Why Soviet Support for ABM Treaty?

[MKSheppard]

This is something I cooked together for IDK where:

MIRV for the Soviets worked the same way -- more targets for less $$$ -- important as there were elements in the USSR which wanted to pull away from mass spending on the arms industries and put more of it into the consumer economy.

There's also another element that needs to be explained.

Ten years ago on another board now disappeared (it's still there, under a different name, but the original databases have broke); someone raised a big point:

It never ceases to anoy me that the USA had a working ABM system and Congress killed it. The USSR had a working ABM system and it seems that they were prepared to cheat on the ABM treaty.

Reagan always found it a bit of a puzzle as to why the USSR was so against SDI yet they had an ABM system and were looking to expand it.

I think I have finally cracked the reason for the USSR (and later Russia's) anti-ABM stance.

They were barely affording the arms race, which was by 1969-1970, forcing them to:

A.) Build a Strategic Aerospace Defense Force (PVO Strany which was it's own independent branch)

B.) Build a Strategic Bombardment Force (Tu-4, Tu-16, Tu-95, and Tu-160 in Long Range Aviation)

C.) Build a Strategic Rocket Force (Tons of IRBM/ICBMs, all of which again was it's own independent branch)

D.) Build a Ballistic Missile Submarine Force (Yankee/Delta, etc)

E.) Build & Maintain Large Conventional Forces (Air & Ground)

In addition, there were two other factors:

A.) The Soviet Navy was slowly spooling up/agitating for plans to build an all-new Blue Water Navy under Gorshkhov in the 1970s onwards.

B.) Soviet Governmental Ministries were agitating for more money to go to the Civilian side of things -- it's worth noting that in the 1950s or so, various Soviet propaganda had pointed towards the 1970s or thereabouts as when COMMUNISM would be achieved in the USSR, allowing for plenty, etc.

On top of all these factors, there was one BIG thing coming down the road which everyone saw and was afraid of the costs for:

The cyberneticization of society, both military-industrial and civilian -- was accelerating, with a lot of advanced technology products which we would recognize today as "modern" appearing in the decade from 1966 to 1976 (plus or minus a few years left/right):

Integrated Air Defense Networks -- in 1958, the US had the AN/FSQ-7 Computer to run SAGE (Semi Automatic Ground Environment). It had had 1 million lines of code, consumed 1.78 MW of power, weighed 113~ tons and could only conduct 75,000 operations per second on approximately 33K memory and 589K storage (1958) or 287K memory and 633K storage (1961) using some 50,000 vacuum tubes, 170,000 diodes and 703 transistors.

By 1977, the US was introducing the first E-3 AWACS which placed a much more capable SAGE-like environment in a mobile platform - it may interest you to know that version E-16A of the Airborne Operational Computer Program (AOCP) for the AWACS fleet circa 2007 weighed in at 1.2~ million lines of code.

Tank Analog Ballistic Computers -- The first analog ones appeared in 1959 with the M13A1C computer on the M48A2C Patton, followed by German FLER-H in the Leopard 1A4 (1974) and the Russian 1V517 [1В517] on the T-64B (1976) and T-80B (1978).

Tank Digital Ballistic Computers -- The first digital computers entered service in 1975 with the Chieftain Mk 5 upgrade program as part of the Marconi Improved Fire Control System (IFCS); followed in 1979 by the Leopard 2 (EMES-15 FCS) and the US M60A3 (M21 Ballistic Computer) and M1 Abrams (1981). The Soviets trialled the 1V528 Digital Computer in the T-80A prototype in 1978, but it didn't enter service until the 1V528-1 in the T-80U in 1985.

'Modern' Artillery Fire Control -- 1967 with US M18 Field Artillery Digital Computer (FADAC), followed by the US Tactical Fire Direction System (TACFIRE) in 1972.

