Question

6. What are some important impacts of the gunpowder revolution?  Of the nuclear revolution?  

Answer 1

The introduction of gunpowder to warfare represented the beginning of the large-scale exploitation of chemical energy by human societies. In two centuries,gunpowder altered the battlefield beyond recognition as new troop types, tactics, and organisation hierarchies were introduced.As firearms had been replacing the old tactics of shock (when the infantry peak prevailed on the battlefield, and the pikemen were the main force), a firing battle took place, and the enemy could be remotely struck with massive fire of musketeers and artillery. Improvements in weapons and tactics led to the fact that any attempt to solve the outcome of a war or a battle by simply increasing the number of soldiers without proper training, weapons, etc., was doomed to failure. Qualitative superiority ultimately gave victory over any number of enemies, if they conceded to their opponents in the technique, organization and ability to use these advantages. No courage, fortitude, and individual ability to fight could ultimately give victory. The victory came to someone who was better armed, organized, disciplined and had better tactics.

The advent of nuclear weapons with their tremendous increase in destructive force decisively shifted the balance between offensive and defensive forces. This change has profound implications in judging the wisdom of any plans to deploy defenses against ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads.

The history of warfare is replete with competition between offense and defense, from the sword and the shield to the struggle between assault troops and fortifications. World War II provides lessons on the relative effectiveness of offense and defense. The French attempted to erect an impenetrable defense in the form of the Maginot Line against Germany, only to have Adolf Hitler’s mobile armored forces circumvent the defenses by taking a more northerly route. An innovative offense defeated a static defense. In the Battle of Britain, Hitler’s Luftwaffe carried out repeated massive attacks against Britain. However, each mission suffered losses on the order of 10 percent, inflicted by the Royal Air Force, which was assisted by radar, a newly introduced technology, and cryptography, which together yielded warning of such attacks. As a consequence, the attacking forces were reduced by a third for each 10 sorties flown, a level of attrition that proved unacceptable. History contains many such examples of both successes and failures of defenses against conventional attacks.

Nuclear weapons, however, profoundly changed the relationship between offense and defense because they increased the explosive power of a payload of a given weight and size by a factor of one million—a very profound change indeed. The demands on the performance and reliability of defenses against an attack by even a single missile carrying a nuclear weapon must therefore be extremely high for the defense to be considered effective. When the Germans attacked Britain during World War II with primitive ballistic missiles, none were intercepted, but the damage was limited because the missiles carried conventional explosives. Had they carried nuclear warheads, a single missile would have devastated London. Defense against ballistic missiles is therefore a totally different problem depending on whether such missiles carry conventional or nuclear payloads.

Against this background, national missile defense has re-entered the national and international political agenda. The Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, signed in 1972, explicitly forbids deployments of defenses that protect the entire territory of signatory nations against strategic ballistic missiles. The basis of this treaty was the mutual recognition during the Cold War that the United States and the Soviet Union had attained a strategic balance based on deterrence: neither side could launch a nuclear attack against the other without incurring the risk of a retaliatory strike that would produce unacceptable damage. To appreciate the extent of the potential destruction, it should be remembered that the combined yield of the two nuclear weapons that killed 250,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki would equal only about one-tenth the yield of a single nuclear weapon in today’s arsenal.

At the height of the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union deployed more than 60,000 nuclear weapons in aggregate. Today the number of nuclear weapons in the world has shrunk by about one-half, with the overwhelming majority in the hands of Russia and the United States. At the same time, the so-called rogue states still have no nuclear weapons, although North Korea may have enough plutonium for one or two.

Nuclear weapons can be delivered to the U.S. homeland in many ways, of which the intercontinental ballistic missile is only one and the one requiring the most technological prowess. Nuclear weapons can be dropped from airplanes of almost any size, delivered by cruise missiles traveling in the earth’s atmosphere, detonated on ships in US harbors, or even smuggled across land borders. The United States has no significant homeland air defense, and its borders are notoriously porous, as witnessed by the largely ineffective “war on drugs.” Thus, a ballistic missile defense, even if it succeeded, would address only one avenue for the delivery of nuclear weapons. Moreover, rogue states are unlikely to adopt long-range missiles as their choice for nuclear weapons delivery because of cost and because the origin of the missiles is unambiguously traceable.

This was the situation during the Cold War, and this is the situation that remains today. The argument that deployment of a national missile defense could decrease US security is not a “relic of the Cold War” and does not reflect “Cold War thinking.” The United States’ vulnerability to delivery of nuclear explosives remains a fact that is difficult, if not impossible, to remedy by technical measures as long as nuclear weapons remain in the arsenals of the world.

The debate over missile defenses is complicated by the fact that ballistic missiles vary in range and can be used to attack military facilities and troop concentrations with conventional warheads. Theater missile defense (TMD), intended to defend smaller areas against short- to medium-range missile attacks, could be useful in defending US troops or military facilities against conventional attacks, whose impact could be significantly blunted by even partially effective defenses. This situation contrasts sharply with the use of defenses against nuclear warheads, where leakage of even a single nuclear warhead would have disastrous effects.

The ABM Treaty does not deal with TMD because the treaty’s intention is to preserve strategic stability, and it is expected that TMD would be used chiefly in battlefield situations against missiles armed with conventional warheads. (The situation is complicated by the fact that in the case of defense of small nations, such as Taiwan, Israel, or even Japan, TMD could be perceived as providing a defense for the entire territory.) In 1997 the United States and Russia negotiated a demarcation agreement that defined the boundary between permitted and forbidden anti-missile deployments as measured by the character of the interceptor and the speed of the target to be intercepted. The demarcation agreement, however, has not as yet been formally submitted to the Senate for ratification, and it remains mired in congressional politics around the future of the ABM Treaty.Clearly, the demands on the performance of missile defenses against nuclear weapons are extremely high. The question therefore becomes, do we have the technology needed to achieve this level of effectiveness? The tablebelow illustrates the alternative means by which interceptors can destroy ballistic missiles. Each one of these approaches has its strengths and weaknesses. The table is divided into columns that delineate when the intercept of the incoming ICBM is to occur: during the boost phase, the time during which the missile booster is still burning; in midcourse, when the attacking missile is traveling outside the atmosphere; and after re-entry, once the offensive missile is approaching its target within the atmosphere.

In addition to the different locations of intercept, missile defenses can employ a variety of technologies. The interceptor can be guided by sensors employing radar or using infrared detectors registering thermal emissions from the target warheads. Sensors can be based on land, placed on aircraft, or deployed on orbiting satellites. The interceptor can destroy the incoming ICBM in a number of ways: by direct impact (hit-to-kill), by fragmentation of an explosive warhead, or through a nuclear detonation.