Draka vs TBO America

[The Yosemite Bear]

besides didn't the US really keep bombers up 24/7 during parts of the cold war. And with Draka lack of EW sophistication, well a bomber that the enemy cant track, in the air is worth how many missiles and bombers dicking around heading "Thataway"

[Stuart]

Ahh, I see his logic. But frankly, what stops the missile designers to use orbital strikes? The "Voevoda" as the main missle of the force, has this capability.

A thing called virtual tradition. By the way, I assume by Orbital strikes you mean Fractional Orbital Bombardment Systems (FOBS). That reduces the number of warheads per missile from ten to one. So effectivley the defense "shot down" nine of the ten warhead without firing a shot. And it greatly extends the time taken for the missile to get here, giving us yet more time to react. Overall, FOBS has been discarded, the game just wasn't worth it.

Intercepting MIRVs in orbit? You should have lots of nuclear interceptor missiles which are faster, more agile and capable of striking at orbital targets.

Had'em back in '67.

Only the "treaty" stops from using space as a platform for MIRV discharge, and it seems that treaties are nonexistent in our scenario.

ASAT is even easier than ABM - you may have read, the Chinese just whacked a satellite and the Indians have just done an ABM test. I can't say this too strongly, there's nothing complex about all this, technically all the problems were solved decades ago. What has been lacking is the political will and some crazy strategic thinking (on our part) and lack of hard cash (on yours). So, if things are getting gruesome, the satellites are gone. In fact, in a real war, they're gone anyway.

Perhaps this'll help envisage how easy it all is. To do ASAT, we don't even need a guidance system.

[Stuart]

I'm not sure what your problem with it is, but basically the idea behind the Draka is to explore paths not taken.

My problem is that it all doesn't work.

BTW I also work in IT and let me just say one thing about hardwiring: patches! That is all... I find his computer stuff a tad hard to believe, but I've been yelled at for suggesting it's out of whack so I won't.

Now try hardwiring a patch into the computer while you;re fighting your way through an air defense system and the missiles are rising, Tic toc tic toc.

Oh Stirling's computer stuff is way out of whack, no argument there, But so is everything else he writes. Remember his invincible Rhinos that weighed twice as much as a B-52?

[The Yosemite Bear]

that's just cruel, fuck you don't even need a real war head, just need the sat to hit an object in it's flight path... the f=m*a will do the job....

[K. A. Pital]

You're forgetting the command system that goes with them.

Still cheaper than the first two. The MBRC and submarines are a total waste of money. "Think systems" - I am. The introduction of the MBRC alone required to re-haul the whole railroad of the country. The US never even finished it's work on mobile ICBM complexes, just because they were so freaking expensive and totally ineffective. The US knew all the locations of the mobile railroad bases, the maximum patrol intensiveness was 2 trains at a given time, IIRC. This is totally unacceptable, not to say that the enemy will deal with a mobile unit just the same way as with a silo missle.

The Russian Navy is building three new SLBMs and is investing a lot of monet in rebuilding the Tu-160 fleet.

The Russian Navy is throwing money into the drain. SLBMs have such a low patrol intensiveness that it's ridiculous to count on them as either a measure of deterrent or a tool of retaliation - not to mention the fact that they would have to be operating totally alone at enemy shores, where their life-hours would be very short. It would be a "hit-or-miss" game, but I doubt the patrolling sub would be victorious in that.

It was very easy to provide a missile defense that would have aborted your attack. We could have done it any time from about '62 onwards.

We developed ABM systems as well; the point of making them was lost after the treaty.

It flies higher and faster (and is more agile than a SR-71 and your fighters and missiles failed dismally against those.

America can fry Russia with it's strategic nuclear forces, while our triade is weak and sucks. Big deal. This isn't news to most of the people here.

[Stuart]

besides didn't the US really keep bombers up 24/7 during parts of the cold war. And with Draka lack of EW sophistication, well a bomber that the enemy cant track, in the air is worth how many missiles and bombers dicking around heading "Thataway"

That's correct, standing air patrols. That's why the B-70 was designed to get off the ground so fast. Saved keepinga proportion of the force airborne all the time.

Even nastier, we can fly the B-70s to the fail-safe point, and get them to wait there. 1,000 miles from their targets, they can make that distance in 25 minutes. Much faster than a missile from North Dakota.

