U.S. considers adding nuclear cruise missiles to destroyers and submarines | Hacker News Reader

U.S. considers adding nuclear cruise missiles to destroyers and submarines

thedrive.com

35 pointsIntronExon49 comments

One wonders what these people are thinking, when the very suggestion of having these weapons available to use puts the whole planet incrementally nearer to nuclear catastrophe. The cost-benefit analysis is so painfully slanted against anything like this that it's absolutely absurd- we have the nuclear triad already, for what it's worth, and it can do it's job better than we need. These toys have no well-defined safe use case and risks that the human mind can scarcely comprehend.

Is this part of some diplomatic tit-for-tat against the Russians over the attack in Syria last week? That's the most reasonable explanation that occurs to me, which is saying something.

> we have the nuclear triad already, for what it's worth, and it can do it's job better than we need.

You also have a President who as a candidate didn't know what the nuclear triad was.

Russia is developing smaller tactical nukes in a similar vein which is what I heard on NPR as the rationale for our own development and deployment of these weapons.

NPR also asserted that there is a feeling among Russians (?) that they could use a small nuke against the US and we wouldn't retaliate because we only have overwhelmingly large nuclear weapons.

I don't know what the basis is for the claim of non-retaliation though NPR isn't necessarily known as some sort of portal of nationalist rhetoric so I'm left confused by the report.

The logic would presumably be that using a significantly larger missile constitutes escalation rather than retaliation. Which begets escalation, which begets mutually assured destruction.

Game theory, rather than rhetoric.

  they could use a small nuke against the US and we
  wouldn't retaliate because we only have
  overwhelmingly large nuclear weapons.

Given that America could simply fire a large nuclear weapon at a low-population-density area if they wanted a controlled number of deaths, no rational person would gamble their family's life on that.

Our response to 9/11 was to invade two countries, one of which wasn’t even involved. I’m pretty sure that even a small nuke detonating on American territory would be met with the complete destruction of the attackers. We don’t really have the concept of a proportional response for this sort of thing.

They're not thinking in those terms. This is basically a political exercise in ass covering to try and distract people from the fact that the DDG-1000 Zumwalt class was a huge expensive mistake. Those ships only exist because after the old battleships were decommissioned, the Marine Corps convinced Congress that the Navy needed new ships to provide gunfire support during amphibious invasions. But the reality is that modern weapons have become so lethal that amphibious assaults against a heavily defended beach would be suicidal anyway even with naval gunfire.

The Zumwalt class is left as a ship without a mission. The guided artillery shells were cancelled due to cost overruns so there's no ammunition to fire out of the cannons. They have no area air defense capability and minimal antisubmarine capability. The smart move would have been to keep the first ship as a technology demonstrator and test article while cancelling the rest but instead they went ahead with building three of the stupid things. Now the Navy leadership is searching desperately for something they can actually do.

Speaking as a former Navy submariner, this isn't going to happen. The surface Navy doesn't have the background or training to handle nuclear weapons - nukes are (and should be) taken extraordinarily seriously. They're not just an add-on weapon, they simply have to be the core of what that ship does in order to be treated properly.

Good point, and then there’s just the question of, why do it at all? Nuclear weapons on a submarine makes sense as a deterrent against first strikes, but a surface ship is as much of a target as a silo or ground based mobile launch platform. The whole idea reeks of BSD in the worst way.

Because surface ships have better communications with shore, and would be more likely to receive a message quickly if AEHF, MILSTAR, and TACAMO are all destroyed in a surprise attack. That's useful both for ordering a retaliatory launch, and detecting if the ship has been attacked/destroyed.

The Russians have also deployed a similar missile on surface ships, and the land based version is in violation of the INF treaty. There is a desire to show that we are willing to respond to an escalation, and to counter it without violating the treaty ourselves.

> There is a desire to show that we are willing to respond to an escalation

You mean to say that there is a desire to show that the US is willing to escalate, too.

If we’re not willing to escalate there’s no nuclear deterrence.

I think it's a very bad idea, and I suspect it's merely the amateur misapplication of a faddish tactic, escalation, to every time and purpose, by people carried away with ideology and politics and who have forgotten boundaries of reason and consequence.

That said, an existential problem the US Navy is facing (along with all branches of all militaries) is that precision, long-range missile technology is maturing and becoming widely available, making much of the Navy's massive capital investment, it's surface fleet, obsolete. How big a deal is it? Think of it this way (based only on reading foreign policy journals; I'm no expert in any sense):

* Long ago, naval battles were fought by sailors boarding each others' ships and fighting hand-to-hand.

