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Now, the Outer Space Treaty prohibits putting nuclear weapons in orbit, so the Soviets named the system “fractional orbital bombardment system” on the grounds that it didn’t make a full orbit. The Soviets could fire that little motor to slow the warhead, bringing it back down wherever they wanted. Attached to that warhead is a small rocket motor. The orbiter fires its thrusters to slow down-what’s called a deorbit burn-which allows it to reenter the atmosphere and glide back to Earth.Īn orbital bombardment system works the same way: A big rocket places a nuclear warhead in orbit. This is what, for example, a space shuttle does. If you want to bring astronauts back or drop a nuclear weapon on another country-and can’t wait a decade-you need to use more energy to slow down and fall back to Earth. There is still a small amount of atmospheric drag in low Earth orbit, so objects do come back over very long periods of time. That also means that, once in orbit, you pretty much stay in orbit. That’s why astronauts in space experience weightlessness-they and everything around them are falling endlessly without ever hitting the ground.
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To be in orbit is to be in a state of free fall, continuously hurtling around the Earth. Isaac Newton imagined orbit by thinking about a cannonball being fired to ever greater distances, one after the other, “till at last, exceeding the limits of the Earth, it should pass quite by without touching it.” It’s just that they are also traveling fast enough that they fall constantly over the horizon in an endless loop.
So why don’t some objects in space, like satellites, fall back down to Earth? Well, they are falling. You can fire a rocket very, very high and have it fall back down to Earth. Orbit is not an altitude it’s a condition. One of the solutions that Moscow was already developing that helped solve the problem was orbital bombardment. Moscow was still alarmed, not merely by what the system was but also by what it could become. In September 1967, then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara announced the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system with a long speech about why missile defenses were destabilizing, followed by a halfhearted explanation that the United States still needed what he called a limited “Chinese-oriented ABM deployment.” So they hit upon what they imagined was a clever idea: Make the system small enough that it wouldn’t alarm Moscow, and publicly frame it as a response to China’s development of ICBMs. missile defense system would intensify the arms race with the Soviet Union. Johnson and his aides were also afraid that a U.S. The Johnson administration felt enormous political pressure to respond with its own missile defense system. Because, again, the core idea of nuclear deterrence is that if you start a conflict, you will die. So, when the Soviets started putting defenses around Moscow in the 1960s, the United States dedicated a huge portion of its nuclear retaliatory forces to penetrating those defenses. And that makes starting the fight a dangerously tempting option.
If one side has a bunch of defenses, however, its leaders might start to think that they could survive and, God forbid, even prevail. The whole idea of nuclear deterrence is that if one party starts a nuclear war, everybody dies. That’s not an acceptable situation from the standpoint of a relationship based on nuclear deterrence. This system ultimately consisted of a number of missiles armed with nuclear weapons intended to vaporize incoming Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs. Starting in the 1960s, the United States began working on a missile defense system, which eventually came to be called Safeguard. But China’s test of such a system is unwelcome news, not because it’s some fantastic futuristic technology but because it is yet another step in a pointless, costly, and dangerous arms race. The Soviet Union deployed a similar system during the Cold War. This is no mere hypersonic system but what Cold Warriors called an “orbital bombardment system.” People are freaking out, with some calling it a “ Sputnik moment.”īut just what is this thing, and how bad is it? Well, it’s an FOBS-a fractional orbital bombardment system. While the word “hypersonic” has gotten all the attention, what is more interesting is that the weapon entered orbit. Over the weekend, the Financial Times reported that in August, China tested a new hypersonic weapons system that circled the globe.