The stability implications of the US nukes' burst-height compensating super-fuze | Hacker News Reader

The stability implications of the US nukes' burst-height compensating super-fuze

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This general problem discussed in this article, a technological change affecting the perceived nuclear arsenal balance, is a reminder of the existential peril of nuclear weapons that we have seemingly forgotten since the fall of the Soviet Union. In some ways this peril has never been greater than it is today with unpredictable leaders of nuclear powers and ever-decreasing barriers to entry for nuclear weapons (e.g. North Korea).

As Einstein said in 1955, when the existential threat was both new and real, “You may reasonably expect a man to walk a tightrope safely for ten minutes; it would be unreasonable to do so without accident for two hundred years.”

We are complacent at our species’ peril. How many intelligent civilizations in the universe have ended shortly after the dawning of their nuclear age? That’s one possible explanation for the Fermi Paradox.

Thus far, humans have been unable to resist use of a technology to gain power and the abstention from use of nuclear power seems only as strong as the current world power structure, which will inevitably fail. There are no easy solutions to this problem but it’s one we must solve to survive. Perhaps we even need to change ourselves biologically, as a species. To engineer ourselves off the paleolithic savannah into one fit to survive in the modern world of nuclear powers and interconnection.

Nuclear weapons are not currently a threat to the existence of the human species. Modern civilization might be at risk, but there are a lot of people spread across vast stretches of land and not enough nukes to kill them all.

Granted they make it vastly easier to kill everyone in a city or even a small country, but people have done similar things for the last 10,000+ years.

A nuclear winter might be arguably better for the long term survival of the human species than an uncontrolled thermal runaway from global warming. Previous ELEs either ejected seeds-of-life into LEO or were Ice Ages, not hot ages. The oncoming arctic methane positive-feedback loop looks "interesting".

I find it very unlikely that a total collapse of modern civilization in addition to poor, irradiated harvests due to nuclear winter is easier to survive than poor harvests and extreme weather while having access to modern technology.

Survival is that of the Earth, not people. Nuclear winter could stop uncontrolled thermal runaway, which would have a worse outcome than nuclear war.

The truth is that we don’t know what the long term impacts of a total exchange would be. Theories range from extreme nuclear winter events, to just the fall of civilization. I sure won’t pretend to know where on that scale the reality is, and hope never to find out.

Here is some food for thought though, about the potential for our civilization to fall; it will not rise again. We’ve accessed far too much petrochemical wealth and burned it, and the same is true of coal, and metal resources. We get around that by using our existing industry and technology to go deeper, refine more, and in general access resources which require advanced technology to exploit.

There is nothing left which can be accessed by primatives, and so no way to claw back from such a reduced state. It will be many millions of years before those resources are reconstituted, far more years than the history of our species so far by orders of magnitude. This is our chance, and if we burn it away in nuclear fire, we are done. It probably won’t happen overnight, but the fall of our civilization is the fall of humanity. Let’s try to avoid that.

The same goes for any cause of systematic civilization-wide collapse, we would be done. The reason we clawed back in the past is that we has only scratched the surface before, but we’ve fully plundered global resources now. It’s onward and upward, or lights out.

Coal is still easy to access in many areas even with just hand tools and can be converted to liquid fuel or used directly for ships / trains. Hydropower and wind power are both easy to access and can scale up to cover modern needs even without coal.

Metal resources are a complex issue. They are arguably much easier to access now as people can just mine old city's.

Coal in the quantities needed to rebuild a shattered civilization are not easily accessed unless you’re thinking of existing mines (which without maintenance would be inaccessible before we were done desperately trying to stay alive as a species). Hydropower and wind power both require advanced industry to work at any useful scale beyond the individual, and there would be no industry. Mind you, I’m ignoring the loss of knowledge, and just how people would remember to do these things, and I’m assuming a “best case” nuclear apocalypse.

I’d prefer that our fate as a species not rely on begging the question of industry and technology.

There is still crazy amounts of coal around WV very near the surface for example. Easily enough to bootstrap an industrial revolution multiple times. It's not a question of mining you can pick coal up from open top mines on the surface with your hands. You even see coal seams where they simply cut down to build roads a little.

We don't use it because the high sulfur content requires more expensive scrubbers to meet modern air quality standards. And due to the drop in solar / wind energy plus concerns about climate change it's likely to be available long term.

PS: US coal supply is estimated around 350 years at current production levels. Though that's also a low estimate based on proven reserves. Further, if you consider the Oxigen in the atmosphere needed to be separated from Carbon in the first place you should realize there is quite a bit of fossil fuels sitting around.