'Modern' SAMs -- 1975-1978 with the S-300 (SA-10A GRUMBLE) -- PATRIOT dates to this era but was much delayed. Essentially, modern SAMs are "second generation" weapons utilizing digital computers in both the missile and ground systems instead of earlier analog/electromechanical systems.

'Modern' ATGMs - 1972 with US BGM-61 TOW and 1976 in T-64B with 9M112 "Kobra" (AT-8 SONGSTER) plus the Franco-German HOT in 1976 as well. Previous ATGMs were kind of klunky kludges that kind of worked (SAGGER, etc).

Laser Rangefinders - 1970 with the Barr & Stroud LF2 on the Chieftain Mk 3/3 followed by the AN/VVS-1 on the M60A2 (1973) and the 1OP73 [1ОП73] on the T-64B (1976), followed by the T-80B (1978) and T-72A (1979).

Key to all these was the mass production of the new integrated semiconductor circuits -- Project Apollo and the Minuteman program consumed a large portion of US semiconductors while they were going on, but they then left a large and healthy semiconductor industry that the electronics industry could then use.

Meanwhile, the USSR had to import 33 automatic semiconductor slicing machines from Japan in mid-1964 (CIA Intelligence Report 'Production of Electronic Components in the USSR 1958-65') to support increased semiconductor production.

There's a lot of tangential evidence that these imports weren't enough; because we can look "out of order" to the 1980s, when NATO militaries were upgrading existing tanks with digital ballistic computers (Leopards 1A4, 1A5, AMX-30), the Soviets were modernizing the T-55M and T-62M series with the BV-55/BV-62 [БВ-55/БВ-62] series of analog computers from 1983 onwards.

I believe that this dichotomy shows how tight the Soviet economy was cybernetically -- there literally was no spare capacity for digital circuits after:

Prestige Aerospace Programs (Radars, ICBMs, Fighter Jets, Space Program)
Prestige Ground Forces Programs (Radars, ATGMs, high tech tanks [T-64/80])
Prestige Naval Programs (modern missile armed ships consume disproportionate amounts of semiconductors)
Prestige Civilian Programs (i.e. that new supercomputer at the VI Lenin Institute of Physics)

That there was nothing left to digitize the remainder of the Soviet Military, explaining the huge masses of T-55/T-62 having to use analog computers; despite tank ballistic computers being not that computationally intensive (you only need to calculate a single ballistic trajectory and have it ready in about a second).

So how does this all have to do with the ABM Treaty and Missile Defense?

Well, back in 1967-1970ish, the total computing environment to run a SAFEGUARD scale national level defense of the US (and by extension the USSR) was about 20 million instructions per second. That was a LOT back then -- a top of the line IBM System 360 could only do 750 thousand instructions per second; so SAFEGUARD's computer system was totally unique when the design was frozen in 1967.

Now look at this from the Soviet point of view -- they'd just spent the last twenty years from 1950-1970 frantically pacing the US in development of every piece of high tech (Integrated Air Defense System, Bombers, Ballistic Missile Subs, Ballistic Missiles); and now the US was threatening to force another frantic race for parity -- only this time the commodities involved would be increasingly scarce transistors and electronic components that everyone else in the Soviet apparatus wanted.

The Soviet Navy under Gorshkhov wanted modern missile armed combatants with heavy electronics fits to replace the Stalinist era gun cruisers, while at the same time the Civilian-related Ministries wanted small transistor radios and other consumer goods that would prove that Communism Worked (TM).

You can't do all this if all your semiconductor production is going into a very big nationwide ABM build-out of battle management centers and radar systems all over the USSR.

More to the point -- you now have to face the possibility of a steadily thickening ABM shield over the United States which will render your (very expensive) investment in ICBMs obsolete even before you've gotten a decade's worth of service out of them.

Soviet Military Power 1988 laid it out nicely for us, even if it does "inflate" by including "mod" variants as all new systems.



