What does the land based ICBM force offer that bombers and submarines don't? Pork for rural areas and missile contractors, according to this article. I should have figured that out on my own sooner.
That's why you need your infrared, and radar satellites.
> Submarines launched missiles exist entirely for this true second strike capability, one that can’t easily be dispatched with.
At the peak of cold war, up to a half of US SSBNs fleet was tailed by union's submarines. With giant advances in sensing, and computing since the cold war, SSBNs became much easier targets.
It's foregone conclusion that your deterrence is stronger if you increase the number of ways you can attack.
> 3,800 warheads [..] for practical purposes, after the first few, they quickly grow redundant. “Once you've dropped a couple of nuclear bombs on a city, if you drop a couple more, all you do is make the rubble shake,”
I'm frankly not sure if this is deliberately disingenuous, intended to be hyperbole, or a fundamental lack of understanding of the situation or some combination of all three, but, this is exceptionally wrong.
The reason you have 3,800 warheads isn't to aim them all at one city. Remember just as the soviets target our nuclear missile silos we must target theirs. Moreover, having such an extensive fleet of missiles ensures that even if we were caught entirely off-guard and the soviets did an impossibly good job of targeting our nuclear forces, and say took out 90% of nuclear strike capabilities we would still have sufficient capabilities to utterly devastate them.
This is why the nuclear triad exists.
How effective would a soviet first strike be at targeting our SSBNs? Can they really track and destroy them at will? Maybe.
How effective would it be against our missile silos? Do they know where they all are? Probably. Can they get their bombs on the ground before we can get ours into the air? Maybe.
How effective would a soviet strike be against our bomber fleets? Do they know where to strike? Perhaps. Can they disable or destroy our bomber fleets before we can get them into the air? Maybe.
But, what are the odds that they can do ALL three simultaneously? Very, very unlikely.
And therein lies the truth of deterrence and nuclear detente. If the enemy understands that even in their best case 99% victory scenario you still possess enough capability to utterly devastate them they can and will not risk it.
Of the 280 submarine launch tubes, only 212 were counted as deployed with as many Trident II missiles loaded. The treaty counts a missile as deployed if it is in a launch tube regardless of whether the submarine is deployed at sea. The United States has declared that it will not deploy more than 240 missiles at any time. Assuming each deployed submarine carries a full missile load, the 212 deployed missiles correspond to 10 submarines fully loaded with a total of 200 missiles. The remaining 12 deployed missiles were onboard one or two submarines loading or offloading missiles at the time the count was made.
The data shows that the 212 deployed missiles carried a total of 945 warheads, or an average of 4 to 5 warheads per missile, corresponding to 70 percent of the 1,344 deployed warheads as of September 1, 2017.
The New START data shows the United States now has just under 400 Minuteman III ICBMs in silos, down from 405 in March 2017. Normally the Air Force strides to have 400 deployed but one missile was undergoing maintenance.
Although the number of deployed ICBMs had declined from 450 to 400, the total numbers of missiles and silos have not. The data shows the Air Force has the same number of missiles and silos as in March 2017 because 50 empty silos are “kept warm” and ready to load 50 non-deployed missiles if necessary. Reduction of deployed ICBMs started in 2016, five years after the New START was signed. And the actual ICBM force is the same size as when the treaty was signed.
The 399 deployed ICBMs carried 399 W78/Mk12A or W87/Mk21 warheads. Although normally loaded with only one warhead each, the Trump NPR confirms that “a portion of the ICBM force can be uploaded” if necessary. We estimate the ICBM force has the capacity to carry a maximum of 800 warheads.
"New Data Shows Detail About Final Phase of US New START Treaty Reductions"
With respect to bombers, they are a lot more certain. With modern anti-aircraft systems, it is uncertain how many bombers would actually make it through.
With respect to SLBM, they are less prone to destruction in normal warfare. What happens if an enemy destroys a ballistic submarine? Do you go to nuclear war over that? What about two? With land based ICBMs to destroy one, you basically need to attack it with a nuclear level weapon in the middle of the country making your intentions clear.
Finally, as mentioned in the article, the land based ICBMs absorb a lot of the enemy nuclear arsenal, since there are a lot of them dispersed over a wide geographic area.
The only way that I see this question arising is if there were direct, open warfare with another highly capable nuclear weapons state. But if the US has gone to war with such a NWS, I think that the logic of rational deterrence has already failed on at least one side -- even if neither side has yet used nuclear arms. Outcomes after that point can't be calculated on the basis of rational cost-benefit analysis because rationality is no longer the driving force.
I find the logic of mutually assured destruction sound as far as it goes. Empirically, it seems correlated with a long period free of (direct) warfare between great powers. But I fear that this mechanism is brittle. It's one accident or leadership cognitive error away from shattering.
You will not attack first if you have no confidence in gaining even a marginal victory, or solid favourable stalemate.
You don't want to weaken you enemy's reluctance to engage in attrition warfare if your objective is to win a battle, and not a war.
Also, both SLBMs and bomber-launched weapons are vulnerable to tactical countermeasures. Fast-attack submarines do routinely shadow patrolling ballestic missile subs, with a credible intent of attacking and destroying the missile subs if a wartime launch appears imminent. Both bombers and air-launched standoff weapons are vulnerable to interceptor fighters and ground-based SAMs... Whereas nobody has really managed to crack the problem of successfully intercepting a mass MIRVed ICBM attack in the terminal flight phase.
But the biggest issue is that we never really know whether our enemies have developed some new capability (be it technological, procedural, or intelligence-derived) that would critically compromise the effectiveness of a major weapons system. If we put all our eggs in one basket, we become more vulnerable to a catastrophic, war-losing breakdown like that.
Why spend billions developing rockets or stealth bombers when you can just load one up on a civilian boat, land on your enemies shore, and truck it to a safehouse in your target city. Let is sit there until you need to detonate it.
And considering how easy it is to bypass ports while smuggling drugs, the idea that port monitoring will prevent it is unconvincing.
For obvious reasons, no side will announce its efforts publicly. Nor will any side announce discovery of other efforts until a hot war starts to seem like a good idea.
The fact that the land is sparsely inhabited doesn't mean the densely inhabited parts of the country don't depend on it.