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The Missiles on Our Land

missilesonourland.org

15 pointsmathgenius31 comments

This is an anti-nuclear weapon article masquerading as a policy dispute.

You can protest the existence of nuclear weapons and support disarmament, that's a valid position, but raising the issue as having a problem with the placement of the silos or something like that is bananas.

They try to make an issue of the radiation spread following a full-scale nuclear attack on the United States, or "increased crime from construction workers", can't really be taken seriously.

Because these reporters don't really have a problem with the silos being here or there (well, maybe they would prefer them there), they don't have a solution like "The heartland is the wrong place for these silos, they should be in Alaska". Their problem is not in the solutions the Air Force has come up with for modernizing the US nuclear arsenal, their problem is with the US having a nuclear arsenal.

In which case just say that. Don't tell me the US shouldn't have a nuclear arsenal because we're going to increase the size of our waste storage or whatever.

well you could abandon the silos completely and only have air and submarine delivered missiles (e.g. UK only has submarines)

That would barely address the articles concerns, as those warheads still need storage, still cost money, still generate waste, still require environmental impact reports for their construction, movement, and storage.

The actual, physical silo is only about a third of what this article takes issue with. The overwhelming majority is focused on its nature as a nuclear silo, and the nuclear aspect doesn't change even if you get rid of the silo.

Now that the UK is down to only submarines, the anti-nuclear people try to get rid of that. A couple of years ago, RT and Wilileaks trotted out this sailor that claimed that the British Trident fleet was unsafe and so they should retire it, and incidentally eliminate the British nuclear deterrent. This was right before a vote to authorize multiple years of funding for it.

Obviously the best arms control treaty is the one your enemy imposes on themselves.

For an article with such high production value, they seem to have forgotten fifty percent of the discussion: the risks of not having the missiles on our land.

Strangely having nukes have kept us out of full scale war.

This knee-jerk reaction to the subject doesn’t add much to the discussion. This is the result of a study aimed specifically at analyzing the safety of those nuclear installations. An argument with substance for an opposing point of view would be a lot more welcome than a cheap jab.

Not at all knee-jerk nor cheap job.

The article does not address the option of not having those missiles. And this “not addressing” seems highly deliberate.

If I do a piece on river pollution being caused by a steel plant, do I have to "address" the scenario where the plant doesn't exist to be "balanced"?

Steel plants polluting nearby rivers is an optional aspect of steel plants. Potentially being hit by attacks is not an optional part of having nuclear weapons.

Do you want GP to use more words to say the same thing? He's right. Just to pick out their leading argument, they simulate a nuclear attack on the silos. AFAICT they do not simulate alternative nuclear war scenarios where the silos do not exist. That seems like an important omission.

What do you mean by "an argument with substance"? The reason to have nuclear silos is to have them act as a nuclear sponge. Make them conspicuous, well-known, that's the whole point. We don't have nukes to attack other but to deter wars and minimize casualties should someone be stupid enough to attack a nuclear superpower.

That idea is absurd. No matter how big your “sponge”, all it takes is a few dozen to land on major cities for the US and its economy to be devastated.

The idea of a nuclear war is absurd. But should someone be stupid enough to start it, any means of reducing damage and minimizing casualties are good.

Pretty tedious website and it all seems agenda driven. As in whats the alternative?

You could probably make do with submarine, ship, and airplane based nuclear weapons?

Those wouldn't solve the issues laid out in the article really, as those warheads still need to live somewhere while not aboard those platforms. They still generate waste, still cost money, etc, etc. Except for the random anecdote about construction-worker-driven-crime (???), anything short of complete disarmament wouldn't address the articles concerns.

And anyway, the silos are part of the nuclear triad[0], removing them is akin to partial disarmament which will never happen without unilateral agreement across all nuclear states.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_triad

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that tens of billions of dollars have been spent solely to harness the thinking of really smart people on this strategic question.

So anything on an hn thread is lucky if it even rises to “glib”, but…

The problem with bombers is that they’re slow & vulnerable; you have to fly them over their targets.

