Even in the early days of the Cold War, it quickly became apparent that simply having hundreds or even thousands of nuclear weapons would never be a sufficient deterrent to atomic attack. For nuclear weapons to be anything other than expensive ornaments, they have to be part of an engineered system that guarantees that they’ll work when they’re called upon to do so, and only then. And more importantly, your adversaries need to know that you’ve made every effort to make sure they go boom, and that they can’t interfere with that process.
In practical terms, nuclear deterrence is all about redundancy. There can be no single point of failure anywhere along the nuclear chain of command, and every system has to have a backup with multiple backups. That’s true inside every component of the system, from the warheads that form the sharp point of the spear to the systems that control and command those weapons, and especially in the systems that relay the orders that will send the missiles and bombers on their way.
When the fateful decision to push the button is made, Cold War planners had to ensure that the message got through. Even though they had a continent-wide system of radios and telephone lines that stitched together every missile launch facility and bomber base at their disposal, planners knew how fragile all that infrastructure could be, especially during a nuclear exchange. When the message absolutely, positively has to get through, you need a way to get above all that destruction, and so they came up with the Emergency Rocket Communication System, or ERCS.
Above It All
The ERCS concept was brutally simple. In the event of receiving an Emergency Action Message (EAM) with a valid launch order, US Air Force missile launch commanders would send a copy of the EAM to a special warhead aboard their ERCS missiles. The missiles would be launched along with the other missiles in the sortie, but with flight paths to the east and west, compared to over-the-pole trajectories for the nuclear-tipped missiles. The ERCS trajectories were designed to provide line-of-sight coverage to all of Strategic Air Command’s missile fields and bomber bases in North America, and also to SAC bases in Europe. Once the third stage of the missile was at apogee, the payload would detach from the launch vehicle and start transmitting the EAM on a continuous loop over one of ten pre-programmed UHF frequencies, ensuring that all strategic assets within sight of the transmitter would get the message even if every other means of communication had failed.
Even by Cold War standards, ERCS went from operational concept to fielded system in a remarkably short time. The SAC directive for what would become ERCS was published in September of 1961, and a contract was quickly awarded to Allied Signal Aerospace Communications to build the thing. In just four months, Allied had a prototype ready for testing. Granted, the design of the payload was simplified considerably by the fact that it was on a one-way trip, but still, the AN/DRC-9, as it was designated, was developed remarkably quickly.
The 875-pound (397-kg) payload, which was to be carried to the edge of space at the tip of an ICBM, contained a complete “store and forward” communications system with redundant UHF transmitters, along with everything needed to control the deployment of the package into space, to manage the thermal conditions inside the spacecraft, and to keep it on a stable trajectory after release. In addition, the entire package was hardened against the effects of electromagnetic pulse, ensuring its ability to relay launch orders no matter what.
The forward section of the package, just aft of the nose cone, mainly contained the equipment to activate the payload’s batteries. As was common in spacecraft of the day, the payload was powered by silver-zinc batteries, which were kept in a non-activated state until needed. To activate them, a gas generator in the forward section would be started about 45 seconds prior to launch. This would provide the pressure needed to force about seven liters of potassium hydroxide electrolyte solution from a reservoir in the forward section through tubes to the pair of batteries in the aft section of the payload. The batteries would immediately supply the 45 VDC needed by the payload’s power converters, which provided both the regulated 28 VDC supply for powering most of the comms equipment, plus the low-voltage, high-current AC supplies needed for the filaments of the tubes used in the RF power amplifiers. In the interest of redundancy, there were two separate power converters, one for each battery.
Also for redundancy and reliability, the payload used a pair of identical transmitters, located in the aft section. These were capable of operating on ten different channels in the UHF band, with the frequency controlled by a solid-state crystal-controlled oscillator. The specific channel was selected at the time of launch and fixed for the duration of the mission. The oscillators fed an exciter circuit, also solid state, that amplified and modulated the carrier signal for the driver amplifiers, before sending them to a series of RF cavity amps that used vapor-cooled tetrodes to boost the signal to about a kilowatt.
Both transmitters were connected to a passive diplexer to couple the two signals together into a common feed line for the payload’s single antenna, which sat behind a fiberglass radome, which was pressurized to reduce the risk of corona discharge, at the very aft of the vehicle. The antenna was an Archimedian spiral design, which is essentially a dipole antenna wound into a spiral with the two legs nested together. This resulted in a right-hand circularly polarized signal that covered the entire frequency range of the transmitter.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Since the business of all this hardware was to transmit EAMs, the AN/DRC-9 was equipped with a recorder-processor system. This was shockingly simple — essentially just a continuous-loop tape deck with its associated amplifiers and controllers. The tape deck had separate playback and record/erase heads, over which the tape moved at a nominal 5 inches per second, or 40 ips when it needed to rapidly cycle back to the beginning of the message. The loop was long enough to record an EAM up to 90 seconds long, which was recorded by the missile combat crew commander (MCCC) over a standard telephone handset on a dedicated ERCS console in the launch complex. The EAM, a long series of NATO phonetic alphabet characters, was dictated verbatim and checked by the deputy MCCC for accuracy; if the MCCC flubbed his lines, the message was recorded over until it was perfect.
