US Preparing to Put Nuclear Bombers Back on 24-Hour Alert
defenseone.com
defenseone.com
Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
Ambassador de Sadesky: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.
Of course, what a waste of money (eg ICBMs and SLBMs are superior in every respect) and unnecessary escalation of risk.
Astonishingly good movie.
In all cases there are costs and visibility challenges like you have to open your silo doors before you shoot missiles and over the arctic missiles take 30 minutes to arrive. Bombers in the air can see fighters who might be tailing them but they cant be countered by ground based missiles easily, it literally goes on and on. Measure, counter-measure. Signal, counter signal. Threat, defensive capability.
Literally end of the world as we know it kind of stuff so a lot of time and effort has been invested in understanding it.
Rather than lecturing me on how I should read more and question less, maybe you could tell me just what advantages bombers have over missiles as at alert force?
The discussion about putting the bombers back on alert is driven by discussions to not renew New START[1]. As you know the air 'leg' of the nuclear trident counters the simultaneous elimination of the the strategic missile forces and the submarine forces by an adversary. One can estimate the number of warheads necessary for that to occur, and while we stay under the lower limit of that estimate there is surety that the bombers would be superfluous. In the event that New START does not renew (2021) or it is pulled out of early, it takes a while to recover the strategic bomber fleet to full readiness status. Training, people, etc. Some of that can be 'short circuited' by pulling retired (but still trained) individuals back into active duty.
You also know that SAC air bases are located such that they can launch (when they are on alert) in less time than it takes for a submarine launched cruise missile to get there and destroy the base. Those bombers would have the capability to destroy our likely adversary. Further you can launch bombers in DEFCON 2 in anticipation of an action which signals your readiness to fight without committing to wholesale destruction of the planet.
You also know that the threats that stand between the bombers and their targets have counters in place to insure that their mission (the destruction of the adversary that just killed off the US) would likely be successful.
They are, and pretty much always have been, the "revenge" team.
Adding bomber bases to the list of targets the enemy must destroy makes their life more difficult, but it seems like the difference would be small. There are, what, half a dozen or so bomber bases you'd have to destroy? One warhead each should do it. My understanding is that ICBM silos are sturdy enough to require a nearly direct hit to destroy them, so you'd need hundreds of warheads to destroy those.
The ability to launch bombers and then change (or cancel) their mission en route is super useful, but that seems separate from the alert role. If you want to put nuclear bombers in the air to put the fear of God into your adversary, you don't need them to be on a five-minute alert (or whatever the actual time will be).
In an effort to return to sanity both countries agreed to bilateral reductions in strategic arms. The point of which was to reduce the number of warheads on strategic weapons (ICBMs) to make such a pre-emptive strike unlikely to succeed. The next step of moving back from the brink of annihilation was to limit the number of warheads in submarines, bombers and medium range missiles. By the end of the cold war both sides had reduced (and verified) that their respective stocks of nuclear warheads was at a level such that neither side was able to preemptively destroy the other, and entering into a conflict could be more controlled/restrained because there would be significant and incontrovertible evidence of first use while the victim would retain significant response capability. These were perhaps the most important treaties negotiated and executed in the 20th century. And have generally kept the chains on that horrific capability.
If New START is not renewed, and we see a build up in nuclear arms again, then it is possible that we see an adversary (or allied adversaries) who get to the point that they can take out all of the strategic capability of the US. If that is likely to occur, then the first step to combat it is to resurrect the bomber force requiring your adversary to expend more warheads to counter all more potential delivery systems. And the typical hawkish policy is to try to keep the number of delivery systems and warheads ahead of your worst cast threat.
In any event, it is the "wrong direction" we need to go if we wish to avoid killing everyone.
Lets say it takes 8 warheads to reliably disable an ICBM silo and you have 80 silos, so that take 160 war heads for those silos. And lets say it takes 25 warheads to cover all the possible areas a mobile ICBM launcher might be in its various revetments and launch positions. So 185 war heads.
Now you add 15 SAC bases with bombers, each takes say 3 war heads to be sure you get it done, that is another 45 warheads. So now 230 warheads are needed. And you want to be sure and take out norad and the line of early warning radars, so call it 250 war heads total with delivery platforms.
If you limit each side to 125 strategic warheads then in the event of a first strike the adversary has to pick which places they can hit because they don't have enough warheads to take out everything.
So the idea of putting bombers on alert, is to increase the number of places you have to hit in order to eliminate a retaliation capability. That either helps reduce a threat of a preemptive strike (they can't be sure what they can kill) because it increases the number of warheads the adversary needs to insure success. Or it forces them to make more warheads in violation of the treaty which would be caught sooner by the verification tools in place.
