Cold war files show UK fear of US H-bomb | Hacker News Reader

Cold war files show UK fear of US H-bomb

ft.com

26 pointsjeo123424 comments

Couple of problems with this article:

1. The atomic bomb didn't end the war with Japan; an impending Russian invasion did. Japan preferred surrendering to America first while they still had some bargaining power left (plus they hated the Russians). Dropping a couple of big bombs on some secondary cities was nothing compared to the devastation of major metropolitan centers from the firebombing campaign.

2. The UK's primary worry was that the USA would once again become isolationist like it usually does, which would leave the UK alone to contend with a very powerful neighbor that could push them around now that Germany was divided and France essentially impotent. The H bomb was simply a demonstration of how powerful (and thus influential) a nation could get. The UK's "special relationship" with America is a diplomatic consequence of this worry.

The title "Cold war files show UK fear of US H-bomb" is quite misleading. The UK feard that the Russians would attack them with hydrogen bombs. Can't see where the US fit into this, except for pioneering the hydrogen bomb, but that doesn't make all hydrogen bombs US bombs.

When we are on the topic of the UK and atomic bombs. This is a great article from the archive: "British nukes were protected by bike locks" - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7097101.stm

The UK was worried that the US was escalating the Cold War conflict and that we'd be more at risk rather than safer as a result.

Given that this was exactly what happened in the late 50s and early 60s (US over estimates Soviet threat for internal political reasons, builds huge arsenals, Soviets scramble to catch up) this is pretty much what happened so their worries were justified.

"US over estimates Soviet threat for internal political reasons"

"Over-estimated" how?

I mean, there really was about a 2:1 Warsaw Pact tank advantage, and nuclear deterrence really was the only realistic way of countering it.

Can you be more specific about how this threat was "over-estimated"?

It's pretty clear that the existence of nuclear weapons deterred political leaders from contemplating war. However, the actual number of weapons in place spiraled vastly beyond what was actually required for deterrence - largely, it has to be said, due to internal US political reasons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_gap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap

NB I'm in no way defending the Soviets, who were a deeply unpleasant bunch, but I think it's pretty clear that a lot of unnecessary risks were run during the Cold War and the UK would have been one of the worst victims.

Nuclear wasn't the only way. We built the A-10 Warthog specifically to counter the tank problem and it filled its role brilliantly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thun...

The A-10 was not a anti-tank panacea. It's survivability was questioned even then, and given what we now know about the threat environment, it's likely it would have suffered tremendously. [1]

Now, in the 1980s, there was a growing idea that it was feasible to stop a conventional attack [2] but this was a new an untested idea. Doctrine still called for tactical nuclear weapons against Soviet bridgeheads as being the only way to assuredly offset the numerical disadvantage.

But that's all tactical. Part of the reason there were simply so many warheads built was to account for attrition and failure. There were real concerns about the inability for nuclear weapons to reach their targets. Having 5 bombs did not assuredly mean 5 cities destroyed. Bombers and cruise missiles could be shot down, ballistic missiles intercepted, and submarines sunk. That's not to mention that, with testing (relatively) limited after 1963, there were reliability concerns regarding a weapon's ability to detonate after delivery (especially with regard to shocks.)

So the solution for the U.S. and the USSR (others turned to more elaborate means [3]) was to simply throw more warheads, on more platforms, in a variety of ways, to ensure that regardless of whether or not this was a first strike, counterforce, etc, weapons would get through in quantity. This was the "A" in Mutually Assured Destruction.

1. http://baloogancampaign.com/2015/02/02/10-future-us-close-ai...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirLand_Battle

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevaline

The A-10 has great marketing, almost like the Marine Corps.

The truth is a bit more complicated. Yes the A-10 would have been capable in the Fulda Gap, but it would have suffered tremendous losses against Soviet air defenses. The depth and breadth of these defenses are astonishing for the time. You would start with the SA-6 for ingress/approach, then the SA-8 Gecko for closer. Finally you would have to deal with SA-7/SA-9, and of course the ZSU-23-4 Shilka. This is just what you would have faced against a moving enemy. Fixed positions would have quite a bit of AAA as well.

You'd also have to contend with Soviet Frontal Aviation. These units weren't nearly as good as the F-4/15/16/Mirages they would have faced, but they'd still be a threat until a reliable CAP was in place.

