United States discloses nuclear warhead numbers; restores nuclear transparency
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Because if they could start churning out a dozen or a hundred a week within a short period of time, why does the standing arsenal really matter? Does it really make a difference in global safety or geopolitics? I don’t know the first thing about the topic so this is all genuine curiosity, and I feel like the googling required to get an answer would put me on lists I don’t really feel like being on.
Where full nuclear war means a full exchange of strategic fire, yes. For tactical nukes or bombardment of a non-retaliating state, less so.
Yep, the trajectory to North Korea (from US mainland) has to pass over Russia and the Russians have to trust that it's not coming for them.
Not that Russia would be okay with us striking NK in the first place, but you get the point.
Annie Jacobsen has a book "Nuclear War: A Scenario" on all this where she interviews high ranking officials and pries into government documents related to nuclear war.
Can the trajectory of an ICBM be inferred by the height of it’s arc?
I guess that depends on current relations between the two countries and assumes there wouldn't be a breakdown of communications when launches are detected.
> Can the trajectory of an ICBM be inferred by the height of it’s arc?
From the book I mentioned in another comment, Russia has very flawed satellite systems for tracking nuclear launches. There is a lot of focus on the fact that you don't have much time in the event of an imminent nuclear strike so I don't think there is much calculations being done if the missile is (generally) coming towards your homeland.
Depends a lot on who/where/why, how much primary and collateral damage, and so on. You may be right that any use of any nuclear weapon turns into a global doomsday. It's hard to say unless it really happens. I'm often surprised that terrible war related incidents end up not escalating beyond the general region where they happened.
This avoids the possibility of gradual nuclear escalation, which can be more easily miscalibrated.
On both sides of the wall - it would have been feasible for a country to attempt to establish it's own alignment separate from the superpowers through the use of nuclear weapons
B-2 bomber crews regularly train for this exact mission.
even if iran can't retaliate with nukes, the geopolitical cost would be insane.
[1] https://www.eurasiantimes.com/us-flaunts-massive-ordnance-pe...
If a bomb can actually rip through 200 meters of cement and ground, then the 60 meter statement is also true.
It also has a history of revealing the actual limits of weapons systems, but only after better capabilities exist (with the limits of those still classified or understated) - that is the 60M limit was the max of the old bomb and they don't need to know about the new one.
https://www.twz.com/iranian-underground-nuclear-facility-may...
But I do agree that the labeling is largely pointless because there are nominally "tactical" weapons with payloads exceeding 100kt. For contrast, Hiroshima (which was enough to destroy a mid-sized city and kill hundreds of thousands with a single bomb) was 16kt. So "tactical weapons" can easily destroy cities. Even if strategic weapons can be hundreds of times higher yield, at some point you're just beating a dead horse, or city as it may be.
Not sure about the landmines, but the US and USSR retired their nuclear artillery decades ago. I'm not sure how much effort it would be to put existing warheads inside shells, or about other countries.
In any case, for the specifics - Wiki gives 2004 [1] as the date the US reportedly dismantled its nuclear artillery, and in 2000 Russia reported that "nearly all" of its nuclear artillery had been dismantled. Nuclear landmines [2] fall under 'atomic demolition munitions' which are basically any sort of small/mobile nuke, so you get everything from landmines to the suitcase nuke weirdness.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_artillery
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_demolition_munition
If we escalated in to full-scale nuclear war this July that'd be unexpected but we're way past 0 warning. There are lots of warnings. In terms of raw risk the last few years might be the biggest risk of a nuclear war breaking out that the species has ever faced.
We have escalated beyond the point we have been in for the last 80 years. Russia have lost more troops than in any war since WWII. That is a lot of dead Slavs. Their strategic nuclear defences have already been attacked [0] and NATO currently appears to be organising direct strikes on Russian territory. They've made it quite clear that they want the war to continue until something in Russia breaks. When more warnings are you expecting to see? There are a lot of warnings out there.
We could easily discover that someone tried to launch the nukes already in this conflict. It would be precedented; the situation is more tense than it ever has been before and we've had fortuitous near misses in similar situations. We're already in territory where we are rolling the dice for a catastrophe with low odds.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/world/europe/ukraine-dron...
Russian aggression reinforced the need for a buffer state - before it wasn't obvious, now it is. NATO is intending to force Russia to leave Ukraine and they are willing to play a very long game bc it's a buffer state in play, not a NATO state.
