Russia and the United States are the most heavily armed of the nine nuclear powers....But only the U.S. has comprehensive surveillance of the globe, provided by three active geosynchronous satellites, with two in reserve, whose infrared receptors can spot missile plumes. That data is supplemented by radar, which gives the U.S. the capacity to double-check that a launch has actually occurred.
Specialists call this verification by both satellite and radar “dual phenomenology.” The Russians don’t have it, at least not reliably. They lack adequate space-based monitoring to supplement their radar.
What they have is a “terrible and dangerous technology shortfall,” according to Theodore Postol, a professor of science, technology, and national security policy at MIT and a former scientific adviser to the chief of naval operations.
He believes that Russian satellites are handicapped by their inability to look straight down and distinguish the infrared signature of a missile launch against the Earth’s terrain. “Imagine that you took a photograph of a complex and rocky area of ground,” he explained in an email to me. To pick out an ant, you’d need to find it in “some very small pixel in a vast array of pixels.” In the infrared part of the spectrum, you need multiple high-quality sensors, each with a small enough field of view to discriminate between the background and a rocket plume and to avoid a false detection from reflected sunlight or extraneous interference.
American satellites look down with sophisticated sensors and orbit in fixed positions relative to the Earth’s surface. By contrast, Postol says, Russian satellites have to look sideways, along a line that forms a tangent over American ICBM missile fields in Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota. Nine Russian satellites in elliptical orbits take turns observing small areas, looking horizontally for missiles that rise above the horizon to spot their plumes against the dark background of space.
The slanted perspective is less reliable, Postol said. First, it covers only a minuscule segment of North America. Second, it won’t see missiles until they reach higher altitudes, where the rocket plumes are dimmer and harder to define. Third, “luminosity from atmospheric phenomena causes background effects that can lead to false detections.” The mirage effect can be seen in a recent image from a newer Russian satellite. Finally, he said, if a missile is not launched precisely where the satellite’s tangent of sight meets the Earth’s surface, the rocket might never rise above the horizon.
That might seem to give the U.S. an advantage of a surprise attack. But if Russian radar picked up a missile later, the time before impact would shrink dangerously—to just over 10 minutes from a U.S. submarine near Norway, about 17 minutes from Wyoming—with little chance to double-check that the launch is authentic. Without global coverage, Russian satellites cannot see submarine launches carrying ballistic missiles with multiple warheads until the missiles enter Russian radar. Knowing their system’s limitations, Moscow might strike quickly, even letting lower officials make the call....
Podvig and Postol disagree on the state of satellite technology. Podvig told me in several email exchanges that the newer Tundra satellites “appear” to have look-down capability. However, he stopped well short of backing up his assertion with hard information, much of which is probably classified and inaccessible.
For his part, Postol cited circumstantial evidence of shortfalls. “If the new Tundra satellites were able to look down at the Earth,” he said, “only two or three of such satellites would be needed.” The Russians have nine, and they orbit through staggered observation slots lasting two and a half hours each, consistent with less reliable tangential lines of observation.
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