MOSCOW, March 12 (UPI) -- First of two parts
On Dec. 13, 2001, George W. Bush declared that the United States would unilaterally withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and a year later he ordered the deployment of an anti-missile defense system.
The reaction of top-level officials in Russia was low-key. Some voiced "regret," and Yury Baluyevsky, then first deputy chief of the General Staff of Russia, said that steps by the United States to put a global anti-missile shield in place by 2010-2015, or perhaps even 2020, "posed no threat to Russia's security."
Indeed, the next 10 to 15 years are going to be a political rather than a military headache for Russia. The technology to develop an effective intercept network, especially against individually targetable warheads, does not currently exist. The only unpleasant note for Russia will be its greater exposure to the system's components, which will be located in Poland and the Czech Republic.
The trajectory of an intercontinental ballistic missile can be divided into four phases. The first is the boost phase: from launch to engine burnout and jettisoning at an altitude of 120 miles to 180 miles. In the case of solid-propellant missiles, this phase may last up to three minutes, and with liquid-propellant ones up to five minutes.
The remaining missile bus contains nuclear warheads, a control system, vernier engines and devices to help the missile penetrate enemy defenses, called "penetration aids." The latter include heavy and light decoys identical in temperature, effective scatter area and flight velocity to live re-entry vehicles, and hundreds of thousands of chaff pieces to confuse an enemy radar.
In the second phase, when instructed by the control system, the bus maneuvers into the first pre-calculated position and fires a warhead and some of the penetration aids against target No. 1. Then it moves into the second pre-calculated position, then the third, and so on, depending on the number of nuclear warheads carried. Each maneuver takes 30 to 40 seconds.
The third phase is the ballistic coasting of all elements released - real and dummy - at altitudes of up to 720 miles. This phase lasts 15 to 20 minutes.
The final and shortest phase is less than a minute long, with "clouds" of elements entering the atmosphere at an altitude of 66 miles to 72 miles and at speeds of around 4.2 miles per second. Air drag causes the dummy elements to fall behind heavier combat units.
Nevertheless, identifying a warhead surrounded by a bevy of decoys is incredibly difficult in engineering terms and is unlikely to be achieved in the near future. So no anti-missile system will be effective unless it can destroy missiles in the first, or boost, phase, which affords the best conditions for pinpointing from the infrared glow of their burning engines and targeting interceptors.
The destruction of missiles is made easier by their large size and relatively low mechanical sturdiness. But interception at this phase is possible only if a ground-based interceptor is faster than the attacking missile and not more than 500 kilometers away, in the case of liquid-fueled ballistic missiles, or 300 kilometers in the case of solid-propellant missiles. The Americans themselves concede that missiles launched from Russia's hinterland would be impossible to intercept, which explains their desire to move anti-missiles closer to the Russian border.
Next: Cutitng the boost phase
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(Yury Zaitsev is an expert at the Russian Academy of Engineering Sciences. This article is reprinted by permission of the RIA Novosti news agency. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti. )
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