>Here is some food for thought though, about the potential for our civilization to fall; it will not rise again. We’ve accessed far too much petrochemical wealth and burned it, and the same is true of coal, and metal resources...exploit

This is nonsense, for a number of reasons.

First, you ignore that smaller, shallow deposits of petroleum still exist all over the world, in more than enough quantity to support a developing civilization if it were to be reduced to, say, less than 1/10th of its current size.

Second, existing stores of substances necessary to civilization will not simply evaporate. Metals, plastics, and other raw materials will be recoverable and recyclable.

Third, while there may be a couple hundred years or so of dark ages, I think it is extremely unlikely for any substantial amount of our current scientific progress to be eradicated. Unless we cover every mile of civilized earth with bombardment, I imagine it is guaranteed that there will be survivors with minimal technical knowledge required to operate computers and harvest various data that will inevitably be left on servers in random locations. All it takes is a handful of hackers to spread knowledge of operation and recovery. Not to mention books and magazines will likely still exist.

I think you underestimate the resilience that modern technology can offer over decades in terms of recovery after a global catastrophe. A laptop, a generator, and a copy of wikipedia will get you far in preserving enough scientific and technical knowledge. Civilization at this point is hard to permanently wipe out.

>survivors with minimal technical knowledge

You mean, like knowing how to go to youtube and search for a video? Those primitive technology videos on youtube will be a fantastic resource come the end of civilization.

Okay, that was sarcasm, but the percentage of the population that is both knowledgeable and healthy/strong enough to survive a massive global fall of civilization is so small that it might not be enough to make a difference. I'm afraid we'd quickly revert back to survival of the fittest where being intelligent would no longer be valued over pure strength.

I fear you overstate the resilience of modern technology.

In the case of, even brief, total civilizational collapse, I doubt you'd be able to access any server whatsoever. The Internet is not stable, it's actively maintained and in the state of constant flux. As for accessing individual computers and small computer networks - just how many of the survivors will have enough knowledge to arrange for electricity at appropriate frequency, ensure it doesn't burn out the fragile machines, and then be able to interface with a (likely password-locked, disk-encrypted) system to extract some useful data?

And even if they do that, just for how long will it do them any good? Modern electronics are built with planned and unplanned obsolescence. Their lifetimes under active use are measured in years, and even inactive they'll age. With no industry (requiring a complex, global supply chain of millions of people) to build fresh replacement drives, there will eventually be nowhere to move the data to.

Our civilization is like a living system, in the sense that it constantly works to repair itself everywhere. Disturb that, and it will rot and die.

GP claimed civilization would be unable to rise again, implying thousands of years of knowledge would disappear.

Wikipedia is available for download and requires less than 15GB of space[1]. This is an unprecedented density of self documenting data, containing thousands of years of advancements in science, mathematics, philosophy, arts.

Consider how many people live in or visit dwellings that are tens or hundreds of miles from large population centers, and how many of these dwellings have emergency gasoline generators and working computers.

Now, presuming that most of the destruction happens in major cities, and the rest of the earth generally remains livable, there will still remain millions of people, and if just a small sampling of competent technically minded people survive, there will be billions of abandoned, unused, solid state devices, and millions of generators to power them, ripe for picking. What are the odds that not a single competent survivor will have backed up a copy of wikipedia to be able share with other survivors in the decades after catastrophe?

When a single human can hold in his hand all of the science and mathematics necessary to derive the technologies upon which modern civilization is based, rebuilding is easily within the realm of possibility. Not to mention, artifacts of modern technology will remain as examples for engineering and even use with sufficient technical knowledge.

Further, I encourage all of you to download and keep a copy of wikipedia for this very, however farfetched, purpose.

[1]https://www.google.com/amp/s/lifehacker.com/how-to-download-...

Fair enough. Access to some amounts of computing may be initially available, but I still believe it would not last more than a few years.

It all boils down to supply chains and the economy, basically. Electronics capable of working with today's data storage media is incredibly complex, and manufacturing replacements will require large and insanely expensive fabs. Those fabs themselves are full of precise tools and exotic materials, every one of which requiring other specialized fabs, using tools requiring other fabs... The whole pipeline from dirt to CPU involves many thousands of people directly, and itself can only exist in an advanced civilization like ours - where lots of other people do everything from agriculture to catering to logistics to law and law enforcement. To build a CPU, you first need to build a civilization like ours. And to build a civilization like ours, you need cheap energy sources - it literally wouldn't be possible without them.

> GP claimed civilization would be unable to rise again, implying thousands of years of knowledge would disappear.