[Stuart]

The US never even finished it's work on mobile ICBM complexes, just because they were so freaking expensive and totally ineffective. The US knew all the locations of the mobile railroad bases, the maximum patrol intensiveness was 2 trains at a given time, IIRC. This is totally unacceptable, not to say that the enemy will deal with a mobile unit just the same way as with a silo missle.

Not so. I worked on the rail mobile missile program. I know exactly why we dropped the idea (in fact, we thought only an idiot would even consider it and the plans were never serious). What we were hoping was that a certain other country would copy the idea. They did.

The Russian Navy is throwing money into the drain. SLBMs have such a low patrol intensiveness that it's ridiculous to count on them as either a measure of deterrent or a tool of retaliation - not to mention the fact that they would have to be operating totally alone at enemy shores, where their life-hours would be very short. It would be a "hit-or-miss" game, but I doubt the patrolling sub would be victorious in that.

Actually, they don't. They operate from a bastion in the Barents Sea. They're low patrol duration is your navy's fault. we get much better untilization out of ours.

However, I'd point out your professionals (who are good) have made a value judgement. Their ranking is SLBMs, Bombers, ICBMs. Ours is the same. So we have us professionals all agreeing. Nice world isn't, (but then we all got along quite well even during the Cold War.)

We developed ABM systems as well; the point of making them was lost after the treaty.

And that proves your people were as dumb as ours. Actually not so, you kept your system around Moscow and detsroyed the British strategic deterrent in the process. In fact the Moscow ABM system has been upgraded recently. Its a pretty good system for a point defense. Definately worth keeping.

America can fry Russia with it's strategic nuclear forces, while our triade is weak and sucks. Big deal. This isn't news to most of the people here.

Not relevent. The point is the B-70 is still largely uninterceptable (even your S-400 - if the wretched thing ever works - is hard put to do the job. In contrast, shooting down ICBMs though is easy and a well-known art. That's the comparison that's important

[Norseman]

Once more I've never seen a serious critique of the Power System and Transportation section (Google Cache just in case) or any of the other stuff I mention.

That said apparently the Drakan space stations fly in LEO geosynchronus orbit (what?) and it's considered very bad form for one of them to fly over enemy territory. That suggests a hell of a lot of lifting power, and a lot of fuel... but then again they use modified Orions and plutonium pellets etc...

But fortunately here's the Google Cache of A very helpful page that accurately details the Drakan gear and behaviour in this period! For any discussion you really need to read this page, it's free and... well... all the information you need is there.

[The Yosemite Bear]

Ok in reguards to their power and transmission tech.

well it's all backwards, and the beginning can be observed in the statement of where it got started. Mining technology.

you see deep mining and petrolium have a problem to this day with flamable substences, Now basic fire science teaches that all fire needs is o2, heat and fuel. Draka closed recycling systems, and pumping air motors into deep drilling, is just asking for those methane deposits to well catastropically conflagerate. Even the Draka won't like the idea of valuable coal burning underground for months, whilst their steam engines were ruined by the shockwaves from the explosions, etc.

secondarily the basic flaw of coal based fuel economy. coal doesn't burn clean, not much bang for the buck, such waste gas clogs up the system, and leads to corrosion. while water doesn't corrode copper as easialy as cast iron, copper can't handle the same level of pressue, neither can draka aluminum. Guess what there's something called conservation of energy.

So the basic physics principals of draka power systems are flawed. incapable of working in the real world. And don't get me started on how much of a bitch titanium is to work with.

[The Yosemite Bear]

also from an auto owner/home plumber, the basic understanding of pipe build up, heavy minerals, metal fatigue, and the principals that create an internal combustion engine, work on macro scale in real life. EG the fucking design of early draka mining operations, and pnumonic power systems is a fucking Deathtrap, especially since Stirling ignores material weakness a lot.

the leo stations could be easily done with the tether system, but they would still fall easilly to the simple physics of the earth's rotation speed, and an object of mass. Yes they like using orion engines for their space propulsion, well the problem is, that you need material that can with stand the heat tranfer on the pusher plate, the whole of basic conservation of energy dictates that the rest of the vessel aside from the pusher plate must be made of less dense material. (conservation of energy)

note the normal WWII fighter listed was more heavily armoured then an A10, could out climb/outspeed a p51, could out turn a zero, and do all this with a range that was physically impossible. unlike in stirling's world fuel does not instantly materialize where it's needed, and most of it is lost in getting off the ground. Also you can't get more force then the fuel would produce.

