Comments by "Larre Valentine" (@internetuser881) on "WSJ News"
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@LAJiini As a general rule of thumb, from pretty much any guided missile, a third of the missile's weight is in guidance and flight control, a third is in the warhead, and a third of the weight is in fuel. Sometimes on interceptors, that number is even lower. That number could be as low as like 10 to 20% in the warhead, because you need to pack that missile with as much fuel as possible to get it up to speed.
So this isn't a hard and fast rule, but it's a good rule of thumb. It's a good way to estimate because you can't really cheat physics. So if an Iron Dome rocket is 90 kilos, then a rough estimate of the warhead is about 30 kilos or roughly 66 pounds.
In all honesty, Israel doesn't really give out the specifications of its weapons. But I would say that the Iron Dome warhead is probably more like ten percent so we might be dealing with a nine kilo warhead on that rocket because again these iron dome interceptors are actually maneuvering it's one of the few
interceptors that can actually maneuver and you need to pack that thing with as much fuel as possible so they can maneuver in midair Now, let's talk about this warhead. The Iron Dome has a proximity warhead. We know that. That means as it gets closer to its target, it explodes in a bunch of shrapnel so that it can hit that incoming warhead. It has a better chance of hitting that incoming warhead like a shotgun hitting a sporting clay. You don't pack a lot of high explosive into an interceptor with a proximity warhead, at least not enough to make a gigantic explosion.
You need enough to kind of push that shrapnel out to create a cloud of shrapnel that the incoming warhead can hit. And then there's the other issue of self-destruction. Surface-to-air missiles self-destruct when they lose track. And they do this to avoid exactly what people think happened,
to avoid this missile from coming down in a populated area and hurting people that it's supposed to protect. Now, there is a non-zero chance that self-destruct wouldn't work. As far as I know, there's only one video I've seen where this has happened.
And in a case like this, where self-destruct doesn't work, the biggest issue is fuel, not warhead. Remember, packing this interceptor with as much fuel as possible, it's probably going to be the fuel that detonates, not the actual proximity warhead because the proximity warhead is made up of
shrapnel and you just need enough explosive to push the shrapnel out. Still, the Iron Dome has fired thousands of missiles over its lifetime of service, and I've seen one video, one video of an interceptor failing to self-destruct. I think that's a pretty reliable system. So we have a missile that's not designed to explode with explosive force,
and a missile with a good track record of self-destructing if it does go off course. That being said, if I use ICD-203, which is a standard in the intelligence community for determining probability, I would say that it is unlikely that this is the impact of an Iron Dome missile.
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