Maverick targeting during the 80s was pretty primitive (this was way before LANTIRN/SNIPER etc), and the Maverick wasn't fire and forget at the time.

Lots of attrition.

Also, helicopters like the AH1/Lynx/B105 would have had similar fates.

The A-10 program only survived the 1970s as an anti-tank respin of a Vietnam counter-insurgency specification.

The gun was only effective against certain aspects of T-64 armour and only after US Army Cobras had eliminated or reduced ZSU and Gaskin vehicles to allow the A-10 to approach to gun range.

What it does very effectively today in close-support was for what it was originally intended, not tank-busting.

The GAU-8 cannon was designed specifically for the anti-tank role using APDU. The A-10 was designed solely for close air support, including attacking tanks as the link I provided mentions. All close air support requires control of the air space.

The gun was only effective against certain aspects of T-64 armour

Would these be the sides and top? Which an aircraft is in a much better position to attack than troops on the ground facing it's forward armor.

While the gun had been viewed as effective and economical, by the 80's there were real question as to how realistic the A-10s survivability would be.

I apologise for not having a link on hand that discusses this, but the standoff requirement to survive in the environment shifted the A-10's primary anti-tank weapon to the AGM-65 Maverick, and not the cannon, soon after it was introduced.

>"Over-estimated" how?

Kennedy's missile gap, for one.

The existence of a threat does not mean that it cannot be over-estimated.

You are ignoring the fact that the USSR built up their atomic weaponry, moved in on other countries, and made threats to the US. Your statement is one-sided.

There's some interesting claims about the current trident system too : https://wikileaks.org/trident-safety/

Well, the bike locks might have been more secure than the launch code for US Minuteman missiles - which was up until 1977:

00000000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link

Also worth noting that UK Trident nukes don't have PALs - each crew already has all the information it needs to launch.

Referrer link: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

Or... https://archive.is/HbkhZ

Thanks! How does this get past the paywall, exactly? Is it passing a user auth through ?

Sites with paywalls often prefer that Google can index them, and Google doesn't like indexing a page that will be shown differently to a user who clicks on it from a search, therefore to get the full content indexed and avoid being penalised by Google, they show the full article if you come from a Google search (or through a Google link that makes it look like you came from a search)

Curious why thorium and heavy water are necessary for H-bombs. I'm more familiar with reactors than bombs but from that perspective, heavy water is a moderator, which you don't need with the highly-enriched fissile in bombs, and thorium isn't fissile, but can be turned U-233 which is fissile but not something we actually use in bombs, or need if we have U-235 or plutonium.

Don't want to use up my very small quota of FT articles, but as for heavy water, thermonuclear bombs use lithium-6 deuteride, lithium-6 hydride where the hydrogen atoms are deuterium (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_hydride#In_nuclear_che...), the best source of which is heavy water.

This compound is a compact and stable solid at the relevant temperatures; as the above says, when bombarded by neutrons the lithium-6 is converted into tritium in an exothermic (favorable) reaction, and then it fuses with the deuterium.

Ah that makes sense. Any idea on thorium?

None whatsoever,

I'm still in my intensive study of the Manhattan Project and one thing that's very clear is that the "try everything that looks like it might work to make sure at least one will" had a great benefit in building the insanely scaled K-25 gaseous diffusion plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-25). This allowed us to easily build reactors and all sorts of things with enriched uranium. With that good an ecosystem, where does thorium fit in?

Ah, here's a theory: the U.K. didn't know how well we'd done in finding uranium sources. So early on, besides just trying it out, wasn't it posited as an alternative to U-235 if we ran low on it? And I've read on Wikipedia that some thermonuclear primaries were/are U-235 implosion designs; if that's advantageous, alternates to U-235 for power reactors could be useful.

And skimming this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_the_United... and finding this http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Uk/UKFacility.html confirms that it took a long time for the U.K. to enrich uranium, especially to militiarily useful levels (HEU) and amounts, 1954 and 1957 respectively, long after the 1952 creation of successful H-bombs.

But I still can't find or think of anything that supports the bald assertion in the article (which I did break down and read), which tells me the author is grossly ignorant of the most basics of the subject, and I strongly suspect the whole article is highly suspect, putting a spin on events that's not in the least supportable by reality, there are plenty of tells, including extremely limited quoting of the documents which are supposed to reveal all this.

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