Our best bet to retain all that knowledge after total civilizational collapse is to form orders - not unlike medieval monks - whose sole purpose would be to make exact paper copies of that knowledge. Otherwise, after computers eventually die, a lot of that knowledge would disappear (because it wouldn't be used), and what would stay would get increasingly distorted over time.

The most problematic would be the high density integrated chips and storage media. Lower densities on scale of say 80s tech are doable in a basement with the right know how and most basic electronics can be fixed or replaced easily enough, (The problem is stated as how to make a good enough plasma doping chamber to make transistors.) If at a cost to size and efficiency. (Even advanced voltage regulators...)

That said, a lot of that hardware, especially rugged, would easily last for a few decades.

We'd have to use cassettes for data storage once again.

I feel like this conversation is taking place in a strange parallel universe in which people don’t appreciate what 15,000+ nuclear warheads being exchanged would do. The fires started from them alone would be an extinction event, and the kinds of incredibly remote areas in which you might find long-term survivors would not be laden with caches of electronics and populations capable of using them.

Getting enough food and water that wasn’t dreadfully contaminated alone would be the preoccupation of generations. By the time anyone had ideas about rising from barbarism, what we think of as civilization now would be rusted, eroded, and overgrown.

All of that assumes the most optimistic of assumptions regarding global wildfires, teratogenic effects, and nuclear winter. We wouldn’t be using magnetic tapes, we’d be using rocks and sticks and animal hides.

The earth's surface is ~200 million square miles. 1 bomb per 13,000 square miles seems bad, but we had survivors very close to ground zero with even H-Bombs and these nukes would not be eventually spread over the surface. Many people would be 5,000+ miles from the closest detention.

Remember we actually detonated a large number of nukes on the surface with minimal impact on global radiation exposure.

While relatively small by modern standards Yoshitaka Kawamot was less than 1km from the hiroshima blast and survived. Yes, these nukes may be 100+x as powerful but destruction is far from 1:1 with yield sizes.

People are not evenly distributed on the surface of the earth, most of which is ocean. Nukes do. It target randomly, they target population centers and strategically valuable regions. Most people live where nukes are aimed, which is why they are aimed there.

15,000 warheads concentrated where humans live, on the fraction of the 27% of Earth that isn’t water. Be reasonable.

Modern technology is build on a mind boggling dependency chain. Just think about how many steps and technologies are necessary to turn sand and ore into a computer. Or even an electric generator. Simple things like reliable, low resistance ball bearings require precision tools to manufacture.

> Nuclear weapons are not currently a threat to the existence of the human species. Modern civilization might be at risk.

Frankly, on almost all metrics meaningful to us today, those are nearly equivalent. If a nuclear exchange causes modern technological society to collapse, then sure - the humanity will likely rebound. After couple thousand to couple million years, which is what it'll take for Earth to regenerate enough of the easily accessible, high-density energy sources to allow for the new industrial revolution.

If we want life for people to keep getting better, it's crucial to ensure our deeply interconnected, global technological civilization doesn't collapse. And that civilization is much, much more fragile than survival of our species in general.

I'm not convinced modern civilization could recover from a total collapse.

I suppose that's what makes it "total".

Command and Control by Eric Schlosser covers many close call nuclear incidents that the US military has had since WWII. The incident which has been seared into my memory is one where an aircraft carrying a nuclear bomb flying over the east coast of the US had a critical engine failure which resulted in the crew bailing out. After the crew bailed out, an object in the cockpit inadvertently armed and dropped the bomb as the aircraft disintegrated. The only thing that prevented the eastern seaboard of the US (including Washington DC and New York City) from being irradiated with fallout was a failsafe switch which prevented a circuit from being completed in the bomb.

It is a wonder that we (still) haven't blown ourselves up yet.

The more horrifying truth from that book is that time and again, for decades, the military actively blocked the implementation of safety measures. They were concerned about the small increase in chance that a bomb would fail to detonate when intended.

I completely agree that it is amazing we have not blown ourselves up yet. Unfortunately, the risk of a nuclear exchange is only rising...

stress of climate change + 7 billion people + human nature == war (very possibly nuclear)

Nuclear weapons have proliferated from just the US having access, then to only a few super powers, to now 8 or 9 countries. That list will only go up over time, not down. The weaponization of nuclear technology is the first time our species created something that is outright able to kill us all (or most of us).