The end result of this strategy is either Russia breaks or the war escalates.
But thanks for playing.
Russia-NATO relations were pretty good, even heading (slowly) towards such membership under Putin in 2000.
Unfortunately, Putin didn't like GWB leaving the ABM treaty, and did like having the old USSR back, so aggression and all else as you say.
Which was a surprise at the time, and left some convinced it was a UN rather than NATO operation.
Able Archer was one of a series of (annual) scheduled training exercises. The Cuban missile crisis was a fairly civil dispute over where people stationed military assets that was resolved diplomatically. The Ukraine War has involved the mobilisation of the Russian military with estimates in the 100s of thousands for Russian casualties and active strikes on Russian military infrastructure.
How are you construing the first two are more tense than the last? The last is a significant escalation of tensions from the first two. We're a long way up the escalation ladder.
And, putting it to you a second time, what warnings are you expecting to see months before a nuclear war starts? I don't think you can see any path from any scenario to nuclear war. I doubt you would have seen a path from Able Archer to nuclear war, or a path from the US deploying missiles in Turkey to nuclear war either.
So yes, I think we were closer to "full scale nuclear war" during the Cuban Missile Crisis than we are today. There isn't much point in continuing the conversation if you can't agree with that.
Then, 40 years later, someone ion the Russian military would explain to you that a person attempted to fire the nukes and it was narrowly prevented by a coincidence. At that point you would see a path to nuclear war. And based on my read of this conversation you probably wouldn't make the connection with the escalatory policy in Turkey as a threat to the Soviets without decades in hindsight either. That was less threatening than the NATO work the US has been orchestrating in Europe.
The publicly available information we have on the Ukraine war suggests a tenser situation than the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Russia's mainland nuclear defence infrastructure has literally been targeted. That is pretty dicey compared to harassing a presumed-harmless submarine near Cuba.
[0] In case you haven't read up on it, the incident you are referring too wasn't publicly discussed until 2002. A lot of other details also weren't available without hindsight.
Come on, people couldn't see a path to nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis? The whole reason it was labeled a "crisis" was because it made the path to war incredibly short. I know it is hard to say "I was wrong", but it is better than tying yourself into knots until you are spouting nonsense like this.
The reality of the situation, whether it was known in real time or not, is that one person prevented the use of nuclear weapons in 1962. How do you get closer to the use of nuclear weapons than it being prevented by one person? Half a person preventing it?
Yes, but the reason the Ukraine war isn't called the "Ukraine crisis" is because the crisis point came, went and then a war began. That is why tensions are higher - we're further up the escalation ladder. The Russian army has partly mobilised and people are shooting at them. The situation is a lot more fraught than a relatively civil argument over where missile emplacements were going to be put and nobody had any actual intentions of killing any Russians.
I put my challenge to you again - what warnings are you expecting to see months before a nuclear war starts? Your last answer was that you'd discover those signs 40 years post-hoc when the Russians told you and I don't think you can defend that as a rational position. If you want an explicit reason, 40 years hindsight is not a warning sign. Warning signs come before the event.
Your argument is that USSR stationing assets, including nukes, in Cuba isn't a provocation against the US while the mere thought of Ukraine joining NATO (not involving any actual NATO assets in Ukraine before the invasion in 2014!) is a provocation?
But compared to the Ukraine war it was a pretty civil dispute. Nobody was intended to get hurt.
Huh? I'd expect most non-Russian-aligned parties would be happy to see Russia retreat from Ukraine, pay reparations, and call that a peace. Russia only needs to break if Russia persists in occupying other countries.
The war can end tomorrow. All that has to happen is for Russia to pack up and leave the territory of another sovereign country. It's really that simple.
If Russia gives up, the war ends. If Ukraine gives up, there is a genocide.
“I believe everything this former KGB operative says about my government! Finally, a neutral party without self-interests who can reveal the truth!”
I'm paraphrasing, but I have friends that believe 100% of Russian propaganda they hear on the Internet and 0% of western mainstream media. "What the BBC is saying is just propaganda!" is a common comment I hear from people quoting Russian disinformation verbatim.
> likely outcome of NATO's persistent expansion
That is literal Russian disinformation. If they cared about NATO expansion, they would have invaded Finland to stop them joining. Or would have bolstered their border defence with them instead of reallocating the local troops to go fight in Ukraine, as they have.
