THE WAY TO THE TOP OF THE TRIAD

General Designer, Academician and Professor Vladimir Semenikhin. Born on February 9, 1918, in the Ukrainian town of Sumy. 
After graduation from the Moscow Energy Institute, from 1941 to 1946, he worked as a shop superintendent at the Ministry of Armaments' plant in Sverdlovsk. Later, until 1963, he was the chief designer of a defense industry plant in Zagorsk. In 1963, he was appointed director of the Research Institute of Automatic Equipment (NIIAA) in Moscow. From 1971 to 1974, he was Deputy Minister of Radio Engineering and a supervisor at NIIAA. In 1974, he was named Director and General Designer of NIIAA. Semenikhin died on November 27, 1990.

Semenikhin began his career in the automation field with the development of the Soviet Union's first automatic bombing sight during World War II. In the 1950s-1960s, in the Soviet Armed Forces, above all in the Air Defense Forces, there arose the need for automating the gathering, processing and interpreting of information, decision making, and the conveyance of decisions to users.

The Specialised Design Bureau of the Zagorsk Electromechanical Plant, near Moscow, was given the task of developing the country's first target allocation and designation systems for air defense missile systems. Such systems, the Krab and ASURK, were developed under Semenikhin's guidance.

In the late 1960s, the Research Institute of Automatic Equipment (NIIAA), developed a system capable of working on a larger number of targets and controlling a group of air defense missile systems: the Vector automatic control system. The creation in the Air Defense Forces of tactical units equipped with both air defense missile systems and fighter aircraft brought about the need to develop a system capable of controlling both missiles and aircraft. Such a system was built and named Senezh. In the late 1970s, another automatic control system was developed on the basis of this system, Rubezh, which was commissioned into service with fighter regiments of the Air Defense Forces and the Air Force. The designers, headed by Vladimir Semenikhin, worked out theoretical fundamentals for the combat control of active assets of the Air Defense Forces and the Air Force, and on this basis developed efficient automatic systems to control these assets.

The creation in the USSR of strategic nuclear forces, to which many outstanding Soviet scientists contributed, among them I. Kurchatov, Y. Khariton, S. Korolev, V. Chelomei, M. Yangel, V. Utkin, V.P. Makeyev and A. Nadiradze, brought about the need to develop an efficient system of control of strategic weapons. In those years, the United States' military doctrine proclaimed the principle of a preemptive nuclear strike. To maintain nuclear parity and to implement national military doctrine, based on the principle of a retaliatory strike, the Soviet Union had to create, in addition to the required number of nuclear warheads and delivery systems, a special system that would within a short period of time determine the fact of a nuclear attack, identify the aggressor, issue a command that a retaliatory strike be carried out, and convey this command to active assets. There must be enough time left for the Soviet missiles to hit nuclear warheads of a potential enemy at a safe altitude, before they fell on Soviet territory.

This task was entrusted to Semenikhin's institute. The chief officials of the defense complex, the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Radio Engineering, understood that this task could be fulfilled only if many research institutes, design bureaus and industrial enterprises of the country pooled efforts. Such a task force was set up in 1968. Apart from NIIAA, which was made responsible for the system as a whole and for combat management command system, it included the Impuls Experimental Design Bureau (the automatic control system for the Strategic Missile Forces), the Yerevan-based Research Institute of Computation Equipment (the automatic control system for the Air Force), and the Mars Research and Production Association (the automatic control system for the Navy).

Semenikhin realized that the development of such a large territorial system, which united different services of the Armed Forces, was impossible without the creation of a medium that would ensure information and technical compatibility and interoperability of different chains of command. This is why a data exchange system was developed with a unified data exchange protocol system. During the work on the data exchange system, NIIAA specialists for the first time in this country proposed building this system not by using direct channels, but on the basis of automatic centers for switching data flows (bursts), situated across the country. This approach helped not only reduce the number of mainline channels by more than 80 percent, but also ensure the transmission of information through these low-quality channels (failure rate probability of 5x10-2 per bit) to a very high degree of authenticity (10-12 per bit).

