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rec.arts.sf.written
John Dierdorf
Jun 18, 1998, 2:00:00 AM

I worked on the Safeguard software from 1969 to 1975 and was at Kwaj briefly. A few Sprint tidbits, which may be affected by 25 years of memory loss:

a. It was supersonic before it was all the way out of the silo, so it 'cracked' like a huge rifle bullet. (Piston-assisted launch - think of the wadding of a shotgun shell.)

b. IIRC, second-stage ignition was 1.2 seconds after launch.

c. It WAS steered from the ground computer complex, sending the commands by modulating the MSR (missile-site-radar) phased-array radar beam that was electronically 'steered' to simultaneously track the positions of incoming RVs and outgoing missiles. Sometimes we got asked about possible jamming by the bad guys, and our stock answer was that if the bad guys could jam a 1-degree megawatt beam, they deserved to win.

d. We ALMOST could have made the thing shoot down RVs ballistically. We had to detune the tracking and guidance software because there was danger of actually hitting the ones we practiced on, and we didn't want (1) debris endangering Kwaj and (2) possible stuff falling into the open ocean where the bad guys might retrieve it. (Kwaj has a HUGE lagoon, and everything was designed to fall inside the lagoon, in territorial waters. There was always a Russian electronics ship sitting at the 3-mile limit, and of course another one off Vandenburg.)

e. The Sprint was incredibly maneuverable. IIRC it was steered by gimbaling the main engine nozzles, and it could do a godawful number of LATERAL G's before things started falling off.

e. The test system was at Kwaj, but the whole complex (including the PAR (peripheral acquisition radar) and Spartan long-range interceptor missiles) actually was installed and operated at Grand Forks ND AFB. (The Salt Treaty said both sides could finish ONE installation of the ABM systems they were working on. We ran GF for a year, I think, to get operational data and then shut 'er down.

f. The reasons for needing the Sprint were (1) with a FOBS (fractional orbit) rather than ballistic launch, the RVs would be already at the edge of the atmosphere when they came over the horizon, and (2) even with a ballistic launch where the PAR could detect 'em on the way up, they would deploy too many dummy warheads for the Spartans to get them all. Once they hit atmospheric re-entry, we could sort out which was which - anything which didn't slow down very fast was a real warhead by definition, since nobody would be stupid enough to build a dummy which massed as much as a real bomb! Unfortunately, by that time they were only a few tens of miles away.

f. I've got some still pictures I could scan if anybody's interested, including one of a dual Sprint launch to test the software's ability to track and hit incoming RVs from two different directions simultaneously. I've seen the movies too (a big WHOMP and a line of smoke out to the horizon, basically) and I'd LOVE to have one, if they exist.

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rec.arts.sf.written
Robert Sneddon
Jun 19, 1998, 2:00:00 AM

John Dierdorf <[email protected]> writes

[Lot of interesting stuff clipped]
>
>[...] they would deploy too many dummy warheads for the Spartan
>to get them all. Once they hit atmospheric re-entry, we could sort
>out which was which - anything which didn't slow down very fast was a
>real warhead by definition, since nobody would be stupid enough to
>build a dummy which massed as much as a real bomb!

Well, actually... a penetration aid is a dummy warhead carried on a MIRV bus designed to (a) look like the real thing (b) manoeuver like the real thing and (c) jam the hell out of any defensive systems trying to decide what is a real threat and what isn't, and confuse command and control systems (including people in the loop). I know somewhat of which I speak, having worked for a short time on Chevaline, and listened in on *interesting* conversations in the site canteen.

Imagine a small, dense probe with a radar reflector, a tenth the size of a bus warhead, designed to be ballistically as efficient as the full-sized warhead. It will kick back the same amount of radar energy, fall at the same speed, possibly "threaten" specific ground targets. If a 10-head bus was loaded with six live warheads and 40 penaids, your ground interceptor systems are going to have a hard time of it.

>f. I've got some still pictures I could scan if anybody's interested,
>including one of a dual Sprint launch to test the software's ability
>to track and hit incoming RVs from two different directions
>simultaneously.

These would be nice, assuming they are not classified.

> I've seen the movies too (a big WHOMP and a line of
>smoke out to the horizon, basically) and I'd LOVE to have one, if they
>exist.

Ditto.

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rec.arts.sf.written
John Dierdorf
Jun 22, 1998, 2:00:00 AM

On Sun, 21 Jun 1998 15:56:58, [email protected] (Matthias Warkus) wrote:

> John Dierdorf schrieb:
> > I worked on the Safeguard software from 1969 to 1975 […]
> What was it written it? What did it run on?

Almost all of it was written in assembly language -- at the time the largest programming project ever written -- maybe 4,000 man-years.