They only cared about Ukraine joining NATO because that would have stopped them invading, as they were planning for over a decade and are doing right now.
A thief that plans to rob you cares deeply about your security system being upgraded! Not upgrading your security to appease the thief will not stop the robbery.
PS: Alexander Lukashenko accidentally let slip in early 2022 that the next target for invasion after Ukraine would have been Moldova. Guess which country Trump suddenly thought shouldn't be joining NATO right after meeting Putin?
Not any other country in Europe. No. Just Moldova, very specifically. Trump was very concerned about it, a country he would not have known the name of or been able to place on a map the day before that meeting. (Or, most likely, even after that meeting.)
Well. Ukraine just wants to shoot at the places where rockets and artillery are shooting at them. It happens that the Russians conveniently are doing so behind the border. They can shoot at you. But you can't shoot back.
I honestly don't understand how people can spin this up as that NATO wants to strike Russia with a straight face.
That’s when it gets scary too.
See Maria Butina and the total ownership of the NRA. Starting with Putin bare-chested riding horses in the GWB “I’m looking into his soul” era to today, the American right wingers are pretty much pro-Russia… amazing feat considering that killing Russians has been historically a priority for them since 1917.
The chances of a Russian fizzle are very high given the maintenance issues with the regular army, but nobody wants to take that bet.
The larger issue is once the “nuclear taboo” is broken nation states will start using them. Nukes aren’t magic, they’re just really big bombs. Most likely the smaller ones are more practical to deliver and will be used on military targets (Bunker busting, destroying fortifications, etc). It wouldn’t play out like Mad Max but basically WWII but with small nukes and regional missile defense systems playing a huge role.
So a total war scenario, but with multi megaton nuclear weapons? That sounds civilization ending to me.
“There was a strong wind that night and as I came out of the shelter, all I could see around us was fire…burning clothing, 'tatami' mats, and debris were blowing down the road and it looked like a flowing river of fire… I remember seeing other families, like us, holding hands and running through the fires…I saw a baby on fire on a mother's back. I saw children on fire, but they were still running. I saw people catch fire when they fell onto the road because it was so hot.” [1] This isn’t an account of the atomic bombs. This is the firebombing of Tokyo, which killed more people and destroyed more homes than either atomic bombs. The US was firebombing Japanese cities week after week, leveling over 60 Japanese cities and killing between 330,000 and 900,000 people (though we will never know for sure because the very records needed were obliterated in the conflagrations). WWII destruction was limited completely by the technology of the time. Total war means total war.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/tokyo-firebombing-survivors-recall-mos...
I think a Mad Max style post apocalypse type situation wouldn't come about until maybe 30 years after a full nuclear war. As disease and civilization continue to deteriorate over time eventually I can see much of the word getting to that state. Kind of like how a polluted lake doesn't kill all the fish immediately, it slowly dies over time.
This sounds exactly like Mad Max. If you remember, in the very first "Mad Max" movie, civilization was not completely gone yet: Max was a policeman, but civilization was in tatters and murderous biker gangs ran wild. The later movies showed civilization being completely gone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W54
And they do have the potential for outsized impact:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse
Interesting quote: "Physicists have testified at United States Congressional hearings that weapons with yields of 10 kt (42 TJ) or less can produce a large EMP."
On top of all that, the only practical way to have any hope of "winning" a nuclear exchange is to hit the other side so unexpectedly hard and fast that they can't mount a strong enough response to completely destroy you in return. There were multiple serious high level discussions about doing exactly that at various points during the Cold War by both sides.
We should all want the world to be as many rungs down the escalation ladder as possible. One or more countries breaking the prohibition on nuclear weapon use and using tactical nuclear weapons would bring the world dangerously close to a full nuclear war. Being a few short steps from such an event is not a stable situation, and it is one that will break badly at some point.
Our current situation is too unstable; deliberately making things much worse is a terrible notion.
to demonstrate this point you can find the end of the movie War Games on youtube. A rouge AI (heh) is determined to launch an ICBM and only when the computer is tasked to play itself in a game of nuclear war does it determine there is no possible way to win. The movie ends with the iconic robotic voiced line "strange game, the only winning move is not to play".
