From a military technology standpoint, throwing rocks from the moon is probably the next technological step in warfare. The way cannons ended the era of the fortress, rocks will end the nuclear status quo.
It's much easier to use the "Rods from God" idea - that is more precise and minimizes collateral damage.
IRL you can use brain-power to avoid using muscle-power!
On the other hand, in-universe, they've got brute-force Epstein drives. For them this is Tuesday.
From https://www.britannica.com/science/Earth-impact-hazard/Frequ...:
> Because there are far fewer large NEOs and long-period comets in space than smaller ones, the chances of a collision decrease rapidly with increasing size. The impact-hazard community—primarily scientists with an interest in the issue—has defined a global catastrophe to be an impact that leads to the death of one-fourth or more of the world’s population. An impact by a 1-km- (0.6-mile-) diameter NEO, the smallest believed capable of causing such a catastrophe, is estimated to occur about once per 100,000 years on average, based on the assumed population in space of such objects. On the other hand, an impact by a 100-metre (328-foot) NEO, the smallest believed capable of causing regional devastation, is estimated to occur about once every 1,000 years on average.
Take your pick!
And remember one doesn't need a tidy Hohman transfer. Rather the opposite in fact. The nastier the intersect angle the better.
(Hopefully we don't end up on some watchlist :-P )
INSTABANG!1!!
In an arms race there may be a period of technological superiority. During that period MAD does not exist.
Bombardment from space creates at least two scenarios that upset MAD.
1. First strike capability
Small projectiles sufficiently accelerated may escape detection from ballistic detection systems. This could give an actor sufficient confidence in their ability to eliminate return strike capability.
2. Plausible deniability
For a period it may not be possible to determine which actor launched a strike. This can cause sufficient hesitation (and the expectation thereof) for an actor to initiate a strike and the target to fail to retaliate due to insufficient confidence in their target.
I'm sure there are other scenarios as well.
You don't, although mobile launchers are not out of the question. A rock catapult is far easier to construct than a nuclear missile launchpad (given available materials). Notably the munitions are fashioned anywhere on the moon and the munition needs no guidance, other than the initial launch window timing.
Right but I’m not talking about construction. I’m talking about destruction. See an enemy building a catapult with your moon-orbiting spy satellite? Send your Space Force astronauts in a rover to dismantle or destroy it. Or send an unmanned rover with robotic, remote controlled arms when we get to that capability.
Several of these components are necessary even for a peaceful research base.
That's not very effective if you can fire and abandon, since it's very likely that someone could work out the locality of the origin, you have to assume there's no way to defend against that. So what? Another one pops up in a few days.
The only way to defend against kinetic bombardment is controlling material gathering/supply and pinpoint destruction and that won't even be an assured defense. In a year, someone could scrap together X materials to hurl another.
Yeehaa!
Not sure I buy it, but if it were taken seriously it could certainly light a fire under the collective keisters of the world's superpowers.
First strike from kinetic bombardment can be far more devastating than first strike from ICBMs due to the surprise factor and simplicity of yield configuration.
Moon-based mass drivers can be trivially protected from Earth-launched counter attacks, since the inbound trajectories can be calculated, the projectiles take days to arrive, and can be intercepted by point defense systems that have lower delta-v requirements. Basic OODA loop supremacy stuff.
First, there is some threshold amount of off-Earth allied population that will undermine and make irrelevant the SLBM deterrent. In the extreme case, consider a Martian opponent.
Second, there is a gamble that a first strike against military targets won’t provoke a return strike against the civilian population. In this case, a restrained first strike that takes out key submarine docks could degrade the advantage provided by Boomers. A limited attack on that kind of infrastructure is hard to pull off, but an asteroid strike might be one of the few ways that it could be done with sufficient plausible deniability.
Gravity-based kinetic weapons will force a rethinking of nuclear MAD — the history of war consistently shows that expensive hardened fixed positions are eventually made into vulnerable death traps through cheap technology.
It is still worthwhile to watch the sky for them, but the risk per year seems to be lower than any man-made disaster I can think of.
And it wouldn't need to be as big as Dino-Ex, either.
Imagine what would happen if something like this impacted or air-bursted with the population density and fragile logistic dependencies of today:
https://phys.org/news/2008-03-cuneiform-clay-tablet.html
Also in that region, just a few thousand years earlier:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-60867-w
Suspected as a possible cause for the onset of the Younger Dryas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi...
edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_possible_impact_struct...
Sort for age, look at diameter of crater in kilometers for the first dozen youngest and think about what that would do for any contemporary agglomeration.