It is a nice article Loss Leader , but actually sort of makes my point....
Here's an article I found after no minutes of searching that says you're completely wrong. Note that it's being reported by an Indian aerospace news organization, so the launch was not exactly secret. Nor would there ever be a need for such secrecy because: 1) You want the enemy to know that your equipment can reach and kill them; 2) Such a test doesn't violate any treaties including any nuclear test ban treaties; and 3) the enemy can detect our ICBM and rocket launches anyway.
Minuteman III ICBM test-fired at Vandenberg Air Force Base
It is a nice article Loss Leader, thanks in all sincerity. I got a lot out of it. That said, it is an article that actually sort of makes my point...Note these warheads from your nice article are "unarmed reentry" vehicles. what you need are LIVE nukes cuz' they are gonna' go cold and hot flying through space then back through the atmosphere. So this test is not what we are looking for Loss Leader, though it is a test not without significance, relevance to our discussion here. As helpful as such tests may be to the military analysts assessing missile performance, they additionally provide sort of a cover, "proof for the public" that these things work. What if they NEVER tested a missile. THEN, EVERYONE WOULD GET SUSPICIOUS THAT THEY WERE TESTING THEM SECRETLY.
Of course we know ICBMS work and we know they work because they have been appropriately tested, the missiles with nukes guidance MIRV buses, the whole bit that is. We know they must have carried this junk into space and then let the bombs fall back through the atmosphere for post space cold exposure cold and atmospheric testing. It is just the powers that be cannot tell us that. So they do these tests which you referenced Loss Leader, which again are meaningful from a weapons analyst's perspective, no question, but they are not tests which answer the big questions. Those big questions being posed here and by others like Goldwater before me.
An additional point that I shall cover in later posts has to do with the nature of this particular kind of testing, firing a test bird west over the Pacific from Vandenberg. The US does essentially all of its PUBLIC testing in this way. It is quite inadequate with respect to targeting Moscow which is north. The course a missile would follow to Moscow if "fired in anger" as they say would not be out of Vandenberg.
A big problem according to some(not all) ICBM guidance specialists back in the 60s and even today is that the earth's gravitational field is not uniform and aside from knowing launch site and target site latitude and longitude precisely, the missile's gravitational field "course" is the most important datum with regard to successful targeting. Now thanks to LRRR work and satellite mapping, we know how the earth's gravitational field varies over its surface place to place , point to point, and this can be programed into the rocket's computer and indeed MUST BE if you plan to hit something as small and hard as a Soviet silo.
However, how does one know if your guidance systems will perform well heading from say a launcher in Montana to now Saint Petersburg, then Leningrad? Most certainly not by way of launching an ICBM with dummy warheads from Vandenberg west to the Marshalls.
General Hepfer considered by many to be the father of the MX points out and I quote, "aligning a Minuteman to accomplish its intended mission is like threading a needle from 400 feet away".
Back in the day, the mirrors employed in doing this had to be adjusted manually. Hepfer again, "They had a tube that went down into the silo, and then they had a mirror, and they would have guys go out in sub-zero weather, minus 30 degrees....sighting on the stars and transferring....an azimuth alignment...you are talking arc seconds to align to..I had some of the young fellows work for me and they would say, ' well, we got kind of cold, and your only desire was to get out of the cold, you didn't really care if it was 10 arc seconds or 30 arc seconds ', and that would really negate the accuracy of the system."
Bringing up Hepfer here is worthwhile because it emphasizes all the subtleties of this. Hepfer was a man who was convinced gravitational field/magnetic field considerations were no big deal, that they were problems, if problems at all that were effectively dealt with. But Hepfer was adamantine and would emphasize time and time again that there was this HUMAN ERROR issue, well illustrated in my quote above. AND, the only way one could tell if an ICBM might actually find the spires of the Kremlin when so called upon to do so would be to simulate such a flight as best you could, with a live warhead so you could assess the bomb's viability upon its return to earth. Would it have detonated were it to have had a trigger? Were the gravity issues a big deal when launching north vs west?
When they trot a missile out Vandenberg way, they "cheat" in a sense. They don't align the mirrors by hand today as before Loss Leader, but the point is, back in those days, when they did test missiles with the hand aligned mirrors, they would align the mirrors with great care before a test launch. What guys like Hepfer wanted to do was see how well these missiles would fly after his boys had aligned their mirrors in the real life situation "good enough?" described above. A situation in which his boys according to him had cut corners. The only way one might test for this type of thing would be multiple test launches with mirror accuracy taken into consideration. The manned space flight program of the United States provided such information and a heck of a lot more.