(It came in on time, on budget, and on spec, and there aren't very many programming projects of ANY size that did that! And as far as we knew it would have worked perfectly against the threat it was designed for, ten years before! <grin>)

The reason for ass'y was simply for speed. As I've told a lot of my programming projects, the design goal was, "If we can shave another micro-second out of an inner loop, then we can keep 652 balls in the air at one time instead of 651. Hey! Now we can save Pittsburgh!"

Many of the inner "loops" were NOT, in fact loops, but were written out linearly for speed. (ANY tradeoff of memory for speed was legitimate - I can remember design-change meetings where the proposal was to save a millisecond.)

It ran on a multi-CPU mainframe "farm" custom-built by Univac. Six or eight CPUs, as I recall, with task dispatching as required. Note that SMP systems weren't exactly common in the late 60's, let alone fault-tolerant ones. We used to show off when the generals came through by asking them to disconnect any data cable or pull any power plug out of the wall, and the software would reconfigure on the fly for the loss of a CPU, memory unit, console, or whatever!!! For transient errors, it could recover from an error interrupt ANYWHERE without a problem - and that included the first-level interrupt routines themselves! IIRC, we could recover from a trap in over 99% of the SECOND-LEVEL interrupt-handler code!

> I'd like all the info I can get! Can you mail me the pictures? (heavily
> compressed JPEG; if possible). And - can I put your information and the
> information of all the others as wells as the pictures and some credits lines
> in my Web page and possibly in the Safeguard FAQ?

I have the dual-sprint launch picture scanned and available at either 1700x2700 (about 500K) or 500x800 (about 70K). Send me an email at the address below and I'll send one along, along with a description of what you're seeing. (You can see the MSR, etc. in the picture.) It's public domain; in fact I have copy negatives of several pictures given to me by the PR office. I'm still hunting for my other prints; when I find 'em I'll scan and maybe set up a web page.

Feel free to use anything I've said, realizing that there's somewhat more likelihood of error in my comments on the missile hardware, since I was on the software side.

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rec.arts.sf.written
Lance
Jun 26, 1998, 2:00:00 AM

My grandfather, who raised me, worked on the Safeguard project in North Dakota as a Corps of Engineers rep. I got a tour of the main radar facility and was astounded at the computers there. This was in '75 I think. There were bnaks of tape drives, huge hard disk drives and CRT's along with the massive CPU's. It is all stil there, in mothballs, gathering dust. The buiilding had 12 foot thick walls, a fifteen foot thick roof and was four or five stories into the prairie. Not only that, it had the largest diesel engines designed to that point for generation of power. It was quite a place... then Carter shut ir down. I too saw a film of a Spint... it moved so fast it looked like the line of smoke was just THERE, you could not see the missile go at all.

Lance

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rec.arts.sf.written
John Dierdorf
Jun 28, 1998, 2:00:00 AM

On Sat, 27 Jun 1998 16:11:35, Paul Dietz <[email protected]>
wrote:
> Kristopher/EOS wrote:

>> > > Carter did the right thing, IMO; the system, however technically
> > > sexy, didn't make much sense strategically.

> > So what? Just exploring the technology and pushing the envelope
> > should have been worth the money. Carter was a short-sighted little
> > twit when he was in office.

> Regardless of whether one thinks that developing the system was
> worthwhile, do note that the system was shut down *after* it became
> operational, when all the envelope-pushing and technology-exploring
> had already been done and paid for.

Amen. Safequard had originally been budgeted for three sites – Grand Forks, Holloman in Missouri, and someplace in Montana, IIRC. At the time, the Soviets were also working on an ICBM system, and the original SALT treaty stipulated that each side could finish development of what they were working on (i.e., "push their own envelope and explore their own technology") but only deploy ONE operational site. The Soviets elected to finish a defensive ring around Moscow and we finished Grand Forks. Once operational in the mid-70s, BOTH we and the Soviets ran our systems long enough to be satisfied with the info collected -- mostly training and maintenance data -- and then shut down.

Repeat: There was NO valid reason to keep Grand Forks operational once it had been on-line long enough to prove stable; all the computer R&D had long since been done in New Jersey (Whippany, Morris Plains, Madison) and tested at Kwajalein. (The missiles and radars, while interesting, were straightforward. The computer hardware and software was what "pushed the envelope." Note that the programming team was dispersed in early '75, so no new features were going to be added no matter how long they operated Grand Forks before pulling the plug.)

Are you calling the members of the US Senate "twits" for approving the SALT treaty? Or the entire Congress for deleting funds for Grand Forks from the '77 or '78 budget?

And in ANY case, the military decision to run for one year had already been made when I left the project in '75, which means it was approved by the Nixon/Ford administration, not Carter.