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Suggested Citation:"GENERAL DISCUSSION OF EGRESS ISSUES." National Research Council. 1982. Design and Construction of Deep Underground Basing Facilities for Strategic Missiles: Report of a Workshop Conducted by the U.S. National Committee on Tunneling Technology, Commission on Engineering and Technical Systems, National Research Council.. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18562.
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Suggested Citation:"GENERAL DISCUSSION OF EGRESS ISSUES." National Research Council. 1982. Design and Construction of Deep Underground Basing Facilities for Strategic Missiles: Report of a Workshop Conducted by the U.S. National Committee on Tunneling Technology, Commission on Engineering and Technical Systems, National Research Council.. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18562.
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Suggested Citation:"GENERAL DISCUSSION OF EGRESS ISSUES." National Research Council. 1982. Design and Construction of Deep Underground Basing Facilities for Strategic Missiles: Report of a Workshop Conducted by the U.S. National Committee on Tunneling Technology, Commission on Engineering and Technical Systems, National Research Council.. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18562.
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Page 140
Suggested Citation:"GENERAL DISCUSSION OF EGRESS ISSUES." National Research Council. 1982. Design and Construction of Deep Underground Basing Facilities for Strategic Missiles: Report of a Workshop Conducted by the U.S. National Committee on Tunneling Technology, Commission on Engineering and Technical Systems, National Research Council.. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18562.
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Page 141
Suggested Citation:"GENERAL DISCUSSION OF EGRESS ISSUES." National Research Council. 1982. Design and Construction of Deep Underground Basing Facilities for Strategic Missiles: Report of a Workshop Conducted by the U.S. National Committee on Tunneling Technology, Commission on Engineering and Technical Systems, National Research Council.. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18562.
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Page 142
Suggested Citation:"GENERAL DISCUSSION OF EGRESS ISSUES." National Research Council. 1982. Design and Construction of Deep Underground Basing Facilities for Strategic Missiles: Report of a Workshop Conducted by the U.S. National Committee on Tunneling Technology, Commission on Engineering and Technical Systems, National Research Council.. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18562.
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Page 143
Suggested Citation:"GENERAL DISCUSSION OF EGRESS ISSUES." National Research Council. 1982. Design and Construction of Deep Underground Basing Facilities for Strategic Missiles: Report of a Workshop Conducted by the U.S. National Committee on Tunneling Technology, Commission on Engineering and Technical Systems, National Research Council.. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18562.
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Page 144
Suggested Citation:"GENERAL DISCUSSION OF EGRESS ISSUES." National Research Council. 1982. Design and Construction of Deep Underground Basing Facilities for Strategic Missiles: Report of a Workshop Conducted by the U.S. National Committee on Tunneling Technology, Commission on Engineering and Technical Systems, National Research Council.. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18562.
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General Discussion of Egress Issues SPEAKER: Is it a given here that in considering the egress alternatives we will have knowledge of what has happened on the surface, in other words the extent and depth of craters? DR. LINGER: That is one of the things that has been proposed. There are a number of rubble zones and craters at the Nevada Test Site. We could go out, presumably within the next six weeks, two months, five months, or whatever is required, and view remote detection schemes for finding out just where is a rubble zone and what is its extent. SPEAKER: We will assume that we will know where when we are planning direction of egress? DR. LINGER: Not necessarily, because we could only assume that if what I just outlined proved to be a viable technique, that is if we could reliably predict where the crater was and— SPEAKER: I am addressing myself to something else. After the attack will you know where the— DR. LINGER: I think what you are saying is which egress to come out because of what happened on the outside, and I don't think that you can really assume that you will know. I don't know. SPEAKER: Can we assume that you can talk to the outside and they can talk back? DR. LINGER: That is right. I think that is something that you can assume. SPEAKER: This 70-foot long missile is— DR. LINGER: It is l00 feet long. Diameter is what you— l38