[The Yosemite Bear]

now other fun ness is in Drakon, where they funnel an internally contained deuterium raction's waste heat like a harrier jump jet. Ok, It seems that a total inability to understand newtonian physics, the effects of changes in accleration/inertia on living bodies, and basic common sense, just hit a brick wall. (yes, I'm refering to Gwens super sonic sub/yatch, that expends a nuclear expropulsion in any direction except 120* fore where the massive water scoup is) without even beginning to realize what the fuck that would do to the vessel in question. (much less the area of ocean surrounding it) (hint watch myth busters on guns fired underwater for an idea as to what would happen)

btw the myth busters episode in question showed that a .22 long will penetrate 3' of water before loosing it's energy

a .50 cal will burst the barrel of the gun

[The Yosemite Bear]

or basically The Draka have every single Nicolai Tessla, Tom Edison etc. born/emigrate to their country. Only one problem, Tessla's instinctual understanding of electricity and radio was dead wrong most of the time. No timed series of explosions can not exceed the binding gravitational forces that keeps the planet intact, an air motor can no rip a structure apart on the atomic level, and you can't fly an airplane by canceling the effect of gravity through broadcast power/electromagnetic manipulation.

[MKSheppard]

or basically The Draka have every single Nicolai Tessla, Tom Edison etc. born/emigrate to their country.

I know, that always struck me as weird. They'd attract the crackpots, like Tesla tho; because of the way their system is set up; while teh successful designers would stay in Europe or the US.

[MKSheppard]

Another major issue I have is this:

NO matter how much security the AFD puts around something, the draka always have uberspies, who infiltrate, and then steal it, ESPECIALLY with technology.

The Draka of course then reverse engineer the technology in a short time, and this doesn't retard their computer/aerospace/etc industry.

Case in point, the Soviet Union; this is verbatim from a letter a Late Friend of mine wrote:

Until the late 1960s the USSR had a thriving computer industry with innovative hardware designers, programmers, and users. Then the KGB stole essentially everything there was to know about the IBM 360 series of mainframes. The leadership assumed that IBM technology was necessarily superior to the homegrown kind and imposed it wholesale, killing off just about all indigenous innovation. This step more than any other assured the entire Communist bloc permanent cybernetic inferiority right through the Fall. They never really progressed beyond the IBM 360 and 370 series machines, and essentially missed the personal computer revolution until the West wisely began letting them import machines.

[The Yosemite Bear]

mind you Tessla did some amazing things, trying to create a better telegraph/telephone system, he built the first radio, observed radar in action and killed one of his lab assistants by X-Raying the guy to death. But all in all, he was pretty crazy, and most of his many ideas were just hairbrained concepts.

[Imperial Overlord]

mind you having read Drake's comments (strangely someoen whose a "Friend" of Stirling and works with him in some co-laberations) Stirling just doesn't get technology, or biology, or anything and bascily needs a minder. The fact that his work in shared universes is miles better then in his solo work, not with standing. His premise was ok, when I was an ignorant high school student, but by the time I learned to code in AS400, C++, etc. his understanding cf computers was so basically stupid and blind, that his computers really shouldn't work AT ALL

Stirling and Drake aren't friends. Whatever their relationship was in their earlier collaborations, it ended with the falling out they had over The Chosen and after that Stirling had a different publisher.

A minor point on the space battles part, but jamming isn't going to stop IR targeting in space or the Draka dropping rocks from the Belt. Nor will it stop them from detonating Fenris and making Earth go all Doctor Strangelove. I don't have any arguments regarding the jamming. I don't think anyone disagrees that Draka verse tech, especially computer and biological tech, is silly. The question of how to treat dumb tech that works perfectly in universe is something I'm going to start another thread about.

[K. A. Pital]

Not so. I worked on the rail mobile missile program. I know exactly why we dropped the idea (in fact, we thought only an idiot would even consider it and the plans were never serious)..

You dropped the idea because it was ridiculous. But we took up the nonexistent "challenge" and made mobile missile complexes. So, with what do you disagree? Your own country has not proceeded with producing mobile complexes because they're ineffective. Ours, however, did.

