Rocket science

[rwanttaja]

Im not an engineer or a scientist and all i know about ICBM is the one we visited south of Tucson and it was in a silo deep under ground. Very cool.
So Mr Un can roll them around the country and hide them, kind of like yall do with the subs.
What was the logic of building these silos all over the midwest?

Primarily, technology. All the electronics are lighter, and decreases in payload weight have a significant effect on the amount of total "push" the rocket will need. Allows a reduction in the size of the rocket. Same thing happened with sub-launched missiles.

The second point was targeting. Our primary targets were a long way off, hence we needed bigger rockets that were less suited to mobile basing. Russia and China, on the other hand, had foes in close proximity (each other) and thus needed medium range ballistic missiles (MRBMs). So they put a lot of resources into mobile basing, which led to a lot of the technology being available when they decided they needed mobile basing for ICBMs.

A third point was mission: The US' missile force was primarily intended as a deterrent, as in, "throw everything you've got at us, we'll still be able to hit you back." Mobile basing is more of a crap shoot; the platforms aren't hardened, thus a saturation strike in a known basing area might have pretty good luck. Russian targeting never has been very good; a hardened, fixed site is probably a better approach when the enemy has less chance of actually coming close (vs. non-hardened mobile launchers).

Finally, there's the politics...the American voter probably wouldn't take kindly to seeing nuclear missile regularly cruising down I-94. The MX mobile basing was out in the desert, with dedicated roads, but we needed a longer-range missile to do it.

Ron Wanttaja