Fleet of 12 Nuclear Submarines in Line for Pentagon Approval | Hacker News Reader

Fleet of 12 Nuclear Submarines in Line for Pentagon Approval

bloomberg.com

For comparison, the entire Apollo program costed $110B in today's money [1]. In addition to other things, this budget covered the construction of 15 Saturn V rockets and 3 additional ground test vehicles of the same size, plus 3 Saturn IB rockets, plus 35 Command Modules and 15 Lunar Modules.

Even if we just considered the 13 Saturn V rockets that were actually flown, it comes down to 110 / 13 = $8.4B per launch... Slightly less than the projected $9B construction cost for each nuclear submarine, which will presumably incur additional operational costs.

And they called the Apollo program a waste of money...

[1] Source: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1579/1

On the other hand, the Saturn V launch system operated for about a week or two each, whereas these submarines should last around 30 years in service.

So they will be 112/12 = 9B$ per boat?

Ohio class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio-class_submarine cost 2B$....

10 times more expensive then Russian Borey-class? If they are a strategic deterrent why don't they just a build a sub around say 2 ICBM shafts and call it a day

Ohio class cost $2bn when it started being built in 1976. That's $8.5bn today.

(Russia's $890MM Borey class subs started being built in 1996. That's $1.4bn today.)

The UK Trident replacements are estimated to be about 15-20 billion GBP for 4 boats - and given that there is every chance that the cost would be a fair bit higher they look roughly comparable to the US costs.

The UK boats will presumably be smaller but won't have the benefits of scale of the US fleet.

Not to mention that the UK is then dependent on the US for servicing and parts. It's not like you can shop around for a cheaper servicing contract.

As far as I know the only parts the UK has a dependency on the US for are the missiles themselves and re-entry vehicles - everything else (including the warheads) are manufactured in the UK but to designs that are, to various extents, "influenced" by US designs.

Edit: I just noticed that the new UK subs are to be called the "Dreadnought" class - so they will probably all start with D and re-use old RN names - so we might end up with an HMS Devastation and HMS Destruction...

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

Or "Dainty" or "Desperate"!

Also the "Dark" class of patrol boats is missing - could have a "Dark Avenger" or "Dark Hero":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark-class_fast_patrol_boat

Edit: No coincidence that Iain Banks' father was in the RN - hence the Culture's use of Cool Ship Names.

Unit motto: I AM THE NIGHT

I vote they call them Daisy, Dainty, Doily, and Floaty McNukeface

Sinky McNukeface surely?

I suspect that with submarines there is an important difference between "submerge" and "sink" :-)

Well, the sub part is pretty expensive, since you have to accomodate 100+ people, with a nuclear reactor/diesel engine + batteries and all the supplies for a long trip. And they need to be able to move undetected, that's the point of the nuclear missile sub as a strategic deterrent.

You should use constant dollars when you compare currency values from one period to another.

The cost per boat is really meaningless. What matters is the total lifecycle cost of the entire system including R&D, construction, operations, shore support, and eventual decommissioning. The total for that will be much more than $112B.

Submarine detection methods have been steadily improving for a long time now, their usefulness is declining but they will still be viable for quite some time.

A good discussion from 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9073740

As said in the conversation you linked (which is interesting, thank you), the obsolescence is for the attack submarines close to their target, whereas missile submarines, like the Columbia, has still the rest of the ocean to hide.

I have a better idea, let us reconfigure the biggest 15 dirtiest ships [1] with Nuclear reactors.

[1] http://www.industrytap.com/worlds-15-biggest-ships-create-mo...

Marine reactors need to be refueled after 25 years and that process is extremely expensive. Also, after end-of-life, the reactor needs to be stored securely, for an indefinite period of time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_naval_reactors#/...

Better idea: let's not allow dirty ships to enter US/EU ports. close the "international loophole" that enables such egregious pollution (and workers' rights abuses). All ships entering US ports must conform to US emissions regulation, not the phony in-name-only "flag" they stamp on the ship of the nation with the least regulation.

The article is... not really correct.

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-the-15-biggest-ships-i...

Yes, sailing unguarded floating dirty bombs past Somali pirates sounds like a wonderful idea.

I suspect a nuclear engine is drastically more expensive to build and maintain, not to mention the disposal issues others have mentioned.

Standard Republican military Keynesianism. Too bad we are so against domestic Keynesianism. I'd rather have national high speed rail.