Couple that with the disturbingly long list of near nuclear accidents publicly made available (who knows what the actual number is): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls

In the short period of time we have had access to nuclear weapons, we have come very close to nuclear war between superpowers:

* Cuban Missile Crisis - Vasili Arkhipov prevents launching of nuclear torpedo while his Soviet submarine flotilla is being bombarded by depth charges (happened to be signaling depth charges). Turns out the US warships above them just wanted the submarines to surface so they could communicate the end of hostilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov

* Computer Malfunction - Stanislav Petrov holds off alerting officials of multiple incoming nuclear ICBMs because he "suspected" they were a glitch, preventing a likely nuclear counter-attack. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

* Science experiment looks like nuclear attack - Boris Yeltsin correctly decides to wait launching a counter-attack based on an incoming rocket. All the while sitting in front of an activated nuclear briefcase and being pressured by aids to launch within the 12 minute response window. The rocket was meant for atmospheric testing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident

* Many, many more... (your example just being one)

Now throw in the ramifications of climate change like political instability, infrastructure strain, resource scarcity, and refugee migrations into the mix.

Things do not look good for the human race.

One bomb going off by accident seems way less scary than the prospect of nuclear war.

The problem is that one bomb going of could rapidly lead to 100's - who is to say it's an accident and not a strike? Wouldn't the enemy pretend it was an accident? Why are they moving forces now? (because they realise that a bomb just went off...)

It depends on what the circumstances are. If communications are disrupted, nuclear forces on alert could mistake it for an attack and launch in retaliation. Daniel Ellsburg's new book details how launch authority, as a practical matter, was delegated to commanders in the field. If they thought that a war had started and they had no communications with their superiors, they would have had authority to launch on their own.

> a reminder of the existential peril of nuclear weapons

Yeah, this was a real walk down memory lane. I haven't read an article discussing the strategy of all-out nuclear war since the fall of the Soviet Union. The idea of the US launching a preemptive strike against the USSR's... er, I mean Russia's siloed ballistic missiles and command structure is absurd and terrifying. Trading nukes with North Korea would be bad enough, but at least they don't have hundreds of sub-launched missiles carrying MIRVs. Maybe it's time to watch "Dr. Strangelove" again.

> boosting the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three

The measure by which the authors conclude a tripling in killing power seems to be intentionally misleading:

> This 86 percent probability is very close to what could be achieved using three warheads with conventional fuzes to attack the same target. To put it differently: In the case of the 100-kt Trident II warhead, the super fuze triples the killing power of the nuclear force it has been applied to.

While obtaining the same probability of destroying any given target requires one third as many warheads, the more relevant statistic seems to me to be expected number of warheads required per target, which is decreased by less than half; Total targets destroyed per missile launched, which seems a more accurate descriptor of "killing power", is increased by a factor of about 1.7 - still notable, but very much not the tripling claimed.

I am not a nuclear policy wonk, so I apologize if this question is answered elsewhere.

Much of the argument presented in this paper from last year is based on how destabilizing it is because Russia does not have an orbital launch detection capability. Since it would double the time they had to respond and requires no action banned or restricted by treaty, why would they not put satellites in orbit that could detect the IR signature of a missile launch? Why not strap it on to their constellation of GLONASS satellites? This seems like a much easier technology to develop and deploy and test (the US is launching rockets every month, it should see every one of those launches reliably). What am I missing here?

First off, it may not be quite that simple. They may need detector tech that they lack. Secondly, development of these dead-hand weapons systems may be easier for them or more appealing for whatever reasons (perhaps cultural).

But yes, you'd think it'd be better to double decision times than to deploy dead-hands.

Also, the U.S. could easily share early warning satellite technology with Russia. This might be a lot easier if relations weren't already so frosty.

I believe Obama's sanctions against Russia were unwise, and ratcheted up tensions unnecessarily. Moreover, Congress' subsequent affirmation of those sanctions and removal of the President's ability to remove them further ratcheted up tensions. And all of this over a very partisan domestic feud about supposed Russian interference in the 2016 election, in a country that regularly interferes in other countries' elections. Is this really worth it for Democrats? Is it really worth it for all those very many Republicans that voted for that silly bill (probably so they could head off Democrat claims of being in cahoots with Russia)?? Almost certainly not. But such is the degree of bitter, uncivil partisanship in the United States today. President Trump doesn't even have the ability to negotiate a thaw in relations given the current statutory situation -- a treaty could be used, sure, but there's no reason to think that the Senate would welcome it anymore than it was willing to let the President be able to reduce sanctions by himself (as would have been the usual case).

My guess is it will take Republicans having a very good 2018, or failing that, a very good 2020, before tensions can decrease. Alternatively, Democrats would have to sweep in 2020 and somehow allow themselves to un-blame Russia for 2016, which just doesn't seem likely, not given their rhetoric so far.

> the U.S. could easily share early warning satellite technology with Russia

I strongly suspect that the US already has "shared" such technology with Russia, in the sense that they have obtained it from spies. There are other possible reasons why Russia might not choose to use such technology even if it has it (see my other post upthread).

