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United States discloses nuclear warhead numbers; restores nuclear transparency

transcriptase
160 replies
1d18h

Every time I’ve seen nuclear stockpiles and the reduction thereof discussed, I’ve wondered: Assuming for some reason the United States needed to ramp back up to an absurd number of warheads (ignore the MAD/political practicalities), how quickly could they do so? What’s the lead time or rate limiting factors in production?

Because if they could start churning out a dozen or a hundred a week within a short period of time, why does the standing arsenal really matter? Does it really make a difference in global safety or geopolitics? I don’t know the first thing about the topic so this is all genuine curiosity, and I feel like the googling required to get an answer would put me on lists I don’t really feel like being on.

skellington
81 replies
1d18h

There is no form of full scale nuclear war where the production apparatus for anything becomes a factor.

slg
46 replies
1d18h

That is assuming nuclear war breaks out with zero warning. There is usually a build up to wars that could involve ramping up production of a nuclear arsenal before any nuclear weapons are actually used.

roenxi
44 replies
1d17h

What type of warning do you expect to see? We currently have a war in Ukraine involving between 2-4 of the major nuclear powers depending on how you want to count them (Russia, US, UK, China). Russia is bleeding heavily and it is hard to tell how close they are to some sort of internal crisis or collapse into groupthink by the military leaders. There have probably been Able Archer style near misses and we could have a repeat of the Cuban missile crisis without much changing. China is building up its nuclear arsenal and the political positioning in APAC suggests that a US-China war is on the cards.

If we escalated in to full-scale nuclear war this July that'd be unexpected but we're way past 0 warning. There are lots of warnings. In terms of raw risk the last few years might be the biggest risk of a nuclear war breaking out that the species has ever faced.

slg
36 replies
1d14h

Maybe we aren't at 0 warning at the moment, but if there is a spectrum from 0 warning to imminent, we are close enough to 0 that the distinction doesn't really matter. The US, UK, and China are not actively fighting in Ukraine and even if they were, this wouldn't be the first time these countries have directly fought each other in a proxy war in the nuclear age. So unless you think the Russian military personnel that would actually carry out a full scale attack on the West would prefer destroying civilization to losing in Ukraine, I would expect some type of escalation beyond the position we have been in for the better part of the last 80 years.

roenxi
25 replies
1d13h

I would expect some type of escalation beyond the position we have been in for the better part of the last 80 years.

We have escalated beyond the point we have been in for the last 80 years. Russia have lost more troops than in any war since WWII. That is a lot of dead Slavs. Their strategic nuclear defences have already been attacked [0] and NATO currently appears to be organising direct strikes on Russian territory. They've made it quite clear that they want the war to continue until something in Russia breaks. When more warnings are you expecting to see? There are a lot of warnings out there.

We could easily discover that someone tried to launch the nukes already in this conflict. It would be precedented; the situation is more tense than it ever has been before and we've had fortuitous near misses in similar situations. We're already in territory where we are rolling the dice for a catastrophe with low odds.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/world/europe/ukraine-dron...

psunavy03
9 replies
22h48m

They've made it quite clear that they want the war to continue until something in Russia breaks.

The war can end tomorrow. All that has to happen is for Russia to pack up and leave the territory of another sovereign country. It's really that simple.

If Russia gives up, the war ends. If Ukraine gives up, there is a genocide.

jiggawatts
8 replies
19h47m

I really don’t understand tankie logic. The nation that has been your geopolitical rival for a century is suddenly the beacon of western civilisation and ideals, despite stating they hate you and everything you stand for, and then attacking a country for merely thinking of allying with you!?

“I believe everything this former KGB operative says about my government! Finally, a neutral party without self-interests who can reveal the truth!

roenxi
7 replies
16h35m

How often you you come across people saying any of that, though? That is a straw man position of the people pointing out that this conflict was quite a likely outcome of NATO's persistent expansion and that the strategic pressure on Russia has been extraordinarily damaging to US interests, European interests, Russian interests and the global security situation. The only people who ended up benefiting from NATO expansion so far have been India and to a lesser extent China.

jiggawatts
6 replies
16h15m

How often you you come across people saying any of that, though?

I'm paraphrasing, but I have friends that believe 100% of Russian propaganda they hear on the Internet and 0% of western mainstream media. "What the BBC is saying is just propaganda!" is a common comment I hear from people quoting Russian disinformation verbatim.

likely outcome of NATO's persistent expansion

That is literal Russian disinformation. If they cared about NATO expansion, they would have invaded Finland to stop them joining. Or would have bolstered their border defence with them instead of reallocating the local troops to go fight in Ukraine, as they have.

They only cared about Ukraine joining NATO because that would have stopped them invading, as they were planning for over a decade and are doing right now.

A thief that plans to rob you cares deeply about your security system being upgraded! Not upgrading your security to appease the thief will not stop the robbery.

PS: Alexander Lukashenko accidentally let slip in early 2022 that the next target for invasion after Ukraine would have been Moldova. Guess which country Trump suddenly thought shouldn't be joining NATO right after meeting Putin?

Not any other country in Europe. No. Just Moldova, very specifically. Trump was very concerned about it, a country he would not have known the name of or been able to place on a map the day before that meeting. (Or, most likely, even after that meeting.)

roenxi
5 replies
14h45m

The issue you have here is the "Russian disinformation" is a better argument, makes more sense and has better evidence than whatever you think the alternative is. Your leading point is that the wrong people are saying it (which I actually doubt, the Russian propaganda position seems to be that Ukraine are an illegitimate regime of Nazis), and your evidence is ... that Finland wasn't invaded when it joined NATO. In 2023. While Russia is already mobilised and engaged in a war. And even then, the argument relies on Russia's foreign policy being on total autopilot. The "disinformation" relies on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlargement_of_NATO and a pretty basic question of what the rational response would look like to a hostile military alliance bearing down on your country's borders. You don't even need to talk to a Russian to figure that one out.

Alexander Lukashenko accidentally let slip in early 2022 that the next target for invasion after Ukraine would have been Moldova. Guess which country Trump suddenly thought shouldn't be joining NATO right after meeting Putin?

Well done Trump? Do you want to see Moldova invaded? If a similar stance had been taken to Ukraine this current war could probably have been avoided too. The response to Russia panicking and doing a puff-up-threateningly routine shouldn't be to poke them.

That is the type of negotiating skill that means Trump keeps doing well and his opponents keep ending up running in to walls. He doesn't provoke randomly and meaninglessly; he has a tendency to only try and annoy people for strategic reasons.

If you take the position that war with Russia is just a self-evident good then sure, the Trump-alternative style of negotiating has been a great success. The issue is there is no reason for there to be any wars involving Russia. This war is a disaster for everyone (bar East Asia)

jiggawatts
3 replies
12h25m

Do you want to see Moldova invaded?

You’re wilfully ignoring the reality that Moldova was always going to be invaded. Not because it might join NATO but because Russia has to invade it “while it still can.”

The same applies to Ukraine, and all of the -stans.

This. Is. The. Stated. Plan.

PS: the same people that believe Russian disinformation now will also believe the made up bullshit excuse China will cook up for invading Taiwan, something they’ve been planning and practising for literally decades now.

PS: I know a sociopath narcissist. She’ll make up a hundred reasons why she did something bad and argue them vehemently, but always pivoting on a dime and switching arguments mid-sentence if proven wrong. The real unstated reason is always “because I wanted to”, but she can’t say that so instead everyone gets an endless stream of ever changing “logic” of why things had to be so. Russian arguments for invading Ukraine are precisely this, and Chinese arguments for Taiwan will be the same.

roenxi
1 replies
11h42m

Not because it might join NATO but because Russia has to invade it “while it still can.”

Your argument here appears to literally be that Russia invades countries randomly. Not just without provocation, but for no reason and with no ability for countries to comply with their demands rather than being invaded. You might want to come up with a better theory before trying to put it to people. This type of nonsense is why the so called "disinformation" does a lot better - it involves the Russian government having motives and acting in a reasonable if stupid manner.

I've found people struggle to come up with a motivation that isn't NATO expansion. One fellow said it wasn't NATO expansion it was that Ukraine was about to integrate with the EU which is a bit ... we can call it EU expansion if that makes people more comfortable. Same difference. Big lump of people who turn out to be disturbingly cheered at the thought of killing lots of Russians. Lots of US funding.

Russian arguments for invading Ukraine are precisely this, and Chinese arguments for Taiwan will be the same.

I mean, sure. But you're not grappling with the obvious question of why did Russia decide that it wanted to invade Ukraine. In the 90s it decided it "wanted" to give Ukraine independence [0] and through the 90s and 00s decided that it was happy to have Ukraine as an independent state. Even in the 10s as the situation started to deteriorate Russia didn't abandon negotiating.

The issue here is that like everyone else they have 30+ years of experience watching how the post-USSR NATO and they had some idea of what was about to happen, ie, Ukraine folded in to the greater anti-Russia military alliance. Obviously they are still a bit naive given that Ukraine was much better prepared than they expected.

[0] I wouldn't say that was acting out of sociopath narcissism on that one. More it was forced to.

jiggawatts
0 replies
10h59m

Your argument here appears to literally be that Russia invades countries randomly. Not just without provocation

No, not randomly! There's has been a plan in motion since well before 2014 to reinstate the former Soviet Union. Putin has repeatedly said that this is his "dream". These countries aren't picked at random, they're all former members of the USSR.

Look at it this way: Belarus is a puppet state without border controls, a part of the new Russian empire all but officially. Ukraine very nearly fell within days during 2022. If it had, the Russians would have kept right on rolling through Transnistria and into Moldova. Kazakhstan or one of the smaller -stans would be next, and so on, until the former USSR was reformed.

Not just without provocation.

Countries can be invaded even if they didn't "provoke" it.

I want you to pause for a second here and think about what you just said.

Are you the type of person to believe that everyone that gets punched in the face "provoked" it somehow? Or every woman that got raped was responsible by "provoking" the rapist?

I ask you to ask yourself these questions because there are people that think that YES, every woman that got raped was at least partly responsible for it.

Are you that person?

If not, why does the same logic not apply to Ukraine?

Must they have "provoked" Russia?

And if they did provoke them somehow, was Russia justified in killing hundreds of thousands of people in response?

What... exactly... was the thing that Ukraine did that justifies 200K dead, 500K+ wounded, millions displaced, etc. Please be specific, outlining how the provocation is somehow a worse outcome for Russia than the dead and wounded they have caused.

Just to reiterate: before you go off on a tangent, please very specifically explain how Ukraine joining NATO has a "greater material impact" on Russia than hundreds of thousands dead and wounded.

By specific, I mean: "If Russia hadn't invaded, they would have lost N million people to X because Ukraine would have done Y, and the evidence for this is Z." Make sure 'N' is > 200K and the source of the information predates 2022.

In the 90s it decided it "wanted" to give Ukraine independence [0] and through the 90s and 00s decided that it was happy to have Ukraine as an independent state.

At no point was Russia happy about the USSR member states leaving, and Putin has repeatedly stated that this is the "greatest geopolitical disaster of the last century".

You're arguing against the core motivation stated by Putin himself repeatedly in personal interviews.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7632057

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-rues-soviet-colla...

https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2022/12/putins-long-w...

Etc...

ithkuil
0 replies
9h57m

There is a subtle detail here in that there is an alternative to being invaded: you can surrender and become a puppet state.

All these words about "NATO expansion" and "western influence" are just a code word for what ultimately just means "no longer under former Soviet-block influence".

Just about any sovereign choice that a country like Ukraine makes that is not bowing their head to Moscow is by definition taken as a direct assault to their god-given right to rule their former empire.

So let's just cut all this crap about NATO or whatnot and let them say clearly:

"I want all the territories of the former Russian empire to remain under their former rulers. Ukraine. Georgia, ... are not free to do what they want with themselves, they are not really sovereign. We Russians have a god-given mandate to rule them. And when they don't want to be ruled by us we will leverage the Russian minorities we have planted in those countries to justify invasion"

It's a perfectly simple and honest way of framing what they really want. And they can claim that "the west" has already done much of that meddling with their imperialistic past and whatnot. Then we can discuss things. But you have to be honest about exactly what you want to happen.

There is no point pretending that the problem is NATO expansion and if it wasn't for NATO a former-soviet country could just do whatever they wanted. The desire of joining NATO is just a reaction to a threat of being dragged back into the Russian influence sphere against their will!

pjc50
0 replies
4h0m

Moldova is already occupied (Transnistria).

The issue is there is no reason for there to be any wars involving Russia

Do they know that? Russia (well, Putin, who is the state) seems to think there is a reason for Russia starting a war involving Russia.

TiredOfLife
5 replies
1d4h

Is that NATO currently in the room with you?

JakkTrent
4 replies
22h50m

This is purpose of NATO - to prevent the lines on the map from changing. Ukraine may not be a member of NATO officially but it doesn't need to be - the Soviet era reason for Ukraine is the same as the NATO, a buffer state.

Russian aggression reinforced the need for a buffer state - before it wasn't obvious, now it is. NATO is intending to force Russia to leave Ukraine and they are willing to play a very long game bc it's a buffer state in play, not a NATO state.

The end result of this strategy is either Russia breaks or the war escalates.

ben_w
2 replies
22h6m

The USSR asked to join NATO, which was quite funny to learn about.

Russia-NATO relations were pretty good, even heading (slowly) towards such membership under Putin in 2000.

Unfortunately, Putin didn't like GWB leaving the ABM treaty, and did like having the old USSR back, so aggression and all else as you say.

Iwan-Zotow
1 replies
15h42m

Perhaps, he saw the result of NATO aggression against Serbia?

ben_w
0 replies
12h38m

"Russian paratroopers seized Slatina airport to become the first peacekeeping force in the war zone" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_bombing_of_Yugoslavia

Which was a surprise at the time, and left some convinced it was a UN rather than NATO operation.

vasac
0 replies
22h30m

Nope. NATO did change the lines on the map.

But thanks for playing.

slg
3 replies
1d2h

One or more nuclear powers has been at war for basically the entire nuclear era. They have all had wars in which they have "lost more troops than in any war since WWII". Even if this is the end of the Putin regime, this wouldn't even be the first time that the Soviet Union/Russia collapsed. I don't know what the path you think you see from where we are now to "full scale nuclear war", but it seems incredibly silly to suggest "the situation is more tense than it ever has been before", especially after you have already name checked Able Archer and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

roenxi
2 replies
16h44m

I don't know what the path you think you see from where we are now to "full scale nuclear war", but it seems incredibly silly to suggest "the situation is more tense than it ever has been before", especially after you have already name checked Able Archer and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Able Archer was one of a series of (annual) scheduled training exercises. The Cuban missile crisis was a fairly civil dispute over where people stationed military assets that was resolved diplomatically. The Ukraine War has involved the mobilisation of the Russian military with estimates in the 100s of thousands for Russian casualties and active strikes on Russian military infrastructure.

