Foreign Weaponry That Makes Leon Panetta Sad, Pt. 2

This article is a follow-up to “Three Flops That Make Leon Panetta Sad.”

Poor Leon. Photo Credit: Reuters

I talked a fair bit last week about the various costly mistakes the U.S. military has made in the context of the upcoming sequestration. A survey conducted by the Program for Public Consultation, the Stimson Center and the Center for Public Integrity discovered that a majority of Americans approved of defense cuts, including majorities in both red and blue states. Despite public approval of cutting defense, both parties are sticking to their battle cry: A cut to defense means economic downturn and weaker security.

Leon Panetta, it seems, always gets brought in at the roughest of times. Here he is — the Defense Security in a time of austerity, stuck trying to wearily convince Congress to take time out of their schedule of not passing any laws while trying to do the rest of his job.

Today, we’re going to list military inventions Leon Panetta would loathe due to both their lack of efficacy, general ridiculousness, and, of course, cost — not to mention how embarrassing it would be to justify these purchases.

Antonov A-40: a Flying Tank with No Armor

The year is 1942.  The Russians have been facing difficulties with air dropping T-27 tankettes on to the ground or into the water — a brilliant idea if executed properly, perhaps, but various tests discovered dropping the crew separate from the tank took much more time than desirable.  Something needs to be done, and the A-Team isn’t around yet for Liam Neeson to demonstrate how to slow down a tank with a cannon.

Along comes Oleg Antonov, a glider guru and graduate from the Kalinin Polytechnical Institute in Leningrad, with a wonderful idea: convert a T-60 tank into a glider, strip it of its armaments, ammunition and headlights as well as most of the fuel, and attach it to either a Tupolev TB-3 or Petlyakov Pe-8.  Now, if a tank without armaments, ammunition, and headlights doesn’t seem useless already, the experiment takes yet another nosedive — one that cannot be stopped by an Irishman and a cannon: The T-60’s drag nearly caused the bomber it was strapped to to crash.  After the tank is dropped, the story becomes fantastically unexciting as the experimental pilot, Sergei Anokhin, drops the wings and drives the tank back to base.

What the Antonov A-40 test was missing was Bradley Cooper screaming maniacally while firing a cannon.  Laws of physics aside, it’s a brilliant idea and you know it.

Why Leon Panetta is sad: Well, for one, the tank itself would have been fairly useless.  Yes, the enemy probably would have stared bug-eyed at this monstrosity falling from the air, but they could blow this unarmored tank up with ease.  Granted, our planes are now faster and stronger — and therefore probably could drag a larger tank with wings around — but that’s not the point.  Thankfully, the Russians figured out this was a waste of money and scrapped the project, but, as we have seen, the U.S. is sometimes not so great at figuring out what does and does not constitute a gigantic waste of funds. 

Dead Hand or Система «Периметр»: the Nuclear Deterrence Device That No One Knew About

Dr. Strangelove explains the mechanisms behind the Doomsday Machine.  Using dark comedies to explain nuclear theory is  the best way to go, right?

I really don’t mean to keep picking on Russia here.  Siberian mosquitoes are awful, but it’s a lovely country.  So, really, it’s not intentional, but it just so happens that some of the creepier — as well as the more amusing — weaponry of the 20th and 21st century happened to come from there.

“Dead Hand” or the “Perimeter” is an example of a “fail-deadly” mechanism (as opposed to “fail-safe” mechanisms), meaning it is a device that promotes deterrence through guarenteeing an overwhelming response, and arguably the most interesting device on this list.  “Dr. Strangelove: or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (1964) explains the theory behind a doomsday machine fairly succinctly:

Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy… the FEAR to attack. And so, because of the automated and irrevocable decision-making process which rules out human meddling, the Doomsday machine is terrifying and simple to understand… and completely credible and convincing. 

In the case of “Dead Hand,” the machine guaranteed retaliation, even if the entire Russian leadership was wiped out in a nuclear attack.  Initially, the doomsday machine was planned exactly as it is typically defined: It was to be a fully automatic system that would allow retaliation without any human action at all.  Naturally, someone along the line thought this was a pretty bad idea.

What could theoretically happen if Khruschev got too drunk and bumped into things if Dead Hand lacked a human firewall.

“Dead Hand,” therefore, required some sort of a human firewall.  If a switch was flipped and the sensors showed the country under attack and the line to the General Staff was dead, the burden was dumped on whoever lay deep inside an underground bunker.  These men had “to decide whether to launch very small command rockets that would take off, fly across the huge vast territory of the Soviet Union and launch all their remaining missiles.”  The nature of these three men and the decision-making process they face is still the subject of debate, but there is no question that the system was built.  But, much unlike a system that was meant to both push for and against mutually assured destruction (MAD), “Dead Hand” was kept secret, and its usefulness as a strategy of deterrence was completely lost.  As Dr. Strangelove pointed out earlier: Deterrence ought to produce fear in the mind of the enemy, but doing so is impossible if the enemy cannot know what it’s up against.

But, as Wired points out, maybe it wasn’t meant to deter the Americans.  To quote:  “According to both Yarynich and Zheleznyakov, Perimeter was never meant as a traditional doomsday machine. The Soviets had taken game theory one step further than Kubrick, Szilard, and everyone else: They built a system to deter themselves.”  Whatever the reasoning behind the device, the fact that it still exists — or even came into existence — is terrifying.

