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Comment by upsidesinclude | Hacker News Reader

I'd consider how much more docile the nation's of the world would have become sans nuke.

If the possibility of an untraceable, space borne, hypersonic weapon was on the table we might have had a better deterrent than nuclear weapons. The lack of fallout and total deniability makes it almost certain they would have been deployed and quite concisely ended a few conflicts at the onset.

It is alarmingly frightening, moreso even, because the impact could be extremely precise- leaving infrastructure intact.

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> I'd consider how much more docile the nation's of the world would have become sans nuke.

Interesting. I expected that nuklear weapons made us more docile. It's a huge deterrence for big powers to go to war with each other. I think we are seeing this play out in Ukraine right now. If Russia had no nuclear weapons, I'd expect NATO to have intervened much more directly at this point, especially after seeing that Russia seems much weaker than expected.

That is precisely why Putin keeps saber rattling about Russia's nukes. NATO (but mostly the US) would wipe out the Russian forces in Ukraine in a matter of days. Since he's committed so much of Russia's military to the invasion, the west would effectively castrate Russian defenses and likely all manner of hell would break loose in all those oppressed satellite regimes (hello! Chechenia, Georgia, Belarus, etc.)

The normalization of saber-rattling about nukes is one of the most unsettling outcomes of this whole conflict TBH, and hopefully it's going to be addressed in some way down the line. If every non-nuclear power is suddenly vulnerable to conventional attacks by any rouge state with nukes, the ensuing equilibrium is pretty clear and is not good for overall stability.

I don't feel like anything has really changed in regards to nuclear saber rattling, Biden did so last year in regards to US citizens[0] no less.

[0]https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/06/23/in-gun...

Well yes, but that's just Biden missing the point entirely as usual. The military is sworn to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, so if a mass insurgency is ever needed to counter some future totalitarian government, much of the military will be on that same side. What Putin has been saying is a whole lot more serious than that.

I think he more critically missed that using nuclear weapons on yourself is a massive tactical blunder. Just pointing out this isn't anything new.

Nuclear saber rattling has been the norm for a very long time; it's just that after the fall of the Soviet Union there wasn't much need for it. Things have returned to their more traditional state.

Kim Jong Un would like you to hold his soju.

Putin has been doing it since at least 2014 (along with the more conventional though due to nuclear deterrence more ridiculous threat of "visiting Berlin again").

It's just that until last month it was taken as just posturing to remind the West and the Russians that Russia, as a nuclear power, has to be taken seriously.

>If every non-nuclear power is suddenly vulnerable to conventional attacks by any rouge state with nukes

There's nothing sudden about it, this has been the reality for decades now. We here in the US were on the other side of the matter in Iraq and arguably Vietnam. This is an old truth.

Some in the US even argued for using nuclear weapons on Vietnam, out of frustration with the lack of progress with conventional war.

Imagine how that would have gone -- dropping nukes on the Vietnamese in order to "save" them from Communism.

Thankfully saner minds prevailed.

Yup. Henry Kissinger was a big part of that nonsense, along with a whole bunch of equally sinister stuff. The cluster bombings of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Korea were in many ways directly the result of his machinations.

That reminds me . . . I need to watch Dr. Strangelove again.

in the 80s it was not unusual for armed Russian strategic bombers to cross into US airspace above Alaska and then be escorted back out by US interceptors. I agree nuclear saber rattling is unsettling but it can get much worse than what we're seeing now.

/btw, in other discussions i've been too cavalier throwing around the likelihood of nuclear weapon use in Ukraine. I've thought about it much more since those other threads

Nah. There's no point in putting hypersonic cruise missiles in space. Too expensive, and not survivable. Those weapons will be launched from air, ground, and surface platforms. Magazine depths will be so limited that they'll only be used for the highest priority targets. They won't be enough to end any major conflict by themselves.

So why are the Chinese doing it?

https://www.heritage.org/asia/commentary/chinas-new-weapon-j...

The Chinese weapon is ground launched, exactly as I stated. Sure you can boost such a weapon up above most of the atmosphere in order to get longer range, but the downside is that higher altitude flight paths make it easier to detect and counter.

AFAIK, there are no publicized counters to partially orbital hypersonic glide weapons in their glide phase due to their maneuverability and speed. Perhaps THAAD - but it may be difficult to ascertain the target when a weapon can glide halfway across the world

Well in theory the RIM-174 (SM-6) has some limited ability to intercept hypersonic glide weapons. Although obviously that's never been tested.

There are counters to hypersonic glide weapons beyond shooting them down. If you can detect it early enough then the target ship can change course and try to evade. The sensors on those missiles have very limited field of view so if it's not receiving a real time target track data link for course correction then it can be possibly be dodged (depending on how many are incoming, weather, and other factors). Even if the target can't evade, a bit of advance warning would at least allow for cueing EW countermeasures.

Nah? You don't put cruise missiles in space. You put mass in space.

I supposed the point would be to hit the highest priority targets and nothing else. Loss of command and logistics has a profound effect on endurance

Putting mass in space as a weapon is just a silly scifi idea disconnected from reality. Even with modern reusable rockets, launch costs are still extremely high, especially if you need enough platforms to hit time sensitive targets. And the platforms wouldn't be survivable. There are cheaper, more effective ways to fulfill the mission.

Not to mention that you get at most as much kinetic energy out as you put in, minus losses to atmospheric drag and what's needed to drop the orbit (you have to burn retrograde to return from orbit).

> Magazine depths will be so limited that they'll only be used for the highest priority targets. They won't be enough to end any major conflict by themselves.

I'm probably being incredibly naive in saying this, but what about "non-wartime" decapitation strikes — where instead of going to war, you just lob some well-timed hypersonic missiles at your enemy's capitol building / parliament / etc. while all key players are inside; presumably not as a way to leave the enemy nation leaderless, but rather to aid an insurgent faction that favors you to take advantage of the chaos to grab power? I.e., why doesn't the CIA bring ICBMs along to their staged coups?

If you do this, the enemy's nuclear-weapons services will look in the playbook under "what to do if someone kills the government", see, "launch everything as a counterattack", and press the button.

A key advantage of a hypersonic weapon is the possibility of first-strikes to disable the enemy's retaliation systems before they have the ability to launch more-traditional retaliatory responses. Only submarines are likely to be mostly-immune to them.

Sure that type of decapitation strike might be attempted on occasion against weaker countries. The US basically tried to take out Saddam Hussein and his inner circle using precision strikes at the beginning of the 2003 Iraq invasion but they mostly missed.

I don't think you'd necessarily have deniability. We have early warning radars and satellite networks now capable of identifying an ICBM missile launch in the boost phase. Even with only ground-based sensor detecting the missile in the midcourse, it is a ballistic missile, which means the missile follows a predictable trajectory. This can be used to fairly precisely determine what it is aiming at, but also could be used to trace the missile back to a launch site.

Well from space, the point of origin is a bit arbitrary. We could just wait for our satellite to reach enemy territory.

Also, ICBMs in their present form would not likely resemble anything deployed in space

Didn't one of the old presidents propose that with the Star Wars program? Drop some metal rods from space and it's supposed to pewpew targets with minimal fuss?

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