Notice how their major modernization efforts (SS-16, SS-17, SS-18, SS-19) come AFTER the 1970s SALT/ABM Treaties which not only:

A.) Placed limits on US strategic nuclear forces, both missile and bomber based?

B.) Made cheap large area ABM impossible through careful crafting of the ABM treaty (that in itself is a post of it's own) to use physics against ABM system designers trying to stay compliant with the treaty.

========

The Soviets were willing to do sneaky "edge case" violations of arms control, banking that we wouldn't politically "overturn the apple cart", namely:

1.) Building a huge radar in violation of the ABM treaty for "something else", but it's totally not an ABM radar! Honest Tovarisch!

2.) Putting several DELTA SSBNs to sea on trials/in service, breaking the SALT limits on SSBN force structure, by claiming that several YANKEE SSBNs were "scheduled for retirement" yet...they were mysteriously "fully armed and operational"

3.) Building the SA-12B GIANT (S-300V with Large 98M2 Missile) circa 1983. The large 98M2 misile had a 2.5 km/sec VBo; really close to the limit of 3 km/sec for SAMs that was agreed to under the 1972 Common Understanding Related to the First Agreed Statement (regarding the ABM Treaty).

Now, in some cases we did do push back -- THAAD started out as a low key response to the Soviet development of S-300V; and it got "important enough" that the following systems were named specifically in "The 1997 Agreement on Confidence Building Measures regarding Tactical ABM":

USA
Theater High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) System
Navy Theater-Wide Theater Ballistic Missile Defense Program

Russia (and successors like Belarus and Ukraine)
S-300V system, known to the United States of America as the SA-12

But overall, they weren't willing to commit absolute outright blatant treaty violations, because they knew that if they did so, we'd detect it via satellites and we'd immediately engage them in an unrestrained arms race, which would then cause the Soviet economy to collapse within 15 years.

[MKSheppard]

Stuart in 2000 on the old, old, old board:

ABM and the Soviet Collapse
I think it was one of the impossible black programs that lead them to believe that it was all over. I'd better clarify that. As you know, I'm a strong believer in ABM defenses and recognize that the technology needed to establish them is very far from being unattainable. In fact we've had the means and the ability to esatblish anti-missile defenses for over 40 years.

So ABM is both practical and desirable. What was impossible about the US program was the way it was being done. Once the defensive options being discussed started to rotate around space-based lasers, orbital battle stations, x-ray lasers and other exotica the Russians started to really believe we could do all those things.

They knew that we had a perfectly good, perfectly capable ABM system in 1965; given development since then what had we come up with since then? Look at the wonders we can see coming out.

What else is there we don't know about? If they had a system that worked all those years ago why are they not building that rather than developing these exotic things.

Doesn't that imply that they've already built the older ....... uh-oh.

Get the Organs of State to look into this. What? They can't find out anything? The security is that good. That can only mean the equipment must work very well indeed. uh-oh uh-oh.

So again they were faced with the options of spending billions on an entirely new development track and had to fold. They didn't know that they had just folded to a hand of nothing.

You can now read Reagan's NSDD 19 that launched Star Wars -- it was declassified in full in 2008 (previously, a heavily redacted version had been released in 1990), and there is this phrase (it was declassified in the 1990 version):

"4. The strategic defense initiative will place principal emphasis on technologies involving nonnuclear kill concepts. Research on new strategic defense concepts utilizing nuclear devices should continue as a hedge against a Soviet ABM breakout (S)"

I think that's the big thing.

Non-nuclear kill is feasible, but it really ups the technical requirements in EVERYTHING.

For one, you're now going to throw away a high end telescope and infrared imager on every kill vehicle.

Considering that Russia didn't even get production level thermal sights onto it's tanks until about the 2000s....and even then they were using imported French CATHERINE chips....

Going non-nuclear kill is also very significant for a variety of reasons:

1.) It meant the USSR couldn't use it's vast penetration of anti nuclear groups and environmental groups like GREENPEACE to defeat any proposed ABM.