How are you construing the first two are more tense than the last? The last is a significant escalation of tensions from the first two. We're a long way up the escalation ladder.

And, putting it to you a second time, what warnings are you expecting to see months before a nuclear war starts? I don't think you can see any path from any scenario to nuclear war. I doubt you would have seen a path from Able Archer to nuclear war, or a path from the US deploying missiles in Turkey to nuclear war either.

slg
0 replies
12h33m

During the Cuban Missile Crisis the US dropped depth charges in the vicinity of the Soviet submarine B-59. This was meant as a sign to surface, but it was interpreted by the sub as an attack suggesting war had already broken out. The Soviet rules of engagement allowed for the launch of nuclear weapons in this situation if all three of the sub's highest ranking officers agreed. Two of them were in agreement, but Vasily Arkhipov disagreed. His decision that day single-handedly stopped nuclear war.

So yes, I think we were closer to "full scale nuclear war" during the Cuban Missile Crisis than we are today. There isn't much point in continuing the conversation if you can't agree with that.

pjc50
0 replies
3h58m

fairly civil dispute over where people stationed military assets

Your argument is that USSR stationing assets, including nukes, in Cuba isn't a provocation against the US while the mere thought of Ukraine joining NATO (not involving any actual NATO assets in Ukraine before the invasion in 2014!) is a provocation?

ithkuil
2 replies
21h27m

organizing direct strikes in Russian territory

Well. Ukraine just wants to shoot at the places where rockets and artillery are shooting at them. It happens that the Russians conveniently are doing so behind the border. They can shoot at you. But you can't shoot back.

I honestly don't understand how people can spin this up as that NATO wants to strike Russia with a straight face.

lazide
0 replies
20h44m

It makes more sense when you figure it’s projection.

That’s when it gets scary too.

Spooky23
0 replies
15h14m

Russia has very good influence operations and seeds this type of propaganda. It’s all over on social media.

See Maria Butina and the total ownership of the NRA. Starting with Putin bare-chested riding horses in the GWB “I’m looking into his soul” era to today, the American right wingers are pretty much pro-Russia… amazing feat considering that killing Russians has been historically a priority for them since 1917.

yencabulator
0 replies
1d1h

They've made it quite clear that they want the war to continue until something in Russia breaks.

Huh? I'd expect most non-Russian-aligned parties would be happy to see Russia retreat from Ukraine, pay reparations, and call that a peace. Russia only needs to break if Russia persists in occupying other countries.

pjc50
0 replies
4h2m

Nuclear war is the one situation Putin can't guarantee his own survival, which is ultimately the only metric he cares about.

The chances of a Russian fizzle are very high given the maintenance issues with the regular army, but nobody wants to take that bet.

oceanplexian
8 replies
1d11h

“Civilization destruction” isn’t a realistic scenario and I think people need to get over that. It’s not the 1980s. It’s almost certain what would actually happen is one or two pop off in a conflict zone like Ukraine and then nukes start getting used tactically like conventional weapons.

The larger issue is once the “nuclear taboo” is broken nation states will start using them. Nukes aren’t magic, they’re just really big bombs. Most likely the smaller ones are more practical to deliver and will be used on military targets (Bunker busting, destroying fortifications, etc). It wouldn’t play out like Mad Max but basically WWII but with small nukes and regional missile defense systems playing a huge role.

rurp
2 replies
22h3m

This line of thinking is both wrong and frightening. Military escalation is always messy and uncertain, and history is full of wars that escalated beyond either side's overall interest. Imperfect information, poor decisions, and tactically reasonable but strategically catastrophic decisions are all ways that can lead to things getting out of hand.

On top of all that, the only practical way to have any hope of "winning" a nuclear exchange is to hit the other side so unexpectedly hard and fast that they can't mount a strong enough response to completely destroy you in return. There were multiple serious high level discussions about doing exactly that at various points during the Cold War by both sides.

We should all want the world to be as many rungs down the escalation ladder as possible. One or more countries breaking the prohibition on nuclear weapon use and using tactical nuclear weapons would bring the world dangerously close to a full nuclear war. Being a few short steps from such an event is not a stable situation, and it is one that will break badly at some point.

Our current situation is too unstable; deliberately making things much worse is a terrible notion.

ithkuil
0 replies
21h35m

Interestingly the very reason why nuclear weapons and the logic of their deployment are so dangerous and unstable, so much that two geopolitical adversaries with lots at stake actually agreed on never using them, led us nowadays to underestimate the danger of nuclear arsenals because in so many years "nothing bad happened". Human psychology is just not very well adapted to stay in perpetual alertness. We tend to normalize situations unfold over long periods of time.

chasd00
0 replies
21h29m

On top of all that, the only practical way to have any hope of "winning" a nuclear exchange is to hit the other side so unexpectedly hard and fast that they can't mount a strong enough response to completely destroy you in return. There were multiple serious high level discussions about doing exactly that at various points during the Cold War by both sides.

to demonstrate this point you can find the end of the movie War Games on youtube. A rouge AI (heh) is determined to launch an ICBM and only when the computer is tasked to play itself in a game of nuclear war does it determine there is no possible way to win. The movie ends with the iconic robotic voiced line "strange game, the only winning move is not to play".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0N7TpqZI-E

chasd00
1 replies
22h35m

I think it's common knowledge that preventing a tactical nuclear war from escalating to a strategic nuclear war is basically impossible. Even a tactical nuke targeting a military base in its entirety is strategic enough to warrant a response targeting an industrial center (city). Then there you have it, the strategic nukes launch on population centers.

I think a Mad Max style post apocalypse type situation wouldn't come about until maybe 30 years after a full nuclear war. As disease and civilization continue to deteriorate over time eventually I can see much of the word getting to that state. Kind of like how a polluted lake doesn't kill all the fish immediately, it slowly dies over time.

shiroiushi
0 replies
11h0m

I think a Mad Max style post apocalypse type situation wouldn't come about until maybe 30 years after a full nuclear war. As disease and civilization continue to deteriorate over time eventually I can see much of the word getting to that state.

This sounds exactly like Mad Max. If you remember, in the very first "Mad Max" movie, civilization was not completely gone yet: Max was a policeman, but civilization was in tatters and murderous biker gangs ran wild. The later movies showed civilization being completely gone.

cjbgkagh
0 replies
22h57m

People can barely afford to exist now, not only would there be real wealth destruction through the course of the destructive war there would be a significant reverse wealth effect kicking in. A veritable economic implosion. WWII had a stimulus wealth effect following on from a Great Depression deflationary super-cycle capped by being able to destroy the completion by having them bomb each other. WWIII has none of those, so any belief that the impact to the average individual could be less than completely ruinous is completely misplaced.

542354234235
0 replies
1d6h

but basically WWII but with small nukes and regional missile defense systems playing a huge role

So a total war scenario, but with multi megaton nuclear weapons? That sounds civilization ending to me.

“There was a strong wind that night and as I came out of the shelter, all I could see around us was fire…burning clothing, 'tatami' mats, and debris were blowing down the road and it looked like a flowing river of fire… I remember seeing other families, like us, holding hands and running through the fires…I saw a baby on fire on a mother's back. I saw children on fire, but they were still running. I saw people catch fire when they fell onto the road because it was so hot.” [1] This isn’t an account of the atomic bombs. This is the firebombing of Tokyo, which killed more people and destroyed more homes than either atomic bombs. The US was firebombing Japanese cities week after week, leveling over 60 Japanese cities and killing between 330,000 and 900,000 people (though we will never know for sure because the very records needed were obliterated in the conflagrations). WWII destruction was limited completely by the technology of the time. Total war means total war.

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/tokyo-firebombing-survivors-recall-mos...

sandspar
0 replies
1d11h

From ChatGPT: Normalcy bias is when people underestimate the possibility and impact of a disaster, believing things will always stay the same. It leads to inaction and unpreparedness during emergencies.

temporarely
3 replies
1d7h

(Russia, US, UK, China)

+France

shmerl
2 replies
16h22m

France being the only sensible one putting Putin back in his place by telling him "we also have nuclear warheads" instead of "we avoid escalation". That's how nuclear deterrent is supposed to work.

cedws
1 replies
11h25m

That strategy would work if you weren’t trying to reason with a Soviet-era psychopath whose only concern is his own legacy. If he’s on his last legs tomorrow you don’t think his final move will be nuclear revenge? This man has demonstrated that he will kill anyone who gets in his way, even his own citizens, in brutal ways.

shmerl
0 replies
10h5m

That "psychopath" (more exactly - sociopath) values his palaces and riches more than burning in a nuclear war. I.e. he can bluff and blackmail, but he is a coward who is obsessed with money and hedonistic pursuits. That's why the idea conveyed to him that if he makes any nuclear attack he personally will be immediately killed (by conventional weapons) made him tone his idiotic threats down by a lot. Those who see their legacy in palaces with golden toilet brushes aren't going to die as martyrs.

Macron understood it well and basically told him to get lost with his threats, or in simple words - France also has nuclear weapons. That's the only language Putin understands.

ClumsyPilot
1 replies
20h53m

biggest risk of a nuclear war breaking out that the species has ever faced

I think this is absurd and I really don’t like this line of thinking. This is being blown away out of proportion.

Russia wants ukraine and China wants Taiwan. These are localised issues, nobody is invading Texas, and core territories of nuclear powers are not in danger.

Much bigger chunks of lands have changed hands over the last 60 years, think collapse of USSR, the debacle in Afghanistan, Vietnam war, etc. The world did not end.

In 2008 American banks did more damage to the world than Russia/China would by successfully taking these areas of land.

Starting a nuclear exchange over these relatively small-ish issues would be peak idiocy. Yes, it sucks for the locals but there are 3 civil wars in Africa and conflict in the Middle East causing the same amount of misery, they are easier to solve but no one cares.

roenxi
0 replies
16h30m

Starting a nuclear exchange over these relatively small-ish issues would be peak idiocy

Starting nuclear war under any conditions would be peak idiocy. We still have relatively regular near misses. The current issues appear to be more significant than situations that have caused near misses in the past.

bagels
0 replies
16h12m

We have the warning. Now would be the time to start building more weapons. Maybe that is what the transparency report is about, so we can show that we've done so next year?

justin66
0 replies
1d16h

During times of escalating tensions with a resourceful geopolitical adversary, you would try to cool things off with diplomacy but simultaneously... start building lots of new nuclear weapons?

Smart!

JumpCrisscross
31 replies
1d18h

no form of full scale nuclear war where the production apparatus for anything becomes a factor

Where full nuclear war means a full exchange of strategic fire, yes. For tactical nukes or bombardment of a non-retaliating state, less so.

llamaimperative
29 replies
1d18h

It's not clear there's any such thing as "tactical nukes" given that they're strategically useless, and it's actually not even clear there's such a thing as nuclear exchange that isn't full scale war. At least as told by Ellsberg in the Doomsday Machine, there was literally no mechanism for the US to launch a partial nuclear attack.

hypeatei
10 replies
1d18h

no mechanism for the US to launch a partial nuclear attack

Yep, the trajectory to North Korea (from US mainland) has to pass over Russia and the Russians have to trust that it's not coming for them.

Not that Russia would be okay with us striking NK in the first place, but you get the point.

crmd
4 replies
1d17h

You can fire an SLBM from the Pacific or the Sea of Japan without traversing Russia or China.

hypeatei
2 replies
1d17h

Assuming you're striking first, yes. Nuclear subs take ~15 minutes to deploy, though, and that isn't the first option when counter striking. The U.S. president has six minutes to decide/launch a counter attack from the missile silos.

Annie Jacobsen has a book "Nuclear War: A Scenario" on all this where she interviews high ranking officials and pries into government documents related to nuclear war.

gpderetta
0 replies
1d9h

On the other hand, NK is not launching a first strike that can take out all US land-bases ICBM sites anytime soon.

datadrivenangel
0 replies
22h49m

Isn't Jacobsen a bit of a crank? Some of her other books include ESP And Area 51.

maxglute
0 replies
1d14h

NK's geographic position is interesting. Unless US boat is launching east from PRC's Yellow / Bohai sea / PLAN bastion, there isn't a trajectory to NK that doesn't look like it's heading towards PRC mainland. And even then, unless timed during summer months, prevailing winds is going to push fallout / radiation towards BJ. During winter downwind will drift to SKR / JP / east coast PRC. I don't know what proportional counter retaliation is, maybe a few nukes off CONUS west coast urban centres, but PRC isn't going to sit there and eat incidental radiation over major population centres even if target is NK.

data-ottawa
2 replies
1d16h

Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to Russia that the US is attacking NK and not just nuking Kamchatka?

Can the trajectory of an ICBM be inferred by the height of it’s arc?

hypeatei
1 replies
1d16h

Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to Russia that the US is attacking NK and not just nuking Kamchatka?

I guess that depends on current relations between the two countries and assumes there wouldn't be a breakdown of communications when launches are detected.

Can the trajectory of an ICBM be inferred by the height of it’s arc?

From the book I mentioned in another comment, Russia has very flawed satellite systems for tracking nuclear launches. There is a lot of focus on the fact that you don't have much time in the event of an imminent nuclear strike so I don't think there is much calculations being done if the missile is (generally) coming towards your homeland.

data-ottawa
0 replies
1d1h

Thanks, that’s helpful, I’ll checkout that book

sillywalk
0 replies
1d13h

Against North Korea why would the US even use an ICBM? Why not a B-2 flown from Guam or from the continental US?

fshbbdssbbgdd
0 replies
1d18h

Are you saying that just because the great circle from US to NK goes over Russia? Can we not fire on a less optimal trajectory? Or from a submarine?

nradov
7 replies
1d15h

There are a limited set of scenarios where a major nuclear state might use a tactical weapon against a lower-tier state. For example, if the USA got into a conflict with Iran and we had actionable intelligence that they were assembling a nuclear weapon in an underground bunker then we might take it out with a small number of tactical nuclear ground strikes. I'm not recommending this but you can game out scenarios where this seems like the least bad course of action.

