Nuking Venus Options

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

I'm not saying their bombs were heavier or less efficient than U.S. ones. AFAIK, they were trying to catch up to the Americans in respect of the "true" H-bomb - they lagged for a while, the Sloika was not a true H-bomb, it could not have been scaled up to much greater yields. The Americans did demonstrate the awesome firepower of the staged radiation implosion in an experimental device ("Mike" - M for Megaton) back in 1952, while the Soviets were still struggling with the Sloika, almost a year later. It wasn't until november 1955 that they tested their first "true" H-bomb, a time when the U.S. already demostrated the ability to weaponize "emergency capability", dry fusion fuel bombs. Since then, the two powers were equally capable of advancing their design -- the Soviets eventually went on to create the Tsar bomba, supposedly the cleanest (though some say this is just soviet propaganda and the actual 50 Mt test was "dirty" as hell) and definitely the most powerful bomb in existence, weighing only 30 tons.

As far as the R-7 goes, I can't say I'm an expert - that's just what I read. I'll trust you on this. Perhaps the design requirement for the R-7 was assuming the guidance will turn out to be imprecise, which later turned out to be false, but resulting in an overkill of a rocket? I'm also wondering about the fact the Soviets would trust their rockets receiving guidance from the ground (especially the ones carrying a warhead) in a time of paranoia and the possibility of sabotage via intruding radio signals. Recall Dr. Strangelove and the paranoia on false transmissions from the other side, which probably was a big concern at the time. I'm implying that while spacecraft-bearing R-7s would be ground controlled, the military probably wanted the warheads to have minds of their own so nothing could interfere with them.

You're right about the H-Bombs. I've read that the idea of using Lithium-6 was gleened from analyzing Soviet fallout from their early layer-cake bombs. Actually it was Arthur C. Clarke who wrote that, but I don't know if its true. Here's a nice website about the Soviet nuclear weapons development: The Soviet Bomb.

The boost phase of the rocket was only about three minutes. That occures well within Soviet territory, and the trajectory was ballistic after that. Radio guidance was carried out over a scrambled centimeter-band channel. The early Atlas missile was also radio controlled at first. Both sides developed better inertial guidance systems eventually.

The V-2 guidance system was quite crude. Chertok says they were surprised to find that the German rockets contained an exact copy of the Sperry gyroscopic torpedo guidance system -- one or two free gyros. That's very inaccurate, because of precession. In the R-7, the Soviets first build a set of uniaxial gyro platforms, with accelerometers. They also extended the stabilization system to control engine throttling, to keep acceleration uniform. Sometime before 1960, they replaced this with a triaxial stabilized platform. The Germans had begun to experiment with that concept too, but never put it in the V-2.

[ljk4-1]

Here are more details and useful links on the Soviet lunar nuke plans:

http://utenti.lycos.it/paoloulivi/nuke.html

The page also includes info and images of some of the nukes detonated
in Earth orbit.

And the similar USAF plans, which included the possibility of recovering
organic matter from the debris cloud of the nuclear explosion on the
lunar surface:

http://utenti.lycos.it/paoloulivi/tr5939v1.html