It happened during the cold warwhen Soviet engineers and military personnel developed a powerful project whose purpose was simple but disturbing: to create a last line of physical defense capable of destroying objects that fall from the sky. Now that “the hypersonic and the terminal maneuvers once again put traditional defense frameworks in check, that forgotten experiment reappears as an unexpected piece of the contemporary puzzle: not even an anti-ballistic missile no space shieldbut a brutally simple idea that could help respond to threats that no longer obey the old rules.
Origin and purpose. As we said, in the middle of the Cold War, the USSR explored an exceptional concept: an active defense system to protect intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos against terminally advanced enemy nuclear warheads.
under the name Mozyr (izdeliye 171), developed by KB Mashinostroyeniya With the direct supervision of Minister Ustinov and the participation of 250 companies from 22 ministries, the objective was to create a kind of “shotgun-type” kinetic shield capable of shooting down American warheads that fell on the Soviet missile fields, compensating for the intrinsic vulnerability of the fixed silos within the nuclear triad.
Technical architecture and mechanism. In essence, Mozyr consisted of a multi-gun battery (with sources varying between 80 and several hundred tubes) that fired rods of tungsten or high-strength steel to form a dense cloud oriented to the approach vector of the enemy warhead.
The system integrated detection, guidance and control of own fire, calculating density and geometry of the salvo of projectiles according to threat, operating automatically. According to the documentsthe defeat of the target was achieved by kinetic closure at about 6 km/s in the lower atmosphere, a sufficient condition, according to Soviet engineers, to prevent the initiation of a nuclear detonation.
Diagram in Russian showing the basic principle of operation of the Mozyr system. It also shows how key components of the system, including projectile launchers, were projected under rotating armored domes
Tests in Kamchatka. Although it was not deployed operationally, it was built and tested. Between 1985 and 1988, tests were carried out in Kura (Kamchatka Peninsula), with a simulated silo and a remote command post. Demilitarized ICBMs were used SS-18 Mod 4 as targets from Plesetsk or Baikonur.
Many of the testimonies describe night events in which the arrival of the reentry vehicle lit up the sky before fragmenting after the impact of the “swarm” of projectiles, verifying the interception. The radar integrated in the tests was the 5N65 (Flat Twin) of the failed system ABM 5K17. In 1991, state tests ended after funding was cut after the failed coup and the Soviet collapse, not because of technical infeasibility.
Fairly basic diagrams showing parts of the 5N65 phased array radar from a CIA document
Legal compatibility. It was one of the keys to the project and the sole idea of implementing it. They counted TWZ analysts that Russian sources claimed that Mozyr did not contravene he ABM Treaty of 1972since it prohibited widely deployed systems, but allowed one ABM site per country, although the interpretation is debatable.
In parallel, the United States evaluated a twin concept (Swarmjet) to protect silos from MX/Peacekeeper with thousands of unguided rockets, but it never went into hardware. After 2002, with death of the ABM Treaty, the legal straitjacket ceased to exist, which reopens the strategic relevance of low-cost solutions.
Strategic relevance compared to MIRV. Mozyr would have had to deal even then with MIRV (like the SS-18 Mod 5 with ten RVs) multiplying targets and risk of saturation. Since then, the challenge is older: modern tactics penetration aidsdecoys, fake object armies, and hypersonic glider vehicles without terminal propulsion that maneuver and degrade discrimination.
A silo APS today would face more density, more ambiguity and greater terminal kinematics. Even so, a “cheap kinetic wall” poses a different strategic return than expensive and scarce exoatmospheric interceptors.
Nuclear context. The United States changes its strength Minuteman III for him LGM-35A Sentinelcontemplates returning to MIRV, and maintains in parallel the SLBM Trident D5 in Ohio and future Columbia. China expands silos and MIRV. Russia maintains SS-18 Mod 6 and UR-100N with Avangard. In echoes of 2012, there were allusions to reactivate a system analogous to Mozyr.
What does it mean? That, in an environment where the volume of terminal threats skyrockets, and ABM munition is expensive, finite and attackable, that last-layer kinetic APS would be, if discrimination and synchronization are mastered, a multiplier of silo survival and, therefore, of the credibility of “second-strike” deterrence.
Balance. If you also want, the Mozyr program tested in metal and fire a principle that today he regains weight: a cheap, local active silo defense, with simple physics and brutal fire density, which does not prevent the enemy’s arrival, but can deny his finish at the decisive point.
On a planet that reenters the logic of nuclear parity and multiplication of systems that until recently seemed a preserve of science fictionthe Soviet notion (if reengineer for the 21st century) once again sounds less like a relic and more like a dress rehearsal for a plausible future.
Image | MichaelINC
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