B-2 bomber crews regularly train for this exact mission.

umbra07
5 replies
1d14h

but why use a nuke? we have all sorts of non-nuclear weaponry. we have bunker busters that can penetrate hundreds of feet.

even if iran can't retaliate with nukes, the geopolitical cost would be insane.

542354234235
3 replies
1d3h

"Iran’s underground nuclear facility could be between 80 meters (260 feet) and 100 meters (328 feet) below the surface... That could be a problem for the GBU-57 since the US Air Force stated that the bomb could rip through 60 meters (200 feet) of cement and ground before detonating. US officials have talked about detonating two of these bombs consecutively to guarantee the destruction of a location. However, the new depth of the Natanz tunnels still poses a significant obstacle." [1]

[1] https://www.eurasiantimes.com/us-flaunts-massive-ordnance-pe...

sophacles
2 replies
21h53m

The US military has a long history of making technically true statements about it's weapons, but which are still misleading.

If a bomb can actually rip through 200 meters of cement and ground, then the 60 meter statement is also true.

It also has a history of revealing the actual limits of weapons systems, but only after better capabilities exist (with the limits of those still classified or understated) - that is the 60M limit was the max of the old bomb and they don't need to know about the new one.

sophacles
0 replies
1h19m

I can see how it comes off as dismissive my bad - it was intended to be a "take such analyses with a grain of salt if you aren't privvy to classified, relevant information".

jmpman
0 replies
1d13h

Iran has some ultra tough concrete. I question if even our best bunker busters can penetrate them.

chasd00
0 replies
22h22m

Things would have to get very very dire to go the tactical nuke route for the US. Not only is there a fear of tactical nuclear war escalating to strategic war there's the fear of demonstrating tactical nuclear war is feasible. If it works and Iran's nuclear capability is destroyed and nothing else happens then it will be all to easy for another power to use tactical nukes and then nuclear weapons become a common component on the battlefield. That makes escalation to the big strategic weapons easier.

somenameforme
3 replies
1d14h

The main difference between tactical and strategic comes down to intended use. Tactical nukes are intended for battlefield use, strategic nukes are intended to end other civilizations. They also come in different delivery methods. For instance there are tactical nuclear landmines, artillery, and so on, whereas most strategic weapons are just going to be missiles and ICBMs in particular.

But I do agree that the labeling is largely pointless because there are nominally "tactical" weapons with payloads exceeding 100kt. For contrast, Hiroshima (which was enough to destroy a mid-sized city and kill hundreds of thousands with a single bomb) was 16kt. So "tactical weapons" can easily destroy cities. Even if strategic weapons can be hundreds of times higher yield, at some point you're just beating a dead horse, or city as it may be.

sillywalk
1 replies
1d12h

there are tactical nuclear landmines, artillery, and so on,

Not sure about the landmines, but the US and USSR retired their nuclear artillery decades ago. I'm not sure how much effort it would be to put existing warheads inside shells, or about other countries.

somenameforme
0 replies
1d11h

I take the disarmament claims with some degree of skepticism. Alot of these weapons provide substantial flexibility and destructive capability, which superpowers are generally not fond of relinquishing. A lot of the nuclear disarmament stuff hit its peak in the years following the collapse of the USSR, at which point US and Russian relations looked very positive and optimistic moving forward. We're now back to lows not seen since the Cold War.

In any case, for the specifics - Wiki gives 2004 [1] as the date the US reportedly dismantled its nuclear artillery, and in 2000 Russia reported that "nearly all" of its nuclear artillery had been dismantled. Nuclear landmines [2] fall under 'atomic demolition munitions' which are basically any sort of small/mobile nuke, so you get everything from landmines to the suitcase nuke weirdness.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_artillery

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_demolition_munition

pjc50
0 replies
3h56m

The question is "does the other side start launching their second strike against your cities once the first 'tactical' mushroom cloud is seen"?

cfraenkel
2 replies
1d17h

All these other comments should just go read the book, it's worth it and a good, if horrifying read. What 'no mechanism' above means is that for many decades the SIOP consisted of 'launch everything'. The only way it was a 'plan' was to time the arrival times to avoid fratricide. This btw meant that even if there was a 'tactical' shooting event in Western Europe, all the targets in China would have been hit, even if they weren't involved. Needless to say, Japan was never informed of this....

hyeonwho4
1 replies
1d16h

From a MAD game theoretic perspective that makes a lot of sense. To avoid non-essential use of nukes, only give policymakers the option of launching everything. Then they will only launch in extreme circumstances. Hopefully only circumstances where there are already missiles inbound.

This avoids the possibility of gradual nuclear escalation, which can be more easily miscalibrated.

lumost
0 replies
22h26m

This seems somewhat impractical, assuredly - plans would have been made in a dark drawer for the case that an earstwhile allied country became politically unstable.

On both sides of the wall - it would have been feasible for a country to attempt to establish it's own alignment separate from the superpowers through the use of nuclear weapons

tyingq
1 replies
1d18h

I take tactical to mean something like "< 100 kilotons", meaning the damage would be much more limited than a large device. Those devices certainly exist. Where it's somewhat plausible a nation could use one and face some retaliation that doesn't escalate into a global doomsday.

Depends a lot on who/where/why, how much primary and collateral damage, and so on. You may be right that any use of any nuclear weapon turns into a global doomsday. It's hard to say unless it really happens. I'm often surprised that terrible war related incidents end up not escalating beyond the general region where they happened.

llamaimperative
0 replies
1d5h

My gripe is not about the nomenclature but about the usefulness of such weapons.

jncfhnb
0 replies
1d17h

That doesn’t make any sense. Just drop it by a conventional non ICBM method

skellington
0 replies
1d18h

I dunno...too hypothetical a question to answer, since we already have enough nukes to destroy everything and nobody is going to reduce their arsenal to one.

pythonguython
0 replies
1d18h

Agreed. It’s over in half a day. Ramping up production is a rung on the escalation ladder. It’s generally good to have more rungs.

chipweinberger
0 replies
13h21m

It’s not a given that both sides have nuclear capability.

megaton size has not been disclosed. The majority could be small nukes.

justin66
14 replies
1d16h

Because if they could start churning out a dozen or a hundred a week within a short period of time, why does the standing arsenal really matter?

Possessing an overwhelming amount of retaliatory force and the combined ability and willingness to deliver it immediately in the face of an enemy's first strike serves a useful purpose for deterrence. "Mutually assured destruction" means that both sides are prevented from attacking, because the other side can respond in kind. It's irrational for either side to attack, since everybody would just die. (and yes, MAD comes with its own problems)

The ability to build a bunch of bombs in the future is entirely unrelated. I mean, who cares?

HaZeust
13 replies
1d15h

I'd also like to add to this; that the ability to consecutively create additional warheads is not of any particular inherent value, especially when our reserve count is more than enough to wipe out any and all civilization - regardless of target diversity.

It's not like missiles or ammo, where the more we produce in times of conflict, the more of an upper-hand we have. We've already reached the ceiling for the finite amount of nuclear warheads required to do the most conceivable damage. Beyond is irrelevant.

hollerith
12 replies
1d14h

What do you imagine happens when thousands of nukes explode? The Earth splits into pieces?

HaZeust
11 replies
1d14h

Nuclear winter??? Strange question.

hollerith
10 replies
1d14h

It's not a strange question: many falsehoods get repeated over and over on the internet and here on HN.

The conversation around nuclear winter focused on burning petroleum storage tanks because (in contrast to burning houses and burning trees) those kinds of fires produce the darkest smoke with a particle size small enough to get high in the atmosphere and to stay in the atmosphere for a long time. "100 oil refinery fires would be sufficient to bring about a small scale, but still globally deleterious nuclear winter," said one prominent paper.

Then Saddam lit 700 oil wells on fire (and deployed land mines to slow down firefighters with the result that it took 7 months to put the fires out), and although there was some slight cooling effect, you really had to go looking for it with precision instruments to detect it at all:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in...

HaZeust
9 replies
1d13h

Who said anything about petroleum storage tanks? The conversation around nuclear winter in relation to nukes is because it's an understood consequence of 100-some Hiroshima-sized warheads being detonated between two major city centers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Climatic_effect...

hollerith
8 replies
1d13h

Who said anything about petroleum storage tanks?

Repeating myself: before the 700 Kuwaiti oil fires, the most influential scientists warning about nuclear winter, like Carl Sagan, relied heavily on petroleum fires to make their argument.

justin66
3 replies
1d13h

I don't recall petroleum fires being a huge part of the dialog, back when nuclear winter was a big public topic, such that I'd bring it up first thing and to the exclusion of other concerns.

It was part of it, for sure. There was at least one apocalyptic science fiction story about the Soviets testing a bomb underground and accidentally setting a massive oil field on fire. (it was called Anvil? Or written by Christopher Anvil? jeez, it's been a while...) But it's strange to see it commented on as the main concern.

Yeul
2 replies
1d8h

I saw 9/11 cloud on TV. That was one building.

If Earth's megacities get nuked I refuse to believe that it would not have consequences for the climate.

hollerith
0 replies
22h35m

I never claimed it wouldn't have consequences for the climate, but there is a big difference between that and the assertion I am replying to, namely, "our reserve count [our current inventory of nukes] is more than enough to wipe out any and all civilization".

CleaveIt2Beaver
0 replies
22h43m

When Canada was on fire last year, we had smoke all down the east coast. I don't know if it affected the temperature, but it sure affected the environment. it doesn't need to go full ashen-winter to fuck up plant growth cycles for farms and whatnot, I'm sure.

defrost
2 replies
1d13h

As a completely serious question, what about the non-influencer scientists, the ones doing actual detailed physical modelling, what were they saying?

As I recall from the time there were three camps on this:

* pro MAD cold war political scientists who stressed that world ending Mutualy Assurred Destruction scenarios were essential to peace keeping,

* antinuclear horrified scientists, Carl Sagan, Betrand Russell, et al who wanted disarmament and peace through understanding and stressed the world ending horror of nuclear weapons and nuclear winter and wrote a lot of papers light on detail.

* actual working geophysicists modelling the world who seemed largely undecided about the actual threat of nuclear winter .. very much in the maybe | maybe not camp.

ADDED: I just read through the wikipedia Nuclear Winter article and seems (by my recollection) to have been culled in the decade since I last read it when (by my recollection) it referenced a great many more papers that fell on the probably not catastrophic side. It now appears to emphasis only papers that agree with the nuclear winter hypothesis.

JakkTrent
1 replies
22h37m

I can't speak to the actual research but after reading various declassified documents from the Soviet Union and Maoist China, I can say truthfully that they did not believe the world would end with a nuclear exchange. Both countries had 1st strike scenarios - both believed some aspect of their government and country would survive.

Mao was particularly disconcerting, to paraphrase, "Nuclear war doesn't scare me, we've got more than enough people and cities, we can rebuild"

Upon further looking into it, I fear MAD may have been at the time an overexaggeration to prevent what would be the most devastating war. Could be true now tho - things have leveled up

floam
0 replies
15h40m

If you have any links handy for the documents from China and the USSR, I’d love to read that.

mrguyorama
0 replies
18m

Since when is Carl Sagan a climatologist?

GemesAS
13 replies
1d18h

Pit production is likely the rate limiting factor.

We disassembled a bunch of AFAPs so have a lot of weapons grade plutonium around. But Pu is nasty to work with & Rocky Flats--the previous pit production facility--closed down years ago. Pit production moved to Los Alamos but it is at a much reduced capability.

Also, Pantex--where nuclear weapons are assembled--isn't exactly the model for speed & efficiency.

holowoodman
4 replies
1d17h

I guess mass produced nukes would rather be enriched uranium based, due to the far easier construction. No fiddly implosive lens assembly. No weird multi-phase cristallization that goes critical if you blink. Metal that is merely as dangerous and nasty as lead, magnesium or arsenic, not plutonium.

If you really want to go carpet-bombing with nukes, miniturization isn't as important as having a lot, quickly and reliably.

sadhorse
1 replies
1d17h

Enriching uranium is more expensive than making plutonium by a long shot. Modern nukes are two point implosion, not really fiddly. And when was the last criticality incident related to phase transition? Can't remember one.

credit_guy
0 replies
1d16h

Enriching uranium is more expensive than making plutonium by a long shot

I'm not sure. This used to be the case in WW2, but today enriching uranium is quite inexpensive.

Here's an enrichment calculator [1]. The cost of enriching to 80% (weapons grade uranium) is $80000/kg, so you can enough uranium for a Hiroshima-style bomb for about $5 million.

$5 million for a nuclear bomb is basically nothing.

[1] https://www.uxc.com/p/tools/FuelCalculator.aspx

harshreality
1 replies
1d12h

Does the U.S. make weapons-grade U235 anymore except for research? I thought gun-type fission weapons were phased out for safety and efficiency reasons. I also thought essentially all "fission" weapons today are fusion-boosted, and I thought the implosion type was the only production-ready design of fusion-boosted weapons.

GemesAS
0 replies
1d

The US isn't producing HEU anymore but still has a decent sized stockpile of it.

A number of the pits in the active stockpile are actually composite Pu/HEU pits & you can actually use HEU in implosion weapons as well.

TedDoesntTalk
1 replies
18h8m

Rocky Flats manufactured triggers. What’s pit production?

rtkwe
0 replies
17h12m

The core of the big modern (relative term here given these designs are pretty old by now) bombs are implosion fission devices that then trigger a secondary fusion explosion. The core of that primary bomb is a plutonium ball called a pit that gets crushed to trigger the initial explosion. Then the xrays released by that get reflected and use in a secondary fusion device in the tiny amount of time the shell of the bomb lasts.

https://ananuclear.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/53f947439e...

bbatha
2 replies
1d4h

Plutonium is very corrosive and sensitive to phase changes so it needs to be refurbished and replaced regularly. The weapons grade plutonium lying around is probably not bomb ready.

lumost
0 replies
22h31m

I'd have to imagine that this material is stored in glass/argon. Corrosion should be controllable over long time horizons.

ggm
0 replies
14h12m

Without casting the military as lying, if they declare they have <x> weapons in substantive state to be used, and place them in missiles, then the implication is they maintain a stockpile of pits capable of meeting that supply, constantly.

If we assume 1 pit per month ages out due to phase and corrosion, then they would presumably have a pipeline of 12 pits in refurbishment continuously.

Since the stockpile is still measured in the thousands, I would assume the stockpile of plutonium pits running through pantex facilities is at a similar scale.

