Rods from God: Kinetic Weapon Hit with Nuclear Weapon Force

The 107-country Outer Space Treaty signed in 1967 prohibits nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons from being placed in or used from Earth's orbit.

 

What they didn't count on was the US Air Force's most simple weapon ever: a tungsten rod that could hit a city with the explosive power of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

 

During the Vietnam War, the US used what it called "Lazy Dog" bombs. These were simply solid-steel pieces, less than 2 inches long, fitted with fins.

 

There was no explosive: They were simply dropped by the hundreds from planes flying above Vietnam. Lazy Dog projectiles (aka "kinetic bombardment") could reach speeds of up to 500 mph as they fell to the ground and could penetrate 9 inches of concrete after being dropped from as little as 3,000 feet. The idea is like shooting bullets at a target, except instead of losing velocity as it travels, the projectile is gaining velocity and energy that will be expended on impact.

 

They were shotgunning a large swath of jungle, raining bullet-size death at high speeds. That's how Project Thor came to be.

 

Instead of hundreds of small projectiles from a few thousand feet, Thor used a large projectile from a few thousand miles above the Earth. The "rods from god" idea was a bundle of telephone-pole-size (20 feet long, 1 foot in diameter) tungsten rods, dropped from orbit, reaching a speed of up to 10 times the speed of sound.

 

The rod itself would penetrate hundreds of feet into the Earth, destroying any potential hardened bunkers or secret underground sites. More than that, when the rod hits, the explosion would be on par with the magnitude of a ground-penetrating nuclear weapon - but with no fallout. Such a weapon could destroy a target with 15 minutes' notice.

 

 

 

To picture what these God rods might look like, think of a bundle of insulated metal telephone poles, dropped from an exquisitely calculated orbital location and reaching a speed of Mach 10 (over 7,000 mph) by the time they hit Earth.

The reason this idea is so attractive is that the rods would have enough kinetic power to destroy even the deepest known facilities -- many hundreds of feet beneath the Earth's surface. The other benefit is that the metal rods would constitute a simple, conventional payload, so we wouldn't be "nuking" anybody with them. Also, such bundles of metal are not specifically disallowed by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which explicitly prohibits only deploying nuclear weapons in space. The rods, however, would violate the spirit of the more general Outer Space Treaty. 

Some in the Pentagon are well aware of these concerns and are chastened by them. So they have come up with other options for waging war from space. The most intriguing is to build a bomber aircraft that can soar from the ground to low-Earth orbit, circle the globe in little over an hour, then dive down and strike any target, anywhere. 

 

Ethical and legal issues aside, the difficulties with waging this kind of war in space are profound, and should keep us from pursuing such a path. The fundamental issue is that it is easier and cheaper to destroy things in space than it is to put them there and make use of them.

The cost of manufacturing each communications or monitoring satellite and putting it into orbit is at least $1 billion, while the cost of a ballistic missile capable of destroying it is about $10 million. And the debris fields created by blown-up satellites would continue to orbit the Earth, making huge swathes of space unusable for decades.