2.) It made ABM much more politically easier to deploy and disseminate. For example, do you think Japan would allow a SAFEGUARD-J system to be built outside of Tokyo armed with 100 "defensive" nuclear tipped interceptors? While the Japanese Ultranationalist right wing would support it (and would parade around cities flying the US flag as they did so), everyone else in Japan would be like "NO!"

For example...what happens if an ABM missile is accidentially launched? What if we launch one on a inbound target that turns out to be a glitch in the computer? Now we have an errant nuclear armed missile flying god knows where...

3.) Non-Nuclear massively simplifies the entire logistics and supporting chain -- you just now have to ensure that soldiers assigned to SDI sites have the standard SECRET clearance given to anyone in the Army with a pulse (they need it to be indoctrinated into the penetration capabilities of BGM-71 I-TOW vs the T-72M done by DIA).

Going Nuclear means that everything that touches the ABM system has to be "special" with zero defects because of nukes -- such as Command & Control; extending to ordnance safety.

Remember, Stuart said that this was why SM-2(N) died in the 1980s -- because while it was feasible to put a nuke into the SM-2 airframe; simply by existing in a Mk 26 magazine or VLS cell, it slowed down system reaction times unacceptably due to the need to make sure "am I about to launch a nuclear armed SAM?" before firing.

3.) The burnout velocity of high end ABMs makes them themselves a ballistic missile threat -- once you get to a vBO of 7 km/sec, you're pretty much capable of doing a ballistic trajectory to a target 6,500 km away -- GBI has a VBo of around 7 km. Going non-nuclear gets rid of this issue, no matter how much Russia screeches REEEEEEE about GBI sites in Poland. What are we gonna do, use a $100 million interceptor to put a 60 kg interceptor with no explosives on board in downtown Moscow?

[MKSheppard]

FYI, one of the major program achievements of the Standard Missile - LEAP program in the early 1990s was that it got 5 MIPS processing performance out of a hardened computing unit about the diameter of a CD-ROM which could fit inside the diameter of the Standard Missile Body.

Compare that to the 20 MIPS needed to run SAFEGUARD in 1973...and you can see how non-nuclear kill was aimed at "pricing out" the Soviets through technology they couldn't produce enough of.

[Poohbah]

What are we gonna do, use a $100 million interceptor to put a 60 kg interceptor with no explosives on board in downtown Moscow?

Hits Pooty-Poot's whip while he's heading to the dacha for some Intercourse & Intoxication

[MKSheppard]

And this is something that only just clicked into place for me now.

https://www.generalstaff.org/WW3/Docs/A ... Y-1972.htm

These were special briefing notes prepared by Kissinger's team in advance of the signing of the ABM Treaty + SALT I and they have a few key points:

The ABM Agreement

The facts of the Safeguard program had to be faced in the SALT decisions:

— We could not get full Safeguard through Congress under any circumstances.

— The 4-site Safeguard tended to receive support only as a “bargaining chip.”

Further, hard-site defense is only a concept – we are years away from having a reliable, deployable system.

We had to make a decision in the negotiations concerning how much we were willing to limit ourselves in order to limit the Soviets. Given our concerns about Soviet ABM and the time it would take to get major new systems, we decided:

— The Soviets are held to two sites (without an agreement they could have deployed a comprehensive system),

— Limiting their system is critically important to the penetration capability of our offensive force. This is as critical as the question of pre-launch survivability.

As for the U.S., the agreement:

— Gives us the Safeguard site we have essentially completed. This site will give us important operating experience which cannot be duplicated by a test facility (e. g. , Kwajalein). This site provides coverage of some ICBMs and bombers of two major command and control centers (SAC and NORAD). Having ABMs to contend with seriously complicates the attacker's calculations.

— Allows us to continue hard-site developments; the Grand Fork radars will provide an early radar base for hard sites.