(this also assumes there is no neutral gas non-corrosive, phase stable storage)

itronitron
0 replies
22h22m

Well, surely we could train an AI to do the assembly. /s

bagels
0 replies
16h15m

In case you didn't know what a pit was, like me:

“pits,” which are spherical shells of plutonium about the size of a bowling ball

I assume that when weapons are decomissioned, the pits are put in storage. So, if they were able to use the same pit design, they could be reuse them?

chasd00
12 replies
22h44m

full scale nuclear war where the full quantity of warheads is used would be over in maybe 1hr tops. Initial attack, detection, response. Then probably another attack and another response from remaining SLICBMs and then that would be it. I don't think any capacity to create more would survive or change the outcome and therefore is not much of a deterrent.

fatbird
8 replies
22h2m

Force replenishment in the event of nuclear war is a moot question, but if someone can go from 100 to 1,000 warheads in a couple months, that has a lot of relevance in a growing crisis--what would Russia have done in 2022 if Ukraine had kept the ability to manufacture them and was able to build 100/year?

scott_w
6 replies
21h30m

I know you asked a slightly different question but I watched a video about Ukraine’s nukes and the reality is they could never deploy them without Russia. The codes always stayed with Moscow and Russia would have forcibly maintained a presence on Ukrainian soil to protect their nukes.

Ukraine returning the nukes was a pragmatic move that, at the time, removed Russian military presence from Ukrainian territory. Think about it another way: the USA maintains nuclear weapons on other country’s territory. They sure as hell staff those sites with US troops!

Retric
2 replies
20h51m

Replacing the electronics is fairly trivial compared to building an atomic weapon from scratch.

Arming codes gives a nation time to recover or destroy them, but it’s not a long term solution.

scott_w
1 replies
3h25m

How do you do that when the Russian military won't let you near the weapons?

Retric
0 replies
1h43m

Ukraine had physical control of these weapons. They handed them over in 1994, 3 years after the fall of the USSR for assurances Russia would respect their borders.

More generally a handful of soldiers isn’t the full might of a countries military. Bribes, blockade until they run out of supplies, or just shoot them.

ClumsyPilot
2 replies
20h57m

If USA maintains nukes in Turkey that does not mean they have enough troops in Turkey to protect the base against the entire Turkish military, should they decide to steamroll it. They rely on nuclear codes more than they rely on tanks to stop nukes falling into the wrong hands.

scott_w
0 replies
3h23m

Turkey allows those troops to be there. Ukraine did not want Russian troops on their soil. Forcibly ejecting those troops would have likely triggered a confrontation with a far more competent Russian military than the one we see today.

northwest65
0 replies
20h9m

They don't actually have to. The 5th and 6th fleet coupled with the various large air bases in the vicinity would have little trouble it pancaking the entire site before the Turks managed to make off with anything if it really came down to it. It's tanks all the way down.

chasd00
0 replies
21h42m

That's a good point, i read this thread top to bottom because this topic has always been fascinating to me. Others have brought up how war wouldn't go from 0 to missiles flying immediately, there would be a crisis and build-up period. So I can see something like that ability to mass produce nuclear weapons and demonstrate it acting as a deterrent and therefore be useful.I can't think of an instance off the top of my head where a massive arms build up caused the other side to back down though.

To your specific point, I think if Ukraine had the keys to even one nuclear weapon and Russia believed they'd use it the invasion would never have happened in the first place.

energy123
2 replies
21h10m

Correct but it's still a deterrent to a conventional invasion even if it doesn't deter a nuclear first strike. Japan and South Korea are nuclear threshold states and that would factor into China's decision making.

Nuclear proliferation is the main reason I am pessimistic about nuclear power as the main global solution to decarbonizing. I don't think a world with 200 threshold nuclear states is a good idea, nor would that be in the interests of any of the major powers, most smaller countries should be aiming for a 100% renewables grid.

bee_rider
1 replies
16h32m

It could have been interesting if tying our grids to, and providing some amount of free energy to, non-nuclear states was a concession given for non-proliferation treaties.

mrguyorama
0 replies
43m

It literally was but the pariah states don't really have a need to a lot of nuclear reactors.

somenameforme
8 replies
1d15h

Let's talk about just how destructive nukes are, because I think most people grossly underestimate this. One bomb in Hiroshima killed hundreds of thousands. And that was a tiny little bomb relative to modern standards - 16kt of yield in a mid-sized city of ~350k people. Modern tactical weapons (weapons intended for battlefield use) can have yields exceeding 100kt. Strategic weapons (weapons intended to end other civilizations) go into the thousands of kt. The strongest weapon ever tested being "Tsar Bomba" which had a yield of 55,000kt, so a few thousand times greater yield than the Hiroshima nuke - which was by itself enough to instantly destroy a mid-sized city and kill more than 40% of its population.

I think it's easy to lose scale/context when looking at things like nuclear test footage, so let's go the other direction. This [1] is the "Mother of All Bombs / MOAB / GBU-43" that was detonated in Afghanistan. It's the second largest conventional weapon ever fielded, weighing more than 20,000lbs and and 30+ft long (so that little blip on the screen is 30 ft for scale). It had a yield of 0.01kt. So now imagine something with literally hundreds of thousands of times greater yield - that's a modern nuke. Or, if it helps for visualization purposes, imagine hundreds of thousands of those raining down - same net effect.

So if nuclear war ever breaks out it's not going to be countries using their nukes to target isolated (and nuclear fortified) launch silos and bunkers in the middle of nowhere - they're going to try to destroy the other country (targeting things like population, economic, health, agriculture), so that they can completely eliminate the threat. And suffice to say - it won't take many nukes. The only reason you'd have thousands is to overwhelm any sort of future-tech missile defense systems as well as to eliminate any possibility for an effective first strike attack attack against you. Although even the nukes themselves are also designed to deal with missile defenses, with one missile often breaking up into multiple independent warheads on approach. This also maximizes the damage for reasons outside the scope of the post.

---

So the point of this is that thousands of nukes is already enough to basically destroy every single major city in the world and thus destroy basically every single country in the world. There's no scenario where suddenly you need to scale up to tens of thousands of nukes or whatever. In fact nations like North Korea already clearly have an effective deterrent with a stockpile that's in the tens of missiles.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6rSxJnpGNg

justin66
3 replies
1d15h

So if nuclear war ever breaks out it's not going to be countries using their nukes to target isolated (and nuclear fortified) launch silos and bunkers in the middle of nowhere - they're going to try to destroy the other country (targeting things like population, economic, health, agriculture), so that they can completely eliminate the threat.

There are at least two falsehoods here. Of course missile silos will be targeted if it's possible to do so. If you're the Russians you might need to make an honest assessment of whether your weapons are accurate enough to destroy a hardened silo, but the US believes they can target silos (and has since at least the eighties).

And prioritizing destruction of enemy population over destruction of the enemy's nuclear weapons and other military assets would just be dumb.

somenameforme
2 replies
1d14h

It's not just about accuracy. Targeting silos comes with multiple problems. The first is that they are deep underground and fortified to withstand nuclear blasts. The second is that even if you believe you can disable a silo, there's a very good chance that by the time your nuke gets there - what was in the silo has already been launched. There are also other practical issues - you don't know where every silo is, there are likely dummy silos meaning you end up completely wasting a high yield weapon, and so on.

US Cold War targets have been declassified. [1] That was from an era with less effective detection, and also where launching would generally involve planes, so airfields were targeted, but again you can see the extreme focus on agriculture, industry, medical, economic, and many targets simply labeled "population." The USSR's target list would have looked, more or less, identical. Modern target lists likely aren't even bothering with silos and just going for complete destruction of the enemy civilization.

Nuclear war, has as a prerequisite, the end of any sort of norms. It's not about destroying the opponent's military, but about literally destroying the opponent's country. Military can be rebuilt and redeployed - by targeting population, industry, economic, medical, population, and so on you completely eliminate the enemy's ability to ever be a threat again.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/23/us/politics/1950s-us-nucl...

[1] - https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb538-Cold-War-Nuclear... (a much more informative, but less approachable article/datacache)

justin66
1 replies
1d14h

It's not about accuracy.

In the case of US silos, it sure is. Nobody believes the doors on those silos would survive a direct hit (edit: meaning, a hit with a US warhead's sort of CEP accuracy), but if the warhead lands a mile away...

The first is that they are deep underground and fortified to withstand nuclear blasts.

If you have any references indicating that Russian ICBM silos have been deemed by the US to be indestructible, I would like to read about that. It is possible to build a bunker deep underground that is difficult to destroy with a single warhead, yes, but what we're talking about is actual silos where ICBMs are deployed.

but again you can see the extreme focus on agriculture, industry, medical, economic, and many targets simply labeled "population."

I see that being referenced as one potential target (category number 275, out of how many I'm not sure) of many. Not the subject of "extreme focus" as you've said here, nor a target that would be prioritized over the enemy's military assets, as you suggest in a parent comment.

(the real war crime is the design of that website)

Modern target lists likely aren't even bothering with silos and just going for complete destruction of the enemy civilization.

I guess this is the gist of my disagreement with your comments. I have no idea why you would believe this. I'm not suggesting the people who do this kind of planning are humanitarians, nor am I suggesting I expect many people to survive a big nuclear exchange. My disagreement is: the idea silos would not be targeted by a party launching a first strike, in favor of hitting soft targets, is silly.

edit: there's enough wrong here that I could go a little crazy with responses. here's just a little more.

There are also other practical issues - you don't know where every silo is,

If you're the US government, you view it as your job to know where all the silos, and to the fullest extent possible all the warheads, are. (and if you're the adversary, you're interested in using your silos as a tool for deterrence and negotiation, which wouldn't work if they all existed in secret)

there are likely dummy silos meaning you end up completely wasting a high yield weapon, and so on.

Russia's strategy has included road-mobile ICBMs that are deliberately difficult to track, but if they've ever built fake silos, I've never heard about it. During the cold war that would have been problematic - the treaties involved inspecting silos. Post-cold war... I don't know, what's the point? In any case, do you have any evidence that this is something they've done?

I guess a cynical person could wonder about how well maintained those Russian ICBMs are today, and whether they're all really "fake silos." ahem You read pretty negative things, but I've never seen anything that seemed better than rank speculation.

somenameforme
0 replies
1d13h

Reread the source. We were aiming for quote, the "systematic destruction" of urban industrial targets. To be clear, that quote is coming from the released documents, not the site covering it. We were explicitly targeting population in each and every city, alongside other non-military targets.

A "dummy" silo does not mean a fake silo, though those may also be used, but simply a silo without a live weapon. Silos are cheap and be constructed extremely rapidly. Beyond dummies, there's also the issues of them having already launched their payload, hardened against attacks (which does not mean immune), and so on. Then there's also the nuclear triad in that weapons will also be coming from the sea and possibly from the air as well.

The goal of this obfuscation and deception is not to avoid masking how many weapons you have, but rather to prevent the enemy from being able to meaningfully disrupt your nuclear retaliation capability; in other words - to protect yourself against a nuclear first strike. In modern times it's unlikely either side believes they can significantly disrupt the opponent's nuclear retaliation capability (unlike in the past when strikes would generally have come from the air and had far lesser range overall), and so it simply makes much more logical sense to optimize the damage caused by your own strikes in pursuit of your opponent's "systematic destruction."

knappe
2 replies
1d15h

To add to this, the Tsar Bomba was so large, it created a shock wave that circled the globe _3_ times.

542354234235
1 replies
1d3h

Another fun Tsar Bomba fact. If you build a thermonuclear weapon’s bomb casing out of U238, the fast neutrons released by the fission/fusion reactions cause the U238 to fission, increasing the yield by about 50%, while also increasing the fallout. The Tsar Bomba variant tested was utilizing a lead casing, because the Soviets were worried that the 100MT version would kill the crew dropping it, and irradiate a significant amount of territory. It is weird to think about how the one tested was the half strength version.

chasd00
0 replies
22h6m

Soviets were worried that the 100MT version would kill the crew dropping it,

another fun fact, the drop plane had only a 50% chance of survival with the 50MT version. They weren't _that_ worried about the crew's fate.

ein0p
0 replies
1d14h

You don’t have to imagine, here’s a web site that lets you model the impact: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/. I positioned the “moderate” 1MT single warhead strikes at all nearby army and naval bases and concluded that I won’t be incinerated right away, but will die of radiation sickness and starvation instead.

jjk166
6 replies
1d1h

It works the same as industrial capacity for things like planes or artillery shells. Once you ramp up production you can produce lots very quickly, the US produced 70,000 between 1945 and 1990, averaging 30 per week with a peak rate around 54 per week; but building out the factories to ramp up takes a long time - for the first 10 years the US averaged 6 per week. Most of the US's nuclear production capacity was dismantled. With WW2 levels of hustle and disregard for safety, we could probably build new facilities in around a year or two. These efforts would be pulling resources from attempts to ramp up production of other wartime necessities. Also you don't just need to build the nukes, you also need to build adequate delivery systems, which are all advanced aerospace manufacturing.

If you eliminate your arsenal and then decide later you want it back, you're giving adversaries a lot of time to beat you to the punch, all the while advertising that you are pursuing nuclear as opposed to conventional weapons to fight your war.

lbotos
5 replies
17h11m

I'm sure someone here knows -- how many actively procured munitions could have their payload swapped for a nuclear payload? Are there "rules" against building "nuclear compatible" munitions?

1992spacemovie
4 replies
15h50m

Yes. And yes. Treaties for arms reduction deal with not only warheads but also delivery vehicles. Protocols include mutual inspection of disabled vehicles, etc.

__MatrixMan__
1 replies
14h58m

I have a hard time imagining that anybody with the resources to secure a nuclear warhead in the first place would later be prevented from using it just because it wasn't plug-n-play compatible with their existing trebuchets or whatever.

jvanderbot
0 replies
4h57m

It's not about "later" it's about "now". You don't inspect standing stockpiles and delivery mechanisms to say "See? We will never have the capability to nuke you", you do so to show that you're not currently building and are not currently sitting on a pile of nukes.

As mentioned probably two posts up, any ramp up would be obvious to adversaries, have some lead time, and would take away from other production efforts.