* When cannon were developed and the tech matured, the enemy could sink you long before you got close enough to board them. The superior range of cannons made the boarding actions obsolete. Ships without cannon were merely floating coffins for their personnel. Eventually, cannon (guns) range increased to around a couple of dozen miles in battleships.

* The cannon dominated the seas for generations, but were quickly made obsolete by planes flying off the decks of large ships, with ranges of hundreds of miles. IIRC, at the Battle of Midway in WWII, the first battle to heavily involve aircraft carriers, the Japanese battleships never even saw an American ship much less have a chance to shoot a cannon at one. The battleships were merely floating coffins for their personnel. These days, U.S. aircraft carriers' planes have a range of around 500 miles without refueling.

* Precision missiles do or will have a range of thousands of miles. Those nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, the core of U.S. military power projection, naval power and strategy, each carrying maybe $15-20 billion in capital plus ~5,000 lives, will become nothing more than floating coffins. The Chinese military is investing heavily in this prospect; those aircraft carriers have long protected Taiwan, and the Chinese government is investing heavily in missile batteries to make sure the carriers never get within range of a battle in Taiwan. Precision long-range missiles introduce another game-changing problem: they are far cheaper to attack with than to defend against. Right now, there is no effective defense against a large salvo of precision missiles; even 1,000 high-end missiles might cost $1 billion - a great bargain for sinking an aircraft carrier, whose defenses might have to shoot down 99% or more in order to survive.

One counter-measure the US Navy is investing in is "distributed lethality": rather than concentrating investment and capability in one very attractive target (aircraft carriers), they want to put missiles and other capabilities on every ship, from destroyers to cargo ships, so the enemy can't take down your naval power with a few missiles. That's part of the reason, I would guess, for nuclear cruise missiles on Zumwalt destroyers.

> Right now, there is no effective defense against a large salvo of precision missiles; even 1,000 high-end missiles might cost $1 billion - a great bargain for sinking an aircraft carrier, whose defenses might have to shoot down 99% or more in order to survive.

20 cents of lead can kill a soldier. Are soldiers obsolete?

10,000 dollars of RPG can destroy an M1 Abrams. Is the Abrams obsolete?

A single SAM site can destroy an entire squadron of F-16s. Are F-16s obsolete?

Well...no. There is an ocean of difference between "can" and "will". Especially for something as insanely complicated as an anti-ship non-nuclear (read: needs a direct hit) ballistic missile (read: terminal course correction is going to be a bitch) trying to hit some of the fastest ships in the US Navy dodging like hell while being covered by a blanket of AA fire the likes of which the world hasn't seen since WW2.

There is a very good reason China has recently started constructing its third aircraft carrier, and it's not because it looks pretty when you hang it over the fireplace.

> 20 cents of lead can kill a soldier. Are soldiers obsolete?

Soldiers (and tanks and F-16s) have effective countermeasures. The difference is that surface ships do not have effective defenses (or will not, when the missile technology matures). Tech does become obsolete; it happened to boarding parties and battleships; aircraft carriers are 80 year old tech, the distance in time between the US Civil War and WWII, and they'll become obsolete some day. I sure hope my side isn't still depending on them when they do - that has been the end of many nations throughout history.

You may not believe it, but it's a pretty broad consensus among experts that I've read. Militaries are investing heavily in that outcome.

What militaries? Because France, the UK, India and China are all investing further in carriers. The broad consensus is demonstrably the opposite of what you're claiming.

E pur si muove

Carriers are still good for projecting political power at s great remove from the mainland of whichever country has them. They’re also effective if your adversary isn’t likely to be armed with swarms or hypersonic missiles.

Agreed, and China's carriers are ineffective against U.S. or other advanced nations' naval power. The theory is that they are designed for lower-end targets and because China, wanting to be seen as a global power, wants the symbol of global naval power. Perception matters a lot in international affairs and politics: How many would take China seriously as a global naval power if they had no carriers, while the US, Russia, UK, France, and also India all do have them? People would perceive that China has not caught up yet.

This analogy doesn't hold water. We have hundreds of thousands of soldiers and sailors, and can muster more if/when needed. If we only had a dozen, then the fact that they can be killed by a 20-cent bullet would indeed be a HUGE problem.

That's what a carrier is: an irreplaceable multi-billion-dollar sitting duck. This was adequately demonstrated by Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, who (IIRC) spoiled a major wargaming exercise by spamming the enemy's capital ships with speedboats, USS Cole-style. Of course, the military's response was to change the rules to disallow Zerg rushes. Hopefully the Chinese, Russians, and/or Iranians got their updated copy of the rulebook.