Conversely, if your adversary does start increasing their warhead stock pile and you don't reactivate your SAC bases, then you open a window in time where a preemptive strike might be effective and end up with itchy trigger fingers because you think their MIGHT be a preemptive strike coming over the horizon and you don't respond fast enough you never will be able to respond. It is that situation, the so called "launch on warning" scenario with weapons that cannot be recalled, can turn a glitch into a war that destroys the planet.
And no the PRK is not a threat in this way as they don't have the ability to threaten all of the US and materially limit our response.
So the bottom line is that while you certainly could use strategic weapons to destroy SAC bomber bases, the major powers have artificially disabled their ability to do so (without leaving the ability to respond intact) through treaties to insure global stability.
You could expand the number of bases, but that’s tremendously expensive. It’s far cheaper to build a missile silo than a bomber base and a fleet of bombers to base there.
So in terms of the real numbers, you’re talking about adding around 1-2% to the number of warheads needed for a successful preemptive strike. Again, is that’s all there is to it, or is it something else?
As for the relative cost of building a missile silo or reactivating a SAC base, I'd be interested in how you get to the notion that building a missile base would be less expensive. They were pretty complex facilities, and there are some great videos on youtube about them. An airbase is a bunch of asphalt spread out, a bunker to hold munitions, and a barracks to hold the pilots. I will be the first person to say I have not built (or even participated in building) either kind of facility but when I imagine how I might build one or the other, the fact that the SAC base is all above ground makes me believe that it would be cheaper to build. Could totally be wrong on that of course.
As for relative cost, that’s a big reason why ICBMs took on such a prominent role: once the technology was worked out, they were much cheaper than bombers.
It’s hard to find precise numbers, but imprecise ones should suffice. We can look at commercial airports to get an idea of what base construction would cost. An asphalt runway won’t cut it here: you need sturdy concrete runways to hold large planes like this. I believe a B-52 needs even more strength than airliners do, because they have fewer wheels. In any case, the cost of constructing a single new runway at a large commercial airport is many hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes over a billion. And that’s just the runway, never mind all the other infrastructure you need. Bombers aren’t cheap either. It’s hard to say what a new B-52 would cost, since nobody has built one for a long time, but it’s peobably hundreds of millions each.
An ICBM plus silo is tens of millions. Various sources online list the Minutemen III at a $7 million cost per unit, but that must be nominal dollars decades back. They’d cost quite a bit more now, but tens of millions should be a reasonable estimate. The silo adds significant cost, but it’s ultimately a fairly small construction projects relative to a whole bomber base.
If you can reactivate old bases, that would help a lot, but they probably need substantial refurbishment if they’ve been idle for a long time, and you still need aircraft to base there. And there are only so many old bases to be had.
When you say something like : "As for relative cost, that’s a big reason why ICBMs took on such a prominent role: once the technology was worked out, they were much cheaper than bombers." I realize you continue to discuss this as an engineer might, how many lines of code to make a compiler versus an interpreter for example. Your statement is both correct and completely irrelevant in the context of the world we live in with its current treaties.
We are forbidden, by treaty, from making any additional ICBMs, no matter what they cost. As a nation we abide that treaty because we believe that doing so is in the best interests of the existence of the world.
In doesn't seem particularly useful to discuss an alternate world unconstrained by such treaties as the general consensus has been to date that such a world is short lived.
"I[t] doesn't seem particularly useful to discuss an alternate world unconstrained by such treaties...." You literally did just that only a few messages ago! "If New START is not renewed, and we see a build up in nuclear arms again...."
I don't get how bombers are useful either the way things are now or in a post-treaty era. As things stand now, you're only adding maybe a half-dozen targets to a preemptive strike target list which is already 400+ entries long. That doesn't seem significant. In a post-treaty world, it's far cheaper to lengthen the target list by building more ICBMs and silos than by building more bombers and bomber bases. (And we're currently about 200 launchers below our limits under New START, so we could build quite a few more. And bombers and ICBMs are lumped together under the same limit, so you can't use bombers as a way to get around a ceiling on ICBMs.)
I'm open to learning how alert bombers help. And if it's just a matter of using existing resources to expand the enemy's target list by 1-2%, that's fair enough. But so far you just keep telling me that it somehow makes a first strike much harder and that I should do more research.
Given the time it may take to validate and characterize a launch warning, have the message reach the President, have him make a decision, relay the message through STRATCOM, retarget the missiles (assuming we're still detargeted), and launch, you're talking at least 10-15 minutes from warning to launch. The Russians have missiles that might arrive faster than that. If bombers on the ground are maintained at a high enough level of alert, they can be launched at the very first warning as a precaution, before any irrevocable decision has been made.
