There was briefly a 3D version integrated with Google Earth that was even more depressing.
Also check out (by the same developer, Alex Wallerstein) MissileMap, where you can plant a launch platform on a map (sub, silo etc.), assign it a missile and a warhead, and see which parts of the earth you can turn to glass. Stiff drink helps; all a bit close to home for this cold war kid.
You are not the only one. I’m still scarred 38 goddamned years later from “The Day After”
World powers can’t directly fight anymore so Russia takes chunks of Europe every so often. China does the same. Ukraine and Taiwan, for example, lose out. We pretend there is peace.
M.A.D. is a deterrent for total nuclear war. It's not a deterrent for war. One thaught "trade" would work, but it's still not perfect.
It's an interesting thought experiment to ponder what exactly a nation-state's political objectives would have to be that a nuclear war would be the best way to accomplish them.
Which country is using "bombarding with migrants" as a deliberate tactic to undermine a rival country?
In contrast, I do agree with you that freezing assets is a real way to retaliate, and we've witnessed it in action. It has happened, and the relevant states have explained how and why it was a deliberate action.
It's not even comparable with the impact of a single nuke let alone nuclear war.
On another note, while Japan has recovered very well — thrived, even — after the impact of two nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union never did fully recover from its Afghanistan debacle, which was part of the background for its eventual collapse. Don't underestimate the undesirability of nuclear attacks or disastrous wars that can neither be won nor gained from.
The bomb dropped on hiroshima was more than an magnitude smaller than a standard bomb these days.
> was 884 million yen, about 1.2 trillion 2021 US dollars, by my calculations.
~884 million yen at the time but that's a relatively meaningless number. A better measure would be 2% of economic wealth of Japan at the time which is where I assume you came up with the second number... for a 20kt fission type bomb dropped in a city of 350,000. A modern bomb 10x the size dropped on a modern city 10x the size is going to be measured in the 10s of trillions in costs - instantly for a single bomb, not part of a 20 year funding campaign that ends up recirculating a lot of money in the military industrial complex.
> On another note, while Japan has recovered very well — thrived, even — after the impact of two nuclear weapons
2 weapons totaling the 10th of a normal weapon at a time no other country had a nuclear weapon to retaliate with.
> the Soviet Union never did fully recover from its Afghanistan debacle, which was part of the background for its eventual collapse. Don't underestimate the undesirability of nuclear attacks or disastrous wars that can neither be won nor gained from.
Sure, plenty of things compounded have led to the downfall of countries over the last few thousand years. I can't however think of any reason or even set of reasons that would be comparable to millions of citizens dying overnight due to instantaneous deletion of a major population center... x100.
Is it really moving the goalposts to say that comparing the economic impact spread over decades isn't the same as one experienced relatively instantaneously?
Or the risk of retaliation from a nuclear power isn't comparable to guerilla warfare?
Moving goalposts or not, it just doesn't seem to be an apt comparison to gauge military rationality.
The historic red lines in the cold war were either one side reaching a first-strike position, or an unstoppable ground invasion in which both sides soldiers were directly involved and tactical nuclear weapons would usefully repel the invasion. Even then NATO troop deployments in Germany during the cold war reflect both a risk that this tipping point wouldn't trigger a nuclear war - as well as carefully calculated strategies to ensure that the risk of a nuclear escalation was high such as by stationing tactical nuclear weapons in Germany.
It's difficult to identify a similar red line in a likely conflict between any of the major nuclear powers.
Game theory is weird and counterintuitive.
1. The U.S. no longer maintains a command post on continuous airborne alert. There are two planes on 15 minute ground alert, but they are very vulnerable sitting on a limited set of alert facilities.
2. A couple of new submarine detection methods have gotten some development. Signal processing for sonar has improved.
3. Missile accuracy has improved, particularly in a first strike scenario where satellite navigation would be available.
4. Aerial drones have gotten much more sophisticated and compact, which could jeopardize silos, communications infrastructure, bombers on the ground, and the E-6s and E-4s.
5. Sea based drones have undergone extensive development and might become a serious threat to the submarine force.
6. Anti satellite weapons have advanced significantly, putting communications satellites to transmit launch orders at risk.
7. There has been more work on maneuvering reentry vehicles and hypersonics, which could enable depressed trajectory launches which, if they were accurate enough to destroy silos or the underground launch control facilities, could knock out the ICBMS with less than 10 minutes of warning, which is not enough to retaliate in time.
First-strike only works if you eradicate _all_ of the opponent's nuclear forces. Otherwise, you're left with a few extremely pissed off submarine Admirals / Captains with nuclear-retaliation abilities.
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Like, you're skipping a major step here. If you destroy comms and launch a nuclear first strike before the submarines are down, you're screwd.
You're basically saying you have confidence that some adversary can 100% detect all of someone else's submarines simultaneously, across the world, with high confidence. Sure, submarine detection has gotten better, but I'm not even sure if you can pinpoint all of the USA's __carriers__ (and near-carriers, like the Marine's Wasp Assault Ships) right now (let alone the USA's submarines).
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I have severe doubts that anyone in the world has enough satellites in the air for 100% ocean coverage. We don't even have enough satellites in the air for 100% ground coverage. The sea is a very large place.
If the technology you allege to exists really does exist, then the MH370 probably would have been found by now. But no: satellites don't fly over 100% of the sea, our computers aren't fast enough to scan everything our eyes-in-the-skys see even if we could scan 100% of the ocean.
