a half-life of 87.8 years decaying into U-234 while Pu-241 has a half-life of 14.329 years decaying into Am-241.
 
NMaude said:
Correct but eventually those pits will need to be melted down and chemically purified to remove decay-products* altering the metallurgical and nuclear composition of the pit before being remanufactured into a new pit.

*Plutonium-238 has a half-life of 87.8 years decaying into U-234 while Pu-241 has a half-life of 14.329 years decaying into Am-241.
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I suspect that any given pit would last a good 45 years before remanufacturing was necessary. 3 half-lives of Pu241.
 
Scott Kenny said:
Nothing wrong with recycling pits, the fragile component is the tritium. And it's perfectly possible to make an Insensitive implosion lens that should fit in the same volume as the W76 lens. CL20 was one of the candidates for that IM lens, but it's a bit too sensitive.
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CL20 is most definitely not what you want, and not really needed for this application, unless you wanted to do something like a 5" nuke shell which isn't happening.
 
Scott Kenny said:
I suspect that any given pit would last a good 45 years before remanufacturing was necessary. 3 half-lives of Pu241.
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Having that much Am-241 no doubt alters the metallurgical properties of the core and hence the way it implodes.
 
Not liking this at all. What we did to nuclear modernization and the nuclear enterprise since 1991 is tragic. We should actuality be replacing Peacekeepers and Midgetman missile in 2023 - with a decade+ operational lifetimes left - not MMIIIs giving us plenty of time to work through issues with a new system.
www.defensenews.com

US Air Force’s Sentinel missile ‘struggling,’ faces rising costs

It has been decades since the Air Force last developed a nuclear missile, the secretary says, and surprise issues are cropping up.
www.defensenews.com www.defensenews.com
 
bobbymike said:
Not liking this at all. What we did to nuclear modernization and the nuclear enterprise since 1991 is tragic. We should actuality be replacing Peacekeepers and Midgetman missile in 2023 - with a decade+ operational lifetimes left - not MMIIIs giving us plenty of time to work through issues with a new system.
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Yeah. Atleast one of them should be still there but thats not how it is now.
 
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If the Cold War had lasted a few years longer the Midgetman would definitely have gone into production but the question in that scenario is how many would've been built.
 
uk 75 said:
details? oink
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The US isn’t embarking on an another strategic nuclear platform. Currently there is Sentinel, Columbia, and LRSO. That is already breaking the bank. Also the US is never investing in anything road mobile because that deployment method is no longer secure in an increasingly prolific ISR environment, and the US already has most of its weapons in a superior deployment scheme.
 
Josh_TN said:
The US isn’t embarking on an another strategic nuclear platform. Currently there is Sentinel, Columbia, and LRSO. That is already breaking the bank. Also the US is never investing in anything road mobile because that deployment method is no longer secure in an increasingly prolific ISR environment, and the US already has most of its weapons in a superior deployment scheme.
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The only way to be relatively secure with road mobile is dirt roads out in the boonies of the western states.
 
uk 75 said:
Understand. Could Tridents be put into Minuteman silos as a Plan B
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Maybe?

Tridents are designed for cold launch, which requires a tighter fit to the tube than hot launch. IIRC the Trident tube inside diameter is 85" when the bird is 83", and there are some green pingpong balls between bird and tube.
 
Yes but getting that back then already expensive ICBM Back again will be expensive but im for it. Give it GPS and Astro Navigation and you get pgm ICBM xD
 

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