Comment by speed_spread
Comment by speed_spread 5 hours ago
Pointless? It made perfect sense back when the main vector of nuclear delivery was heavy long range bombers.
Comment by speed_spread 5 hours ago
Pointless? It made perfect sense back when the main vector of nuclear delivery was heavy long range bombers.
The R-7 was never a practical weapon and the Soviet Union would primarily rely on strategic bombers for their war plans for many years after that. Even during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviets only had a few dozen ICBMs (which is why IRBMs being in Cuba, right next to America, was relevant and desirable for them), the bulk of the threat through the 1970s and into the 80s was bombers.
The R7 ICBM was operationally deployed to northern Russia on February 9th, 1959. The Arrow was canceled on February 20th, 1959.
The Arrow was pointless before it finished development. Canada correctly figured out that further investment into dedicated super-interceptors was a bad choice. They DID buy US interceptors to replace their old ones because 1) You usually hedge your bets when you can in defense spending and 2) Governments were not excited to say "We stopped building these planes because we literally cannot protect you from nuclear weapons now"
The US spent decades continuing down interceptor development and saw exactly zero payoff for it. We retired the Delta Dart in 1986 after never using the garbage machine, which likely wouldn't even have been good at it's job. Consider that the primary armament of the interceptor Canada bought to replace the Arrow was a fucking unguided nuclear rocket. Because that was literally the only interception weapon that provided even a snowballs chance in hell of being effective.
The Detla Dart was built to sit in a shed in the plains of Canada, waiting for a truly terrible day. When SAGE radars saw the wave of bombers, an alarm would sound and the pilot would jump in the plane and turn it on. The plane, automated entirely by SAGE, would rocket up to intercept altitude and be guided to the intercept. Closing rates were in excess of Mach 4. You only had a single pass at the target and if you didn't get them, you would not be able to catch up and eliminate the threat. Missing meant nukes dropping on US cities. Because of this terrible engagement profile, the entire weapons system was automated. You had a screen between your lap that you interacted with like a Vectrex video game to line up with a circle. The actual weapon firing was automated because that's how tight the tolerances were. Early models even had stupid dumbfire WW2 style rockets. One of the first times this interception process and fire control was tested, they blew up the plane towing the target drone. That's just how poor ground based interception was. We are talking like 50% interception rates on a good day.
The Arrow would have been similarly worthless. The only thing these programs succeeded at was stressing out pilots.