Furthermore: Satellites are floating up there in the sky. I'm sure the military is just watching each-other's satellites and knowing when they pass by or not. If a Satellite can see you, you can see the Satellite. If you can see the Satellite, you can tell your Submarines where to hide.
Now all of the 7 points have eaten away at this certainty. For now, it looks like the equation is still in favor of MAD, but it with a smaller margin. But what if Russia or China has some trick/secret weapon to disable the SLBMs? Or maybe they are just waiting until they know the locations of all carriers/subs - they have many years, and it might only take one random moment of 100% detection! I'm sure the odds are very low, but I'm not comfortable with a gamble when nuclear annihilation on the line.
The fact that the dominant military doctrine hinges on some increasingly uncertain calculations is terrifying to me.
Then do they have a secret / trick to disable all briefcase bombs? The Davy Crockett nuke is under 50lbs and was designed for infantry to use (in a almost certainly suicide manner). And then plenty of other types were invented as time went on.
If you can't get them with the big guns, you get them with the small ones, which are still devastating. There are still layers-upon-layers to ensure MAD, as far as I can tell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_demolition_munition
And let me remind you: the pipebomb guy from Jan6th hasn't been found yet, despite modern surveillance methods and nearly a year of FBI searching and interviews.
Radioactive payloads are harder to sneak in as ports are scanned with geiger counters, easier to do pipe bombs or fertilizer bombs, etc, but less effective.
To do real collateral damage you have to deliver the payload via the air.
Off-topic nitpick, the pipe bombs were planted on Jan 5th near the DNC and RNC headquarters. There's no known relation to the Jan 6th capitol protest.
-My pet scenario is you just use DHL and ship the thing in a container.
Imagine a handful of nukes going off in, say, the Suez canal, in a lock in the Panama canal, Shanghai, Singapore, LA and Rotterdam.
You don't need to kill billions to bring the world to a halt. We'd face shortages of pretty much everything for quite a long time, with all the difficulties, suffering and general havoc that would bring with it.
Keep in mind that the spooks are loathe to reveal their best technology so would never reveal it for something like finding the MH370.
And that's roughly the difficulty of finding a submarine. If anyone is seriously thinking that they can find all of an advanced nation's submarines and disabling them in a first-strike style attack... well... yeah. Its just not feasible with current technology.
Then you knock out the E-6s, E-4s, and all fixed VLF transmitters to remove VLF comms capability. Then you knock out, at minimum, the AEHF and Milstar satellites, but I've heard the SSBNs now can send up an Iridium buoy, which is good, that is a lot of satellites to take out. I don't know the feasibility of that. This buys some amount of time before a launch message can be received by the sub.
Now we would presume that before such a strike, the locations of the patrolling SSBNs are known. There are a number of new types of sensors such as green lasers, enhanced sonars, satellite wake detection, even antineutrino detection, about which some has come out in the open literature. There is also the emerging possibility of swarms of sonar equipped underwater drones that could aid in detection.
As for destroying the submarines, that could be any combination of attack submarines, underwater drones, aircraft with torpedoes, or aircraft with nuclear depth bombs.
It's also instructive to think about how a potential pause due to comms unavailability could affect deterrence as well, since an adversary could launch a first strike limited to military targets, and if the SSBNs were alive but out of communication, an adversary could threaten a follow up attack on cities if the remaining SSBNs did not surrender, and this would be an extremely difficult ultimatum to refuse.
Okay, so... explain to me how Russia and/or China plans to to destroy an E-6 stationed in Nebraska before a second-strike is launched by the USA.
It takes something like 20 minutes for a missile traveling at Mach 20, launched in Russia, before it reaches Nebraska. And the whole world will know that an ICBM was launched because those things aren't exactly subtle.
And once you figure out how to kill the one in Nebraska, then you have to tell me how you kill the one in Kentucky. I guess you launch both missiles simultaneously, but... I'm sure you can see where this is going. You're gonna have to launch hundreds of ICBMs simultaneously, and then wait 20 minutes, and then hope the entirety of the USA's defense is caught sleeping on their job for 20 minutes.
The other possibility is depressed trajectory SLBMs. Those could hit most targets in the U.S. in 7 minutes or less. The only problem is that the depressed trajectory means that the reentry vehicle spends more time in the atmosphere, so they're less accurate. With a maneuvering reentry vehicle, you can get better accuracy.
Or at a minimum: think about the logistics behind such an attack. Even if you get one military base, there are hundreds of them across the USA, and you're suggesting that someone has the capability to attack all of them simultaneously.
Now, I have seen some evidence that this vulnerability is being more acknowledged and that they're moving around the alerts more. It's not a full roving alert because of course there are a limited number of crews, they have families, and there are not that many bases that have the working alert facilities that Pax River and Travis have.
I actually happened to be driving by a random air force base on a road trip recently and happened to see an E-4 taxiing for takeoff, which was interesting to me. They may be using those more to try to increase the alert coverage.
I saw some congressional testimony from 2019 about this issue, and the general was asked why they can't move back to continuous airborne alert like they did before '91, and the answer was that the E-6s are old and they don't have very many, and that they would only be able to do this for a couple of months before maintenance requirements precluded them from launching. Sitting on the ground puts less hours on the engines and airframes and so they can maintain that alert.