— Provides defense of the NCA at Washington. The NCA defense gives protection against small and accidental attacks, moreover, it complicates any attacker’s problem and gives the NCA important decision time. Since it uses many components from Malmstrom, the NCA will only cost about $100 million more than building the Malmstrom sites.

— The combined NCA defense and Grand Fork's deployment give us an important protected warning and assessment capability; the large radars at these sites, particularly by ABMs, can provide critical information. The protection of our command and control and the hardened and protected ABM radars allow the President to consider other responses than all-out nuclear war -- an important part of our strategy.

If the offensive threat becomes such that our retaliatory forces is threatened, we can break out the ABM Treaty by invoking overriding national interest. Nothing is lost; in fact, we gain time to develop hard-site defense.

After reading that, it all clicked into place -- everything for the last 45 years.

See, I once got interested in who voted for SAFEGUARD to be defunded one day after it became operational. The common cite "voted on by House on blah blah" was actually for the IIRC FY75 Defense Appropriations bill.

I looked into the appropriations bill and I found that the section in the bill defunding SAFEGUARD was inserted as an amendment by...the Senate.

I don't know who sponsored that amendment as that level of detail on a random bill from 1970s isn't online -- I'd have to call Congressional Library to find out.

But I can make one good guess:



TED KENNEDY.

Once you start thinking, it all falls into place:

1970s:

Can't get the full SAFEGUARD system that protects all of CONUS "under any circumstances [through Congress]."

Even the cut down 4 site SAFEGUARD system is viewed only as a “bargaining chip” by Congress.

The limited 1 site SAFEGUARD for Minuteman defense is defunded 1 day after it's operational.

1980s

By this time, Ted Kennedy is the "lion of the Senate", and forces Reagan to limit SDI to a "blue sky" R&D system focusing on space based defenses and eventual miniaturized hit to kill which can always be deferred continuously into the future; instead of a brutally simple SAFEGUARD II system taking advantage of 15 years of computer + radar development that could be deployed by 1987.

Also, Reagan at this time was trying to get massive rearmament through Congress -- many of the "blue sky" systems proposed in the early 1970s
were only just about beginning to enter production -- the 1972 Briefing Notes even call out two Reagan-era programs:

Again, except for Poseidon MIRVs, we had no active SLBM program at the start of negotiations. The ULMS was planned for launching in the 1980s and maximum acceleration still means 1978 or 1979.

Our continuing B-1 development program would allow a new strategic aircraft near the end of the [SALT I] period and our stand-off missile program, the SRAM (as many as 20 SRAM could be carried by a single bomber) increases the effectiveness of our force.

Kennedy and the Democrats who controlled Congress essentially held SDI hostage (and to a lesser extent some of the 80s buildup) to extract concessions for social spending (that was a big issue with Reagan era deficits). Reagan was forced to choose between "do I want a massive modern conventional force that can slaughter the Soviets, or do I want ABM? If I go for ABM full blast, I may not get it, due to obstinacy of the Kennedies..."

1990s - 2000s

Kennedy is still the "Lion of the Senate" and despite the Persian Gulf War showing that ballistic missiles are going to be a big thing, I don't think we would ever have gotten what we have now if it wasn't for the Republican Revolution of 1994 that finally broke Democrat power in Congress. But Kennedy still retained enough power in the Senate to force NMD to be "limited" -- if you look at the old SASC committee reports from the period regarding ABM/SDI/GMD you'll see "KENNEDY OPPOSES" -- in effect, he acted as a brake retarder forcing things to be limited.

Teddy finally kicked the bucket in August 2009; but unfortunately for us, Obama was POTUS at that point from January 2009 onwards -- and Obama stalled ABM by killing off Multi-Kill Vehicle (MKV) plus Kinetic Energy Interceptor (KEI) + GBI for Europe.

Can you imagine how much different things would've been if McCain had won in 2008? McCain would have used ABM to make sure that Russia would be known as nothing but the "gas station of Europe".