They operate from a bastion in the Barents Sea.

The SLBM base location is known to the US forces.

They're low patrol duration is your navy's fault. we get much better untilization out of ours.

Even with your highest intensity, it's still low. And it's not only duration of patrols, also the number of boats simultaneously out.

However, I'd point out your professionals (who are good) have made a value judgement.

Any hints as to who those professionals might be? (I hope it's not a public statement by some Min-Ob white collar) Because I have enough friends from the RVSN and also know a few people who worked on missile construction. Though we might be going into classified stuff here.

Actually not so, you kept your system around Moscow and detsroyed the British strategic deterrent in the process. In fact the Moscow ABM system has been upgraded recently. Its a pretty good system for a point defense.

The Moscow ABM is all good and well, and it's done with treaty compliance, countries may have 1 ABM system up and running. The fact that you abandoned yours half-way doesn't mean we are smarter or whatnot, I don't see a big point in having 1 point-defense ABM system, in a global nuclear exchange it would be useless and overwhelmed anyway.

The point is the B-70 is still largely uninterceptable (even your S-400 - if the wretched thing ever works - is hard put to do the job.

If the B-70 is so good, I wonder why the thing was ditched. Care to shed some light? And if the bombers are so invulnerable and cheap, clearly the USSR would've went for them because we were kind of short on cash during the early deterrent and needed all possible methods of bombing you.
And I wonder why most of the books I read on strategic aviation state that the development of existing and potential long-range anti-air missile defense complexes (of which S-300 and S-400 are a prime example) was a major factor in abandoning the B-70 program?
Not to be without evidence, a quote from an S-400 operator (the guy was operating the distance meter):

Served on the ZRV test fields (Priozersk). With my participation, in 1990 we run tests of the C-400 complex. The complex hit winged missiles in the stratosphere (70 km) on a range of 450 km with 1 countermissile per each target. I'm fairly certain it can kill the SR-71.

Several people on Airbase and VIF who operated S-200/S-300 are pretty certain that the system could've destroyed the S-71 with a sufficient number of launches. I can put out the exact quotes if you wish.

[Beowulf]

The Ohio class is at sea for approximately 69% of the time, neglecting the overhaul periods (the first of which the now SSGNs just finished). After factoring in the overhauls, they've been at sea approximately 59% of the time. The USN doesn't have a low patrol intensity.

The B-70 was ditched because Strange MacNamara decided that missiles were cheaper (which they are, per unit, but that neglects the rest of the system).

[K. A. Pital]

The Ohio class is at sea for approximately 69% of the time

I know the KON of American subs (and our own, too). The US keeps 4 boats on patrol and has 10 battle-ready boats at any given moment (IIRC).

[Norseman]

If the B-70 is so good, I wonder why the thing was ditched. Care to shed some light? And if the bombers are so invulnerable and cheap, clearly the USSR would've went for them because we were kind of short on cash during the early deterrent and needed all possible methods of bombing you.

I would like to add that I wonder why no one else has built or seriously considered to build such a thing after the B-70 got cancelled. I mean the British cancelled the Avro 730 and went with missiles instead, and the Russians ditched their T-4s, the Tu-160s were reduced to Mach 2.

The only airplanes to be manufactured to reach those speeds seem to have been the SR-71 and the MiG-25 and -31.

With those three exceptions the Chinese, the EU, the Soviets, and even the USA, seems to have tucked triple sonic fighters and bombers away and never bothered to revive the concept.

So basically every single airforce and nation in the entire world took the wrong path forty years ago, and never again tried to get back on the right one... even when things like the B-1 and B-2 were being developed; even when development budgets were being created for new bombers, despite the apparently obvious advantages to triple sonic bombers no one decided to develop one.

Did technology retard after the B-70 was retired? I mean I would assume that engines, materials and knowledge of aerodynamics has improved a lot since the 1960s.

Now you could say that this is all military fashion, that everyone is emulating the USAF without giving serious consideration to what their real needs are. The only problem is that this reminds me of Sir William White and his statements about the "Cult of the Monster Battleship" where he suggested that dreadnaughts were a dreadful waste of money and taking the navy down the wrong path; and that the only reason other navies built Dreadnaughts was because of the prestige of the Royal Navy.