Why Leon Panetta is sad: Two reasons. First, who invents a device meant to deter nuclear war, and then fails to alert the enemy?  If it was truly meant to deter the Soviets from blowing us up, then that’s pretty creepy.  Second, call it years of Catholic guilt or a ever-building anxiety of what will happen if cutbacks cause us to let our guard down, but Leon is not pleased. Unless you’re a sociopath or suicidal, there’s no reason why the continued existence of “Dead Hand” would make you happy.  Unlike some of the other examples in this article, it’s not the stupidity or monetary cost of doomsday systems that causes Leon to frown; rather, it’s the sheer anxiety of will Putin throw a bear across the room and accidentally hit the switch while a technical malfunction in the bunker cause these three men to erradiate the whole United States and forcing us all into vaults for years until our father’s actions (again played by Liam Neeson) forces us to escape that keeps Leon frowning and the run-on sentences flowing.

Nazi Sun Gun: Dumb Things with Mirrors

Years before the Russians released their nuclear deterrent that they failed to tell anybody about, the Nazis were off playing with mirrors.  Remember when you used to try and set leaves on fire with a mirror when you were a kid?  Or ants?  Or grass?

Look at them. They’re smiling. They think this is funny. Maybe if violent video games hadn’t been invented this never would have happened. Photo Credit: All about Bugs! Leslie Harrington

Well, apparently you had similar ideas to a hoard of crazed scientists working for a maniacal totalitarian government.  It’s okay; you at least grew out of it (we hope), but these fellows failed to realize that building a death ray using the power of the sun and 1940s technology was about as far-fetched as Winston Churchill giving up liquor and cigars.

Hermann Oberth, an Austro-Hungarian born German engineer, drew up plans to build a space station with a 100 meter wide concave mirror so as to reflect light onto a particular point of the early.  Naturally, some Nazi scientists had to pick up on this, and attempted to build a reflector that was 3.5 square miles and 5,100 miles above the Earth.  Their thinking?  Point the contraption at a city and boil everyone alive.  Thankfully, they didn’t quite have the technology, but when the scientists were discovered by the Allies, they claimed — had they been left to their own devices — that the “sun gun” would’ve been possible anywhere between 50-100 years in the future.

We hope Islam Karimov hasn’t come up with this yet. Source: Google Images

Why Leon Panetta is sad: The U.S. is by no means the pinnacle of efficiency when it comes to using weapons that come at a reasonable cost.  Yet somehow an F35 of F22 seem innocuous compared to a gigantic space mirror of doom.  In fact, if you wanted to make a rock-solid case of the use of drones on counterterrorist action, make mention of the fact that you could have instead tried using a sun gun on Osama bin Laden.  You might get mentioned in the New York Times’ “A Moral Case for Big Ol’ Space Mirrors of Doom.”

Project Habbakuk: Winston Churchill’s Island of Ice

Speaking of Winston Churchill not drinking or smoking anymore…

Project Habbakuk was a product — if you can even call it that, seeing as it was cancelled before the full carrier was built — of one Geoffrey Pyke, one of those rare individuals who managed to get a job by showing up looking like the lead singer of a grunge band and saying “he is a man who thinks.”  His new boss, Lord Mountbatten (no joke), soon discovered that this is what Geoffrey Pyke was thinking about:

Pyke envisioned ships as vast and solid as icebergs. You could make the sides of your boat tens of feet thick, hundreds if you felt like it, and bullets or torpedoes would bounce away or knock off pathetically ineffectual chunks. And when a torpedo did knock a chunk away—so? You were floating in a sea of raw repair material. Given how long it took pykrete to melt, and the minimal onboard refrigeration equipment needed to stay frozen and afloat, it would be months or years before the boats exhausted their usefulness. In battle, the ice ships could put their onboard refrigeration systems to good use by spraying super-cooled water at enemy ships, icing their hatches shut, clogging their guns, and freezing hapless sailors to death.

Pykrete freighters could carry eight entire Liberty class freighters as cargo, but Pyke’s dream was not to use them as cargo ships but as aircraft carriers. One of the great disadvantages of aircraft carriers had always been that their short landing surfaces and cramped storage favored small planes with foldable wings and light armor. The most desirable fighters, like Spitfires, were not an easy fit for carriers, an­d bombers were altogether out of the question. Pyke’s logical conclusion was to build a behemoth: the H.M.S Habbakuk, he called it. Constructed from 40-foot blocks of ice, his Habbakuk would be 2,000 feet long, 300 feet wide, with walls 40 feet thick. Its interior would easily accommodate 200 Spitfires. The largest ship then afloat was the H.M.S Queen Mary, which weighed in at 86,000 tons. The Habbakuk would weigh 2 million tons.

In other words, Habbakuk would be floating monstrosity that could not only fight wars and hold a large quantity of airplanes — it could take down the Titanic several times as well.

Alternatively, we could just put the movie “Titanic” to give you an idea of Habbakuk’s power. Photo Credit: Paramount

The Brits were running out of metal, and, after Churchill gave his blessing, they headed up to Canada to begin work on a prototype. Mountbatten famously found this process strangely enjoyable — he, after all, was put in charge with testing the pykrete by firing shot guns off at the prototype. And unlike some of the aforementioned projects, the pykrete did what it was supposed to: It didn’t shatter, and the bullets instead ricocheted off and went on their way.

Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on your point of view/defense budget — the project died off. Selling the idea to the Americans didn’t work — they had their own tricks up their sleeves, and none of them required a massive iceberg-gone-aircraft carrier.

Why Leon Panetta is sad: We don’t have H.M.S. Habbakuk. After all, it would certainly be supremely useful in Afghanistan. And compared to the price tag on one F-35, this massive floating island/iceberg seemed downright cheap.