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Comment by maxander | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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