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> I have promised myself never to build weapons unless the United States is attacked

The issue with this is that by the time we are under attack it’s already too late to develop weapons. Most of the naval and air assets we used to fight World War II (the modern ur-example of a just conflict) were on the drawing board and planned, if not already in production, prior to Pearl Harbor. The problem is only magnified today where it takes years, not months, to build a ship, for example. Pledging to not work on weapons and other military projects absent a conflict is, in essence, a pledge never to work on weapons or military projects ever.

Agreed. My general position is that, creatively applied, the weapons we have are good enough. This is not in a relative sense, but an absolute one.

I do not wish to spend my limited time on the planet improving the fundamental rate at which we can kill one another. We, as a species, are already excellent at that task.

I am a physicist. If we are involved in a protracted conflict, there will be plenty of opportunities akin to MIT's Rad Lab or the Manhattan Project to which I might contribute. R.V. Jones is a personal hero. Until then, I would rather contribute to preserving life or chasing down nature's secrets (my day job through 9/16, when I cast off on a new odyssey).

Your point is correct and important; I like to think of it as the proverbial "speak softly and carry a big stick".

There's however one key, pivotal change that happened during the wartime - scaling out the manufacturing and logistics. Primarily USA, and largely Great Britain and USSR, scaled out production of weapons, vehicles & materiel, subassemblies, and certain raw materials by factor of 10x or even 100x. Same with the related logistics. This was a huge undertaking[1], required high level of engineering, manufacturing, and managerial expertise. If people like GP only got into weapons & materiel production in the wartime, they'd still contribute greatly to the military effort.

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[1] building and relocating whole factories, rearranging production lines, and adjusting designs & manufacturing techniques for streamlining. Example, a ship was built in under 5 days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Robert_E._Peary

The NIKE missile silo is interesting too. They have some information about the armaments of the US and the USSR. From what I recall, or what at least left an impression, the US had technically better missile systems that were reliable but less nukes overall. In contrast, the USSR had worse targeting and less reliable missiles and so was relying on a very large number of nukes. I remember thinking about the probabilities.

The US actually had many more and much better nuclear weapons and delivery systems, but they thought the soviets were much further along than they really were.

The Soviets were the first to deploy operational ICBMs.

They also had the first Submarine launched ballistic missile.

They had the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons for many years.

They developed the most potent nuclear weapons.

Can you be more specific?

Guidance systems were (and are) presumably worse, if one has to judge by officially released data. Propulsion systems were much more difficult to keep in a ready to launch state, and much more fragile. In general, USSR preferred less sophisticated solutions, instead making sure they could be easily replicated.

Because that had worked for them in WW2, when German tanks (among many other things) were technically superior to their Soviet counter-parts with the results we all know.

Fortunately this will never happen but I have always been curious about how US technicals would fare in a ground-war in Russia. My bet is that they would fail most of the times with no possibility of easy fixes, at least compared to their Soviet (now Russian) equivalents. What’s the US equivalent for the Russian Ural or Kamaz trucks?

Quantity has a quality of its own.

T-34, which was superior to most German tanks like pzkpfw 3/4 when it was introduced, was produced in vast numbers, around 80000. German designed a competitive tank with the Panther, but only about 6000 were made, and they were beset by reliability problems.

Add in the production by the Western allies, such as 50000 Sherman tanks, the surprising thing is that Nazi Germany didn't collapse faster.

Don't know about modern hardware. Certainly Soviet hardware has a reputation for reliability in adverse conditions. OTOH the first Gulf war was a pretty damning indictment of the warfighting ability of Soviet armour.

I have seen a description of the allied fighting in Normandy that concluded that it doesn't matter if your tanks are 6 times better if your enemy has 10 times the number of tanks.

In Northern France much of the tank action IIRC was at very short range, due to lots of hedgerows.

In such an environment where all tanks are able to reliably hit and penetrate all others, numbers become the dominant factor.

In more open country, tank armour and punching power make more of a difference.

> My bet is that they would fail most of the times with no possibility of easy fixes

That's a solid bet. The US has not engaged a similarly sophisticated opponent in generations and with high unit costs of American weapons, any such war would be extraordinarily costly.

