8.1 A Brief History of Weapons
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8.1.4 Atomic (Nuclear) and Other Types of Weapons
The main purpose of including this chapter in our book, according to the idea of the
authors, was to communicate the fact that due to physical and technical limitations,
any classic weapon, even the most modern one, does not guarantee victory to any of
the opposing parties to the reader in a technically solid way, based on the well-known
information systematized by the authors.
Taking into account the fairly wide expected audience, the authors wanted to sum
up the results of this chapter not in technical terms, but in literary language, which
is understandable not just to technical specialists and military officers.
And the best option we could come up with was to refer to the material published
by the popularizer of science, talented writer, philosopher, and authoritative futurologist Stanislaw Lem in his work “Weapon Systems of the Twenty First Century or
The Upside-Down Evolution”.
Below we present the main quotes and fragments of text from this work, leaving
the reader to judge how the results of analysis of weapon systems of the twenty-first
century performed by philosopher and writer Lem correlate to the above technical
materials of this analytical chapter.
According to Lem, soon after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American nuclear researchers founded the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; on its cover
they put the picture of a clock with the minute hand at ten to midnight. Six years
later, after the first successful tests of the hydrogen bomb, they moved the hand five
minutes closer, and when the Soviet Union acquired thermonuclear weapons the
hand was moved three minutes closer. The next move would mean the end of civilization. The Bulletin’s doctrine was: ONE WORLD OR NONE. The world would either
unite and be saved, or would perish. With the nuclear build-up on both sides of the
ocean and the placing of ever larger payloads of plutonium and tritium in ever more
accurate ballistic missiles, none of the scientists who were the “fathers of the bomb”
believed that peace—troubled as it was by local, conventional wars—would last to
the end of the century. Atomic weapons had amended Clausewitz’s famous definition
(“War is … a continuation of political activity by other means”), because now the
threat of attack could substitute for the attack itself. Thus came about the doctrine of
symmetrical deterrence known later as the “balance of terror.” Different American
administrations advocated it with different initials. There was, for example, mutual
assured destruction (MAD), based on the “second-strike” principle (the ability of the
country attacked to retaliate in force). The vocabulary of destruction was enriched
in the next decades. There was “Total Strategic Exchange,” meaning all-out nuclear
war; multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV), a missile firing a
number of warheads simultaneously, each aimed at a different target; Penetration
Aids (PENAID), dummy missiles to fool the opponent’s radar; and Maneuvrable
Reentry (MARY), a missile capable of evading antimissiles and of hitting the target
within fifty feet of the programmed “ground zero”, and so on.
The key notions included the time of detection of a ballistic attack, which in
turn depended on the possibility to recognize such attack. Although the danger
749
8.1.4 Atomic (Nuclear) and Other Types of Weapons
The main purpose of including this chapter in our book, according to the idea of the
authors, was to communicate the fact that due to physical and technical limitations,
any classic weapon, even the most modern one, does not guarantee victory to any of
the opposing parties to the reader in a technically solid way, based on the well-known
information systematized by the authors.
Taking into account the fairly wide expected audience, the authors wanted to sum
up the results of this chapter not in technical terms, but in literary language, which
is understandable not just to technical specialists and military officers.
And the best option we could come up with was to refer to the material published
by the popularizer of science, talented writer, philosopher, and authoritative futurologist Stanislaw Lem in his work “Weapon Systems of the Twenty First Century or
The Upside-Down Evolution”.
Below we present the main quotes and fragments of text from this work, leaving
the reader to judge how the results of analysis of weapon systems of the twenty-first
century performed by philosopher and writer Lem correlate to the above technical
materials of this analytical chapter.
According to Lem, soon after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American nuclear researchers founded the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; on its cover
they put the picture of a clock with the minute hand at ten to midnight. Six years
later, after the first successful tests of the hydrogen bomb, they moved the hand five
minutes closer, and when the Soviet Union acquired thermonuclear weapons the
hand was moved three minutes closer. The next move would mean the end of civilization. The Bulletin’s doctrine was: ONE WORLD OR NONE. The world would either
unite and be saved, or would perish. With the nuclear build-up on both sides of the
ocean and the placing of ever larger payloads of plutonium and tritium in ever more
accurate ballistic missiles, none of the scientists who were the “fathers of the bomb”
believed that peace—troubled as it was by local, conventional wars—would last to
the end of the century. Atomic weapons had amended Clausewitz’s famous definition
(“War is … a continuation of political activity by other means”), because now the
threat of attack could substitute for the attack itself. Thus came about the doctrine of
symmetrical deterrence known later as the “balance of terror.” Different American
administrations advocated it with different initials. There was, for example, mutual
assured destruction (MAD), based on the “second-strike” principle (the ability of the
country attacked to retaliate in force). The vocabulary of destruction was enriched
in the next decades. There was “Total Strategic Exchange,” meaning all-out nuclear
war; multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV), a missile firing a
number of warheads simultaneously, each aimed at a different target; Penetration
Aids (PENAID), dummy missiles to fool the opponent’s radar; and Maneuvrable
Reentry (MARY), a missile capable of evading antimissiles and of hitting the target
within fifty feet of the programmed “ground zero”, and so on.
The key notions included the time of detection of a ballistic attack, which in
turn depended on the possibility to recognize such attack. Although the danger