l39 SPEAKER: At any rate you lay it down horizontally, and then does it fire off or do you walk it out to the end of the mountain and then it fires off? DR. LINGER: It will come out and erect and fire itself or it would come out and fire. I don't think it would fire in the tunnel. It would have to come to the end. SPEAKER: How do you walk it out? Are you going to lay a rail in this tunnel? DR. LINGER: Therein lies a problem. How does one get it out? I don't really know. I am not sure that anybody does. Carl will lend some light to this. LT. COL. RULE: With the multiple protective shelter system the means of launches is kind of like in submarines. We have a canister—a metal- lic canister or some form of hard structure in which the missile is in place. That, in the old concept, would move outside of the shelter area and erect up to a vertical position, and then there would be a gas that would form—either steam or a hot gas—to eject the missile from the canister. The missile would ignite once it was clear of the canis- ter, but we would have to worry about putting that canister on wheels or transport of some type in its underground complex, to get through the egress, to break the ground, and then to be able to get to a kind of near-vertical attitude and launch. SPEAKER: Does that have a firm foundation? When you get it out, you have to tip it up, and it has got to not tilt? LT. COL. RULE: You would like to have it stable, yes, sir. SPEAKER: So all the supports and everything you erect have to be out- side the limits of that canister and still be capable of supporting the weight of the canister? LT. COL. RULE: That is correct. You have a tremendous moment arm, you know, getting from the horizontal to the vertical, but that has been worked up. It is an engineering problem that has been worked out for the multiple protective shelter system. SPEAKER: That would have to be done in the rubble zone? LT. COL. RULE: You have to get through the rubble zone and then be able to erect it after you have egressed. SPEAKER: Before the Russians spot you on the ground. SPEAKER: Jay, can it then guide itself from either side of the mountain? If you go out either way it takes it from there; you just get it up in the air?

l40 DR. MERRITT: Conceivably, of course, if one went through the rubble zone with some sort of aligning system the canister could be anchored within that lining system. It would not have to actually expose itself on the surface and erect itself from the rubble zone. It could be di- rected from the lining and ejected by steam or otherwise. One other point. This is not my field, but I have been told by those in missile design that the interstages and the pressures implied by hot launch within a tunnel are such that you don't want to try to tackle that problem. You have to canisterize the missile such that it is a cold launch up to some point and then hot launch outside of that envi- ronment. DR. LINGER: Good question. As Colonel Rule said, the MX is designed to come out, erect itself, cold launch, and then fire. SPEAKER: I had a question on the Mesa concept. You know everything seems to be the attenuation of the tunnels of the central control system for all of this underground, based on numbers we will use like one di- rect hit. But if you have a Mesa system with five or six tunnels then this whole thing has to be able to withstand—what?—half a dozen direct or indirect hits over a two-day period? DR. LINGER: I would go back to Dr. Sevin's chart which showed the depth to which you had to go to survive, was it half a kilobar or one kilobar? Did you see at the bottom what he had for the threat? Did he have 800 megatons which would have to be delivered? You would have to deliver those in packages and have them all go off at the same time. SPEAKER: Is there any return, either repeatedly hitting the same place? DR. LINGER: The Colonel just mentioned that, and it may apply to what you are asking: whether or not somebody would keep repeatedly hitting the rubble zone to try to dig you out and— SPEAKER: No, that is not my question. We saw the experiments of half a kilobar from one side, and what I am thinking of is that those tun- nels may have to withstand one or two blasts from different directions over a period of time? DR. LINGER: Yes, and a rather large weapon yield altogether. SPEAKER: It seems that the chamber to tilt this thing down or turn it around is going to be crucial. You would have to build that with skilled miners before the shooting starts because you are just going to have soldiers in there to do the rest of it. DR. LINGER: This would be complete in itself. That is, this system would be complete with the necessary radius and size to maneuver the missile for each of the egress and each of the maintenance and operation