And that this weeks evacuation "drill" was already scheduled?
This is war time preparation.
We can't risk them thinking we're vulnerable to a preemptive strike for even a day or week.
It's precautionary measure to prevent an escalation to WW3. Hopefully it works out.
See it's the complicated, many possible options, nature of war planning that makes stuff like this much less black and white.
The war planning based around what you describe assumed the Soviet submarine fleet, yes?
Are you worried about Russia, China ("the Type 094s noisiness would make it difficult for it to reach and maintain patrol areas where it could strike at the contiguous United States"), or India?
The threat of a sudden first strike that destroys our weapons on the ground is why we have ballistic missile submarines.
DPRK has already engaged in acts of war against both ROK and Japan. There's nothing unilateral left.
As terrible as the North Korean regime is from a humanitarian perspective, they do seem relatively rational as far as international politics are concerned. The US has demonstrated an appetite for regime change, international law be damned, for decades and decades. If you're a weaker opponent, taking a hostage (Seoul) and making credible threats is a very effective strategy for self preservation.
Also, the number of conventional and nuclear weapons we have pointed at their country, from a very close proximity, at all times, is not something we might spend very much time thinking about ourselves, but is top of mind for them. Given their large losses of civilian life in the Korean war at the hands of the US, I'd imagine they'd take that stuff very seriously.
Anyway, none of this excuses the clear oppressiveness of Kim Jong Un's government. But it's not like they're the only nation that abuses its military power in threatening ways, and a strong case could be made that they're reacting to us just as we are reacting to them. Just don't expect the American media to dwell too long on how our actions could be considered provocative.
That's incorrect analysis. Nothing like instantaneous destruction would occur without nuclear weapons. It would take months of perfect artillery fire to destroy Seoul, assuming 100% detonation rate, unlimited ammo and assuming zero artillery is destroyed. They would run out of ammo before destroying Seoul, even in the impossible perfect scenario.
"How much damage an initial attack would inflict depends on how many are used and on how much of the ordnance explodes. In 2010, North Korean forces fired about 170 shells at an island in the South, killing two civilians and two soldiers. Analysts later concluded that about 25 percent of the North’s shells failed to detonate.
"A study published by the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability in 2012 accounting for these and other factors such as population density concluded that an initial artillery barrage by the North focused on military targets would result in nearly 3,000 fatalities, while one targeting civilians would kill nearly 30,000 people."
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/world/asia/north-korea-so...
"A retired U.S. general said a Pentagon war scenario showed a conventional war with North Korea could result in about 20,000 deaths per day in South Korea, according to the Los Angeles Times."
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/25/korean-war-simulation-by-dod...
http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a6212/north-korea-a...
https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/how-north-korea-would...
That's the most recent statement by a high-ranking government official that I've heard, but it's so high that it has to be an exaggeration. Anyway, to surpass Hiroshima, they don't need anywhere near that amount. They just need about 3x what your estimate says they had in 2012. Less if Seoul has grown in population density during that time.
If only there were something in between artillery shelling and nuclear weapons...
Clearly, some cases are way, way less than optimal.
D-day planning, for instance, was quite ugly. They planned for roughly 40% casualties just on securing the beachhead. That’s a military solution, but it sure sucked. Thankfully it worked out much better than the plan.
Indeed. Especially since the US refuses to end the Korean war by signing a peace treaty.
It's just posturing, and "putting Nuclear Bombers on 24-hour alert" is also just posturing.
It also raises the risk of unintentional nuclear exchange.
The world has come close to nuclear war multiple times as a result of miscommunication, equipment failure, or accident.
The more nukes world leaders are waving about, the greater the risks.
> It's just posturing, and "putting Nuclear Bombers on 24-hour alert" is also just posturing.
That's exactly my point: there's nothing one-sided about this. DPRK is playing their hand, the U.S. must play theirs.
Or, as the far stronger side, the US could de-escalate. Not only is this the less-risky option, but it would also garner global respect/admiration for the US - something that has been in short supply for a long time.
Guam appears to be an internet hub for a few relatively important lines.
"The SEA-US cable system will link the five areas and territories of Manado in Indonesia, Davao in Southern Philippines; Piti in the territory of Guam; as well as Honolulu (on the island of Oahu), Hawaii; and Los Angeles, California in the continental U.S." [1]
[1] https://www.submarinenetworks.com/systems/trans-pacific/sea-...
Here's the global map:
That last line about using nukes for combat is scary. Every country should take a stance they wont be first to fire. It reduces the likelyhood of actually having to use them. Once US is talking pre-emptive tactical strikes now Russia and China are much more likely to gear up for the same and sit there guessing if they should launch first next time tensions increase.
