ABSTRACT
The threats to the product may not be entirely the result of hostile actions. For example, a nuclear armed cruise missile en route to the target may have to œy in close proximity to other missile detonations causing intense electromagnetic effects in the structure. One of the most complex problems the author ever experienced in development entailed exactly this problem. The missile was overweight and everyone on the team understood weight and how to eliminate it. The airframe design engineer for a major part of the fuselage could not get the nuclear survivability and vulnerability engineer to approve his design after trimming considerable weight out of his design. In a meeting called to understand the problem, the nuclear survivability and vulnerability engineer explained
in broken English that a near burst could cause such currents to œow in that part of the airframe as to result in structural problems under maneuver. Convinced that mission deconœiction could not alone solve the problem of near burst, the program had to accept an overweight condition. This was a case of specialty engineering conœict where everyone understood the one discipline but no one understood the other. The solution to a weight problem is to have less mass that was exactly the wrong path for the other discipline. We tend to manage what we understand better than what we do not.