Log_out_
1 replies
13h16m

Are treaties still worth something? In a world where authoritarians defect the "global community" and start wars of conquests that violate MAD , are those papers and laws still worth something?

amitport
0 replies
12h19m

The "global community" was never a thing. In the fist decade of the UN some countries made an effort, quickely it became a power grab political nightmare that never actually resolved anything.

fragmede
4 replies
1d14h

googling required to get an answer would put me on lists I don’t really feel like being on.

But asking in the clear under the pseudonym "transcriptase" here isn't going to get you put on the exact same lists? How do you think this list making process works?

transcriptase
2 replies
1d14h

I would assume that asking a question in the comments section of a relevant article, and making clear why I’m doing so is slightly less flag worthy than randomly googling questions about logistics and production.

gosub100
0 replies
23h5m

You have good training for living under a police state, being submissive to authority and not asking why or having any concern for your rights. Your social credit score must be high. I'm curious did you learn this in "lockdown" drills in your elementary school?

TiredOfLife
0 replies
1d13h

If lists like that are being made, then Googling would put you on a huge automatic list that would be queried only as part of a targeted inquiry. But asking in comment section of relevant article would put you on a short "immediate action" list.

GJim
0 replies
1d9h

This is the 'chilling effect' in action.

toast0
3 replies
1d14h

Because if they could start churning out a dozen or a hundred a week within a short period of time, why does the standing arsenal really matter?

There's probably a declared number where this matters, but the current number of warheads is high enough that's there's no need to make more. 3,000 is plenty to retaliate against an opponent with 30,000. More doesn't provide a benefit.

Nuclear disarmament, as practiced by the US and Russia is a negotiation to reduce the number of warheads in a coordinated fashion so that it's possible to convince warmongers on both sides that it's reasonable. The benefits are primary a reduction in cost to maintain and secure the warheads and a significant reduction in the risk of accidents related to the warheads. Mutual destruction is still assured --- you'd need a lot fewer warheads for that and involvement of other nuclear states; but then your question of production capacity would be more interesting.

yencabulator
2 replies
1d1h

3,000 is plenty to retaliate against an opponent with 30,000. More doesn't provide a benefit.

I think a big part of this is that the long-distance missiles, when all of this was invented, were not very accurate. Sending 10 to do the job of 1 might have been necessary just to hit the intended targets.

Modern missiles are quite capable of precision strikes.

oremolten
0 replies
3h45m

This is a big part of why the long lines bunkers/sites were abandoned. Once the accuracy increased to more than 1mi the resilience of the bunkers and sites were folly. (built to withstand multiple mt within 1mi)

chasd00
0 replies
22h14m

Modern missiles are quite capable of precision strikes.

yes, this is also why yields have dropped considerably. I'm not sure if there are any > 5 MT weapons in the US arsenal anymore. I think most are in the 500-750KT range, the missiles and delivery vehicle are accurate enough to produce the same result as the larger warheads and 5-7 (can't remember exactly) warheads can be carried by a single missile. So instead of having one missile launch one giant warhead that may hit 50 miles away from the target you have one missile launch 5-7 smaller warheads that hit within 50 meters of 5-7 different targets.

dekhn
1 replies
20h34m

Like many other things in the US that we don't do any more, if you found the right people (many of whom are retired) and gave them the right amount of money (copious) and eliminated all the "pesky" bottlenecks (environmental analyses, legal challenges, etc), it would take a year to start producing weapons.

On the other hand, that's how we ended up with Hanford Site.

mrguyorama
0 replies
7m

This has not shown to be the case as we have seen with American artillery shell production. The companies are not yet ramping up, because they don't want the ground cut out from under them if the war ends early next year and congress decides to cut any funding.

Turns out having fickle, lazy, stupid, feckless politicians have the ability to destroy projects with the stroke of a pen on a whim after every election means nobody is willing to put up their own investment, and having a business sector that is largely run by shithead middle management types who have never worked a day in their lives that wasn't just balancing a spreadsheet are unwilling to do something because it doesn't promise a HIGH ENOUGH return on investment.

God forbid you don't make ALL the profit.

ianburrell
0 replies
1d18h

The US has tons and tons plutonium from old nuclear weapons. Enough to build tens of thousands of nukes.

Also, centrifuge aren’t used by advanced nations to make nukes. They use plutonium from spent reactor fuel. The US has lots of spent fuel that could be reprocessed for the plutonium.

ranger_danger
0 replies
1d16h

I suppose the easier solution (not that I'm advocating it) would be to lie about disposing of them in the first place.

pipodeclown
0 replies
21h20m

Standing stockpiles matter in a ever changing and destabilising world. We can't imagine it now but what if the US (or any other nuclear power) started to destabalise, maybe end up in a civil war, fracture up into smaller pieces, what ever. The less nuclear weapons you have lying around during and after that process the less opportunities for things to go terribly wrong.

mattmaroon
0 replies
16h42m

My guess would be fast enough if you’re talking about a Cold War, not fast enough if you’re talking about a hot one.

lumost
0 replies
1d18h

The final cost of an h-bomb at industrial scale was estimated at 10k in the 1960s (for low yield).

However for practical purposes. One simply needs enough missiles and warheads of sufficient yield to overwhelm opposing interceptors, avoid risks of pre-emptive strike/miss-fires+500.

After that there are rapidly diminishing returns for more warheads.

ianburrell
0 replies
1d18h

The US has plenty of any conceivable war. There is probably long time to restart production since haven’t done it in a while.

The big factor is that the deployment platforms are limited. There are 400 Minuteman III missiles sitting in silos. They could put more warheads on them, but those are sitting in storage. The same is true of Trident missiles on submarines.

They could make nuclear gravity bombs but those aren’t really useful. We also have lots of those in storage.

_rm
0 replies
1d11h

Nukes tend to blow up all your stuff quite a bit faster than you can build more of it.

FredPret
32 replies
1d19h

Max warheads = 31k

Current warheads = 3.7k

I wonder how long a nuke in storage lasts - ie, how much work does it take to maintain a stockpile of x nukes, and if you can turn those swords into ploughshares relatively easily.

philipkglass
14 replies
1d19h

It takes quite a bit of work to maintain nuclear warheads. All active US weapons contain plutonium 239, which has a half life of 24,100 years. It's radioactive by alpha decay, which leads to changes in the material properties due to energetic collisions and the buildup of microscopic helium bubbles (alpha particles are merely ionized helium nuclei, so stopped alpha particles become helium). Since the US stopped testing actual nuclear warheads in the early 1990s, it takes a great deal of indirect theoretical and experimental evidence to make sure that nuclear warheads are reliable without live fire tests. That's part of "stockpile stewardship." [1] If the plutonium has deviated too far from its original mechanical behavior, it would need to be removed from warheads, purified, and remanufactured into replacements that match the original specs. And again, the rebuilt components need to be reliable but they can't actually be tested via explosion.

US weapons also rely on tritium gas "boosting" to operate reliably and efficiently [2], and tritium decays with only a 12.3 year half life. The gas reservoirs of weapons need their tritium replaced at significantly shorter intervals. Even manufacturing enough tritium to maintain the stockpile has become a challenge because the US has retired its Cold War era weapons-material reactors that used to operate at Hanford and Savannah River. Currently the US uses a power reactor owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority to make tritium for weapons [3].

It's possible to make nuclear weapons (even thermonuclear weapons) with only uranium 235 for fissile material and no stored tritium. Such weapons could last a much longer time without active maintenance, since U-235 decays thousands of times slower than Pu-239. However, they would be larger and heavier for the same explosive yield, which complicates delivery. They would also lose certain safety features. Finally, without being able to perform full scale tests, it is doubtful that the US would have the confidence to replace its current high-maintenance weapons stockpile with a new generation of low-maintenance weapons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockpile_stewardship

[2] https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq4-3.html#Nfaq4.3....

[3] https://www.wvlt.tv/2022/05/24/watts-bar-lone-source-nuclear... "Watts Bar lone source of a nuclear weapon material; TVA increasing production"

bamboozled
9 replies
1d18h

I really wonder what the state of Russia's nuclear arsenal is like then? Better or worse? Maybe that still have a lot of the old Nuclear power stations running to better supply the materials to maintain their warheads ?

danielodievich
7 replies
1d17h

This is a frequent topic of discussion in various forums and I am sure by Very Serious People in Charge [TM].

Extrapolating from the general sad state of the weapon systems in use by Russians where they are at this point unpacking tanks made in 1950, the quality of maintenance on their vehicles, and is difficult to plausibly claim that all the ancient rusty USSR stuff across the strategic rocket barrier is in any sort of usable shape.

Now, if an order to launch is given, some rockets may launch, some of those may actually fly, some of those flying actually get somewhere, and perhaps some of THOSE may actually detonate should they reach the target, and maybe if you're lucky at the designed yield. The percentages in that funnel that aren't known. And nobody [perhaps except some crazies] wants to find them out because even one in the middle of big city is enough.

hollerith
5 replies
1d17h

difficult to plausibly claim that all the ancient rusty USSR stuff across the strategic rocket barrier is in any sort of usable shape.

There is no more ancient rusty USSR stuff -- at least in the Kremlin's strategic nuclear arsenal:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41041532

bamboozled
4 replies
1d15h

Without evidence, that comment is an opinion piece. Hopefully we never have to find out.

hollerith
3 replies
1d15h

Could it be that the source of your skepticism is the fact that you have over the last 2 years seen many comments here on HN asserting that Russia's military is probably incapable of maintaining an effective strategic nuclear capability whereas my comment is the first one you've seen that takes the opposite position?

According to one comment I saw here a few weeks ago, Russia's nukes are probably made of wood.

I suggest searching the web for "Russian nuclear weapons modernization", restricting yourself to credible news outlets.

bamboozled
2 replies
1d7h

Still feels like an opinion, as the other commenter said, look at the state of their equipment when going against Ukraine, there is little indication their nukes or their silos, bombers are much better except your opinion.

Opinions are fine, but the evidence against your opinion is currently stronger.

hollerith
1 replies
1d4h

When credible news organizations repeat Russian claims that they've completed a modernization of their strategic nukes then years and years go by with no expert or credible source (that I have noticed) contradicting the Russian claims, that is evidence. Who besides the Russian military might know about the state of Russia's stockpile? Spies for one. And until 2022 US nuke experts regularly inspected all Russian strategic nuclear sites per the START 3 treaty. They probably weren't able to disassemble any warheads as part of their inspections, but there's a lot you can learn merely by, e.g., measuring the gamma rays produced by the warhead.

Also, you do realize that Russia is currently winning in Ukraine -- in part because they have an equipment advantage over Ukraine? E.g., the glide bombs they recently developed have proven effective.

racional
0 replies
1d3h

Also, you do realize that Russia is currently winning in Ukraine

They are not "currently winning". By any objective measure, the war on the ground is currently a stalement.

Only problem is that in the long term -- stalemates never work out for the occupiers.

In Russia's case: If the situation continues as it does, and moving at the glacial pace that it does, and draining 10 percent of its GDP every year -- they will ultimately have to give up on their optional neocolonial adventure, pick up their toys and go home.

IAmGraydon
0 replies
21h33m

Now, if an order to launch is given, some rockets may launch, some of those may actually fly, some of those flying actually get somewhere, and perhaps some of THOSE may actually detonate should they reach the target, and maybe if you're lucky at the designed yield. The percentages in that funnel that aren't known.

I think you're likely wrong about that last part. I would be willing to bet that certain US 3-letter agencies know very well what the percentages in that funnel are. It's clearly enough that the west is careful about direct confrontation with Russia.

GJim
0 replies
1d9h

I really wonder what the state of Russia's nuclear arsenal is like then?

Does it matter?

The thing about a nuclear *deterrent* is that it doesn't have to work. There just has to be a realistic possibility that (at least some of it) it might.

Loughla
2 replies
1d19h

How do you know all this? Is that a hobby or a job?

philipkglass
1 replies
1d18h

It's a hobby. I read a lot and I have enough formal education to digest primary sources (mostly; my highest qualification is auditing a neutronics course while in grad school).

If you too would like to know way more about nuclear weapons than is useful in civilian life, I'd recommend reading:

Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb

The nuclear weapons FAQ, authored by Carey Sublette, a hobbyist researcher who is extraordinarily dedicated to understanding nuclear weapons from declassified documents and physical principles: https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html

Anne C. Fitzpatrick's dissertation Igniting the Light Elements: The Los Alamos Thermonuclear Weapon Project, 1942-1952: https://www.osti.gov/biblio/10596

The Arms Control Wonk blog/podcast: https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/

Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein's blog Restricted Data: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/

The nuclear weapons subreddit, particularly posts on it authored by Alex Wellerstein, Carey Sublette, and a few others whose names currently escape me: https://old.reddit.com/r/nuclearweapons/

Chuck Hansen's book "U.S Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History" (out of print, sadly; will have to pay $$$ or find a scanned pirate copy) and his massive book/PDF "The Swords of Armageddon" available for purchase here: http://www.uscoldwar.com/

MengerSponge
0 replies
1d18h

Let me add "Inventing Accuracy" to your list of recommended reading. It's fascinating, and it's a powerful microscope to reveal the relationship between strategic need and technological development

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262631471/inventing-accuracy/

topspin
0 replies
21h4m

it is doubtful that the US would have the confidence to replace its current high-maintenance weapons stockpile with a new generation of low-maintenance weapons

That's peace time thinking. Little Boy was detonated over Hiroshima without ever having performed a full scale test of the design. Our knowledge and modeling capabilities today are more than sufficient to produce and stockpile a new design that is guaranteed to work -- without testing an actual weapon -- if that somehow became necessary.

There are many reasons why a nuclear power such as the US is unlikely to consider doing this, but lack of confidence in weapon design or manufacture is not among those reasons.

jmyeet
9 replies
1d18h

So this varies depending on what kind of nuclear weapon is and the delivery system.

The major deterrant is the LGM-30G Minuteman III [1]. Most of our rockets use liquid propellants. Since the alert window is under 10 minutes, you can't keep a liquid-fuelled rocket permanently fueled so the Minuteman was developed as a solid rocket fuel booster.

There's a whole team responsible for maintaining the boosters and warheads of this first line of defense [2].

But there are a variety of other systems. Some dropped by strategic bombers, others on mobile launchers, shorter range missiles deployed in Europe (eg MRBMs in Turkey), nuclear weapons deployed on submarines and so on. Also you have a mix of types. AFAIK the US was moved away from highly-enriched uranium weapons in favor of plutonium. Or at least, HEU reactors have shut down. Maybe there's a sufficient stockpile? Also, a lot of these weapons will be thernonuclear so you have to worry about the production and storage of tritium. IIRC a lot of tritium is a byproduct of plutonium production.