We really need to cage these war hawks that get into power. My jaw hit the ground at the stupidity of that statement. They just made the world and their country a significantly more dangerous place. Thats far from defending their nation.
What makes you think they want to reduce the likelihood of actually having to use them?
It's like another part of the article:
"One painting -- a symbol of the Cold War -- depicts a silhouette of a B-52 with the words 'Peace The Old Fashioned Way,' written underneath."
There's a gigantic military-industrial complex that is built around the virtually unquestioned assumption that military force is an excellent solution to many of the world's problems -- and that often such force is best used "preemptively". Many if not most politicians in power around the world share these assumption, as does much of the general population.
There have been multiple very serious pushes towards preemptively initiating nuclear war throughout history, and certainly no shortage of preemptive conventional conflict.
I am continually astonished that the world hasn't already ended in a nuclear conflagration by now.
The global situation that 'we find ourselves in', or the global situation that we have actually created?
It's like watching a slow motion train wreck, kind of satisfying but damn is it terrifying.
This situation has been poorly reported, and I don't think many people without a security clearance understand what's been happening in the past few years. The threat is a Russian decapitation strike. Non-alert bombers are trivially easy to destroy. The ICBM fleet now depends on 40 launch control centers, or one of a few special aircraft in order to be able to launch. These aircraft, prior to 1991, were on continuous airborne alert. There are now three of them on ground alert, with (my guess) 15-30 minute response time.
These aircraft are also the primary communications mechanism with the missile subs. The subs are also capable of raising a communications buoy and communicating via satellite, but this is not normal operating procedure, and there are only about five satellites that they can use.
The Russians have a number of new weapons systems, some public, some not. They appear to have a maneuvering reentry vehicle that could allow depressed trajectories, which means sub-10 minute warning times. This is not enough time for the President to be located, make a decision, transmit it to the silos, and have the missiles away. There are also several new Russian anti-satellite weapons, including one that appears to be in geosynchronous orbit, which could knock out the communications satellites to talk to the subs. With a communications blackout, there would potentially be time to destroy the subs before they could launch.
Having bombers on alert is not a real solution to this problem, but it's better than nothing. Potentially, the bombers could be ordered to launch at the first warning, and might make it away from the airfield in time. They could start flying to targets immediately, but wouldn't have to strike if it were a false warning. The better solution would be to put the special planes (the E-6Bs) back on continuous airborne alert, but according to what the generals said at some congressional hearings back in March, the problem is that the E-6Bs are too old, and there aren't enough of them to be able to maintain airborne alert. Unfortunately we don't even have a budgeted program to design a replacement, and the airframe they're based on is obsolete.
Also, you may have missed the cold war ending. Despite all that's going on, there really is no argument why Russia would prefer post-armageddon hellscape to the SQ.
Russia started helping North Korea with ICBM and super EMP technology after Bush pulled out of the anti ballistic missile treaty unilaterally.
Putin realized there was no way to catch up to US technology. The only solution is to damage the US enough that Russia can catch up.
Trump is the fool and Kim Jung Un is the patsy. Putin is the puppet master.
Even if some SSBNs did survive undetected, since the end of the cold war, the PAL codes for the warheads on the U.S. subs are not stored on the sub, they have to be received in the EAM. This means that the captain is no longer capable of acting independently. In the UK case, the captain does have the codes, and he is supposed to read a "letter of last resort" to tell him what to do. Given the circumstances that this letter is written under, it's unlikely that it says "nuke the bastards." Furthermore, if, perhaps hours or days after an attack, communication was restored, if the Russian attack were purely counterforce, it's likely that there would be single digit millions of casualties in the U.S. With a nearly defanged U.S., the Russians would presumably issue an ultimatum to surrender any remaining nuclear weapons or they would launch a follow-on countervalue attack. It's hard to imagine a U.S. president proceeding with a strike against Russia under these circumstances, given that effective counterforce would be impossible, and the Russian leadership would have in any case not be in a vulnerable spot anymore.
This all sounds very hypothetical, except that there is a worrying pattern of actions and development programs that suggest that Russia is pursuing this capability. They've recently (failed to) launch what appears to be a submarine detecting satellite, their subs are patrolling much closer to the U.S. than they ever have since the cold war, they have this new anti-satellite capability, they've been running sonar ships past Kings Bay, they appear to have a new DT capability, they're upgrading the Moscow ABM system, they're improving their civil defense capabilities, and supposedly digging new bunkers for the leadership, and they appear to have been behind a propaganda campaign to discredit the UK Trident system so that the UK would decommission its deterrent.
BTW I have never head a clearance and all of my info comes from open sources. You can piece a lot together if you go looking deeply though.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/world/north-kor...