Spending a Fortune on Anti-Missile Systems: Why Intercepting Missiles Still Feels Like Gambling?
Imagine a peaceful morning disrupted by the fiery launch of intercontinental ballistic missiles from a deep mountain bunker or a submerged submarine. Within minutes, they accelerate to over 20 times the speed of sound, exiting the atmosphere into the quiet edge of space, with your city as their final destination. The only hope lies in the complex and sophisticated anti-missile system. But how effective is it really?
After approaching the target, it will plunge back into the atmosphere at tens of Mach, landing approximately one minute later. In the following seconds, energy equivalent to hundreds of thousands of tons of TNT explodes on buildings, leveling entire urban areas within seconds.
At this point, your only hope is that extremely complex and sophisticated piece of equipment – the anti-missile system.
So, what exactly is an anti-missile system? Can it truly protect you when a missile is incoming? To successfully intercept a missile, three things need to be done: find the missile, lock onto the missile, and destroy the missile.
This is the first anti-missile system in human history, the Soviet “System A”.
Among them, this behemoth, 8 meters high and 150 meters long, resembling a dam, is its “eye” – the Danube-2 long-range radar early warning station.
Its job is to find the missile’s location.
When a missile is detected within a range of 1200 kilometers, the “Danube-2” reacts first, marking the approximate direction with an error of within one kilometer, and calculating the missile’s approximate altitude and initial velocity, then transmitting this preliminary data to the command center.
Next, these three radars with a diameter of 4.65 m take over.
After receiving data from the command center, they lock onto the missile’s position from three angles, pinpointing its location with an error of within five meters.
And based on this data, they calculate the missile’s trajectory and the optimal interception route, sending instructions to the launch pad. Finally, the interceptor missile, guided by the guidance radar, rushes along the predetermined orbit towards the incoming missile.
However, all of this was almost unimaginable in the 1960s – back then, building such a system meant that even the first step, “finding the missile,” was almost impossible.
Although radar technology was already quite mature at the time, it was mainly designed for aircraft.
And locking onto a missile is much more difficult than locking onto an aircraft. During World War II, the German dive bomber Stuka had a radar cross-section of about 10 square meters. The V-2 missile, however, had a reflection area of only 0.1 square meters. This means its radar echo intensity was only one percent of that of an aircraft.
More troublesome, the missile’s speed was also much faster than that of an aircraft, leaving a shorter window for the radar to capture the signal.
Finding a missile required a detection capability dozens of times higher than the most advanced air defense radar at the time. Furthermore, people’s understanding of missiles was quite limited at the time. Even technical personnel specializing in missiles mostly focused on how to launch and how to hit.
Research on trajectory tracking, the most important aspect of anti-missile systems, was almost blank. Even the reflective properties of the missile warhead were not yet understood.
Therefore, even after the Soviet Central Committee decided to approve the project, many academician-level experts doubted the feasibility of the anti-missile system concept.
Even Korolev, the father of the manned rocket that later sent Gagarin into space, publicly stated that, technically speaking, there was no possibility of establishing an effective anti-missile system, either now or in the future.
In addition, missile data was highly classified, and missile experts were very cautious with related materials, even refusing to provide key data to the anti-missile research team at one point.
Faced with this situation, the 30th Experimental Design Bureau, responsible for anti-missile system research, came up with a rather “Russian” solution: since they didn’t know the missile’s trajectory, they would shoot more missiles and see what they looked like on radar.
Under the command of the leader Kisuniko, the 30th Design Bureau built two experimental radar stations, РЭ-1 and РЭ-2, near a missile test range in Kazakhstan.
And over the next year or so, they had the two radars constantly staring at the missiles in the sky, comparing the recorded echo signals with the readings from theodolites, cameras, and telemetry information from the missile’s head rotation sensors, analyzing the missile’s signal structure on radar point by point.
Through repeated observation and comparison, Kisuniko’s team finally mapped out the complete radar characteristics of the missile. In 1957, the РЭ-2 radar successfully tracked an R-2 missile in the air.
Based on this data, engineers further developed the “Danube-2” long-range radar early warning station, capable of detecting missile traces from a thousand kilometers away.
At the same time, Kisuniko’s promoted “triangulation method” also successfully solved the radar’s performance problems.
Triangulation, simply put, is like three people pointing to the same missile in the sky from different directions – the intersection of the three lines of sight in space is the location of the target.
When the target enters the precise measurement range, the three radars will start simultaneously, measuring the precise coordinates of the missile in space. At this point, the anti-missile system research team finally completed all the necessary skill points and figured out the missile’s location.
So, the last question remaining before building a complete anti-missile system is: how to shoot down the missile.
The speed of a missile in its final flight segment is usually between 3 and 4 kilometers per second. The speed of the interceptor missile is also about the same.
At this speed, the window period from the missile entering the radar’s precise detection range to launching the interceptor is only a few minutes. In these few minutes, the anti-missile system not only needs to calculate the future intersection point of the two missiles, but also continuously correct the interceptor missile’s flight trajectory, allowing it to accurately fly to that position.
This is like simultaneously launching two bullets into the sky hundreds of kilometers away, and requiring them to collide in mid-air – the difficulty can be imagined.
Therefore, Soviet engineers did not focus on improving missile accuracy, but chose a more “cost-effective” solution: equipping the interceptor missile with a special fragmentation warhead.
This warhead contains 16,000 explosive spheres, 24 mm in diameter, wrapped in tungsten carbide. When the interceptor missile approaches the target, the warhead detonates in the air, simultaneously spraying tens of thousands of high-speed metal fragments towards the target, forming a huge kill zone of over 70 meters.