l4l locations. As each section is completed, it would be complete in it- self. SPEAKER: A variation of Wayne's question this morning about what are the Russians doing. On the basis of a feat being better than a theory, the Swiss and the Swedish have long been involved in the psychology of burying everything and going deeper. Do we have knowledge or is that not even worth looking at or is that none of our business at all? DR. LINGER: I don't think we could discuss it at this security level. All I can say is Dick Robbins is coming in tomorrow and just ask him about his two machines which are over there. Five years ago he gave them the plans for his machine, and they went right back home and built one, and they have not got one of their machines to work yet. So, any- way, I don't know what they are doing. All I know is I think they have got bigger problems than we do. SPEAKER: I think we are all assuming something here that has not been said so far, and that is that the people in the tunnel will not be deaf- ened so they will be unable to hear orders and that they won't be in- jured by the shock. Is that a viable assumption? DR. LINGER: Yes, and one thing that Joe LaComb said when he showed his movie was that the tunnel survived, but it indicated that it would of necessity have to be further protected inside for personnel and equip- ment, and I think he made that statement, and I think that is a very good statement. SPEAKER: I am concerned about the noise levels as well as the physical injury. DR. LINGER: I am sure that the noise level problem has got to be ad- dressed. SPEAKER: I have one other question somewhat in that same line. There was some discussion about heat dissipation at certain depths after the blast, but I heard nothing here about radiation when you remove this rubble. What occurs at that point? DR. LINGER: I think the radiation problem, because of the automation of the missile as it comes out and erects and cold launches, is not a problem. I mean it is a solvable problem. I think it is a solved prob- lem. SPEAKER: Then those people that remove the rubble are expendable, right? DR. LINGER: No. That is one reason why I think that all of the discus- sion has focused on TBMs, you know, that it is assumed that egress or mining out would be as automated as possible.

l42 MR. LA COMB: I don't believe the radiation will be a real problem be- cause it would simply be, even if we had a horizontal surface, it would be tied up mostly in blast funnels, which might be two, three, to four feet thick that you could handle by shielding it out. I don't think it would be a significant problem. SPEAKER: You still have to dispose of it. You would be hauling your muck or your radiation muck down into the heart of the system. DR. LINGER: You mean the egress? You are making an assumption that you are going to haul the muck back down and not drop it in a pit. SPEAKER: Even if you drop it in the pit, it will go into the pit but it is still going down into the mountain. DR. LINGER: Yes, but I think that is after the attack. SPEAKER: The missile will egress, erect, and fire off. You know you are going to have to have a hardened slab therefore to do that. Then the egress takes place, you are going to have a lot of muck lying around on that slab, too. You may not be able to do it without some actual man- power out there to facilitate actual firing. Once it comes out you have some of the radioactive muck that is bound to come back inside or fall around it. It will get back into the hole it came out of. DR. LINGER: As Joe LaComb said, I don't think the activity in that material that is going to come back down is going to be that hazardous, and I think that that is one of the drivers in trying to get the egress out at a slope where it can fall away on the outside, where you don't have to dig through what is otherwise deposited broken rubble. One of the advantages of the horizontal or near-horizontal egress out through a rock slope is the fact that you won't have this rubble lying there to worry about handling manually. SPEAKER: The problems of egress due to rubble, radiation, and other things that have been cited lead me to harbor the idea that the storage of a single missile should be in a corkscrew, convoluted type of open- ing where you could have it on rail and of a diameter so that the mis- sile could be lowered to whatever point you want and a multiplicity of openings going out so that if one gets rubblized you have got four or five others. DR. LINGER: That is exactly the point of this kind of system, that the egress can be chosen. You mightn't know exactly what the situation was outside at this egress point but you would have an opportunity to go out through multiple egress points, all of which would be unknown to the en- emy and all of which would be far enough apart so that in fact it would be impossible for him to cover that entire area with the kind of rubble that we are worried about.