[Norseman]

mind you having read Drake's comments (strangely someoen whose a "Friend" of Stirling and works with him in some co-laberations) Stirling just doesn't get technology, or biology, or anything and bascily needs a minder. The fact that his work in shared universes is miles better then in his solo work, not with standing. His premise was ok, when I was an ignorant high school student, but by the time I learned to code in AS400, C++, etc. his understanding cf computers was so basically stupid and blind, that his computers really shouldn't work AT ALL

Stirling and Drake aren't friends. Whatever their relationship was in their earlier collaborations, it ended with the falling out they had over The Chosen and after that Stirling had a different publisher.

Oh? Whatever happened? I've read "The Chosen" and it seems like just another Jolly Rousing Adventure Novel, except of course that the Draka equivalent loses in the end.

A minor point on the space battles part, but jamming isn't going to stop IR targeting in space or the Draka dropping rocks from the Belt.

Indeed it won't, and even if you can knock out geo synchronius battlestations and LEO battlestations that won't get rid of the other stuff. In short TBO America will have to co-operate somewhat with the rest of the world or have the Draka start dropping shit on them.

Nor will it stop them from detonating Fenris and making Earth go all Doctor Strangelove.

If it works that is.

I don't have any arguments regarding the jamming. I don't think anyone disagrees that Draka verse tech, especially computer and biological tech, is silly. The question of how to treat dumb tech that works perfectly in universe is something I'm going to start another thread about.

By assuming that it works perfectly because everyone else uses the same paradigm?

[Imperial Overlord]

Oh? Whatever happened? I've read "The Chosen" and it seems like just another Jolly Rousing Adventure Novel, except of course that the Draka equivalent loses in the end.

This is second hand, so take with a grain of salt. The story, as I've heard it, is that The Chosen was to be another standard Stirling/Drake project, which means that Drake writes a 20,000 word core to the book and then Stirling fleshes it out. The evil Draka equivalent are due to get smashed at the end. Stirling instead writes it so the Chosen are merely set back, not wiped out. Drake gets pissed as this is not what they've agreed on and rewrites the end of the book. This is pretty much the last straw in Stirling's relationship with Baen Books, which had already had some rough patches. No more cowriting with Drake and Stirling goes off to another publisher.

It does seem to fit the facts and the slightly off kilter ending of The Chosen which felt a little rushed and tacked on (narratively speaking).

[K. A. Pital]

The only airplanes to be manufactured to reach those speeds seem to have been the SR-71 and the MiG-25 and -31.

Actually, if America had not bothered with those ridiculously expensive planes of theirs, we wouldn't even need to build anything like the Mig-25 or Mig-31 - which are little more than manned rockets which are created to hunt supersonic aerial targets. And yeah, the supersonic bomber concept was ditched by all countries, not just by America. If it were indeed a cheap and effective weapon, I would assume the less rich Warsaw Pact would've stood by the decision to make them.
If supersonic bombers were only "ditched" because of McNamara's "wrong" decision, why does FAS say that those bombers were offset because of the emergence of new SAMs? Something isn't right here.

[Stuart]

A minor point on the space battles part, but jamming isn't going to stop IR targeting in space or the Draka dropping rocks from the Belt.

As a matter of fact, it will. IR jamming is also a very well known technique; there are several such systems listed in the US AN-systems inventory and most other countries have the same kit. It's not just a matter of using flares or towed decoys, there are active IR jamming techniques as well. The key point is that all of these techniques require very fast, very agile computers. For example, modern missile IR homing heads don't just pick out infra-red sources, they analyse the movement of that IR source and determine if it is moving like the anticipated target. For example, an IR source doing a ballistic arc downwards will be disregarded by the sensor because that isn't how the target behaves. Also, the sensor looks at the source and asks if it really is the target? What is it's heat distribution? What does the fingerprint of heat patterns actually look like? Does it look like something in the threat library? Think on that, a sensor package that can not only pick out the correct IR source but can calculate how it is behaving and make a value judgement on that behavior, packaged inside a sensor that fits within a Sidewinder missile.

So IR jamming is mortally affected by those dumb computers. In contrast, the SAC bombers in TBO have state-of-the-art EW equipment and can do both ECM and ECCM in both radio- and IR frequency. The Drakans just can't compete with that. They're blind.

Nor will it stop them from detonating Fenris and making Earth go all Doctor Strangelove.