> And all of this over a very partisan domestic feud about supposed Russian interference in the 2016 election

The majority party in the Congress that adopted the sanctions is the same as the one of the President who allegedly benefitted from the interference. And national security officials in that same Presidential administration have described the Russian interference as something that happened in 2016 and can be expected to continue.

Blaming the sanctions on a domestic “partisan feud” is incorrect.

My impression is that Republicans voted for that bill because they were afraid that voting no would be used against them as proof that they were in cahoots with the Russians. I think that's at least a tenable interpretation.

> why would they not put satellites in orbit that could detect the IR signature of a missile launch?

The article speculates that they do not have all of the capabilities needed (putting satellites in orbit is just one of them, you also need the detection hardware on the satellites, the ground stations to process and interpret the data, and people trained to use all this stuff properly).

An alternative speculation would be that Russia actually prefers not to have a better detection capability, because then they would be responsible for using it and would be less able to complain about the US. As it is, they can claim publicly that it is the US that is destabilizing things, while covertly they continue all sorts of much more destabilizing activities.

The alternative speculation is silly. Whatever you might think about Russia, it's a rolled gold certainty that they don't want to be involved in an accidental nuclear exchange.

> Whatever you might think about Russia, it's a rolled gold certainty that they don't want to be involved in an accidental nuclear exchange.

I'm sure the average Russian citizen doesn't. I'm not so sure about Putin.

It would be a national catastrophe for every nation involved, and no-one at the top levels is in any doubt about that.

why, what did he say about it?

It's combination of priorities, capabilities and money. If Russia can maintain credible second strike capability that survives the first strike, detecting attack is not necessary. Russia chose to develop new second strike weapons that survive surprise first strike with the limited resources it has.

Nuclear long range torpedo and Nuclear powered cruise missile that Russia is developing is just that kid of weapon. They are relatively easy to hide and incredibly difficult to intercept (U.S. had similar development in 60's. Google: Project Pluto and SLAM)

This is covered in the article:

Detailed analyses, initially stimulated by questions about why the alert went on for so long, showed that a specialized space-based Russian early warning system called Prognoz was then under development. Analysis of the Prognoz satellite constellation and of available Russian infrared sensor technologies indicated that even if the satellite system had been working, it would not have been able to provide surveillance of the North Atlantic. Today, Russia has stopped launching satellites into this constellation and has instead focused enormous resources exclusively into building a highly robust and redundant network of ground-based radars. It is now very clear that Russia’s extreme de-emphasis on satellite early warning systems and its extreme focus on building numerous, technologically varied ground-based radar warning systems is due to the lack of critical technologies needed to implement a space-based ballistic missile warning system.

They don't have it because it's a very hard problem. You need IR sensors providing near global coverage and you need the sensors and the data processing pipeline to be good enough to provide low latency on detections (ideally seconds) with high confidence through filtering out false positives. That's an incredibly challenging technical problem. The US solves this problem with a fleet of satellites that each cost $1.9 billion a pop with R&D probably several times that and ground based infrastructure that is probably similarly expensive. Russia's defense budget in total is only about $50 billion a year, they just don't have the money to afford such a program.

Noam Chomsky has been talking about this for a while. He gave a talk at Harvard* that discussed the threat of terminal war and mentioned this in his talk. Some might claim that 3x stronger hard-kill power is a stronger deterrent and can allow us to retire the land based ICBMs. It can also ratchet up tensions, and I'm going to lol all the way to the bank if the military gives up a huge source of funding. Inter-branch competition has been that way since the inception of the nuclear program. Capabilities have been replicated wastefully at various points to keep people happy.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4675156/noam-chomsky-requiem-...

EDIT: It was actually at the unitarian church outside of Harvard.

We've been adding such improvements for as long as missiles have existed. Better nosecones, rearrange the interior furniture, new guidance software, etc. When the Cold War was still on, we made two-three foot shots (0) from Vandyland (1) per year. Each one was mined for research and used for tweaking. The two big changes were solid fuel boosters and multiple warheads. Everything else has been minor in comparison.

0 https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/amp9936/behind-the...

1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandenberg_Air_Force_Base

This was why I was assuming the Russians brought back the nuclear torpedo. Not needing the B part of a ICBM greatly decreases fuel and thus size requirement.

Actually, a drone of the size of Status-6 will need a huge amount of fuel. It's easier to travel through the air than through water. Unless the Russians plan on deploying it from ships right off shore, it'll need very long range.

Status-6 is supposedly nuclear powered, so its range is effectively unlimited.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status-6_Oceanic_Multipurpose_...