Riper used his personal access codes and authority as a US general to cheat the test. He also exploited the wonky weapon allocation rules in the game to load down speed boats with several times their weight in heavy weapons - which outside a game would either sink them or make them utterly sluggish. He also communicated with his men using civilian phones, but then claimed he was using "motorcycle couriers" and therefore he should be totally immune to all surveillance. Motorcycle couriers who happen to travel at the speed of light, use no gas, and took none of his men to operate.

He basically was trying to pull of a peasent railgun, and then got pissy when people told him he still had to obey the laws of physics with his strategies whatever other rules the navy's scenario involved.

https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Peasant_Railgun

The idea of "spamming the enemy with speed boats" as a tactic is over 130 years old at this point. It was called "the young school" of naval thought, or Jeune École in its native French. It failed spectacularly in the real world, because militaries need only invest in a few destroyers armed with rapid fire cannons and the entire plan goes belly up. A hundred speed boats were simply no match for one destroyer armed with machine guns.

How hard would it be to get a couple of Senior MTs and SSBN weapons officers to go to those surface ships? Then they'd at least have personnel experienced in handling nuclear weapons.

It's not just a matter of personnel and the equipment. There's a whole infrastructure, including logistics, legal, security, etc, supporting these weapons that would need to be replicated or expanded for surface vessels.

Of course it requires more than experienced personnel, but the person I was responding to made it sound like the Navy doesn't have people with the experience to run such a program which is what I was arguing against...the Navy has many personnel experienced with nuclear weapon system maintenance, operation, program management, etc. from which they can draw from...

Mods on existing ships has been done before...logistics/legal/security for boats with nuclear weapons are already well established and these converted ships would probably have to be either relocated to where the SSBNs reside or new facilities would be built that mirror the SSBN bases...in any case, I don't see it as being "impossible" to accomplish.

Back in the 1960s the surface Navy did briefly have some nuclear antiaircraft missiles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-2_Terrier

And in the same era they were also cooperating with NATO to put Polaris SLBM tubes on surface ships as the Multilateral Force ( MLF ).

Both the USN cruiser Long Beach and the Italian Andrea Dorias were fitted for-but-not-with Polaris.

Edit: upon research, actually Long Beach had her tube space replaced during construction.

Out of interest, are you from the UK? The reason I ask is that I've seen the phrase "fitted for-but-not-with" quite a lot in discussions of UK military matters.

Yes indeed. We UKians often use it sardonically, for example our new carriers are FFBNW aeroplanes...

I agree. We have bombers for a reason. Have they already forgotten about USS Cole??

Speaking as another former Navy submariner, I respectfully disagree. This could very well happen. I knew of at least one conventional boat that was upgraded in fairly short order. Whether or not it should have been is a separate question.

It isn't that tall of an order and the Navy certainly has talented and capable individuals that can execute a conversion...it has a pretty large talent pool to draw from...just because the "surface fleet" hasn't done it before, it doesn't mean they couldn't ever do it.

The surface fleet most certainly has done it before. U.S. surface ships used to carry nuclear Tomahawks, depth charges, torpedoes and surface to air missiles. Carriers carried nuclear gravity bombs. This all ended in 1991, but many of the same ships are still in service.

The Virginia class has 16 Tomahawk tubes, it shouldn't be a huge effort to retrofit some tubes to be capable of having TLAM/N. But would that meet the safety standards required for nuclear armaments?

Until 1991, the surface navy did carry nuclear weapons, e.g. cruise missiles, nuclear anti-air missiles, nuclear depth charges, and tactical nuclear weapons for aircraft on aircraft carriers. In 1991 these were offloaded, but until 2010 the attack submarines still had the capability of carrying nuclear cruise missiles (the nuclear tomahawk), although the missiles themselves were in storage. [1]

I still remember the 1980s when American navy ships visiting Europe were generally assumed to carry nuclear weapons (and caused protests), it was not so long ago.

[1] https://fas.org/blogs/security/2016/02/nuclear-weapons-at-se...

yes - "...neither confirm nor deny..."

> nuclear depth charges

Wow, that's one I haven't heard before. Sounds radical.

ASROC. It was a missile that IIRC went up to 40km, then plunged into the ocean, detonating at some depth. A countermeasure to nuclear cruise missile boats, which could launch from considerable distances.

