A Cold War Satellite Program Called Parcae Revolutionized Signals Intelligence
24 comments
·January 21, 2025JohnCClarke
sandworm101
Or, the sensors were on the surface and a sat was being used to collect and communicate what they were hearing. A few fixed listening stations, communicating only up to sats, would have had advantages.
perihelions
A few more comments of interest from yesterday,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42793564 ("A Spy Satellite You've Never Heard of Helped Win the Cold War (ieee.org)", 18 comments)
hindsightbias
What commercial bistatic radar sats can accomplish today:
https://www.militaryaerospace.com/communications/article/143...
actionfromafar
This sentence stuck out to me: "MAD, which so far had dissuaded either side from launching a nuclear strike, could tilt in the wrong direction"
The thing about M.A.D. is that there is no right direction on the tilt. An imbalance in either direction encourages all parties to strike first.
lupusreal
Except not actually, because even if nuclear power is imbalanced, nuclear war is still too dangerous for anybody who's not as crazy as General Ripper.
themaninthedark
MAD stands for Mutually Assured Destruction.
They type of imbalance that is being talked about removed the "Mutual". So total destruction of your opponent and minimal to no damage to your side.
This is why things like "decapitation strikes" where you destroy the leadership and prevent enemy launches were considered.
This is also why the U.S. has a nuclear trident: Land ICBM, Sub SLBM and Strategic bombers that are ready to take off the moment a launch is detected. To ensure that for any strike against the U.S. there would be retaliation.
What the imbalance or lack of mutual would lead to is either:
A. Stronger force strikes first in order to win the conflict.
B. Weaker force strikes first because they know that stronger force will strike to try and win.lupusreal
> "They type of imbalance that is being talked about removed the "Mutual"."
The type of imbalance I responded to was characterized as a "tilt". Overly simplistic models of MAD have a tendency to become completely divorced from reality. There was imbalance, real and perceived, in one direction or another, throughout the Cold War and right up to today, but so far nuclear war hasn't started despite what those simplistic models say. For one, those models overestimated the willingness of politicians on either side to commit mass murder simply because they have an opportunity. Secondly, they overestimate the tolerance for even the risk of just a single counter-value retaliatory strike managing to get through. The retaliation does not have to be total, the destruction not mutually balanced, for the threat of retaliation to still serve as effective deterrence.
dylan604
> Strategic bombers that are ready to take off the moment a launch is detected
At the height of the cold war, something like 1/3 of all SAC bombers were airborne at any time. They rotated a la shift changes to ensure there was no delay and minimized risk of not getting some off the ground. The fact there were not more Broken Arrow incidents is pretty amazing
scarecrowbob
I think your assertion here relies heavily on the unstated assumption that the folks running states are psychotics who would happily see the world burn.
If you assume that folks don't want to murder millions of other humans just on general principle (without giving evidence, I think this is true), then there is the position C:
"regardless of the balance of destructive power, people try to avoid mass murder and maintain relationships through politics".
I have two suspicions:
First, the folks running the US (given thier history of slavery and genocide) often do not see other groups of humans as "human", and thus would make the calculation you're making. SO I can totally see why you'd assume US leaders think that way.
I also suspect that a core tenant of US propaganda is to assert that every country on earth would enslave every human. And thus the US is just following its manifest destiny in attempting to do so, via economic, political, or military means.
Those are just suspicions.
However, I think looking at things such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, US incursions into Korea in the 50s, the actual treatment by the USSR/Stalin of Vietnam and other national movements, and the split between the USSR and China-- looking at those things, I've had a hard time buying the "international communist conspiracy", especially when put up against what the US actually did to destabilize places like Guatamala, Iran, Indonesia, Brazil, Vietnam, etc.
That is to say, I think the folks running the USSR and China during the so-called cold war were actually focused on trying to unfuckup the dumb things that they did in transitioning their agriculture- I just don't buy (looking at how these countries dealt with each other) that they had the same willingness to murder half the planet by burning them to a crisp.
jgrahamc
Some time in the late 1990s I was lying on the grass in my back garden in the Bay Area. It was a clear night and I was just watching the sky when three satellites flew over in formation. I don't know which satellites I saw but they were almost certainly part of a related program: https://www.satobs.org/noss.html
KineticLensman
Many years ago I saw the ISS overhead with a second smaller dot near it. This was the space shuttle (can't remember which mission) that had recently undocked and was still in the vicinity. Very pleasing!
m4rtink
Saw that as well once or twice. Still doable today with ISS and Dragon or other visiting spacecraft - they are just smaller and harder to spot. :)
echoangle
> NOSS satellites locate and track ships at sea by detecting their radio transmissions and analyzing them using the TDOA (time-difference-of-arrival) technique.
Very cool, basically inverted GPS.
sandworm101
Except they didn't. The sats were sensors that relayed data down. Systems on the ground did the calculations. I imagine there was another revolution when proper computers started being put in orbit to do the math locally, vastly reducing the needed bandwidth.
dingaling
"In a time of mutual assured destruction"
I do wish that myth would die. All nuclear players during the Cold War intended to "win" at nuclear war fighting; MAD was never a doctrine.
In fact MAD was popularised by McNamara to mock the concept!
danielvf
Here's an excerpt of McNamara's famous speech in San Francisco, 1967.
> The cornerstone of our strategic policy continues to be to deter nuclear attack upon the United States or its allies. We do this by maintaining a highly reliable ability to inflict unacceptable damage upon any single aggressor or combination of aggressors at any time during the course of a strategic nuclear exchange, even after absorbing a surprise first strike. This can be defined as our assured-destruction capability.
> Security depends upon assuming a worst plausible case, and having the ability to cope with it. In that eventuality we must be able to absorb the total weight of nuclear attack on our country -- on our retaliatory forces, on our command and control apparatus, on our industrial capacity, on our cities, and on our population -- and still be capable of damaging the aggressor to the point that his society would be simply no longer viable in twentieth-century terms. That is what deterrence of nuclear aggression means. It means the certainty of suicide to the aggressor, not merely to his military forces, but to his society as a whole.
https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/deterrence...
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McNamara used the term "assured destruction" over and over again it became a cornerstone of his policy. Later a civilian added an "M" to MAD, and the term caught on.
Here's an interview transcript from much later, in 1987:
INT: Much has been made during this period of the term 'MAD', Mutually Assured or..
RM: Yes..
INT: ......Destruction. Can you explain what was meant by that?
RM: It's not mad! (laugh) Mutual Assured Destruction is the foundation of deterrence.
RM: Today it's a derogative term , but those that denigrate it don't understand deterrence. If you want a stable nuclear world -- if that isn't an oxymoron -- , to rephrase it, to the degree one can achieve a stable nuclear world, it requires that each side be confident that it can deter the other.
lostlogin
Nuclear Folly, a book on the Cuban Missile Crisis by Serhii Plokhy makes and interesting point, the Nuclear Age came before the Information Age.
The consequences of this were very nearly catastrophic, as the speed at which communication occurred was just so slow, with intel and news coming in so very very slowly. Discussions were being made in the dark and were outdated or based on outdated incorrect assumption.
I think there was considerably more luck than we’d like in the ‘system’ we engineered.
Blackman[1] is a 1986 textbook that includes an example of a naval tracking application with observations every 90 minutes. It was obvious to me that the observations were satellite based and TIL they must have come from this system.
It's an excellent book. Used it heavily during my PhD.
[1] https://uk.artechhouse.com/Multiple-Target-Tracking-with-Rad...