Humanity as a whole is probably better off.

A core strategy of US nuclear forces for the past sixty years has been to increase precision and to reduce warhead size.

The biggest US warhead ever was in service in 1954 - a 15,000 kiloton bomb. Our biggest current bomb, designed in the 70's, is 1,200 kilotons, less than a tenth of what we've had before. Our latest ICBM warhead is only 300 - 475 kilotons.

Also with the increased precision, the US has been reducing the number of warheads - we now have one third? the number of warheads we had in the 1960's. In fact, Russia has more declared nuclear weapons than the US.

The increase accuracy is likely to save a lot of lives in the case of war.

"The increase accuracy is likely to save a lot of lives in the case of war."

Unlikely. It's likely to kill about as many with better efficiency.

Not really. The aim of these improvements, according to the article, is to more efficiently take out hardened military installations. The soldiers serving at those bases will die either way, but using fewer bombs means less collateral damage, and thus fewer civilian loses.

You're missing the forest for the trees. The accuracy to kilotonnage ratio of the warheads, as well as the absolute warhead count, is irrelevant. The US nuclear arsenal as a whole is 2-3x more effective, and thus 2-3x deadlier, because of the super-fuze.

Also, even if the increased accuracy results in less civilian casualties during the first strike (debatable, as strategic population centers will still be targeted...with greater accuracy), the super-fuze is still likely increasing the overall probability of nuclear war. Thus I would hardly say it makes humanity as a whole better off.

In the eighties, the US had missles with a CEP of 300 feet. The increased accuracy from the fuzes is irrelevant in terms of attacking cities. It only matters for attacking nuclear hardened silos.

The US arsenal has been getting less deadly against civilians and the earth, while becoming more effective against other nuclear forces. Seems like a good trade.

> The increase accuracy is likely to save a lot of lives in the case of war.

In the case a a limited tactical war, that is a good possibility.

For a global war, perhaps in the short term there may well be fewer casualties, but then potentially a lot more 'survivors' to suffer over the next weeks/months/years.

Would you want to try and scrabble for survival following a large scale nuclear attack, or be vaporised at the start. I certainly know my preference.

One of the interesting things is that both the US and Russia gave up a significant number of warheads per missile through MIRV number reduction treaties. Submarine and lane based missiles on both sides that might have previously held 3 or 4 MIRVs now have a single re entry vehicle. But things like the status-6 are not covered by these treaties.

How many centurys do you expect to have civilization before someone that doesn't value life as much as you do does the unthinkable?

This is compensated for by Russia's implementation of fractional orbital bombardment systems that bypass radar detection.

Nobody is actually worried about that supposed compensation. The biggest joke going, is the notion that any of these technology improvements matter once you start lobbing hundreds of nuclear weapons at each other.

Bypass radar detection? Funny stuff.

The US has never thought it could stop dozens, much less hundreds, of Russia missiles. Fractional orbital bombardment system? A waste of money that Russia doesn't have, as one of the poorest major nations on earth (with a GDP per capita below Grenada).

Do you know why the US has spent so relatively little pushing nuclear weapons tech forward the last 40 years? Because it doesn't matter: just about everyone dies regardless. Russia has no missile shield, and the US has no missile shield that can stop a large volley of traditional missiles.

Very informative article. Sheds more light into the emerging nuclear weapons race.

> In particular, Russia is now in the process of testing a 40-ton nuclear-powered underwater unmanned vehicle (UUV) that could robotically deliver, across thousands of kilometers, a 100-megaton nuclear warhead against the coastal cities and ports of the United States.

Interesting. What kind of damage would that do. Maybe a few of those blowing up at the same time would cause a tsunami wave? It sounds like something out of Dr. Strangelove. Water is also good at dampening explosions, I'd think.

Aha, there is XKCD for this already: https://what-if.xkcd.com/15 . It turns out the wave created by one won't be like a tsunami wave as it will break too quickly. So maybe they'd need to stagger a few devices in a row.

Linked from there is a very thorough paper "Evaluation of Various Theoretical Models For Underwater Explosion" http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/737271.pdf

I did some research on Operation Crossroads a while back. I'm not sure what the blast effect damage would be, but it would cause radioactive water to wash over the town. Several warships in the exercise were scrapped because they could not be cleaned as certain isotopes stuck to the metal.

EDIT: Of course, how much radiation exposure you're willing to tolerate is a risk assessment call, but it seems pretty unfair to the civilian population to take any significant increased radiological risk.

EDIT2: 100MT is the design yield of the Tsar bomba, the actual detonated yield was 50MT b/c the plane dropping it would not have been able to escape at the design yield. This is a very very big bomb if that capability were actually used. I assume smaller bombs would also be able to be used as well.