Maintaining a significant nuclear arsenal is actually really complex and expensive.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman

[2]: https://minutemanmissile.com/missilemaintenance.html

lmm
6 replies
1d18h

Since the alert window is under 10 minutes, you can't keep a liquid-fuelled rocket permanently fueled so the Minuteman was developed as a solid rocket fuel booster.

Huh? The Titan II was developed to do precisely that and worked that way for decades, they were liquid-fuelled and kept fuelled in their silos.

openasocket
5 replies
1d18h

Liquid propellants are generally less stable than solid fuel. I had read in multiple places (from reputable sources) that you generally couldn’t keep liquid missiles permanently fueled like that. The propellants are extremely corrosive and dangerous.

But you are right that the Titan II is liquid fueled and was kept permanently fueled in the silo. I’m not entirely sure how to resolve those two facts. The Wikipedia page about the Titan II does mention multiple accidents and fatalities related to propellant leaks, so I’m guessing that they were just more risky to operate?

silverquiet
2 replies
1d18h

There was an incident where a technician dropped a large socket down a silo that impacted the side of a Titan missile and set off a chain of events that ended in an explosion that nearly detonated a nuclear bomb on US soil.

sillywalk
1 replies
1d14h

The Damascus Incident[0]. There's a book called Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser that details the incident, and a PBS based on the book about it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_ex...

knappe
0 replies
1d12h

I was hoping this book would be a recommended. It really, really focused, reinforced is really not the right word to use here, my views on nuclear weapons.

This should be required reading.

mr_toad
0 replies
1d17h

The main problem with traditional liquid fuelled rockets is keeping the propellant cold. It’s not feasible to keep a rocket with liquid oxygen fuelled for long periods. The Titan missiles use hypergolic fuel which is more storable, but also extremely toxic and volatile. More than 50 people have been killed in accidents involving this rocket.

justin66
0 replies
1d15h

It helps if you think of liquid-fueled rockets relying on cryogenics as something entirely different than those using hypergolics. Cryogenics can't sit there for a long time but hypergolics can.

sitharus
0 replies
1d18h

you can't keep a liquid-fuelled rocket permanently fueled so the Minuteman was developed as a solid rocket fuel booster.

You absolutely can! The Soviet doctrine was to use storable liquid propellants in their ICBMs - typically unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) as the fuel and nitrogen tetroxide as the oxidiser. I don’t know if they need the fuel/oxidiser replaced periodically but that combination is storable for over a decade.

The US went with solid rockets as they are more reliable - no turbines or valves etc - at the expense of performance, but the US perfected making large solid rockets before the USSR. The USSR however perfected oxidiser-rich staged combustion which extracted a lot more performance.

Storable liquid propellants are still used on satellites and deep space missions that need to perform large course corrections during their missions.

sillywalk
0 replies
1d12h

Forgive me if you meant all of your comment historically.

Most of our rockets use liquid propellants.

Which ones? As far as I know the US only has solid fuel nuclear armed missiles. The Minuteman and the Trident.

others on mobile launchers, shorter range missiles deployed in Europe (eg MRBMs in Turkey),

The US only has aircraft dropped bombs in Europe. The US retired their nuclear capable rockets and cruise missiles under the INF treaty in 1988. They retired their nuclear artillery etc at the end of the Cold War.

The (liquid fuelled) Jupiter missiles were removed from Turkey in 1962 after the Cuban missile crisis, in exchange for the USSR removing their nukes from Cuba, though there are still US nukes in Turkey.

Also, a lot of these weapons will be thernonuclear

All of them are.

mikewarot
1 replies
1d19h

Plutonium pits slowly transmute, and the emitted alpha particles are trapped and form helium bubbles. They have to be replaced periodically.

wdh505
0 replies
1d19h

I think the tritium "preignition" has to be replaced every 10 years.

jiggawatts
1 replies
1d19h

how long a nuke in storage lasts

Decades, certainly. All but the first few generations of bombs were designed for long periods of storage.

Notably, many of the TOP500 supercomputers were built with the singular goal of simulating the ageing of nuclear weapons in storage.

If a supercomputer is owned by the DoE or SANDIA, then that's what it is for.

turn those swords into ploughshares relatively easily.

Yes! Cold-war era warheads from both the Soviet Union and the US have been used as nuclear fuel. A notable one was the Megatons to Megawatts program: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program

The plutonium in bombs is essentially "super high grade" reactor fuel. Even degraded after decades in storage it is still far, far better than what is typically used. It just needs to be converted into the MOX (metal oxide) fuel pellets and then used in a reactor, pretty much as-is.

dekhn
0 replies
1d18h

While many supercomputers were funded by stockpile stewardship, the goal was to produce high performance computers capable of a wide range of simulation needs.

One good example would be NERSC at LBL- it's unclassified research only, and their series of supercomputers were never intended to simulate ageing nuclear weapons.

Hard to say exactly what goes on in the classified supercomputers, but they certainly weren't spending much of their time simulating aging nuclear weapons- that was the ostensible reason.

openasocket
0 replies
1d19h

I think it’s shorter than you would imagine. I recall an episode of the podcast Arms Control Wonk talking about the nukes in possession of Ukraine during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Professor Lewis stated that those warheads likely had a service life of 5-10 years. But that may be specific to those Soviet warheads, and I think that different components need to be replaced at different intervals.

hollerith
0 replies
1d17h

I wonder how long a nuke in storage lasts

Russia's nuclear stockpile -- at least the strategic warheads -- have all been built anew since the end of the Cold War. The US is also modernizing its stockpile in the same way, but it has not finished yet.

"built anew": made with all new components except that the fissile material is recycled from an old Cold-War-era warhead. (They probably re-cast and re-machine the fissile material.)

The reader might be asking, How can Russia, a poor country, afford that? Well, nukes aren't that expensive once you have the fissile material and the design and manufacturing expertise and infrastructure. The pay for the soldiers to guard the nukes and constantly be on the ready to launch them is more expensive, according to one report I saw recently (and Russia has low personnel costs).

PoignardAzur
31 replies
1d18h

3000 nukes is better than Cold War highs, but it's still massive overkill.

Even with a 90% interception rate, 300 nukes would be enough to kill tens of millions of citizens of any country from the blast alone. If an enemy leader isn't deterred by that, 2700 extra nukes aren't going to change their mind.

JumpCrisscross
17 replies
1d18h

it's still massive overkill

The bombs are there because “the only way to avoid being the victim of a nuclear first strike (that having the enemy hit you with their nukes) was being able to credibly deliver a second strike.”

“Thus the absurd-sounding conclusion to fairly solid chain of logic: to avoid the use of nuclear weapons, you have to build so many nuclear weapons that it is impossible for a nuclear-armed opponent to destroy them all in a first strike, ensuring your second-strike lands. You build extra missiles for the purpose of not having to fire them.”

https://acoup.blog/2022/03/11/collections-nuclear-deterrence...

llamaimperative
13 replies
1d18h

You don't need a huge number of nuclear weapons to achieve this, you need nuclear weapons in secret and ideally changing locations (i.e. submarines)

SkyPuncher
7 replies
1d15h

This doesn't work since you can't really prove that your opponent doesn't know the secret or changing locations - either out of sabotage or technical advancement.

nradov
6 replies
1d15h

I can't imagine any sort of sabotage that would make SSBNs easier to locate without also being obvious to the crew. As for technical advancements, what are you thinking of there within the current laws of physics? No other country has the economic resources to blanket the ocean with detection platforms. Some researchers have proposed using satellites to detect submarine wakes but that would take a huge constellation and could only even potentially work if the sub was moving fast at a shallow depth.

maxglute
2 replies
1d12h

PLAN copying / rotating fleet of DARPA ACTUV (ASW Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel). Park them outside sub home ports (outside of territorial waters / contiguous zone but within active sonar range) and blast sonar to keep continuous track once they're underway. Likely then hand off to faster/more powerful surface ASW platforms. Combine with rumored mini nuke boats from PLAN, especially if autonomous improves to drastically reduce manning (less mouths to feed to match endurance of big nuke boats), basically tailgate nuke boats the second they leave parking lot. Trumpet following girl meme. Economically, hard to say, but only fraction of very expensive to operate 14 boomers/SSNs on deterrent patrol at any given time.

That said, IMO hardly matters, sea/air leg of triad can be replaced by redundant / distributed land, not silos but road mobile TELs in hardened shelters probably for MUCH cheaper per warhead - PLA/PLARF model. Can have 1000s of cheap TEL trucks / fake warheads to play shell game and be just as impossible to decapitation strike as a few SSNs with 20 missiles. Mobile land leg just politically not sensible because it means unambigiously painting target on homeland, not just empty silo fields in bumfuck nowhere. IMO half the reason of sea/air leg now is they're out of sight/out of mind doing distant patrols. No one wants to see a nuclear TEL driving down the highway and process implications. If anti missile defense improves, cost/benefit of limited magazine SSNs gets even worse - a tube on a 2.5B+ nuke boat cost 100m to acquire + likely very expensive operation costs per shot to field. You can buy 500+ HEMTT 8x8 to hull around solid fuel ICBMs for that price. PRC can probably buy 1,000. Economics of nuke boats as delivery platforms outside of psychology does not seem to make sense, but civilian psychology when it comes to nuclear planning is very important.

nradov
1 replies
1d11h

The level of resources it would take to even try something like that is way beyond what even China can afford. Just completely unrealistic.

maxglute
0 replies
1d11h

Which part specifically?

Darpa toying with ACTUV expliclity because it was _dirt_ cheap vs relying on large surface combatants + air for ASW - small hulls with 10-20k per day operating cost vs 500k-800k per day ASW destroyer (US costs). It would be cheap to build out a fleet of ~50 small autonomous / minimally manned surface/subsurface fleet to follow the handful of SSNs on deployment at any given time. 30-80 ACTUV for surface ASW (US costs) is already 5-10 shadowing each deterrent patrol SSN. Economy of scale enters picture even if nuclear powered - danger is mostly political, parking reactors in adversaries EEZs. PLA relative cost vs USN acquiring/maintaining SSNs likely much cheaper / lopsided. Look at PRC's 80 type 22s that existed basically on the hope that it can deter the 1-2 carriers US normally throws in theatre.

As for mobile TEL / mobile land triad, like 30k+ HEMTT+LVSR has been built, and that's just Oshkosh Defense building tactical trucks. # of USD 300-500k heavy/tactical trucks globally in 100,000s. Add in land infra/tunnel/harden costs and you won't get close to 100m per shot. Can probably get Oshkosh to hammer out budget decoy TELs with autonomous driving without any of the the expensive TEL/launch hardware. Say what you will about US industry, US auto still pretty capable of building things that roll on wheels vs US ship building. SSNX is projected to be 5-7B per unit (200m+ per launch tube), that buys you a lot of road mobile launchers. E: USN plants to acquire like 30 of them. I would be very surprised PLAN needs to spend 150-200B on a ASW UAV fleet to counter that. That's ~400-600 054s frigates. An ACTUV drone would cost fraction of manned frigates. I think you're dramatically underestimating just how expensive US SSN force is / will projected to be and how economics will incentivize scope of counters.

ls612
2 replies
1d13h

SSBN stealth could be at risk by mid-century if current technologies continue to advance in surveillance and information processing. That would be enormously destabilizing from a grand strategic perspective but is still very much a future worry not a contemporary problem yet.

nradov
1 replies
18h38m

Which technologies specifically?

ls612
0 replies
15h43m

The two which I’ve read are concerning are using the ferromagnetic material in a sub to detect tiny variations in the magnetic field using supercooled sensors and just better computers and acoustic sensors to extract more signal from well below the noise floor.

There’s also some more science fiction level technologies proposed like using the nuclear signature of a sub’s reactor or using space based LIDAR to detect signs of the wake of a submerged submarine but I’ll defer judgment on those for now. But longer term I wouldn’t completely count them out.

justin66
1 replies
1d15h

The fixed missile silos out in the middle of nowhere (sorry Montana!) serve a lot of useful purposes. If you do not intend to be the one who pushes the button and destroys the entire world, it is nice having weapons like that precisely because the adversary can see whether or not you've fired them. If the enemy can see that your ICBMs haven't launched and your bombers aren't in range to fire their cruise missiles, they know you haven't gone all the way. Additionally, silos like that are something the adversary must target if they have any hope to survive, which is one less warhead they can drop somewhere else (an air base, fleet, city, or whatever).

A submarine is inherently less predictable, yes, and in terms of ratcheting down tensions that is not always great.

542354234235
0 replies
1d2h

One additional reason, that the enemy would have to destroy a large amount of American territory to realistically neutralize the threat. They can’t just target some military bases and subs in an attempt to cripple us while attempting to keep it limited. No half measures.

jncfhnb
0 replies
1d17h

Which is a lot more fallible than just having a huge number

golergka
0 replies
1d16h

Security through obscurity is fragile. Strength in numbers — less so.

JumpCrisscross
0 replies
1d12h

You don't need a huge number of nuclear weapons to achieve this, you need nuclear weapons in secret and ideally changing locations (i.e. submarines)

No. Most fundamentally because secret deterrents are, by definition, unverifiable.

ranger_danger
0 replies
1d16h

They also have "dial-a-yield" now so the stockpile of larger weapons can be used on smaller targets without ridiculous fallout.

buildsjets
0 replies
1d15h

Thus, the need for the Air Force to appropriate a multitrillion dollar black-box budget to develop a Sub-Supersonic Invisible and Noiseless Defensive Second-Strike Offensive Attack Bomber that flies faster than light so that you can bomb someone yesterday.

PoignardAzur
0 replies
1d7h

I could argue the claim on its merits, eg that the world has changed since The Delicate Balance of Terror was written in (checks) 1958, that omnipresent satellite surveillance means that a first strike could never wipe out the enemy nuclear arsenal, etc.

But I think that's giving Brett too much credit here. His argument rests purely in the realm of game theory and logical-sounding ideas. In actual practice, the US military has never in its existence ran an analysis of how many nuclear weapons would be necessary to achieve strategic objectives in any specific scenarios.

Brett later points out that:

This buildup, driven by concerns beyond even deterrence did lead to absurdities: when the SIOP (‘Single Integrated Operational Plan’) for a nuclear war was assessed by General George Lee Butler in 1991, he declared it, “the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life,” Having more warheads than targets had lead to the assignment of absurd amounts of nuclear firepower on increasingly trivial targets.