The recorder-processor was activated in playback mode once the transmitter was activated, which occurred about 31 seconds after thrust termination of the third stage of the rocket and after spin motors had fired to spin-stabilize the payload during the ballistic phase of its flight. Test flights over the Pacific launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California showed that transmissions were readable for anywhere from 14 to 22 minutes, more than enough to transmit a complete EAM multiple times.
As was common with many Cold War projects, work on ERCS started before the launch vehicle it was intended for, the Minuteman II, was even constructed. As an interim solution, the Air Force mounted the payloads to their Blue Scout launch vehicles, a rocket that had only been used for satellites and scientific payloads. But it performed well enough in a series of tests through the end of 1963 that the Air Force certified the Blue Scout version of ERCS as operational and deployed it to three sites in Nebraska on mobile trailer launchers. The Blue Scout ERCS would serve until the Minuteman version was certified as operational in 1968, greatly improving readiness by putting the system in a hardened silo rather than in vulnerable above-ground launch trailers.
By the mid-70s, ten Minuteman II ERCS sorties were operational across ten different launch facilities at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. Luckily, they and their spicier cousins all stayed in their silos through even the hottest days of the Cold War, only emerging in 1991 when the entire Minuteman II force was ordered to stand down by President George H.W. Bush. By that point, global military communications had advanced considerably, and the redundancy offered by ERCS was deemed no longer worth the expense of maintaining the 1960s technology that provided it. All ERCS payloads were removed from their missiles and deactivated by the end of 1991.
Nice write up!
Interesting leak related to this topic:
https://https://danwatch.dk/en/serious-security-breach-russian-nuclear-facilities-exposed/
yeah. Wow.
With “single point of failure”, does that include persons such as: Stanislav Petrov ?
Correct. The US nuclear command system is designed to prevent the US equivalent of a hero like him from saving the world.
It doesn’t matter how sensible the people with the actual weapons are. The US command structure does not allow for Petrovs and Arkhipovs.
If you are in this position your only option is to secretly destroy the system. Make sure they do not actually work. You look like you’re carrying out your orders but the system cannot actually function. Be smarter than your boss, is it really that hard?
I honestly never believed the story of Stanislav Petrov. I suspect it was concocted from bits and pieces of USSR propaganda rehashed to fit the late 1990s fairy tales of “USSR no more” and please the US politicians signing off the undisclosed Cash for Kremlin bills.
Regardless, military has its own system of checks and balances that’s not related in any way to what’s shown in the popular media. I’d very much know that it stays that way, unknown to the general public.
I don’t know when this was declassified but I recall reading about the system in the mid-80’s.
Supposedly there was also a flying equivalent of this system — not Looking Glass but a C-5 or something equally huge that would allow a missle with this repeater to be launched in mid-air. The missile dropped out the back, a parachute aligned it and it launched.
The stuff both sides put together to make sure everyone died still gives me nightmares.
Supposedly the Soviets built a bunch of missiles with warheads crammed full of modified Anthrax spore for air burst over (former) population center, to be launched only after a nuclear exchange just to be sure everyone was really taken care of.
Again, hard to find documentation of and harder to really come to grips with the lengths both sides went to.
Mutual Assured Destruction works ! (especially so when you have folks as mentioned prior – Mr Petrov, – AND – Vasily Arkhipov ) …. they correctly questioned why would America launch an attack? knowing the response would be immediate & devastating (thanks to the the technologies mentioned in the article). All the nuclear powers are aware of how destructive an all out exchange would be. The proverbial (as Captain Kirk put it), “a doomsday weapon, it’s never meant to be used”.
A thermonuclear warhead is one of the most complex inventions ever conceived by humans.
If you believe the UFO folks, also why ET’s seem to be interested in them.
Looking forward to the day we can have:
“Gravimetric Torpedoes, are high-yield weapons that use an advanced graviton inversion field to create a gravimetric distortion, which causes gravimetric shear in the target’s structure. This distortion results in severe structural damage and is capable of tearing starships apart. The complex phase variance of the gravitons allows the torpedo to pass through shields, making it an extremely effective weapon.”
You can bet some researcher will work to create one.
The future looks bright ! (I gotta wear shades !)…. mwah hahaha
With russians acting on a maffia level and the us acting like irresponisble clowns it’s nearly a miracle that more serious “accidents” have not happened (yet).
