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The satellite shoot-down and China: doing the math
by our very own Old Spook
This was in a comment thread yesterday; I thought it deserved to be an article in its own right. Hope you don't mind that I took the liberty of posting it for you.
Excellent idea, and thanks for doing this. I've archived the two major BMD threads from yesterday and the day before as 'Classics' so they'll be available. AoS.
What you have to remember is that the Chinese have 24 confirmed operational ICBMs (which varies down to as few as 18 at a time due to maint). Yes. Just TWENTY-FOUR. DF-5/CSS-4 is the designation. Single 5 MT warhead, but 4 of them have a MIRV bus with up to 6 RV's each being supposedly 1-2MT. Range 15,000 Km, which means they can hit the western and central US. Liquid fueled. CEP of 600m (singe warhead) to 3 Km (MIRV). Takes them 30-60 minutes to prep them for launch, and rumor is that they do not usually keep the warheads mated to the missiles, so the launch prep may be even more time consuming.

Failure rate has been estimated (based on test firings) to be 8 percent for the launcher, 5 percent for the warheads (higher for MIRV bus).

So if they popped the entire arsenal, 24 missiles, they are likely to have 2 fail during launch. So lets pretend that those failures are single warhead launchers, the MIRV ones work. thats a total of 18 + (6*4) = 42 RVs. Out of that they lose 2 malfunction.

Thats a total of 40 RVs. we have the capacity to launch approximately 20 SM3 per ship, and have 3 of those available (remember, launch prep indications give us up to an hour of alert) Thats 60 launches against 40 warheads. Lest trim it down and say its a 1 per. SM3 have succeeded 15 of 17 targets so far, including early failures. 88 percent of 42 (I assume bad RV will not be visible until terminal phase, so all 42 need to be targets) is 36.9 - round down to 36.

That means 4 warheads leak through the initial phase. then Alaska gets involved, 12 missiles, fire 4, 80% = 1 left. Cali gets involved 8 missiles, fire 2. Dead RV.

China is neutralized for now.

(FYI they're are upgrading to the DF-31 and another missile, all of which will be MIRV'd, and have a full global range - still the total number of RVs will be less than 160 - and we carry enough SM3 in 3 Aegis to deliver 1 shot at each).

So yeah, the Chinese are pissed. We just pulled their fangs for a while.
Posted by: Mike 2008-02-22
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=228968