David Bennett

The Pull-Up Method For Extending Missile Range

The Korea Herald reported on Apr 28, 2021 that the South Korean Defense Minister had commented on a recent test flight of North Korean missiles.

He was reported to have said that the missile flew 600 km by the “pull-up” method. That was a revision of an earlier statement that the missile flew 450km. So naturally, I wanted to know what this method is.

It turns out it is a way of using the atmosphere and the region above the atmosphere. It is rather like skimming a stone across the water on a lake.

In a normal flight, a missile follows a parabolic trajectory. That’s much as would happen if you were to throw a ball into the air to reach its target.

The pull-up or boost-glide method extends the range by starting with a normal parabolic arc. That sends the missile above the atmosphere on the initial thrust, which then re-enter the atmosphere in the normal way.

The boost-glide comes in when the missile pulls up by altering its wing angle. That aims it back up above the atmosphere. Above the atmosphere there is less drag, so the missile is catapulted forward faster and further on a second arc.

According to Wikipedia, the method dates from 1941 when German engineers hoped to attack America with long-range missiles.

The thing is that time spent in the atmosphere heats up missiles because of the friction drag. The hope therefore was to allow missiles to cool off above the atmosphere between time spent in the atmosphere.

The German idea didn’t come to anything. That was because missiles of the period heated up too much between skips and wouldn’t survive the trip. The Germans revived the idea later in the war, but it never came to anything. After the war, both Russia and the US pursued the idea. That came to a halt with the development of powerful Intercontinental missiles made the pull-up method redundant.

That was until the military realised there was a second use of the pull-up method. In the latest versions of pull-up, a missile might perform a number of skips. That makes it able to travel faster and less predictably, thereby overcoming air defences.

And now full circle to North Korea, which doest not have enough capability to build an intercontinental ballistic missile. It can, however, can use the skip method to extend the range of smaller missiles.

Lots Of Butterflies

I saw a lot of butterflies, but it will take me a while to set the scene. A few years ago I spent a year travelling through Central and South America. On this particular day I took a ride in a big dugout canoe up a broad river. It was a bright, sunny day as they mostly always were. I was in Ecuador, although I don’t recall the name of the river or the exact area of the country.

We passed an Indian village as I could tell from the dress of the people. Our passing must have been something of an occasion because people were standing on the bank. Being in a dugout we were low near the surface of the water. And I recall the way the boatsman spoke to the people on the river bank. He spoke in a normal conversational tone, no louder than if he had been addressing me in the canoe.

I can’t say how far it was to the bank, but much further than one would expect his voice to reach. And the voices of the villagers carried to us clear as day. I thought it was a wonderful thing how sound travels so far across water.

How Many Butterflies

Now to the point of this. When I landed a little further up the river, I was the only person there. I must have intended that as my destination, I didn’t just land without knowing that I had somewhere to sleep. But I don’t recall why I aimed for that particular place. So there I was. I made a fire and cooked porridge. Then I went out and sat on the hillside eating and looking down at the sweep of the river.

Butterflies started to come up the hill in a broad swathe, over my head. They weren’t just milling around. They were heading somewhere and they kept on coming.

At some point I went back to the pan on the fire to put more porridge on my plate. Then I wandered back and sat on the hill. And the butterflies kept on coming.

There are a lot of butterflies in South America. So perhaps I was a little bit immune to seeing them. For example, the wire grill over a bus window would be covered in butterflies that had impacted it. At every puddle in a muddy road, the surface of the water would be covered in butterflies. Often they would be big yellow ones nearly as wide as the palm of your hand.

But the sheer number of butterflies coming up the hill finally finally impinged into my consciousness. So I made a rough calculation as I sat there. I did a rough count of how many butterflies I could see at one time. And I estimated how long I had been there, including when I went to get more porridge.

Bottom line, I estimate that more than ten thousand butterflies flew over my head.

By chance I was watching a TV programme about butterfly migration in the USA, and it described migration by Monarch butterflies, and that is what I am going to go with. I think that is what they were.

Unhappy In The Party

In the unhappy Nazi party every member had a rank, some above and some below. Stick to the rules and you could lord it over those lower. But always you lived under the threat from someone higher. Such unhappiness from pretending you were king, whereas you were just a disposable link in the chain.

I concluded that that was why the uniforms were well styled, to enable party members to live with the distasteful knowledge that they were at the mercy of their superiors. Of course it was not just that their superiors were higher up; that is true in all organisations that have ranks.

