How do ICBM early warning systems differentiate between a real threat and a launch of a normal rocket intended to go to space?
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A few ways:
1) normal rockets launch from very specific locations. Those locations don’t launch ICBMs, so just where the launch originates gets you about 99% there. We observe these sites pretty regularly. Even nuclear missile subs are usually being tracked by an opposing attack sub, so even the ones that move are usually being observed. US/Soviet attack subs would camp outside the other party’s sub base and do a little cat and mouse when they depart. Not sure to what degree Russia is even participating in submarine activities any more.
2) The trajectory of an ICBM launch looks nothing like a regular rocket launch. They go into highly eccentric suborbital trajectories and generally not toward any normal orbits.
3) Everyone announces their regular launches, so everyone knows they’re coming, for exactly this reason.
IOW, it’s pretty obvious now.
A rocket launch in Cape Cod is normal
A rocket launch in the middle of nowhere South Dakota is not normal.
The people who track missiles are aware of this.
If it was launched from Cape Canaveral then it’s probably an orbital flight.
If it was launched from a silo in the middle of a field in idaho then it’s probs a ICBM
ICBMs have the property of being hard to move and easy to see. In fact, US ICBM silos in active use are documented on Wikipedia. It’s no stretch to imagine that other countries know that too, and vice versa.
Furthermore, civilian spaceports also tend not to move. This greatly simplifies the problem of differentiating a missile with a warhead from a rocket with a satellite.
Further, rocket launches come with a whole dog and pony show to ensure there’s no aircraft in the safety corridor surrounding the rocket’s flight path, including depending on the launch trajectory requesting permission from other countries to send the rocket through their airspace. Even secret military rocket launches are handled like this, they’re just not as well televised nor is there much (if any) information about the payload.
ICBMs have none of this preparation. They are designed to get launched within about a minute of verifying that they’re actually supposed to. They just appear out of a field in North Dakota in this hypothetical circumstance.
One exception to this is the launch silo at Vandenberg. Occasionally they’ll shoot off a real missile with dummy warheads, for testing. This involves similar preparations to a civilian rocket launch as well as the same sort of approval process.
They don’t and can’t in the initial (boost phase) of the launch. Certain ICBM’s will dump stages at certain times typically much earlier than commercial orbital rockets will, but this isn’t proof positive. ICBM’S also typically have a faster acceleration profile but this also isn’t diagnostic.
ICBM’s will shut down their rockets a few minutes before orbital launch rockets do.
Another clue is that there aren’t that many launch sites on earth which are used for commercial or scientific rocket launches. So you can automatically assign low risk status to launches from certain areas. There are a lot of treaties and agreements against using commercial launch areas for ICBM’s.
The biggest fail safe is certain national launch control organizations, which laws in most countries will require you to file a flight plan and launch information ahead of time before launching above, say, 2000m so . In the USA legally you’re required to get in touch with the FAA and NASA for example.
These organizations then share relavent information with other countries informing them of the launch plans so there are no surprises.
There was an infamous incident in Norway in 1995 where scientists launched a high altitude research rocket from the Norwegian coast over the island of Svalbard. Through some series of miscommunications the Russian military and particularly the Early warning radar command failed to be notified. This led them to declare high alert within about a mintute of the launch, because the rocket initially had sufficient similarity to a US Trident 2 SLBM. This caused the Russian nuclear Briefcase to be activated and given to then President Boris Yeltsin. After some 8 minutes of the 10 minute alloted decision time it was determined that the rocket was headed northwest away from Russian territory and therefore was unlikely to be a threat. Yeltsin was informed of this and wisely decided to order a stand-down.
Normal launches originate from a very small number of well documented launch sites. Yes in theory you could launch an ICBM from Cape Canaveral… but a launch from Siberian would raise eye brows.
I feel like people are getting overly technical with this, the actual reason is because rockets going into space are PLANNED. Any country with detection capabilities already knows when a rocket is going into space.
It’s the unannounced ones we pay attention to.
Source: Military
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