If they try there'll be a click, a whirr and nothing will happen. Doomesday devices don't work. There are good reasons for that. They'll have crippled themselves economically and militarily to build something that's totally useless. I think the kindest thing is to assume this so-called Fenris bomb is a bluff that managed to fool the idiots on earth they were supposed to be fighting. As soon as the highly nuclear-familiar TBO U.S. turned up, SAC would look at that threat, burst out laughing aand send a message saying "Yeah, right". A threat has to be credible and this so-called Fenris thing isn't.

I don't have any arguments regarding the jamming. I don't think anyone disagrees that Draka verse tech, especially computer and biological tech, is silly.

But the original question was how the Draka would fare against the TBOverse U.S. at a given time. That makes the EW question critical and we are stuck with what Stirling wrote. With those ridiculous "computers", Drakan EW is so appallingly ineffective that they're blind, deaf and dumb against a fully-sighted opponent with full situational awareness and the ruthlessness to keep pounding until either the Drakans surrender unconditionally or the last Drakan dies huddled in his shelter.

[Stuart]

You dropped the idea because it was ridiculous. But we took up the nonexistent "challenge" and made mobile missile complexes. So, with what do you disagree? Your own country has not proceeded with producing mobile complexes because they're ineffective. Ours, however, did.

The point is a very preliminary analysis showed that rail-mobile systems are not a very viable way to go; they have all the disadvantages of all the other basing systems and none of their advantages. However, there was a calculated guess on our part that if we started playing with the idea, the Soviet Union would assume we'd cracked those problems and start investing there as well, further increasing the strain on the Soviet economy. A lot of black programs were like that, they weren't designed to produce results, they were designed to make the Soviet Union waste money on non-programs and thus go broke. It worked. One of the little problems we had at our end was spending all the money we had allocated. The money was going into the black budget (had to be to make it credible) but there were no serious programs to spend it on. SO we were scrabbling around, trying to find ways of dumping cash.

The SLBM base location is known to the US forces.

Of course it is, I've seen the targeteering pictures. The boats won't be there.

Even with your highest intensity, it's still low. And it's not only duration of patrols, also the number of boats simultaneously out.

No, it isn't low. It's a LOT higher than yours, almost by an order of magnitude. And I'm very well aware of the numerical analysis of numbers and I know exactly how many boats we have and can get to sea at any one time.

Any hints as to who those professionals might be? (I hope it's not a public statement by some Min-Ob white collar) Because I have enough friends from the RVSN and also know a few people who worked on missile construction. Though we might be going into classified stuff here.

The analysts and defense systems planners who do the strategic planning for the U.S. armed forces. I work for them. And we have good social/professional contacts with our equivalents on your side. Always have had, no matetr what the relationships between the two countries, at that level we all got along quite well together.

The Moscow ABM is all good and well, and it's done with treaty compliance, countries may have 1 ABM system up and running. The fact that you abandoned yours half-way doesn't mean we are smarter or whatnot, I don't see a big point in having 1 point-defense ABM system, in a global nuclear exchange it would be useless and overwhelmed anyway.

Again, a fundamental misapprehension. I'll show you why. Back in the 1950s, the British depended upon the V-bombers for its strategic deterrent. They were tasked with hitting 200 targets in the Western USSR. However, by the late 1950s, it was feared that the increasing strength of Soviet air defenses would stop the bombers getting through by the middle-1960s (that turned out to be wrong but its another story). The important point is that the British made a policy decision, they switched away from bombers to missiles, eventually settling on Polaris. Polaris had three warheads which cound NOT be independently-targeted. So each Polaris submarine could target 16 locations. The entire fleet could, therefore, target 64 locations with three warheads per. Of course, not all the boats would be at sea so in reality we could only count on two boats, 32 targets. So, the Soviet air defenses had reduced the scale of the threat from 200 targets at risk to 32 - in other words, they had eliminated 84 percent of the inbound strike without firing a shot. Our old friend virtual attrition again.

By the mid 1970s, the British started to fear that Polaris would be vulnerable to missile defense systems (three cheers, they woke up, pity they were ten years late but that's another story). They couldn't afford Poseidon so they wanted to upgrade Polaris to penetrate said defenses. That was a program called Chevaline. This took the basic Polaris missile, removed one of the three warheads and replaced it with penetration aids (decoys mostly). Then, they made a policy decision to concentrate on Moscow and target all their missiles on that city, hoping to overwhelm the defenses with 32 warheads. In other words, the British target list had just dropped to one. So, the defense was 99.5 percent efficient; it had reduced the number of targets at risk from 200 to one.