It’s an interesting consequence of the fact that nuclear bomb technology got really good well before electronics and computers did. There was a period of a decade or two where the ability to put a bomb close to a target wasn’t really there, but the ability did exist to make a small bomb with a really big bang. The solution is logical even if crazy: use a nuke, and then it’s ok if you can barely get the weapon within a quarter mile of your target. Thus we saw nuclear depth charges, nuclear torpedoes, nuclear anti-aircraft missiles, nuclear anti-missile missiles, and even nuclear bazookas.

The Royal Navy also frequently carried nuclear weapons until 1993, and this caused a bit of an issue with the Falklands War, as the UK was a signatory to the Treaty of Tlatelolco (the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean): the MoD long insisted that all nuclear weapons had been off-loaded before they set sail for the South Atlantic, but in 2003 admitted this was untrue[1], though still claimed they never reached territorial waters of any signatory country.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/dec/06/military.fr...

it was never a secret that many of the surface navy's combatants were nuclear-capable for the entire duration of the cold war - stuff like ASROC/W44, but also TLAM-N. as a DD SWO in the early 90s, i went through some of the same surety inspections as you guys.

(that said, i think that platform proliferation is a terrible idea, and since deploying such platforms anywhere but blue water makes little sense, you'd effectively be reducing the already marginal deployable strength of the current surface force. the SWOs have too much to cover already.)

Are these the same destroyers that drove into merchant ships twice last summer?

The world would be much better off if the only nuclear weapons were ICBMs based in the heart of the country that would be launching them. There would be no ambiguity on who has attacked when everyone can see where the missile came from.

Does the US really need a nuclear cruise missile now that they are not needed to destroy Soviet tank battalions invading Europe? Nuclear powers ought to try really hard not to be shooting at each other and have clear Schelling points not to cross so that nuclear exchange does not happen by a series of small scale escalations. More people who can launch nuclear weapons is a bad idea.

US provides nuclear umbrella to several allies. To maintain credible nuclear deterrence escalation ladders are needed. It's not credible to assume that US would be willing to lose millions of citizens in major US metropolitan areas to revenge Warsaw or Tokyo in nuclear tit-for-tat.

NATO has nuclear sharing arrangement to maintain steps in the nuclear escalation ladder (B61 bombs dropped by aircraft operated by host country). Nuclear Tomahawks were used in 80's to provide similar nuclear umbrella to Japan. US was never willing to launch ICBM's from US soil to defend Japan. Any response would have been from Tomahawks launched from US subs, aircraft os surface vessels close to Japan. When US retired Nuclear Tomahawks there were long discussions with Japanese on how to maintain the deterrence.

There is no ideological competition anymore. As a result the probability of regional nuclear conflict has increased not decreased. Shelling points would become unclear if US would only have ICBM's.

I would agree with you on the current situation. It would be nice if the US did not have to nuke anyone if Japan or Germany were invaded. WWII ended a long time ago and almost everyone who fought in that war is dead. Maybe the occupation should end also.

I guess my post was part of a bigger idea about reducing the need for US overseas occupation of the Axis powers and its huge military industrial complex. Most countries could have a small number of nuclear ICBMs, well defended but transparently held. A little shooting among neighbors would still happen like with China, India, and Pakistan today, but such a setup might reduce the probability of a large nuclear exchange causing a nuclear winter while still preventing the horrible conventional world wars that seem to happen when nuclear weapons don't exist. It would be nice if nuclear weapons could move to a tit-for-tat posture instead of MAD. I think the tail risk for a MAD strategy is highly underestimated by almost everyone.

In a shooting war, you wouldn’t want a large conventional rocket attack or zodiac-delivered explosion, to disable the controls for scuttling the ship, and disrupt the chain of command for orders to scuttle due enemy action killing key crew members. The fog of war could lead to enough confusion and damage, such that a seaworthy ship is left afloat with no leadership, in dangerous waters.

Military ships can be difficult to sink, and willfully sinking them might not always be an option. So if the ship is captured, and held long enough to put warheads in the hands of a dangerous people, the weapons could disappear and appear in the hands of someone looking to extract a ransom to return them unused.

With submarines, this is not the case, even if the bottom of the ocean isn’t always unreachable. At least the bottom of the ocean sufficiently complicates salvage, past a certain depth.

No one wants another arms race.

The defense industry, weapons manufacturers, and, by extension, the congressmen and congresswomen they own certainly do...

There is a tremendous profit motive in war for some people.

https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

When corporations dictate USG policy, this fact is more important than ever to keep in mind.

Chutiyapanti ki bhi hadd hoti hai

I thought we had agreed that tactical nuclear weapons are an evolutionary dead end? Are nuclear options on the table again?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com