To be fair, we could probably have both if national rail was a priority. The interstate system was built over decades during periods of high military spending and several conflicts.

Modernization of our nuclear capability isn't necessary a bad thing (if you assume MAD doctrine is effective and that the nuclear triad is a key piece of this).

Interstate spending can easily be viewed as defense spending. After all it's called the "Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways" and was partly inspired by Nazi Germany's Autobahn system that was instrumental for fast troop movement.

Indeed. I think you could make the argument that it was a better investment than something like the F-35 though - at least the interstate system provides continuous economic benefit etc.

How many nuclear weapons do you really need for MAD to be effective?

The magic number seems to be about 100. Enough to destroy important cities and military targets with some spares to reduce the chance of your arsenal being eliminated by a first strike.

This has been the standard political cycle since Nixon.

Democrats roll back military spending and funnel that money to their domestic pet projects like environmental causes, fighting poverty, and improving education. Then, once a Republican is back in office, they roll back most of those pet projects and funnel the money back into the military budget.

You can more easily see the ups and downs on some of the charts here: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/defense_spending

Wow, TIL the US spends almost a full percent of GDP on veterans. That sounded like a huge amount to me, but then I found the US has an equally huge number of veterans: 22 million, or 7% of the population are veterans! So it's just ~$8000 per person per year.

Think about that for a minute: if you put 30 random US people in a room, on average two of them will have served in wars!

Edit: you can also clearly see the rise of the military industrial complex in those graphs.

The state of the US military makes a lot more sense when you consider that it's the only jobs program that Republicans will enthusiastically support. A large part of its de facto mission is to be an (unusually wasteful) welfare program that can actually secure serious amounts of funding from Congress. That 7% of the population of veterans receives some serious benefits, including retirement if they served (IIRC) 20 years, plus they were employed for some period of time when they might otherwise not have been (or have displaced someone else from a job).

[EDIT] grammar

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/include/usgs_chart2p32.p...

so "defense" spending was higher during wars, not really surprising and its peak was during Obama's term. Really doesnt fit the whole republican vs democrat theory.

> I'd rather have national high speed rail.

I'd rather have national "high efficiency" healthcare. Think of how many medical schools, hospitals, and MD scholarships could be created with $112B. That's how you really "fix" healthcare.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia-class_submarine

Nothing that a good trillion-dollar bill can't pay for.

I really think they need to store frozen embryos on these subs. Sounds silly?

I'm thinking in any kind of civilization ending disaster subs underwater might have the best chance at surviving and they could stay under for a few months to wait out the worst of any kind of aftermath.

After that they'd need a large genetic stock to repopulate the species.

Would be more viable having a stock of frozen sperm and a minimum requirement on female crew. Still, I don't think that is the primary function of these submarines.

Edit: seems that women have only recently begun serving on submarines: http://scoopdeck.navytimes.com/2012/05/29/first-all-female-s...

Can you identify a specific type of disaster which would destroy all bunkers around the world without evaporating the oceans?

Even the global nuclear stockpile can't boil the oceans.

Even nuclear winter won't destroy all humanity. Just modernity.

A 100% lethal virus with high incubation period. Bunkers typically have a lot more contact with the outside than nuclear subs

Compute the energy required to "evaporate the oceans". Compute the energy all nuclear weapons can expend.

Humanity is not going to "evaporate the oceans" anytime soon. The energy requirements for that would be somewhere around Kardashev level [1] 1.3-1.5 or so.

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

Bunkers being fixed locations means they could be targeted for attack. If it serves military purposes, there is a good chance it'll be targeted. If the sole purpose is as an embryo bank, it'd be useless if there is no trained staff to use it after the disaster, and keeping people there 24/7 would be unreasonable if it doesn't serve other purposes. A submarine has a much higher chance of survival, and is already being manned 24/7 for deterrence purposes.

Have you seen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus_(1980_film)

Sounds like you might enjoy it.

It is conversations like this that get me.

Spend the money on healthcare and education instead. We have enough nuclear deterrents.

Have you been reading Seveneves?

aren't there enough male and female soldiers in the military with enough reproduction capacity ?

the socialist jobs program

> why don't they just a build a sub around say 2 ICBM shafts and call it a day

You say that like it should be trivially easy. Guess what, launching a missle from underwater to hit a target a thousand miles away is actually pretty difficult and complicated! Who'da thunk, right?

I thought US was more advanced than France on this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M51_(missile)

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