+France
Macron understood it well and basically told him to get lost with his threats, or in simple words - France also has nuclear weapons. That's the only language Putin understands.
It is precisely the fact that dictators like Putin are so pampered and disconnected from the consequences of their actions that worries me. He won't think twice about the lives that will be lost. He's constructed his own alternate historical timeline to justify his assault on Ukraine. He could do the same to justify dropping some nukes.
> It is precisely the fact that dictators like Putin are so pampered and disconnected from the consequences of their actions that worries me.
Which is exactly the reason to make it clear that consequence of his actions like nuclear war would he his immediate death. I.e. the logic goes the other way around and that logic works. You can't use the logic of "let's not escalate" with such people.
I think this is absurd and I really don’t like this line of thinking. This is being blown away out of proportion.
Russia wants ukraine and China wants Taiwan. These are localised issues, nobody is invading Texas, and core territories of nuclear powers are not in danger.
Much bigger chunks of lands have changed hands over the last 60 years, think collapse of USSR, the debacle in Afghanistan, Vietnam war, etc. The world did not end.
In 2008 American banks did more damage to the world than Russia/China would by successfully taking these areas of land.
Starting a nuclear exchange over these relatively small-ish issues would be peak idiocy. Yes, it sucks for the locals but there are 3 civil wars in Africa and conflict in the Middle East causing the same amount of misery, they are easier to solve but no one cares.
Starting nuclear war under any conditions would be peak idiocy. We still have relatively regular near misses. The current issues appear to be more significant than situations that have caused near misses in the past.
Smart!
megaton size has not been disclosed. The majority could be small nukes.
Also, centrifuge aren’t used by advanced nations to make nukes. They use plutonium from spent reactor fuel. The US has lots of spent fuel that could be reprocessed for the plutonium.
The big factor is that the deployment platforms are limited. There are 400 Minuteman III missiles sitting in silos. They could put more warheads on them, but those are sitting in storage. The same is true of Trident missiles on submarines.
They could make nuclear gravity bombs but those aren’t really useful. We also have lots of those in storage.
However for practical purposes. One simply needs enough missiles and warheads of sufficient yield to overwhelm opposing interceptors, avoid risks of pre-emptive strike/miss-fires+500.
After that there are rapidly diminishing returns for more warheads.
We disassembled a bunch of AFAPs so have a lot of weapons grade plutonium around. But Pu is nasty to work with & Rocky Flats--the previous pit production facility--closed down years ago. Pit production moved to Los Alamos but it is at a much reduced capability.
Also, Pantex--where nuclear weapons are assembled--isn't exactly the model for speed & efficiency.
If you really want to go carpet-bombing with nukes, miniturization isn't as important as having a lot, quickly and reliably.
I'm not sure. This used to be the case in WW2, but today enriching uranium is quite inexpensive.
Here's an enrichment calculator [1]. The cost of enriching to 80% (weapons grade uranium) is $80000/kg, so you can enough uranium for a Hiroshima-style bomb for about $5 million.
$5 million for a nuclear bomb is basically nothing.
I assume that's something like the amortised cost over the lifetime of a factory dedicated to making them, rather than something which at least a few people on this forum can personally afford?
Urenco is a company that specializes in uranium enrichment. It is owned by the UK government (1/3), the Dutch government (1/3) and 2 German energy companies. They will not sell you weapons grade uranium, and if you don't have a legitimate reason, they will not sell you anything.
But if the UK or the US government asks them for weapons grade uranium for the purpose of making nuclear bombs, I imagine that they would be willing to provide.
As for Iran, they needed to build from scratch the many thousands of centrifuges, and they don't have any paying customer that could help recoup some of the cost. Plus, for a long time they needed to do the enrichment in a covert way, to hide it from the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors. Once they were caught enriching, they first got hit by Stuxnet then they got sanctioned. Then they did a deal with the US and some European countries, where they promised to stop the enrichment, which they did. They restarted when Trump withdrew from the deal, and now they have enough enriched uranium to make several bombs if they want.
A number of the pits in the active stockpile are actually composite Pu/HEU pits & you can actually use HEU in implosion weapons as well.
If we assume 1 pit per month ages out due to phase and corrosion, then they would presumably have a pipeline of 12 pits in refurbishment continuously.
Since the stockpile is still measured in the thousands, I would assume the stockpile of plutonium pits running through pantex facilities is at a similar scale.