To translate the data exchange system into life, an original data exchange protocol system was worked out, which, in a way, anticipated international recommendations on a seven-level protocol system.

Apart from the data exchange system, special data transmission systems were built for long-range aviation and submarines. The Poetika-D system was developed by the Polyot Research and Production Association, and the Arkhipelag-D system was developed by the ETU Research Institute.

For the development of the above-mentioned complex of systems, above all, the combat management command and data exchange systems, Vladimir Semenikhin was given the title of Hero of Socialist Labor, and the leading developers and specialists were awarded Lenin and State Prizes.

Since the use of strategic nuclear forces was impossible without the sanction of top state and military leaders, a system of sanctioning the use of these forces was created. This system made it possible for the country's leaders to approve operation plans rapidly and give sanction to the use of strategic nuclear forces from wherever they were staying, and precluded unsanctioned use of these forces.

The next serious step in the development of systems for control of the strategic forces triad (the Strategic Missile Forces, the Air Force and the Navy) was the construction of an automated military strategic intelligence system. The main task of this system was to keep a watch on the military-political situation in the world and form an authentic military-strategic warning. To accomplish this task, a territorial combat information system was built with distributed databases. In the 1980s, with a view to upgrading control over all arms and services of the Armed Forces, a comprehensive program was worked out for developing a unified automatic control system for the Armed Forces. The program provided for the control of not only the triad of the strategic nuclear forces using main, standby and duplicating systems, but also of general-purpose forces.

General Designer Vladimir Semenikhin died before this program was carried out. Today, when information technologies and data processing and transmission systems are rapidly developing, this serious problem is facing his followers, colleagues and present-day users of these systems.

Semenikhin realized the great role and significance of modern specialists very well and paid much attention to their training. He headed the Scientific Council of NIIAA and the Educational and Research Center of the Moscow Institute of Radio Electronics and Automation, where NIIAA's leading scientists and designers trained specialists. Semenikhin was also a member of the Soviet Union's High Certification Commission.

The title "general designer," given to people who headed large-scale projects, required of these people a statesmanlike mentality, a wide range of interests, the ability to find time and energy to resolve concrete issues and, on the basis of their generalization, make strategic decisions, and also be considerate to colleagues and specialists of various levels, from engineer to minister. Vladimir Semenikhin had all these qualities. During our many years of cooperation, I never stopped wondering about two of his traits: the diversity of his interests and his approachability. His interests ranged from medicine, arts, sports and education to national policies; to his touching attitude to the Russian nature, his contact with it and the ability to derive much energy from it; to fishing (his hobby number one, about which all his colleagues knew) or hours-long mushroom hunting, during which he discussed and resolved with his colleagues major engineering problems.

Both the fishing and mushroom hunting offered good opportunities for Semenikhin to socialize. On those occasions, the qualities that were valued particularly highly were a sense of humor and cooking talents. His colleagues could discuss with Semenikhin problems related to their work and rely on his advice and help.

Finally, Semenikhin's most important quality was his affability and obliging nature, no matter who turned to him. For Semenikhin, too, it was of immense importance: he received invaluable information from concrete users, which helped him generalize it and make optimal decisions on difficult scientific and technical problems. The style of Semenikhin's work, which he had developed over years, helped him resolve, in a creative way, both minor problems (technical or human) and state-level issues, ensuring rigid discipline in their fulfillment.

I hope that in today's difficult conditions Semenikhin's friends and colleagues, inheriting his experience and style of work, will do their best to develop new automatic control systems or modernize existing ones, to ensure Russia’s security.

The Moscow conference, which marked Semenikhin's 80th birthday, pointed out in its statement that the potential of Russian specialists helps implement programs of automatic control systems at the highest possible level and develop the national school of specialists in this field. Participants in the conference also decided to hold annual Semenikhin Workshops on theoretical and practical issues related to the development, introduction and operation of general and special purpose systems.