100M ton Tsar Bomba, surface explosion just outside the Golden Gate bridge.

https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=100000&lat=37.813996...

I wonder at what depth a nuclear sub would detonate. It does seem conceivable that it might surface. The fallout model relies on the fireball touching land, so the part that is over water would have less impact. However, with a bomb that size, the water might consist of only a fraction of the total area.

I think that instead of trying to create a tsunami, it might be slightly more effective to drive one straight into a port/city, and detonate at the surface.

New York: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?t=a1c1cd0eeccb2488024ace...

San Francisco: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=100000&lat=37.747095...

Ah makes sense. So it is more about delivering it closer to the shore so it can't be as easily detected than creating tsunami waves as the main mechanism of destruction.

Why wouldn't you just use Fedex, DHL or an intermodal shipper?

You joke but they have an intermodal shipping container missile. You can buy it if you have some extra cash laying around:

http://roe.ru/eng/catalog/naval-systems/shipborne-weapons/kl...

Think more in terms of killing a whole carrier battle group in one shot, or closing a major port (for a long time) due to blast damage and radiation. Larger bombs are diriter bombs, and detonating in water is pretty much the dirtiest use of a dirty bomb.

In short, this is a strategic terror weapon, an area denial weapon, and a radiological weapon.

Yes, quite. There's no tactical or even strategic value to this other than as a terror-based deterrent. Of course, all nuclear deterrence is terror-based to some degree, but weapons that can only really be meant to attack populations are more terrible than ones meant to attack military targets.

We saw this back during the height of the Cold War, where first very high-yield weapons were deployed due to lack of sufficient accuracy, then later these were replaced with lower-yield weapons as accuracy increased. These UUVs are a desperate move to make up for lower capability in other parts of the Russian deterrence strategy. They're scary indeed.

There's no tactical or even strategic value to this other than as a terror-based deterrent.

Of course. It's explicitly a second-strike weapon: if it is ever actually used, it has already failed in its mission.

What makes water especially dirty for this purpose? It seems like more of the bad particles would be washed back out to sea than if they'd been dispersed as fallout dust.

It might seem counterintuitive for the reason you described, but the problem with water and ground bursts, is that the entirety of the radioactive byproducts interact with large amounts of dense material. I’m a true airbursrs, the fireball doesn’t touch the ground, so the air itself is contaminated, along with material from the ground which is drawn up into the fireball through convention and blast effects. That’s still dirty, and in the case of the Tsar Bomba (50MT) catastrophically dirty. The total volume of affected material though is relatively low.

If you detonate underwater, all of fission byproducts, and unburned fuel comes into direct and prolonged contact with a large volume of dense material. In a shallow blast, gigstons of thst material are ejected into the atmosphere, while the rest remains underwater. It will be diluted, it a 100MT device is still going to produce horrendous and long-lasting effects.

That material will poison the underwater environment as it settles in the immediate area, and for km away as it dissipates. Worse, it will enter the food chain and be concentrated through progressive predation.

This covers the explosive (not radiological) effects of non-airbursts for some context! http://www.abomb1.org/nukeffct/enw77b2.html

Part of the problem is that 100-megaton bombs are probably built with Uranium-238 tampers and are extremely dirty. To use even one of those would cause enormous problems for all parties including the one deploying it. It's not something you want to do.

I suspect these UUVs have no such tamper and a yield more in the 30-megaton range for this reason. These would still be more than enough to kill many millions each.

My guess too is that these wouldn't be detonated underwater -- not much rise above water would be needed to wreck havoc.

My biggest concern is that these would likely be dead-hand weapons, with many possible failure modes leading to attack.

We should be willing to share space-based early warning data and technology with the Russians to head off this crisis. Alternatively go back to the old fuzes, but sharing early warning satellite tech is easier.

> We should be willing to share space-based early warning data and technology with the Russians to head off this crisis.

That's interesting to think about. It makes logical sense at first, but I doubt it is realistic.

Thinking about it some more, it seems having a better detection capability means having a higher chance of shooting the missiles down. That can then be used by the aggressor to dampen a retaliatory attack. (Say we give it to Russia. They attack first. Then when we retaliate, they use our advanced system to know the trajectories of the incoming missiles and use that to shoot them down. Our retaliatory attack fails and we lose).

TLDR: smarter targeting allows the same explosive power to be more effective.

This general principle has been known for a very long time. These are the same people who put out the totally useless "Doomsday clock" and like the "Doomsday clock" are just trying to stir up fear.

