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I love videos of the Sprint missile.
But something that hit me watching these vids...
It's almost getting kinetic kills. In 1975.
A high-explosive warhead with annular blast fragmentation would suffice.
NOPE!
W-66 nuke warhead! 2kt of airburst hate.
Radar and guidance didn't get worse since 1975.
Every time the Sprint comes back into my consciousnesses I am struck with the conviction that the whole idea of Reagan's "Star Wars" strategic defense initiative was wholly valid and within our technological grasp.
It was treaties, not capability, that killed most of this stuff.
Capabilities which have risen from the ashes of state department interference of late...
A big part of the problem that stopped the Strategic Defense Initiative was that the media absolutely HATED Reagan (not as bad as they do Trump but it was bad) and would have pissed all over anything at all that he did. The fact that he existed was all it took. How DARE those unwashed peasants in Flyover Country pick that rube?
ReplyDeleteHate to tell you, but I watched Sprints do direct hits against incoming warhead simulators back in 1972 and 1973. And Spartan ABMs do the same.
ReplyDeleteI lived at Kwajalein island at the time. The ABMs were launched from Meck Island about halfway up the eastern side of Kwajalein Atoll.
Spartans were neat, they'd launch and go down range and hit or blow up near a golden bb flying towards the center of the atoll.
Sprints were all 'here comes the warhead simulator' and then whooooosh miss and whooooosh hit.
My dad was the AF liaison officer for the Army post at Kwajalein and was responsible for the Navy divers using Perry Cubmarines to recover whatever they could recover.
Got to tour Meck Island, we took a DeHavilland Caribou to and from there. The STOL landing was neat, but the takeoff was neater.
The footage I could find only showed passes well within the blast radius of a conventional warhead. Technically a "miss" but...
DeleteIf we were getting direct hits that bolsters my position that SDI would have worked.
I am totally jealous you got to see them shooting live.
It was totally cool watching them launch. Needless to say, pretty much everyone on the island stopped and watched the launches and the reentry vehicles coming downrange from Vandenberg.
DeleteBefore Kwaj I lived at Vandenberg and got to watch the Minutemen arrive by rail and get launched.
And we (family) got to climb all over the range instrumentation and tracking ships like the Hoyt S. Vandenberg.
So I got to futz around all over the Western Test Range, as a kid, watching stuff launch and blow up and other cool things.
As to watching the Sprint? Don't blink. They were that fast.
I think the US didn't tell people they were getting direct hits in the early 70s because, well, seeeecreeetsssss.
And the Cubmarines? Painted yellow, of course. Dad got to go down in one. He also got to stand on the sarcophagus at Runit Island in Enewetok to take radiation measurements (before it started cracking and leaking...)
To further bake your brain about what we had in the early 70s, the big pyramid shaped phase array radars could put out enough radar energy to zorch both biological and electro/mechanical guidance systems from a reasonable distance. Crazy powerful, thing AEGIS on steroids and not floating. Scary powerful radar, able to go from wide scan to pinpoint with waaaay too much radar energy, like melt-your-face-off-right-before-turning-you-into-a-giant-porkrind energy.
DeleteAnd there's one of the SAFEGUARD Sprint facilities that's for sale up in the cold lands. Includes a semi-hardened office building, an underground bunker that's huge and a missile field with individual silos, all surrounded by military-grade chain link fence. Be interested if it wasn't up in the cold lands and if I had lots and lots of money.
So, yes, we had excellent ABM capability, and were already working on ABM on the Standard series of naval missiles and airborne ASATs launched from fast fighters (even before the ASAT-outfitted F-15s came on line, one of the potential missions of the fighter-version of the SR-71 and some of the high-speed fighters.)
What Reagan was pushing for was to add space-based real-time sensor satellites and space-based weapon platforms to catch the warheads as they came over the top of the world.
All was very achievable using 70's tech, the 80's tech just made it that much more doable, 90's tech would have just made it super. With today's tech, damn, if we were serious, we could do a much better version of Israel's Iron Dome, able to pick off sea-launched cruise missiles and ICBMs besides the ground launched ICBMs.
Ronnie Ray-Gun was awesome. And the media lied about him every chance they could, the bastids.