Third World Missiles 2
Towards the end of WW II, on Friday September 8, 1944, people were heading home in the quiet of the evening to the quiet suburb of Chiswick, in West London. Suddenly, at 6:43 pm, with absolutely no warning, a huge explosion rocked Staverley Road. There had been no sound of an aircraft, no by-now-familiar stuttering drone of a V-1 (or "doodlebug") cruise missile, and not even an air raid warning. That's because the explosion was caused by a V-2 rocket, carrying some 730 kilograms of high explosives in its warhead. The Staverley Road explosion, that destroyed six homes, was the first ballistic missile attack in the history of the human race. There had been no warning because the V-2 traveled faster than the speed of sound.
The V-2 was an unreliable rocket, and it was not very accurate. Rocket scientists measure accuracy with CEP (or Circular Error Probable). The CEP is the diameter of a circle within which you expect half of your missiles to land. The CEP for the V-2 was terrible - about 17 kilometres. Today's ballistic missiles have a CEP as low as 10-50 metres. The V-2's low CEP, and high unreliability, meant that out of the 1,359 V-2 rockets fired, only 518 actually hit London. But even though the V-2 rockets caused fewer casualties and created less damage than the V-1, they had an incredibly significant effect on England in terms of psychological, and military strategic effects.
One major psychological effect on the citizens of England was a massive drop in morale. First, there was there no advance warning because it travelled faster than the speed of sound. Second, the citizens knew that there was no possible defence against the rocket. At any moment of the day or night, you could be looking at a block of flats in your street, and it could just suddenly vanish, and only after you had been hit by the noise of the explosion, and the flying debris, would you hear the noise of the incoming rocket.
The huge drop in morale meant that there was now a sudden need to destroy the V-2 rocket launch sites that the Nazis had set up in occupied Holland.
And so the Allies had to launch Operation Market Garden - the airborne landings on Arnhem. Operation Market Garden was a disaster. Not only was the operation a failure, the Allies suffered more casualties than they did in the invasion of the European mainland on D-Day. And so now the Allies had to divert massive air power away from the re-taking of Europe to Operation Crossbow, to try to destroy the V-2 rocket launch sites. But the V-2 rocket launchers were both camouflaged and mobile, so the air strikes were not very effective. And there was a huge cost - nearly 450 aircraft and about 2,900 air crew.
So the lesson from the V-2 rocket attack was that a relatively small number of attacks by missiles could have major military, strategic and psychological effects on the country being attacked - even if the missiles were primitive, unreliable and inaccurate.
That's one reason some countries love the idea of having their own ballistic missiles. Sure, you could probably deliver the warheads with a truck, or a ship - but you wouldn't get the same strategic and psychological effects.
There are other reasons some countries love ballistic missiles so much. Because they're very fast and so have a much shorter flight time, they're much more likely to actually get through to their intended target. Ballistic missiles are virtually impossible to stop once you've launched them. They're cheaper to develop than aircraft and don't need large fixed air fields, which are obvious targets. Missiles are a very attractive and relatively cheap way of "leveling the playing field" against a much more wealthy, more technologically advanced and better-equipped military opponent.
Even in the year 2003, there are still no reliable anti-missile defences - which is why some 36 countries around the world have their own ballistic missiles, some 14 countries make and export them, and another 6 countries are developing, or have the capability to develop, ballistic missiles.
The reason that people talk about rocket science as being very hard, is because it really is fiendishly and diabolically difficult to design and build a missile. A rocket burns up a huge amount of difficult-to-handle fuel in a very short period of time, so you've got to be able to manage that colossal amount of energy. And usually, rocket engines will burn only for a few hundred seconds. For the rest of the flight, the ballistic missile goes where you pointed it, so you've got to make very sure that you've got it set on exactly the right path.
To actually make your own missile from scratch, you need people with expertise in every field from chemistry to aeronautics, from technical drawing to computer-aided design, from machine tool operation up to optical engineering, and even advanced welding.
Countries that want to have their own missiles usually use some mixture of three overlapping methods - they either buy them from a foreign country, they either modify some foreign design or they make it themselves with a lot of help from foreigners, and I'll talk more about that, next time...
Published 01 April 2003
© 2024 Karl S. Kruszelnicki Pty Ltd
