However, they are not adequate to provide the requisite confidence in our ICBM arsenal.
You aren't qualified to make this judgment.
I thought I mentioned that I liked the article you provided.
Your approval of it is irrelevant. We are asking you to reconcile your claims with how nuclear missions should be tested with the available facts regarding how they actually
are tested.
The article correctly notes that we use instrument packages in the place of warheads. I have given you a detailed explanation for why we do this. Without acknowledging that, you are now suddenly claiming that the warheads themselves send telemetry. In other words, you realize what a colossal mistake you've made, but you don't want to concede that instrument packages are far superior to the warheads themselves for validating not only launch vehicle performance, but the test environment to which the warheads are subjected.
Now you've invented an improbable hybrid: a nuclear warhead instrumented with telemetry to tell its makers how it will fare. This is no different than when you realized that the Moon as a military base wouldn't do any of the things you needed it to do, and that artificial satellites were superior. You invented a hybrid approach that would use satellites, "and also the Moon," even though the Moon is now irrelevant to the overall plan. Similarly the presence of valuable fissible material is now superfluous, because the telemetry is the real value obtained from the test.
Your arrogance in refusing to concede a point you clearly know you've lost makes it tedious to discuss anything with you. You are the last to see your own errors.
The article also correctly notes that the specific trajectory is not an issue. You seem to think that the only valid test is to fire in the right general direction so as to faithfully duplicate the flight path to the Soviet Union. What you fail to discern, due to your inexperience, is that a weapon that is essentially hardwired to be able to fly only to a certain target or target area is essentially useless.
What we want -- and what we built -- is a vehicle that can fly to any practical destination we designate from time to time, including all of its "dirty"
en route parameters such as terrain and mascons. This calls for a general solution, not one that works only for hitting Moscow. The general solution incorporates any reasonable launch site location, any reasonable azimuth to target, and provides the general algorithm for dealing with known and fixed intervening irregularities.
What validates the guidance strategy is the ability to hit
any target selected at flight time, from any reasonable launch site, not just one target we think is valuable today, from one point in Florida. To say that we can only test meaningfully if we launch in the general direction of Moscow is as layman-esque and naive as you can get. It exhibits a deep failure to understand this class of problem at its most fundamental level. In your world, archers can only hit a target if they're firing north; they can't shoot arrows east without changing everything they do. And again, Bate explains all this in his concise and clear textbook,
which was originally written for USAF rocketeers.
Imagine the simple task of adding two numbers as analogous to solving the general guidance problem. If I may write in pidgen computer language for a moment, what we actually build and test looks like
READ X;
READ Y;
PRINT X + Y;
What you propose is closer to
READ X;
READ Y;
IF X = 1 and Y = 1 THEN PRINT 2
ELSE IF X = 1 and Y = 2 THEN PRINT 3
ELSE IF X = 1 and Y = 3 THEN PRINT 4
...
and so forth. In your world the rocketeers panic because they don't know if they've covered the case where X = 23 and Y = -4, so they have to test that one specifically. In the real world the rocketeers don't panic because they provided a generalized solution that covers most if not all cases.
Your inability to understand how aerospace solutions are actually designed and built stems from your lack of qualifications in the field, and leads you to invent "requirements" for testing these systems that are simply nonsensical.
On the other hand, they do not test all of the important and essential functional components of the missile.
You aren't qualified to make that judgment.
Say it is 1959 Loss leader instead of 2009. How would you know that your warhead was OK and would detonate as it should after passing through the atmosphere at unimaginable speeds?
The speeds may be "unimaginable" to a non-engineer, but I assure you this is simply the kind of problem we engineers are tasked with solving routinely. The velocity of a re-entering vehicle follows a deterministic profile.
You may not understand it, but
we do. Kindly do not burden the experts with projections of your ignorance.
If you really knew the history of Apollo, you'd understand how much of the underlying engineering -- including the test rigs and methods -- were borrowed from ballistic missile technology, including warheads both nuclear and conventional. Apollo built upon knowledge that
already existed in the industry -- knowledge you don't know anything about because you aren't properly trained and experienced.
How would you know that your heat shield protected your warhead?
Because you have (a) determined the aerodynamic heating and loading profile using instrument packages, (b) devised methods of duplicating that heating and loading profile on Earth, and (c) detonated test warheads that have been subjected to the duplicated environment.
You say this is insufficient, but you're just handwaving. I asked you to describe exactly how a ground-based test so devised would fail to achieve suitable confidence. You have spent this entire page ignoring that question because your inexpertise leaves you with nothing to do but gesticulate vaguely.
