Square Rockets?

I do not spend much time wondering about the design of military rockets. But I do find myself utterly perplexed as to why they make these things with a circular external cross-section.

If you are not bothered about whether your rocket is going to be trackable by radar, or even if you would like your rocket to be trackable by radar, then obviously a round cross-section makes a lot of sense. Round shapes are nice and visible to radar. And you get the maximum internal area, and avoid the problem that corners are particularly vulnerable to internal pressure. So yes, I can well see why the rockets which we send up to launch satellites, or to replenish the larders of the international space station, would have a round cross-section.

Conversely, if you do not want your rocket to be shot down by an anti-missile missile, you might be better off if the external shape of the rocket consists entirely of flat surfaces. That is how our modern fighter planes are made. They look a bit weird, as if designed by origami enthusiasts with a stack of black cardboard. But they have a much, much, smaller radar profile. So why not make your rocket out of square hollow sections, with a pyramid shape at the nose?

No Happy Ever After in Palestine

The prospects of peace in the Middle East are bad, and looking as if they might well get worse. And so, let us look back and ask ourselves the question: was the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine in 1947 a good idea?

Some context. Back in Roman times, Jews were in the majority in Palestine, but by the 17^th century, only about 1% of the local population was Jewish. By the 1930s, this had risen to about 20%. During the Second World War, a disproportionately large number of Jews were killed. The total death toll was around 80 million people, and assuming about 6 million Jewish deaths, that is about 8% – well above the global proportion. Around 1% of the world’s population was Jewish in those days, of whom it is thought that around 90% were Ashkenazi Jews. I hope I will not offend anybody by saying that, broadly speaking, Ashkenazi Jews are people who practice the Jewish faith, but whose genetic origin is more to be found in the south of what used to be the Soviet Union than in Palestine. So, at the end of the Second World War, there were about ¼ million Jews, of varying genetic origin,  in Palestine. Obviously, that number then rocketed up with the formation of the Jewish state.

An inescapable lesson from history is that if you parachute a large number of people who have one genetic or cultural origin into a different general population, you are likely to get trouble. Examples are legion, and it is unlikely to serve any useful purpose to list them here. Suffice to say that, since 1947/1948, there has indeed been trouble. Estimates vary, but probably around 180,000 people, mostly Palestinians but also many Jews, have been killed in the more or less continual series of conflicts. You would have to be ridiculously optimistic to believe that that number is going to stop there.

Let us get that number in context. It is, within an order of magnitude, the same as the total number of Jews in Palestine when all this began. It is easy to see why the United Nations thought that, after the terrible hardships that the Jews went through in the Second World War, they should be comforted by being given a homeland. But that comfort has come at a horrendous cost. And that cost keeps on rising at, one has to fear, an exponential rate.

Lemons for Lebanon

I hope I am wrong about this, but as I understand it the prospect of avoiding war in the Lebanon does not look good. Not just for political reasons, but for a military reason.

If the analyses are even half right, the position is something like this. Hezbollah have tens of thousands of rockets ready to fire at Israel. The bulk of these are relatively unsophisticated unguided missiles, which cost Hezbollah a couple of hundred dollars each. The Israelis have a highly sophisticated Iron Dome system. These anti-missile missiles have something like a 90% prospect of shooting down any missile which Hezbollah fire into Israel, at a cost of around $50,000 a pop. In recent weeks, Hezbollah have been firing some of these missiles, but only a very small proportion of their available arsenal. They have probably been doing this partly for political reasons, and partly to make inroads into Israel’s stock of Iron Dome anti-missile missiles. More recently, Israel has been taking out some of Hezbollah’s missile capability, but again only a small proportion of the whole available arsenal.

Israel has probably a dozen Iron Dome batteries, and these have been effectively coping with most of what Hezbollah has been throwing at Israel over the past few weeks. But if Hezbollah were to launch a much larger proportion of its missiles (i.e. twenty thousand or so), Israel’s Iron Dome capability would soon be overwhelmed and exhausted, and Israel would be pretty much defenceless against both Hezbollah’s cheap crude missiles and, more importantly, its more limited stock of bigger, longer range guided missiles, which could hit Israel’s major cities with devastating effect.