It’s like turning a sniper rifle into a shotgun. On March 4, 1961, the Soviet Union conducted the first truly meaningful anti-missile interception test in human history.
In this experiment, a V-1000 interceptor missile equipped with a fragmentation warhead flew to the predetermined interception point under the guidance of radar and computers, and successfully destroyed an R-12 missile at an altitude of 25 kilometers.
Even so, the Soviets still felt it wasn’t safe enough.
In the A-35 air defense system deployed in actual combat, they simply went all the way and replaced it with a nuclear warhead. Directly using the shock wave, radiation, and high-energy particles from the nuclear explosion to create a huge AOE, destroying everything within a few kilometers. Truly achieving a kind of “cannon firing at mosquitoes.”
Don’t ask if it’s accurate, just ask if it defended. The Soviet leadership was very satisfied with this result, quickly put it into service, and paraded it on Red Square as “high-speed anti-missile weapons.”
Khrushchev proudly declared in Pravda, “Our rockets can now hit a fly in space.”
However, although Khrushchev personally endorsed the great success, as the first generation of anti-missile systems in human history, A-35 actually had fatal flaws.
First, in this system, the interceptor missile itself has no autonomous computing ability, and all trajectory calculations and guidance control rely on ground-based radar and command centers. Although the nuclear bomb can ensure that it destroys everything thoroughly, the electromagnetic pulse generated during the explosion interferes with enemy missiles while indiscriminately attacking its own frequency bands.
It’s like a small-scale “flood system,” where everyone can only charge with bayonets after the explosion. In experiments, there have been cases where the anti-missile system destroyed its own radar and communication systems.
At this point, the defending side, whose own nuclear bomb had messed things up, could only hang up, while the attacking side thousands of kilometers away could launch another missile completely unaffected. Secondly, its interception altitude is only about 25 kilometers.
At this point, the warhead has entered the final dive stage at a speed of over 20 Mach, and the interception system has only one chance. Once it misses, the missile will land in seconds. The entire system has almost no room for error.
To solve these problems, modern anti-missile systems have undergone many modifications.
On the one hand, modern anti-missile systems no longer rely solely on ground-based radar, but instead place some of the “eyes” and “brains” directly onto the interceptor missile, allowing the missile to self-judge who to hit after flying near the target. The Patriot anti-missile missile is a typical example.
It is equipped with radar and a computing module, and a jet device for changing course on the side. After the ground radar detects an incoming missile, it first roughly indicates the target’s direction and trajectory, sending it nearby.
Then, the radar at the front of the missile starts up, cooperating with satellites to more accurately identify the target. Finally, the computing module recalculates the trajectory and activates the rocket’s jet device to adjust the interception direction, ultimately completing the interception.
And thanks to the precision of this system, the Patriot no longer needs a nuclear bomb, a self-destructive AOE attack, and doesn’t even need to carry an explosive warhead, relying solely on physical impact to shatter the incoming missile.
On the other hand, people also realized that rather than “operating” at the last moment, it is better to move the battlefield forward, turning their attention to the earlier mid-course phase of the missile flight.
The mid-course phase has the longest time, the smallest speed change, and the most stable flight trajectory. Therefore, the anti-missile system can detect the target at a farther distance and have more time to calculate the interception window and launch the interceptor missile. The anti-missile system has more time and a higher margin of error.
But mid-course interception also has its own problems. At this stage, the missile flies too high, reaching the outer atmosphere with almost no air. For the end-stage warhead tens of kilometers above the ground, the speed curves of objects with different shapes and volumes are different under the influence of air resistance.
Radar can accurately locate the warhead based on these characteristics.
But in the outer atmosphere, due to the disappearance of air resistance, in the eyes of radar, the warhead of a missile is almost indistinguishable from a metal block in flight. And the number of interceptor missiles on the defending side is always limited. Generally speaking, to ensure a high interception rate, at least three interceptors are needed for one missile.
Under this casualty ratio, even Hawk missiles don’t have that many rockets to shoot down everything that looks like a missile on radar.
Therefore, in order to identify the real warhead in space, modern mid-course anti-missile systems integrate multi-spectral, multi-system detection methods such as infrared imaging and optical recognition on the basis of radar detection.
Just “seeing” clearly is not enough, mid-course interceptor missiles must also have flexible maneuverability in space.
At a distance of thousands of kilometers, even if the calculation error is only one in a thousand, it may deviate by tens of kilometers. This requires the interceptor missile itself not only to “see” but also to “move” flexibly in space. This relies on the core structure of the mid-course interceptor missile, the exoatmospheric kill vehicle (EKV).
After the main rocket sends the interceptor missile to the predetermined orbit, it will, like a satellite launch, discard all boosters, leaving only a small interceptor unit.
It consists of a propulsion system with vector nozzles, a warhead for destroying the target, and a probe for tracking the target. It’s like a very fast satellite. The infrared detector and optical sensor at the front are responsible for confirming the target in the final stage.
Once the target is locked, the internal computing module will calculate the relative position and velocity of the two in real-time, predict the future intersection point, and finally, the EKV’s own propulsion system will quickly adjust the flight direction, “bend” the interceptor’s trajectory to the correct position.
Today’s anti-missile systems no longer rely on a single interceptor or radar, but a defense network that combines multi-layered and multi-modal methods.
Through a perception network built by low-orbit infrared early warning satellites and long-range phased array radars, early detection can be achieved immediately after missile launch, providing sufficient time and data support for multi-stage interception.
At the end of the missile’s flight, there are also systems specializing in high-altitude end-stage interception as a backup. But even so, it cannot be 100% successful. To this day, the arms race between spear and shield continues, and may never have a winner.
However, the author sincerely hopes that there will be a day when humans no longer need it – even if there is only a one in a billion chance.