(offtopic) Last sentence made me want to play red alert 2. Though, you cannot call apocalypse tanks unsophisticated...

I believe GP was referring to this:

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

While there was lots of bluffing on both sides (Star Wars, cough), the notion of "better" is a terrible misunderstanding of that time, and of nuclear weapons today. Once capacity exists on all sides to end earth several times over, better is an exercise and distinction without meaning, a mad illusion of value maybe to military grammar nazis

More effective?

When you have 100 nukes comming at you, it doesn't matter that much how effective they are. You'll get nuked, no doubt.

It matters, a great deal in a sort of sad way.

I can only speak for Sweden, but a lot of large military and civilian defence bunkers (and hardened, fixed in bedrock artillery) went obsolete went “the other side” got better targeting systems.

Until then, a lot of the installations were immune to anything but a direct hit, which was incredibly unlikely. Airbursts just wouldn’t have cut it to crack open the more serious underground installations.

Hmm, didn't think it that way, you're right.

modern airburst fuzes are indeed accurate enough to destroy hardened underground bunkers: https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni...

Minutiae:

Just to clarify I meant the old “hit somewhere in the city core” airbursts against which our underground shelters would have held up pretty well. To maximise impact a ground hit is seldom the right choice, too much energy is initially absorbed. (Also the fallout is made worse in a ground burst which can be a bad thing for an attacker if they want to follow up with boots on the ground.)

Capability of actual MAD did not exist for most of the Cold War. If Kennedy went bonkers and initiated pre-emptive strike. USA would survive. It would lose some of the major cities and tens of millions of people, but it would live. USSR would cease to exist a long with all of its proxies in east Europe. A lot of the Europe would be gone but again probably damage on level of Black Death not extinction event.

Soviet intel and propaganda was always far above what west could do. It is what kept it looking close for two decades.

Korea for example. US could easily use nukes with impunity. It did not but there would be no consequences in terms of nuclear retaliation as Stalin knew what the equation was. Still he took the bet to attack south.. just a mad lad that he was. When Chinese counter attacked if US used nukes again there would be no retaliation, McArthur got retired over that.

I am really happy we lived through that. It is incredibly lucky that it was US that got the nukes first and not Germany or USSR or other similar regime.

>A lot of the Europe would be gone but again probably damage on level of Black Death not extinction event.

If you think "oh this is not so bad" you should watch Threads.

Second that. Left me in a state of shock for weeks when I saw it. Compared with threads, "the day after" is kids stuff.

https://archive.org/details/threads_201712

In the early 1960s an all out attack by the US would have resulted in at least 600 million dead - including 100 million dead in Western Europe.

Add to that the effects of medium range Soviet weapons in Western Europe (which they had a lot of) then things would have been very bad here.

Source: The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg

What are you on about?

The whole race was about creating nukes to nuke the other nukes out of the orbit when they are attacking, so the total amount of nukes was way beyond what was required to destroy the other side.

Fun fact - the US spent more on developing stealth aircraft than on Star Wars.

The USSR seemed to spend little or nothing on stealth.

From the book 'Stealth' by Peter Westwick.

> I have promised myself never to build weapons unless the United States is attacked

Attacked by whom and for what purpose and for what ends? How would you moderate your response to an attack based on the circumstances? How do you even know the attack was real or that it had the intent that was reported by the media[1]?

The US is a big country, and while its mainland has never suffered any significant attack by a nation-state in de-jure war, the US is "attacked" in some way or another quite regularly - the immediate example is 9/11 of course, but what about economic and social attacks (e.g. Russia social-media manipulation, or the PRC's attempts to replace US influence abroad)?

I assume the US is your home - but from my perspective (as a non-American) that seems a tad chauvinistic: do I detect you implying that the US worth defending but not other democracies? Or 1,001 other points one could make along similar lines.

I appreciate that one's moral philosophy and position on the extent of the right to self-defence (from the person, to the home, to the town, to the nation) is a very complicated and subjective topic, so to be clear: I don't mean to attack your stated position at all (I'm sure you have a well-reasoned position), but it's a bad idea to try to succinctly summarize one's opinion on this matter in particular on the Internet.