l43 SPEAKER: It would seem to me that the military had better make it pol- icy that these guys are constantly digging tunnels, because even with trained tunnelmen we cannot always achieve the kinds of rates that these policies are—so they had just better dig holes in that mountain all the time. DR. LINGER: Actually what you are saying, and what I am sure all the mining contractors like Traylor will reemphasize, is that once you get them going you might as well keep them going because that is when you get your production. I think that a point that should be made is that starting with a relatively small system and constantly expanding is ideal for getting the ultimate system you want and absolutely necessary for the operational capacity of the machine and men. That is what you are saying. You have got to keep them going to keep them tuned to that. SPEAKER: They have got to know how to repair that TBM. They have got to know all this stuff. DR. LINGER: That is a damn good point, and it is a point that should be made because what it says is don't build the whole thing and have the machines sitting down there. Keep building it. Those are the kinds of points, I think, that are important. SPEAKER: I have heard comments about retaining communications, through- rock communications, and so forth. Have any thoughts been given at this point to maintaining ventilation? If the main tunnel is blasted shut— DR. LINGER: Yes, you have got a problem. You don't want to mine in the wet area and yet on the other hand you are going to have to have water, and you are going to have to have some heat dissipation medium. Obvious- ly water would be the best. So, you are between a rock and a hard spot, and the best siting is probably that that in fact has perched aquifers that do replenish themselves and can be used as heat sinks, and that has got to be a driver in the siting. SPEAKER: Why is it we have to leave so much material between the point of egress and where the missile is going to be if we are going to have to do some sort of mining? Isn't it possible to have some sort of me- chanical stopper system so that one of them might be hit and damaged, but there would be so many horizontal points of egress that you have lots of options to follow? What you are really trying to do is prevent damage to the entire system by a hit on one of these points of horizon- tal egress, and you have other options open for firing missiles. DR. LINGER: So you have a lot of potential egresses all of which go closer to the face than you would go for secured hardness, some of which you may get wiped out, and that is an alternative, and that is an alternative I am sure that will be considered, because it gives you the multiple egresses and it gives you a quicker out, than if you are at 2,000 feet to bore out.

l44 SPEAKER: It, also, cuts down on a lot of the mining that might be re- quired in circumstances like that. DR. LINGER: Yes, but they cannot go close enough so that the Russians can identify where they are. SPEAKER: But that is a parameter of the system, according to some of the people I heard talk, that we have to assume that they know every- thing about the system to start with. DR. LINGER: That I think was stated at the onset. Whether they would know the exact location of the egress, these blind egresses, I don't think that was intended to cover that. I am not sure. SPEAKER: Could we get clarification of that? It can affect the whole concept. DR. LINGER: The egress won't go to the surface. They would go some dis- tance from the surface, and in the discussions I have been in on, it is assumed that in fact they will not know where those egresses are. They may know where the ingress is, you know, where you are taking things in. They will certainly know where you are bringing the muck out because there are going to have to be multiple egresses for the muck, but they probably would not know. I think you could assume they would not know. SPEAKER: I think it is fair to comment that the multiple-aim-point con- cept of digging the tunnels near the surface or all the way out, regard- less if you try to harden them or put blast doors or something to shut them up, has been shown to be really not the right way to go because for every tunnel we dig all they have to do is add one more MIRV and it becomes cheaper for them to add a MIRV than for us to dig a tunnel, and that has been the downfall of the current shelter program in the past. That is why we tried to go to a totally benign environment until we have to start showing our hand and at the same time protect ourselves. DR. LINGER: And to translate—"No, they won't know where those egresses are." SPEAKER: I suggest that one way in which you can preserve the location- al uncertainty of the egress stub tunnels, if you don't take them all the way to surface, is simply to set them in random directions without any survey work ever being done. DR. LINGER: From some of the tunnels I have been in I am not sure even if you told them that there was a survey and gave it to them that they would know where they were coming out.

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