The problem with submarines is they have to hide, which pulls against maintaining reliable communication. They’re also absurdly complex in engineering and operation, which means they may have vulnerabilities we haven’t thought of or can’t confidently mitigate.

Groud-based ICBM’s trade off these issues for the equally big issue of being immobile.

You're absolutely correct. Thanks for your succinct reply.

Before commenting in this area I probably have to remind myself of the history of the MAD policies and the conditions that lead to that.

They could be moved around, disguised as freight trains.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railcar-launched_ICBM

Choo Choo!

> You could probably make do with submarine, ship, and airplane based nuclear weapons?

So instead of the enemy nuking farm fields in North Dakota, they shoot more nukes at heavily-populated cities?

The article takes a bizarrely myopic view, with charts of fallout patterns that show only the land based silos they're complaining about getting nuked, as if removing them would remove the risk of fallout. If only we could be so lucky.

Can you not get to the point with a proper written exposition? You really need to make me wait five seconds to load all that bloated multimedia CONTENT? Then I have to scroll for days only to incrementally reveal the topic? I can't skim or read deeply here. There's just one mode: "keep swiping for more CONTENT!". The fucking TikTok paradigm. I couldn't continue, clicked away.

The medium shouldn't be the message.

I did not know about the nuclear sponge tactics. It seems pretty interesting, and the only argument for having the silos at all.

Yeh, that was mu first thought when I saw this page and scary visualization where Russian missiles fall on silos instead on American cities in the West and East Coast. So the logic here is broken but Russian propaganda has never been too subtle.

That's the most infuriatingly awful website I've tried to use since Flash. I had to give up.

Neat but..better to have them in this day than to need them and not have them. Americas'a enemies certainly have and want them.

Meta: Just please, please, stop building these scroll-jacking bullshit websites. They are unreadable, confusing and just stupid.

On a slow mobile connection, I got a "site launching" holding message and wondered if the whole thing was just some terrible pun...

I got that on a gigabit connection.

This is a very impressive effort to point out a major, unjust act being committed on civilians by military leaders, but it has to be noted that nothing will change in this situation for as long as the military junta that really runs the USA today (masquerading as a republic) fails to have its feet held to the fire in the form of war crimes prosecutions of its leadership, which MUST happen before we can even begin to address the wider issue of nuclear proliferation.

We are held hostage by this junta, because it desires nothing but power over the world. That's why the USA spends many more billions murdering people than it does, making peace, every year.

Until the American people hold their war criminals feet to the fire, the nuclear issue is going to be a non-starter, and may even serve as a major distraction from the real issue, which is that the American people are hostages to their own military junta, which commits a murderous act against innocent human beings, on average, every twenty minutes.

THAT is a bigger threat to world peace than nuclear proliferation, people. Won't someone please make a slick website to highlight this issue, mmmkay... (hint: its https://airwars.org/)

(EDIT: as usual, oppressively rate-limited when discussing America's very real war crimes situation... embarrassing, eh, Americans?)

bell-cot said: "Nice rant..."

Oh, okay, its the Joint Chiefs of Staff operating through the revolving door between the US' military leadership and the CFR, which factually masquerades America's military junta problem.

And yes, in spite of the dire embarrassment that the average American may feel upon learning of its existence, it is factually a military junta, well-versed in hiding its activities from the only power capable of bringing it to heel: the American public.

Incidentally, the military junta that has built this heinous empire of death and destruction also has a slick web site outlining the very real issue:

https://therevolvingdoorproject.org

Nuclear proliferation is at one point in the scale - but the real issue is the general publics' ignorance of just how bad things are, that the worlds 'greatest nation' spends a trillion dollars a year preparing to murder innocent people, and yet simply WON'T give its own citizens world-class education and health care, meanwhile ..

Nice rant...but I think you'd have a far better argument for "evil capitalist Wall Street really runs the USA today". A military junta bright enough to tell its own *ss from a foxhole would not have optimized so much of the US economy for short-term Wall Street profits - to the military's own extreme detriment - for starters.

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