In fact, Chevaline was a failure. The decoys and penetration aids didn't work - the target discrimination technology was (and remains) far ahead of decoy technology and sieving out the real targets from the decoys proved to be ridiculously easy. Also, jettisoning the decoys from the missile proved to be really unhealthy, there's a lot of grief there, its not as easy as it sounds and there are some fundamental problems that still haven't been solved. Also, 32 warheads weren't enough to saturate the Moscow defenses. Eventually the problem was solved by going to the Trident D-5 but, again, that's another story.

That's the big point. There aren't an unlimited number of warheads and the more that are fired at some targets means fewer that can be fired at others. Moscow was - and remains and always has been - a strategic decoy. In the language of my world, its a missile sponge. Also, another key point, ABM systems buy time. They allow time for decisions to be made carefully. A single warhead is coming in - is it an attack, an accident or are our sensors playing up. In a non-ABM world, the decison time is the time taken for the missile to reach its target - because that target is going to be destroyed. In an ABM world, a single missile can be shot down and the decision time is much, much longer. That makes for a safer world for all of us.

If the B-70 is so good, I wonder why the thing was ditched. Care to shed some light? And if the bombers are so invulnerable and cheap, clearly the USSR would've went for them because we were kind of short on cash during the early deterrent and needed all possible methods of bombing you.

Three words Robert Strange McNamara. The worst disaster ever to happen to U.S. defense procurement. McNamara was a very stupid man who took the promises of the missile developers as gospel and never did any real analysis of the costs of what they actually proposed. Having made his mind up, he then refused to listen to any other arguments. Worse, having made up his mind in advance, he deliberately distorted every figure he could get his hands on. For example, defense analysis had showed that it required 100 dollars of offensive expenditure to offset every four dollars spent on defense (ABMs). McNamara simplyarbitrarily reversed the figures.

McNamara also represented a change in the way strategic thought was going. Up to his tenure, American strategy was based on winning a war, on destroying our opponent without suffering critical damage ourselves. McNarama changed that to "stability", a balance of forces argument that would cause everybody to be nice. There's a lot of evidence that he cooked the books on B-70 precisely because he knew how deadly effective it was and believed having such a lethally-effective delivery system would disturb "stability". As I said, a very, very stupid man.

And I wonder why most of the books I read on strategic aviation state that the development of existing and potential long-range anti-air missile defense complexes (of which S-300 and S-400 are a prime example) was a major factor in abandoning the B-70 program?

Because that was the official rationale given out at the time and it's stuck. In fact, there are no missiles in widespraed service even today that have a reasonable chance of killing a B-70.

Not to be without evidence, a quote from an S-400 operator (the guy was operating the distance meter): Served on the ZRV test fields (Priozersk). With my participation, in 1990 we run tests of the C-400 complex. The complex hit winged missiles in the stratosphere (70 km) on a range of 450 km with 1 countermissile per each target. I'm fairly certain it can kill the SR-71.

I find that very hard to believe because I happen to know that the S-400 system doesn't work at all. It's official entry-to-service date has been pushed back to 2012. The Chinese are hopping mad about it, they paid for their missiles and they're not getting them. S-400 has severe systemic problems that defy easy solution. I guess your guy might be an S-300 missileer; S-300 does have a marginal engagement capability against a B-70.

Several people on Airbase and VIF who operated S-200/S-300 are pretty certain that the system could've destroyed the S-71 with a sufficient number of launches. I can put out the exact quotes if you wish.

I'm sure they are convinced. I've also been told that Swedish Viggens armed with their version of Sparrow have staged intercepts of SR-71s and that BAC Lightnings armed with Red Top could do the same. We call thsi the "Bullfrog Tendancy". In reality, S-300 does, as I said have a marginal capability against SR-71 targets and an even more marginal capability against the higher-flying, faster and more manoeuverable B-70. However, in a full-scale nuclear assault, marginal capabilities don't cut it. In a conventional bombing raid, losing 5 percent of teh attack force is bad and 10 percent is a disaster. In a nuclear strike, only shooting down 10 percent of the bombers is a disaster - for the defense.