[1] Thinking of 9/11 again: I'd wager the vast majority of Americans would repeat the "they hate us for our freedom" line without thinking too much about how much of a gross-oversimplification that line was when there were in-fact many reasons for the plot (e.g. https://mershoncenter.osu.edu/news/what-caused-911-and-conse... ). I guess if anything good came out of 9/11 it's that Islamofascist militants realised any political message they want to make would be completely distorted or misrepresented in the American media landscape - even if some of their goals were still achieved (e.g. getting the US stuck in a quagmire in the Middle East).

Maybe just to add, what if "attack" was fabricated, just to evoke exactly response that can justify any mean? "Exitus acta probat".

Although I was not thinking about conspiracy theories like 9/11 or Perl Harbor, fundamentally I am quite curious to find why is more believable for average American that Putin can rig US election than that Trump can attack some oversea country with excuse of them having chemical weapons.

I remember that Iraq was attacked with strong claims from intelligence agency that they have weapons of mass destruction (another president), America destroyed Iraq and what remained from that destroyed economy was seed of ISIS. Later on, when they have not found any evidence of weapons official admired that they spiced the info. Because hey oil was interest to protect. Despite biggest protest in history of the World, and despite not having UN approval America attacked Iraq.

Also, I am curious to find out, what makes someone think that it is ok to drop a bomb that will level entire city and kill thousands innocent people, basically committing genocide. Allays were portrayed as good in WW2 but are we? First bombed was dropped to Hiroshima 70,000 people vaporized instantly, later on 140,000 would die. Now I guess they had some kind report, but they did not stopped there, they dropped another one to Nagasaki.

So let say they did not know about first one, but second one was pure genocide, targets were civilians. Now I ask among those ~300,000 was there any innocent child?

My point is what ever way you feel it is justifiable it is not, history is written by the winners, and our "morality" tends to bend accordingly.

As we progress in future, if we do not find mechanisms to identify human psychopathic tendencies we are doomed, as each fraction of advancement would just mean higher risk and probability of mutual destruction. Technology is just a multiplier of all our abilities and who we are. Although we tend to think we are better than our savage ancestors, history has proven number of times - that we are not.

> devoting instead a portion of my time to non-proliferation work

This is very interesting to me, what line of work are you in such that you are able to devote a portion of your time to non-proliferation work? Having previously worked at one of the NNSA labs it's my understanding that non-proliferation work is often classified, but I'd be interested to hear how normal technically-minded folks can contribute.

> I have promised myself never to build weapons unless the United States is attacked

What if it is the United States that attacks another country? Would you build weapons for that other country instead? Pacifism should be an universal attitude for it to make sense at all.

If?

Back in 1814, the Brits did have hostile units on US soil.

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

Anything more recent?

(for that matter, are there any scenarios for full major power wars that don't end after an hour or two?)

During the early 1860s plenty of hostile units were on US soil. Over million people died.

It is interesting that at this polarising times, the idea that this weaponry will be used in an internal conflict is not considered.

I'd counted that conflict as internal in GP. It seems the nations of the time agreed: none recognised the Confederacy.

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

(I've noticed many revolutionary movements fail when their key exports turn out to have been worth less, due to stocking or substitution, on world markets than they'd been planning. Sometime I should check successful revolutions, and see what happened in their export markets...)

Edit: for the US revolution, nothing so far on the economic effects of the British blockade, but the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Chesapeake implies they lacked complete naval superiority.

The comment I was replying to is the other way around. The times the USA has attacked other countries are too numerous to type out.

> never to build weapons unless the United States is attacked

It'd be kinda late to start building weapons then. Imagine a country being attacked by an adversary like USSR and start building weapons at the moment of the attack only. They couldn't last a week.

Note also that the official ideology of the USSR presumes ultimate violent overthrow of every non-socialist state. While late USSR has mellowed down somewhat and preferred stealth and sneaky rather than open combat, the expansionist drive has never been gone. And I wonder what we could have seen if USSR would have been the only country that had nukes in their possession...