great concept, but, eight twenty foot long one foot diameter tungsten rods would weigh, what... it'd take a Saturn V to lift them
Posted on 09/13/2017 9:04:35 AM PDT by Oldpuppymax
Was the top secret space coast launch late this past week really carrying components of "Rods from God," the nickname of a doomsday weapon known as "Project Thor" that can rain hell on North Korea in an attack traveling at Mach Ten? In an exclusive feature, the National ENQUIRER describes America's possible deployment of satellite arsenals of tungsten, non-nuclear rods the size of telephone poles, "the equivalent of a meteor crashing into the Earth's crust." The tabloid explains that deployment of this weaponry by the US military awaits only the President's "GO" order. "Unlike a nuclear weapon, the Rods from God leave no radioactive cloud." Another advantage of this unusual weapon system is that because it can be launched very rapidly, "North Korea will have no warning and no time to react!"
Army veteran and Boeing researcher, Jerry Pournelle, envisioned just such a weapon way back in the 1950's, but it didn't show up until 2003 in a US Air Force report. Allegedly, one rod is "20-foot-long, one-foot-in-diameter." Contained in a series of eight in two satellites, each rod has a "destructive yield of about 11 1/2 tons of TNT. This highly destructive weapon is being seen as preferable to a nuclear solution to North Korea's provocations toward the USA because no nuclear fallout would decimate the North Korean population. When the launch took place on Florida's east coast at Cape Canaveral, news anchors merely described it as being "top secret."
According to Wikipedia, the effectiveness of "Rods from God," lies in the notion of kinetic bombardment or "kinetic orbital strike." The destructive force “…comes from the kinetic energy of the projectile impacting at very high velocities." This military weaponry concept originated during the USA's Cold War period when the citizenry was still recovering from WWII's nuclear attacks that destroyed Japan and left the threat of nuclear fallout not only on the war victims but on future Japanese. Because kinetic energy fuels the inert tungsten rods, the kinetic bombardment is not prohibited by the Outer Space Treaty that prevents the use of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
The Lazy Dog bomb, "a steel projectile shaped like a conventional bomb" was emptied out of aircraft onto enemy troops during the Vietnam War. It had the same effect as the firing of a machine gun vertically.
What are the hey using to haul 160,000 pounds up to LEO?
Highly unlikely. We'd still have to lift the materials up there for them to be printed. Might as well just lift the finished product.
I’ve read of a similar method to take out a nuclear reactor.
The rod punches a hole in the reactor containment dome and continues into the reactor, before burying itself below the reactor bed. The reactor loses coolant and melts down, concealing the rod, if not destroying it. A little puff of radioactive dust pops out of the dome hole, and that’s it.
You want to drop Oldsmobiles on him from space?
Cool!
Thanks for the info.
great concept, but, eight twenty foot long one foot diameter tungsten rods would weigh, what... it'd take a Saturn V to lift them
I read an article a few months back saying that delivering heavy tungsten rods to orbit is really really cost prohibitive. I would guess the govt wouldn’t be able to keep this weapon under wraps if we had it.
It is a great concept though. No nuclear fallout and the enemy will have zero warning that is incoming. Just kaboom! Where did that come from?
The rods still have to be actively navigated to Earth; they do not freefall from the satellite. If they did, they would literally be worse than useless. So, still hackable.
They are practically unusable for any purpose except bunker busting.
At around 19,000 lb per rod, how many dollars’ worth of tungsten would we be donating to NK?
Mighty white of you to acknowlege what we need right now is NORK bunker-busting.
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