Biggest problem I see is (giving in to) nuclear blackmail. That is a quite serious problem at the moment.
During the cold war, before such things were ‘common knowledge’ a retired Navy officer (friend’s dad) explained a few things that ‘Everybody anywhere near power knew, but would never say out loud.’
Without these facts, inexplicable things were happening.
They included:
Israel has nukes. The USA gave them their first weapons grade, but they were in full production.
Taiwan doesn’t have nukes. They had chemical weapons, maybe biologicals, on missiles aimed at the mainland. Their was high grade batshit in power there at the time.
The USA was in the Korean DMZ to keep the south from going north. Their was high grade batshit in power there at the time.
Japan doesn’t have a nuke, but it had the kit assembled. Still had strong batshit undercurrent hiding in power, along with batshit peaceniks throwing public tantrums. If he were alive today he’d be worried about ‘Jap aircraft carriers’, but more worried about China.
China and Russia are not friends. ‘Friends’ is not a useful concept when talking about nations. Allies is the term for nations. Leaders can sometimes be friends. China and Russia were not allies either. Between them, only power mattered.
He also introduced me to the process of looking for ‘WTF’s in political actions (not words, never words).
Considering possible ‘hidden states’ that could explain those WTFs.
But never to accept that those theories are anything more than theories, until you have facts.
For example:
I’ve suspected for decades that the DNC and RNC are in a state of ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ (MAD).
Every time a serious power player is about to get nailed (Clinton, Cheney, alt Clinton) they pull the punch and take a scapegoat. Almost like they got backed off with a folder full of dead girls AND live boys.
I suspect this MAD data started in Hoovers FBI, but leaked and forked decades ago.
We’ll see if Trump isn’t exactly the bull we want in this China shop…
MAD is only metastable and Trump is a loose cannon on as many pharmaceuticals as Nancy Reagan.
Trump realizing the value of the ‘Epstein Portfolio’ (most valuable thing on earth) and deciding to cover it up now that it’s ‘his’ is not a good sign.
But of course the Ds also took a copy, it’s not as valuable as it was when only Mossad had it.
Epstein would have walked if he hadn’t kept a copy and started the spill.
Interesting times.
Too many people know secrets for them to stay secret.
Anyhow, my aluminum foil deflector beanie has slipped off…’must spend money on junk’.
Matka wie że ćpiesz?
Nudny..
Aluminized mylar works as well as foil, and it wont tear so easily.
It’s hard to imagine what the benefit of those anthrax missiles would be. I doubt either side had a plan that included “just taking the hit” and rebuilding afterwards. To put it another way, destroying 99% of the infrastructure and population should be sufficient deterrent. It hardly matters if a few stragglers survive. They wouldn’t be in a position to do any harm to the USSR and by the time the US was “rebuilt” it would effectively be a new country. Maybe the idea was to give the soviets a leg up in the race back from the stone age? Haha.
Yeah, on one side it’s pretty horrific to think about. On the other hand, we did successfully stop World War Three through World War Eleven from happening in the interim since 1945. So we have quite the luxury of dreaming up hypotheses and counterfactual history, casually imagining what could have happened… What if it all went horribly wrong. The reality is that we at least succeeded at stopping the cycle of global convulsive war. So that’s something.
We obviously did not stop war generally. But I do notice a distinct lack of PUBLICLY KNOWN nuclear doomsday systems in all the nations which have been invaded since 1945. Israel is a weird exception… They have one, but everyone still insists on maintaining the charade of a public secret, pretending that they don’t.
Seems pretty conclusive.
As a teen I remember my next door neighbor’s dad working on popup antennas for missile sites. I think he worked for Sylvania. MAD times, indeed.
I used to work at a company that provides extremely robust messaging systems, and the old saying about engineers spending their entire careers solving more or less the same problem over and over again is true. One of the people involved had basically worked on two problems, making long distance circuits work better any two points in the USA and a few other places no matter what ( and the “what” list was really long, but hilariously did not include all hands meetings to talk about the robustness of the system during which the batteries ran down. The bell system runs on batteries you know, right?) the other project was figuring out how to bill the customer for a call from NYC to Cleveland, and how split the revenue when the call is routed through Chicago and Denver.
Anyway he was loaned to whoever cooked up the Star Wars SDI which was originally just supposed to defend ICBM sites, but President Reagan just ad-libbed that it was going to shield the entire country. There were a bunch of scientists at the white house listening to to the speech and a lot of them were freaking out that the whole project was probably impossible with any foreseeable technology, and that it obviously wasn’t going to to work.
At this point Edward Teller(according to my friend) said maybe, but the Soviets will go broke figuring that out. Others pointed out that if the Soviets thought it would work, it put them into a use it or loose it situation which was a very bad idea.