The bitter pill for the individual in the Nazi party was that his superiors were Nazis. Nazis started out as bully boys, fighting on the streets. So the threat wasn’t just some theoretical worry of a verbal reprimand or of losing one’s rank. Get it wrong and you could be stood up against a wall. That’s what made it the unhappy Nazi party for each and every member. Even the boss had reason to be afraid.

I read that when the machine gunners were given the task of shooting down massed groups of people in Eastern Europe, they got a taste for it. Or they were horror struck and had to drink to be able to continue. Either way, their commanders learned that they had to bolt down the machine guns. They bolted the guns down so the gunners couldn’t just keep on traversing and murder their own. Once the gunners started, they didn’t want to stop.

Cheka, or The Chekist

There’s a similar theme in the film Cheka, or The Chekist, about a squad of executioners carrying out the orders of the local Soviet in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. First comes callousness, then comes madness, which is a sane reaction to the horror of what one is perpetrating.

There’s a scene in the film where a cleaner is cleaning the corridors, and sees scrawled on the walls by one of the squad ‘Executioner’s apprentice school of the Revolutionary Socialist Party’. To the viewer, we see it was written with poor sardonic wit by one of the squad.

The cleaner lifts her head and looks down the corridor to the closed area. The wheels are turning in her head as she works out what is happening daily down there. She is on the brink between disbelief and of being horror struck when she senses the presence of someone behind her. The leader of the squad is looking down at her, and when she senses his presence she is terrified. And then quickly she takes her rag to wipe off the scrawl. He waits a moment, and then moves on.

Is Taiwan part of China?

Is Taiwan part of China? China has been saying for a long time that it is. The Taiwanese do not agree, and the US takes the side of Taiwan. It is pretty obvious that it is only the presence of the USA that prevents China making a move.

It’s not easy to disentangle disinformation from the truth. The US says that China is being aggressive. China says that joint US and Taiwanese manoeuvres in its own backyard is aggressive. And everyone has an endgame, or at least a medium term endgame. So who to trust for the truth? Maybe there isn’t a truth because the parties involved are making it up as the go along, reacting to information they receive and changing position accordingly. That’s how things get out of hand.

It’s a thousand miles from Beijing to Taipei, and about one hundred miles from the nearest point on the mainland coast to the island of Taiwan. Taiwan has been a vassal state or tribute state of China in the past, and today regards itself as a totally autonomous country with a population of twenty-three million.

The Financial Times

So all that in mind, my eye was drawn to an online ‘Breaking News’ item in the Financial Times of 27th March 2021 that read ‘Exclusive – The US fears that China is flirting with the idea of seizing control of Taiwan.’

And then today I read a report from the Asia Times (Hong Kong) in the the 27 March 2021 edition of The Week that puts a new complexion on matters. There is a shortage of chips, and Taiwan is a world leader in chip production. If a ship stuck in the Suez Canal can cause havoc, what would no chips with everything do?

The Asia Times (Hong Kong)

Here’s the report from the Asia Times (Hong Kong), and a note in passing to the reference to Hong Kong, which slightly surprises me bearing in mind the crackdown from Beijing. I looked at their site (the are online only) and I cannot see a mission statement or ethics position, so I don’t know who they are.

A serious shortage of semiconductor chips is threatening to turn into a major global crisis, says Johan Svensson. The chips are integral to almost all electronic appliances; as technology advances, everything from cars to medical devices requires them. Coronavirus lockdowns were expected to lessen demand for the components, but the opposite happened: a rush for home-working technology, along with the release of several high-profile games consoles, sent orders soaring.

When car manufacturing forecasts eventually picked up, the automotive industry found itself in the midst of a crippling supply crunch; many car brands have been forced to delay or cut production. The shortage is now so serious that it has prompted dire warnings that it could slow down the global economic recovery. What’s more, it risks escalating geopolitical tensions.

There are currently only three major chip producers the world: America’s Intel, South Korea’s Samsung and TSMC. The last of these, by far ‘the most efficient’ of the three, is based in Taiwan – a ‘flashpoint’ for tensions between China and the US. For the global electronics supply chain to be dependent on a country threatened with military takeover by China is deeply worrying. The world’s governments must face this issue as a ‘top priority’.

Is Taiwan part of China

When Britain’s lease of Hong Kong expired in 1997, the parties negotiated an exit strategy and an agreement for what would happen then. Now Britain accuses China of breaking the agreement. I think that is unrealistic. What exactly did Britain think would happen? Hong Kong in the longer or shorter term is part of China, so of course Beijing wants to bring it into harmony with the rest of the country. Any other view is unrealistic or disingenuous.