Fear can be a very useful thing to avoid something as catastrophic as nuclear war.

Fear causes people to not make rational decisions. It's not a solution.

Decision makers may not be fearful, but it may help if their electors are afraid and pressure them to solve the issue.

If the elected need to use deception to implement their goals...

I rightly hope that everyone is scared shitless about the possibility of any war - let alone nuclear war.

But not so scared that a larger war results from unwillingness to fight a smaller war. We saw that movie in the 30s.

We've also seen how it has turned out in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Libya. Hundreds of thousands of people dead, for nothing. But as long as it's other people dying, we're totally fine with that.

Strawman. None of those involved genocidal maniacs (unless you include Cambodia, where the U.S. did not intervene) nor plain old tin pot dictators bent on world domination.

The other choice is to be equally effective, but with less explosive power. It's an effort to be environmentally friendly.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists exists primarily to encourage awareness.

The Doomsday Clock is perhaps imperfect, but it keeps the conversation going, something essential.

I want to live in a world where instantaneous human-caused planetary disasters cannot happen.

> I want to live in a world where instantaneous human-caused planetary disasters cannot happen.

That may very well stay in the past (until the first such disaster) - the whole point of technology is to have ever finer control over ever more powerful things. Two big subsets of that are ever-increasing energy demands (energy = destructive power), and self-replication (aka. biotechnology).

I can't, for the life of me, understand why the major nuclear powers still cannot commit to full denuclearization. It's really one meeting away between Russia and US, they agree to take all nuclear weapons out of service by 2050 then strong arm every country in the world to participate.

What plausible purpose do these weapons serve (except deterrence itself), fully knowing that using them will almost guarantee massive retaliation?

At this point, I imagine it's a "you first" issue. Trust is pretty darn scarce these days, how can you be sure the other side won't just annihilate you the moment they know you can't retaliate? That or be sure that not even one nuke is active or to take a page from guns, "80%" or nearly-active?

Even if we do manage full denuclearization, it'd be pretty darn hard to keep it that way seeing as how we can't even stop North Korea from joining the club.

Who said anything about trust? It would certainly proceed in a lockstep process, with strict accountability and transparency, where the parties agree on a schedule to gradually dismantle all weapons and production infrastructure and supply detailed information at various checkpoints. You can't build a nuclear arsenal overnight.

NK joined an exclusive club and now Kim is rewarded with a visit from Trump. In this version of the world, possessing nuclear weapons is a source of legitimacy for any country. In a non-nuclear world, actions to obtain them will prompt imediate preemptive conventional attacks. Russia, US and EU could agree to maintain minimal deterrence capability against rouge actors like NK, but insufficient for global war.

Even if you do establish a procedure, how do you guarantee that the reported number of weapons prior to dearmament is accurate (and thus matches the number of dismantled weapons), and that the other side didn't keep a stockpile in an off-the-books location? That brings us back to trust -- that the other side is legitimately engaging with the process and that the totality of weapons is known, rather than merely reducing their numbers (which would be no bad thing, but significantly different to total disarmament, particularly if only one side goes through with it)?

> the other side didn't keep a stockpile in an off-the-books location?

This seems an implausible strategy on the long run, to organize such a conspiracy you would need thousands of people in the know, from political leaders to technicians. The value of this intelligence would be so colossal that it's unfathomable nobody would sell it for profit or release it for conscience reasons. See the Israel story and Mordechai Vanunu.

Then again, if you manage to have a stockpile of nuclear pits (actual warheads require continuous maintenance, Tritium replenishment etc.) that only 15 people know about, in an non-deployable configuration and hide them so deep that the ultra-sensitive nuclear detectors mandated by the treaties can't sense them, is that a major threat? Their existence might simply fade out of institutional memory.

> In a non-nuclear world, actions to obtain them will prompt imediate preemptive conventional attacks

There are plenty of ways to sufficiently deter a preemptive conventional invasion and North Korea is a perfect example of it. Their conventional artillery poses a significant threat to Seoul, which by itself put a huge damper on any talks about conventional warfare to topple the regime or attack their nuclear facilities.

> You can't build a nuclear arsenal overnight.

True but it's extremely hard to verify that the other party isn't hiding a 100-200 warheads in some remote barely documented base and hid the extra production in lost/modified paperwork. Larger countries with larger militaries just make the number of possible hiding spaces that much higher.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

I think deploying a world-killing nuclear arsenal hasn’t been bad for economic and political relationships with critical partners.

I think this has been the case with NATO, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Korea, Taiwan, and Pakistan.

On the balance, this obviously doesn’t make the overall strategy sound in the long-run, but the nuclear enterprise has been myopic from the beginning.

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