Brett notes this, but it doesn't seem to give him pause or to cause his to reevaluate the validity of the doctrines he cites, even though those doctrines were largely written to justify what he rightfully describes as absurdities.

The US military has always, from the moment the nuclear bomb was invented, operated with the mindset of "more nukes is better". There is no conceivable number of nukes that would make the military go "okay, that's enough, we have enough to achieve our strategic objectives in any plausible scenario". As the quote above points out, giving them more nukes just makes them assign more per potential target.

The only administration that chose to conduct a survey of the SAC's war plan for deploying nukes, the fucking Bush administration under Dick Cheney, found that the plan was ridiculously overkill (hence the quote above) which directly lead to the US signing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.[1]

HN commenters in this thread are giving a bunch of rationalizations why the US's nuclear policy is perfectly reasonable game theory, but any times military analysts with clearance actually looked at the US's nuke arsenal and the plans to deploy it, their conclusion was the same: "We have way more than we need".

[1] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/the-illogic-of-nuclear-esc...

trynumber9
4 replies
1d18h

They aren't targeting cities anymore but Russian and Chinese weapon installations. Consider the number of these. And that the ballistic missile defense is concentrated at these locations. It is surely more than 300.

llamaimperative
2 replies
1d18h

They aren't targeting cities anymore

Citation needed.

llamaimperative
0 replies
1d5h

We did not have access to the policy documents used by DOD’S war planners or the details of the U.S. strategic nuclear weapons targeting plans. This limited our ability to verify that the process of transforming policy into targeting options functions as described by DOD officials.

This document is a description of the targeting process, which existed even when the actual output of that process was "every single city in Russia and China with a population greater than 50,000"

PoignardAzur
0 replies
1d6h

I already gave another in-depth reply, so I'll keep this one short: the idea that the current US nuclear arsenal would be fully needed to cripple Russia or China's military and industrial capacity is ridiculous, and has been thoroughly rejected any time military analysts were actually asked by the government to make a survey of the US's nuclear plans (which is, not that often).

You don't need to bomb every station of a train line to cripple the line. If you want to stop car production, you don't need to blow up the car factory, the bolt factory, the windshield factory, and every single rare earth mine in the country.

Yet those are the kind of assumptions the US doctrine relies on.

Quoting from [1]: again:

Another jaw-dropping example: One part of the nuclear war plan called for destroying the Soviet tank army. As a result, JSTPS aimed a lot of weapons at not only the tanks themselves, but also the factory that produced the tanks, the steel mill that supplied the factory, the ore-processing facility that supplied the steel mill, and the mine that furnished the ore.

[1] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/the-illogic-of-nuclear-esc...

keybored
4 replies
21h20m

I can’t believe that people still believe in MAD. It’s such a galaxy brain theory that weapons of mass destruction will actually make us safer because that other guy over there have them as well.

And the theory will only be conclusively disproven if someone pushes the button.

distortedsignal
3 replies
19h41m

It kept war out of central Europe from 1945 until 2022 (I'm not 100% sure we shouldn't count Georgia/Bosnia/Chechnia/Kosovo, so I'll say "central Europe").

I don't think two nuclear armed powers have ever declared war on each other - despite two nuclear armed powers currently being in active conflict (India and China) and another few being incredibly geopolitically unfriendly (India/Pakistan and Israel/Iran).

The whole idea behind MAD initially was that if Russia decided to get ideas in Europe, the Western powers would stop them with a nuclear curtain. That's why France has a "warning shot" nuclear doctrine, and the US hasn't ruled out Nuclear First Strike.

IMO, for what it was trying to stop, it worked. Ask people in China and India - it seems to be working for them as well.

EDIT: as an amendment to this: would Russia have been so bold as to invade Ukraine if the 1994 surrender of Ukraine's nuclear arsenal hadn't happened?

keybored
2 replies
10h48m

Like I said. A lack of war will be taken as direct evidence that it works (not any other causes). And the only way to disprove it conclusively is if we all wipe each other out.

distortedsignal
1 replies
9h59m

I guess my issue with your statement is that it seems almost impossible to disprove short of someone doing the unthinkable. We have history to suggest (note: not prove) that MAD works.

It’s kinda like economics. We can’t really prove anything in economics works the way we think it does, but we have a bunch of REALLY GOOD suggestions to support our hypotheses.

MAD isn’t a natural law - it’s a social construct, very much like economics.

keybored
0 replies
8h41m

If you think MAD is like an economics theory then I guess we are on the same page.

jupp0r
0 replies
1d17h

There is no system in existence that would provide a 90% interception rate. Existing anti ballistic missile systems are designed to intercept smaller attacks with low single digit warheads, no MIRVs and no decoys not a full scale attack.

elcritch
0 replies
14h38m

Oddly it seems useful for the US to have that large of a stockpile. Perhaps it's from watching too many sci-fi movies, but having a bunch of nukes on hand in the event of a massive asteroid on a trajectory to hit earth seems useful to me.

Alternatively if non-linear greenhouse process cause something like "all clouds disappearing suddenly", then nukes could be part of a last ditch effort to induce a nuclear winter to allow us time to find Ling term solutions.

Lastly, it is the USA. Why have 300 weapons when you can have 3,000.

dyauspitr
0 replies
1d18h

Good. It needs to be a threat with plenty of teeth.

johnohara
17 replies
1d18h

Is it possible that over the years the number of nuclear devices per warhead has increased?

1, 4, 8, etc. per warhead, thereby increasing your capability while claiming a reduction?

BMc2020
7 replies
1d18h

What you are thinking of is (or used to be, called a MIRV, a mulitiple independently-targeted re-entry vehicle). There's still only one atom bomb per warhead, but 6 warheads per mirv. Think of the MIRV like a cylinder on a revolver with 6 warheads per MIRV like the bullets in it. The warhead has the minimum amount of hardware necessary to make it blow up, while the MIRV has the computers and rocket engines on it. So the MIRV zips forward, backward, up down, then releases a warhead at the right moment for the warhead to fall to the ground. (which has no movement capability at all, not even fins). Then the MIRV zips around and releases another warhead and so on until all 6 are gone.

That being said, there are LOTS of ways to deliver warheads. The one that scares me the most is that the Russians have hidden ones pre-positioned in our 40 biggest cities or so.

Fun Fact: The russians don't even have to fire their missiles to wipe us all out. They could set them all off in their silos and create a nuclear winter that would accomplish the same thing.

edit: Sorry to pile on, you went from 0 to 3 replies in the time it took me to write this.

johnohara
2 replies
1d18h

What I was thinking was that whenever the U.S. enters into any form of weapons reduction agreement there has to be an enormous amount of internal reluctance to actually make those reductions.

Reagan's so-called "trust, but verify" policy.

I find it difficult to accept that any party to those agreements would actually reduce anything without having equivalent plans B, C, and D.

I am not a weapons expert so thank you for your insight.

holowoodman
0 replies
1d17h

All those arms-reduction treaties are accompanied by some regime of mutual inspections and checks. Each party visits the other's facilities and counts stuff, assesses production and storage capabilities, paperwork, etc. And compares those results to their otherwise-obtained (read: by spies) data about the other party's weapons counts.

Of course it isn't foolproof, and each party can and will maybe try to sneak a few more warheads somewhere. But those inspections at least provide some rough limit on the sneakiness, because if they had more than X% more, we would have noticed or so...

hollerith
0 replies
1d17h

Till 2022 Washington and Moscow were regularly inspecting each other's nuclear installations to verify compliance with the treaty.

literallycancer
1 replies
1d13h

The nuclear winter thing is based on the paper where they assume that there's zero days of stockpiled grain isn't it? When in reality we could go for years with just the grain farmers keep to balance out market volatility.

BMc2020
0 replies
18h5m

I'd like to see a cite for that.

liamwire
0 replies
1d13h

The one that scares me the most is that the Russians have hidden ones pre-positioned in our 40 biggest cities or so.

I find it hard to believe you seriously consider this, even in the absurd world of MAD-driven decisions.

Simply put, for it to be even remotely likely would require that none of these devices had as of yet been discovered, nor the intelligence nor logistics surrounding them been compromised or otherwise intercepted.

Consider that if such a situation were to be true, and uncovered, that the only possible responses would be either immediate action to have them removed, immediate retaliation, or allowing them to exist. In the first two scenarios, the weapons are no longer relevant, whether because they’re removed or war has started. In the final scenario, we’re functionally at the same place as we are with the traditional nuclear triad, albeit far closer to the precipice due to reasons made clear in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

All of this to say, the challenges, costs, and risks of enacting such a situation, as utterly ridicule-worthy in their totality as they are, can perhaps be hand-waved away by pointing to other Cold War era events. However, to argue this has actually been done, despite the entire lack of any strategic benefit, and the immeasurable net loss of position and risk to the Russians that results? Come on.

jcranmer
0 replies
1d13h

Fun Fact: The russians don't even have to fire their missiles to wipe us all out. They could set them all off in their silos and create a nuclear winter that would accomplish the same thing.

There's a lot about nuclear winter that is controversial, but having nuclear weapons go off in their silos is one thing that almost everybody can agree can't cause a nuclear winter. The basic premise of nuclear winter is a) nuclear explosions on cities cause massive uncontrollable firestorms b) that pump soot into the stratosphere c) which causes massive global cooling. If any one of those links in the chain fails to hold, then nuclear winter just can't occur. A nuclear weapon going off in its silo will be more of a massive earthworks project than a firestorm, especially if the silo isn't located in the heart of a city with lots of juicy combustible material to cook off all at once.

ianburrell
3 replies
1d18h

Nuclear warhead is a single nuclear device.

Are you thinking MIRV where multiple nuclear warheads are mounted to missile? The US has down rated lots of SLBMs and ICBMs recently. Many of the warheads in storage are from missiles. They could put them back, but then they would show in the active count.

johnohara
2 replies
1d17h

That's insightful because it means it may be strictly an accounting issue versus an actual reduction in the number of warheads i.e. the number of warheads counted == the number mounted, not the total number possessed.

ianburrell
0 replies
1d17h

The number mounted matters cause it determines how missiles can be used. With multiple warheads, ICBMs could be used for first strike. First strike won’t work, but opponent still needs to worry about it. With one warhead, ICBMs are only useful for retaliation strike.

Also, the US is still following New START treaty after Russsia pulled out.

holowoodman
0 replies
1d17h

The number of mounted warheads is a very important issue, because a nuclear war will take at most half a day. So all the mounted warheads at that point are the ones that can be used, nothing more.

Of course if the war doesn't come as a surprise but with a lot of buildup, then you can remount everything over a few weeks.

jauntywundrkind
1 replies
1d13h

LGM-118 Peacekeeper

MIRV ICMB produced and deployed by the United States from 1985 to 2005. The missile could carry up to twelve Mark 21 reentry vehicles (although treaties limited its actual payload to 10), each armed with a 300-kiloton W87 warhead. Initial plans called for building and deploying 100 MX ICBMs, but budgetary concerns limited the final procurement; only 50 entered service. Disarmament treaties signed after the Peacekeeper's development led to its withdrawal from service in 2005.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-118_Peacekeeper

So, that's what we had been doing for a couple decades. The most crazy ass nuclear cluster bomb.

Now we're still trying to replace the LGM-30 Minutemen ICBMs we have had since 1962: Northrop Grumman's LGM-35 Sentinel. And it's taking forever & costing an unbelievable sum ($200B, $210M/missile including ground systems, although they're back to the drawing board to try to get costs down). https://www.defensenews.com/air/2024/07/08/pentagon-keeps-co...

This is after Minuteman was ~$7m/missile, a super-cheap cast-solid-fuel design, with McNamera shutting down efforts on more expensive & fancy Atlas and Titan missiles. Weighing 1/9th the weight of the monstrous Soviet R7. One persistent dude (Hall) convinced everyone we didn't need fancy we needed a survivable competent second strike capable missile swarm. Minuteman is wild. There are some great submissions on it; the communication network submission from three days ago was fabulous & shows very much a Paul Baram of RAND/Arpanet style network resiliency idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41019604

Also of note, Minuteman's original D-17B computer is also quite the thing. There are some great submissions on it. It uses an early hard-disk like thing as working memory. It uses diode-resistor logic (DRL) since diode-transistor-logic (DTL) wasn't reliable enough yet. Incredibly stunningly built guidance computer that was core to a reliable totally cutting edge inertial guidance system.

Anyhow yeah, we built them decommissioned utterly crazy multi-warhead missiles. And are trying and having trouble going back and building a new single warhead ICBM.

sillywalk
0 replies
1d12h

Note that the Minuteman 3, the currently deployed one, also had (has?) a MIRV capability (3 warheads). I believe it's just a single warhead now because of treaties (which may have expired), and I don't know how difficult it would be to re-MIRV it.

Scaevolus
1 replies
1d18h

The US recently improved trigger accuracy, detonating warheads at precise distances to maximize kills on hardened targets, which had the effect of increasing the number of effective warheads.

sillywalk
0 replies
1d14h

I remember reading about this a few years ago... the MC4700 "super-fuze"

It looks like it was deployed back in 2009 on the warheads on Trident SLBMs. From [0]:

"Before the invention of this new fuzing mechanism, even the most accurate ballistic missile warheads might not detonate close enough to targets hardened against nuclear attack to destroy them. But the new super-fuze is designed to destroy fixed targets by detonating above and around a target in a much more effective way. Warheads that would otherwise overfly a target and land too far away will now, because of the new fuzing system, detonate above the target.

The result of this fuzing scheme is a significant increase in the probability that a warhead will explode close enough to destroy the target even though the accuracy of the missile-warhead system has itself not improved.

As a consequence, the US submarine force today is much more capable than it was previously against hardened targets such as Russian ICBM silos. A decade ago, only about 20 percent of US submarine warheads had hard-target kill capability; today they all do."

[0] https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni...

devwastaken
11 replies
1d18h

Nobody asks how many anti nuke missiles. :)

BMc2020
9 replies
1d18h

Funny enough, I know a little bit about this one. We have them, but they are all come-from-behind missiles, so the launch site has to be as close to Russia (or wherever) as possible, which angers the Russians.

The head-on hit-a-bullet-with-another-bullet-is missile still impossible, although many would like us to believe they are already here. Nuh uh.

