I remember that this was one of the factors that weirded up the whole cold war. ICBMs are hard to aim, though in the US we were able to find a workable solution. (A Polaris could drop a retarded-descent pizza into my driveway and then conveniently dispose of itself in the nearby unused lot.)
Soviet missiles were not so accurate, so they just build bunches of them hoping to hit their targets through sheer redundancy. (This became dinner talk at Cal-Tech in the eighties since SDI was expected to be able to intercept the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal, including bunches of decoys) So their redundancy was used by General Electric to promote the missile gap, as justification why we needed to buy more GE nukes to close the difference.
This is why, I’m pretty sure, we don’t really need to be too afraid of DPRK going madman with their handful of nukes. So far we’ve seen the Kims lob ICBMs into the pacific, but they haven’t shown they could hit a given continent, let alone someplace important, and the US knows from its own experience that ICBM math is hard.
There was a YouTube video with, I think action lab, where they tested this weapon on a smaller scale with sand castles.
The experiment failed overall because of the difficulty of aiming the payload and anticipating the correalis effect
Veritasium I think.
Yep that’s the channel. Thank you!
Video for those interested.
I remember that this was one of the factors that weirded up the whole cold war. ICBMs are hard to aim, though in the US we were able to find a workable solution. (A Polaris could drop a retarded-descent pizza into my driveway and then conveniently dispose of itself in the nearby unused lot.)
Soviet missiles were not so accurate, so they just build bunches of them hoping to hit their targets through sheer redundancy. (This became dinner talk at Cal-Tech in the eighties since SDI was expected to be able to intercept the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal, including bunches of decoys) So their redundancy was used by General Electric to promote the missile gap, as justification why we needed to buy more GE nukes to close the difference.
This is why, I’m pretty sure, we don’t really need to be too afraid of DPRK going madman with their handful of nukes. So far we’ve seen the Kims lob ICBMs into the pacific, but they haven’t shown they could hit a given continent, let alone someplace important, and the US knows from its own experience that ICBM math is hard.