Plus those are still useless against nukes delivered inside ton of cocaine.

amenhotep
5 replies
1d17h

Your contention is that GMD, THAAD, PAC-3 and Arrow are essentially expensive fireworks? Interesting. Russia and Iran will be delighted to hear that in fact their ballistic missiles were not intercepted.

BMc2020
3 replies
1d17h

BMc2020: "I would have to be a complete nut to say Hitler was a great man."

amenhotep: "You said Hitler was a great man."

yodon
2 replies
1d16h

I suspect in other contexts you're aware of this, but personal attacks generally don't land well here. Consider continuing to focus on making important points well, as that tends to work better, as does assuming the best when someone disagrees with you, since sometimes that's a sign your comment can be legitimately interpreted or read in ways you didn't expect or intend.

BMc2020
1 replies
1d5h

He was trying to put words in my mouth and got caught.

wewtyflakes
0 replies
23h15m

You were making claims that a particular technology does not work, and the other poster was ribbing you by playing along with that thought in a way that suggests the technology actually does exist and works. They did not put words into your mouth, but they did give specific examples of technology to highlight their point.

holowoodman
0 replies
1d17h

While an ICBM is a ballistic missile, the trajectory is far far higher than the usual short- to medium-range ballistic missiles. Velocity at the receiving end of the trajectory will be far higher. Visibility into the trajectory will be worse, because of the huge range and the earth being "in the way".

fluoridation
0 replies
22h13m

The GP specifically referred to head-on interception, when the missile is coming down towards its target. This is midcourse interception, when the missile is drifting horizontally from the launch site to the target.

ranger207
0 replies
18h20m

Enough to counter anything launched from North Korea towards the US and that's about it. Having enough anti-nuke missiles to shoot down every one means that it's feasible you could win a first strike, which is not conductive to stable nuclear relations

starik36
7 replies
1d18h

Why did US disclose this number? Is there a treaty compelling them to? Did other nuclear powers disclose them?

thaumasiotes
0 replies
1d17h

They're scared and they want to intimidate. Talking about them is the first step toward using them.

maxglute
0 replies
1d17h

IMO context is: recent US/PRC nuclear talk broke down. US/RU nuclear monitoring also broke down post UKR war. There is no strategic monitoring system anymore between large nuclear powers. Only mind games now. Throw number out there for deterrence/mind game as everyone is either building out (PRC) or modernizing nuke force (US/RU). Maybe anchoring technique to limit proliferation range. That said, there's no reason US adversaries should believe # is credible. And even if it is, each country has different # of launchers/warheads for deterence posture due to different geopolitical/technological constraints. I.e. ballistic missile defense changes penetration ratios.

justin66
0 replies
1d15h

How would you write treaties governing the number of weapons of various types each side deploys and where they deploy them, if you kept this information secret?

hugh-avherald
0 replies
1d16h

While generally it's an advantage to keep information about your true military capability secret, for nuclear weapons it's the opposite.

holowoodman
0 replies
1d17h

Everyone knows the rough number anyways I'd suspect. Publishing numbers is a part of all arms-control treaties, so unilaterally publishing it may be an attempt to show willingness and shame the others towards a new arms-control treaty.

And of course, as the sister comment said, an announcement of dick-size.

_visgean
0 replies
1d18h

it has no reason not to, its a detterent, russia and china needs to believe that the nukes are working and that there is enough for them to ensure the mutual assured destruction.

gumby
7 replies
21h41m

Looks like only about half of them have been deployed. The rest are mostly retired but not yet dismantled, or in inventory (https://thebulletin.org/premium/2024-05/united-states-nuclea...)

Apart from the absolute number, is the collection of current weapons "more effective" (whatever that would mean -- some sort of fit for purpose) than the ~23K warheads at the end of the cold war? Or is it simply a subset of the devices in 1989, with some maintenance since then?

I believe the US is designing a new warhead, maybe the first since the end of the cold war (source, discussion at the nuclear testing museum in Las Vegas last month, perhaps not the most reliable source). What about delivery?

fragmede
4 replies
20h12m

Do you need to do delivery? If nuclear winter is going to end humanity as we know it, then couldn't you blow up an uninhabited wasteland part of your own country and still hurt everyone?

taberiand
0 replies
19h36m

Isn't this the plot of Dr. Strangelove? If they do decide on that strategy, let's hope they don't keep the news for a special occasion...

philipkglass
0 replies
20h9m

"In Search of a Bigger Boom"

https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/12/in-search-of-a-bi...

The scientist Edward Teller, according to one account, kept a blackboard in his office at Los Alamos during World War II with a list of hypothetical nuclear weapons on it. The last item on his list was the largest one he could imagine. The method of “delivery” — weapon-designer jargon for how you get your bomb from here to there, the target — was listed as “Backyard.” As the scientist who related this anecdote explained, “since that particular design would probably kill everyone on Earth, there was no use carting it anywhere.”

lcvw
0 replies
17h11m

My understanding is that the theory behind nuclear winter is that all of the nuked cities will ignite, and the massive firestorms will eject ash into the upper atmosphere where it will persist for years. Aka you still need to blow up some cities to cause the winter.

Also nuclear winter is somewhat controversial, I don’t know what the latest model results are.

andrewflnr
0 replies
20h4m

"Hurt everyone" is not most people's ideal strategy. Maybe North Korea would go for that, but it's really preferred to hurt the enemy more than yourself.

sillywalk
0 replies
17h52m

Yes. It looks like the new warhead will be the W93, to be deployed on the new Columbia class SSBNs. I assume they'd deploy on some sort of upgraded/refurbished Trident missile.

~$20 Billion requested for fiscal 2025.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

mandevil
0 replies
19h59m

The US plan for new warheads- the Reliable Replacement Warhead- was killed by Obama in 2009. (There are minor improvements like the Mod 12 version of the B61 is under production, which is really a remaking of the Mod 4 version, stuff like that.)

However, most of the delivery mechanisms are reaching block obsolescence and will need new replacements soon: the Columbia class ballistic missile submarine to replace the Ohios, the B-21 Raider to replace the B-2, the GBSD to replace the Minuteman III, and the LRSO to replace the ALCM from the same B-52s that flew in 1963 (literally the last year of production for a B-52). It's probably going to be something like a trillion dollars over 30 years, is what outside analysts figure. Because basically Stratcom has been saying "we'll just keep doing what we did in 1989, but smaller" since 1991, and the service lives of all the equipment has run out, and so everything needs to replaced at the same time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renovation_of_the_nuclear_weap... for the price tag.

corry
7 replies
1d17h

What an odd situation, where we can applaud "the transparency" (and I do, honestly) while the US is also simultaneously cheerfully delivering a public reminder that "we have more than enough to absolutely annihilate anyone and everyone... so don't fuck with us."

nimbius
2 replies
1d15h

Most of the stockpile remains or grows solely due to senators from colorado, Wyoming and montana who host the ground based strategic nuclear arsenal. Force reduction would mean lost jobs and revenue.

At least the transparency can start a discussion hopefully.

TiredOfLife
1 replies
1d15h

And nothing to do with russia invading its neighbors and threatening to nuke anyone helping them.

542354234235
0 replies
1d2h

Probably not. The US nuclear triad is very well known and doesn’t rely on exact numbers. It isn’t like Russia would think “maybe they decommissioned all their SSBN nuclear subs and we are in the clear” until they saw the yearly numbers. The point is that we already have plenty enough to obliterate any nation on earth in either a first or second strike. The arms reduction treaties and transparency have always been to reassure war hawks that we still have plenty to kill everyone, so we don’t need to spend money making more and risk an accident.

If you want to saber rattle, you test new systems like hypersonic missiles that are capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Or you perform “military exercises” to show how capable and/or stealthy your nuclear subs and bombers are.

refurb
1 replies
1d14h

so don't fuck with us.

That's the entire point of nuclear weapons, isnit?

tbihl
0 replies
3h1m

Not necessarily. That's the entire point of US American nuclear weapons.

Edit: Unexplained downvotes are hopefully for my unclear wording. MAD is the doctrine of the US, but other places have doctrines ranging from "don't disturb our geopolitical sacred cow" to "escalation in armed conflict." Obviously there's reason to wonder whether everyone, pushed hard enough, would resort to nuclear weapons (an important consideration before putting an enemy on 'death ground'), but having stated policy that the weapons are not on the table is better than a stated policy that use would be justified “… also in the case of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons, when the very existence of the state is put under threat”, as Putin signed in 2020.

https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/read-the-fine-print-russias-...

golergka
0 replies
1d16h

What's odd about this? Both a good things worth applauding to.

IIAOPSW
0 replies
1d17h

As they said at the end of Dr. Strangelove, these things have absolutely no value as a deterrent if you don't tell anyone you have them!

switch007
6 replies
1d16h

What was going through their minds in the 60s when they amassed 5,000...10,000 but went on to amass over 30,000? Was there any point after a few thousand?

sillywalk
1 replies
1d12h

Watch Dr. Strangelove.

voxadam
0 replies
1d9h

"Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?"

jjk166
1 replies
1d

Back in the day, most of these weapons were to be dropped from massed strategic bombers or launched on short range missiles. You needed lots both because a lot of these were never going to make it to the target and those that did would be highly inaccurate. This is combined with most of the nukes being intended to either take out the adversary's large stockpile, or survive the use of the adversary's stockpile.

morkalork
0 replies
14h59m

Then there's the crazy use cases where they made nuclear weapons fitted for air-to-air missiles carried by interceptors as well as ground based air defense. The motivator being the poor accuracy of missiles at the time as well as why shoot N missiles at N incoming bombers when you can fire 1 and take out a whole formation. There must have been hundreds of warheads produced for those purposes alone.

murderfs
0 replies
1d12h

Keep in mind that Sputnik only happened in 1957, so the chances of a nuke actually hitting its target were much smaller during the build up than after the rollout of ICBMs. A lot of these were tactical nuclear weapons deployed in Europe to be launched at invading Soviet forces (including by infantry! Look up the Davy Crockett if you want to see Fallout's mini-nuke's real life counterpart)

pythonguython
2 replies
1d19h

Hans has always been the guy keeping count. Just about anytime you hear someone cite the US stockpile count, it’s his number. Truly impressive how accurate he is able to be with no special accesses. Only 40 off.

wahern
1 replies
1d17h

The data had already been declassified up to 2020, so they only needed to estimate changes over the past 3-4 years:

Between 2010 and 2018, the US government publicly disclosed the size of the nuclear weapons stockpile; however, in 2019 and 2020, the Trump administration rejected requests from the Federation of American Scientists to declassify the latest stockpile numbers (Aftergood 2019; Kristensen 2019a, 2020b). In 2021, the Biden administration restored the United States’ previous transparency levels by declassifying both numbers for the entire history of the US nuclear arsenal until September 2020—including the missing years of the Trump administration.

Source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2024.2...

pythonguython
0 replies
1d16h

I was unaware they published in the 2010s. Worth noting Hans was counting even before then

credit_guy
1 replies
1d9h

I think the point of this sudden urge for transparency is to send a message to Russia and to the US allies about the tactical nukes.

There is currently a perception of a disparity of capabilities in tactical nukes. There is parity in strategic nukes because of the New Start treaty [1].

Here's a report to the US Senate about the tactical nukes [2] produced in April 2024, and here's a quote by Putin lifted from that report:

  > On June 16, 2023, President Putin declared, “We have more such [tactical] nuclear weapons than NATO countries.  They know about it and never stop trying to persuade us to start nuclear reduction talks.  Like hell we will …. It is our competitive advantage.”
Of course the US allies are worried that maybe the US nuclear umbrella is not that strong after all.

Then how many tactical nukes do Russia and the US have? The perception was that Russia has between 1000 and 2000 and the US just a few hundred, but the numbers were uncertain.

I think this report sends the message that the US has thousands of such tactical weapons, not just a few hundred. The message is not exactly spelled out but here's my reading.

The only current tactical nuke in the US arsenal is the B61 [3]. More than 3000 were built, but it's not clear how many are still available today. The latest versions are B61-12 and B61-13, of which 400 were supposed to be made (in total, not each). The current number of B61-12 and B61-13 is not available, and I saw an estimate of 100 [4].

With this report, we can infer the total number of B61. How? The number of strategic warheads is capped at 1550. The latest US report [5] is that the number as of January this year was 1419, but this includes heavy bombers (B52, B1 and B2), of which there are 60, so actual deployed strategic warheads are 1359.

The total number in the nuclear stockpile according to this new transparency report is 3748. The report explains what this number represents:

  > all types of nuclear weapons, including deployed and non-deployed, and strategic and non-strategic.
Since we know the number of deployed strategic (1359) and the total number (3748), it follows that the rest (2389) is the total of the non-deployed strategic warheads and all the B61s (deployed or not).

I can't find number of non-deployed strategic warheads, but I think it should be very small, otherwise the arms treaty is a total joke. The difference between deployed and non-deployed is quite minimal, for example the non-deployed weapons have their tritium bottles removed.

So my guess is that the majority of the 2389 number above is B61 tactical nukes. Not all of them are deployed or active, but they can become so in a very short timespan.

I think this is the message that the US is trying to send.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_START

[2] https://www.state.gov/report-on-the-status-of-tactical-nonst...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B61_nuclear_bomb

[4] https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nuclear-weapons-who-h...

[5] https://www.state.gov/2023-report-to-congress-on-implementat...

sillywalk
0 replies
16h17m

I think the point of this sudden urge for transparency is to send a message to Russia and to the US allies about the tactical nukes.

Perhaps. I don't think it the disparity really matters that much. Either Nuclear deterrence works or it doesn't. Once the first nuke goes off, all bets are off.

US allies are worried that maybe the US nuclear umbrella is not that strong after all.

I imagine that US allies do worry, I suppose that has been the case since NATO's inception. But I don't think it's about the strength of the umbrella. It is the willingness to, after having offered shelter under it, actually employ nuclear weapons.

Ukraine, is another question. If Russia employs tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, I don't think having a few hundred more B-61s (or a few thousand more tactical nukes to be deployed by hypothetical means) would be relevant. There are only so many aircraft that are equipped to fly them, crews trained to use them, and only so many "targets" to hit, before targets becomes another word for cities.

At least initially, I assume that any US/NATO nuclear response would be on Russian targets occupying Ukrainian soil, hoping to avoid retaliation.

All this is so depressing and scary.

hereme888
0 replies
17h11m

Has anyone "secretly" placed nukes in space yet?

baud147258
0 replies
2h28m

It seems like some of the conversations in that thread went a little nuclear, no?

sorry I couldn't resist