(this also assumes there is no neutral gas non-corrosive, phase stable storage)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/behind-the-scenes...
https://ananuclear.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/53f947439e...
The pit (primary) is a hollow shape that gets crushed, producing a fission explosion. The X-rays released by that are absorbed by a (highly classified) foam encasing the secondary, which vaporizes (explodes), compressing the secondary causing fusion. The foam, and the secondary, are encased in a substantial tamper made of U-238.
The tamper’s mass impedes the expansion of the secondary, making it more efficient. The tamper is also largely converted to Pu-239 by the neutron flux from the secondary, and immediately fissions releasing a whole lot more energy. This approach is used in all modern thermonuclear weapons, with the majority of the total energy coming from fission.
The ‘Tsar Bomba’ weapon, the largest ever detonated, was designed to be a 100 megaton blast, but Khrushchev was concerned about fallout. So, he directed the U-238 tamper be replaced with lead, which reduced the explosive yield to ~60 MT.
“pits,” which are spherical shells of plutonium about the size of a bowling ball
I assume that when weapons are decomissioned, the pits are put in storage. So, if they were able to use the same pit design, they could be reuse them?
Possessing an overwhelming amount of retaliatory force and the combined ability and willingness to deliver it immediately in the face of an enemy's first strike serves a useful purpose for deterrence. "Mutually assured destruction" means that both sides are prevented from attacking, because the other side can respond in kind. It's irrational for either side to attack, since everybody would just die. (and yes, MAD comes with its own problems)
The ability to build a bunch of bombs in the future is entirely unrelated. I mean, who cares?
It's not like missiles or ammo, where the more we produce in times of conflict, the more of an upper-hand we have. We've already reached the ceiling for the finite amount of nuclear warheads required to do the most conceivable damage. Beyond is irrelevant.
The conversation around nuclear winter focused on burning petroleum storage tanks because (in contrast to burning houses and burning trees) those kinds of fires produce the darkest smoke with a particle size small enough to get high in the atmosphere and to stay in the atmosphere for a long time. "100 oil refinery fires would be sufficient to bring about a small scale, but still globally deleterious nuclear winter," said one prominent paper.
Then Saddam lit 700 oil wells on fire (and deployed land mines to slow down firefighters with the result that it took 7 months to put the fires out), and although there was some slight cooling effect, you really had to go looking for it with precision instruments to detect it at all:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Climatic_effect...
Repeating myself: before the 700 Kuwaiti oil fires, the most influential scientists warning about nuclear winter, like Carl Sagan, relied heavily on petroleum fires to make their argument.
As I recall from the time there were three camps on this:
* pro MAD cold war political scientists who stressed that world ending Mutualy Assurred Destruction scenarios were essential to peace keeping,
* antinuclear horrified scientists, Carl Sagan, Betrand Russell, et al who wanted disarmament and peace through understanding and stressed the world ending horror of nuclear weapons and nuclear winter and wrote a lot of papers light on detail.
* actual working geophysicists modelling the world who seemed largely undecided about the actual threat of nuclear winter .. very much in the maybe | maybe not camp.
ADDED: I just read through the wikipedia Nuclear Winter article and seems (by my recollection) to have been culled in the decade since I last read it when (by my recollection) it referenced a great many more papers that fell on the probably not catastrophic side. It now appears to emphasis only papers that agree with the nuclear winter hypothesis.
Mao was particularly disconcerting, to paraphrase, "Nuclear war doesn't scare me, we've got more than enough people and cities, we can rebuild"
Upon further looking into it, I fear MAD may have been at the time an overexaggeration to prevent what would be the most devastating war. Could be true now tho - things have leveled up
It was part of it, for sure. There was at least one apocalyptic science fiction story about the Soviets testing a bomb underground and accidentally setting a massive oil field on fire. (it was called Anvil? Or written by Christopher Anvil? jeez, it's been a while...) But it's strange to see it commented on as the main concern.
If Earth's megacities get nuked I refuse to believe that it would not have consequences for the climate.
I think it's easy to lose scale/context when looking at things like nuclear test footage, so let's go the other direction. This [1] is the "Mother of All Bombs / MOAB / GBU-43" that was detonated in Afghanistan. It's the second largest conventional weapon ever fielded, weighing more than 20,000lbs and and 30+ft long (so that little blip on the screen is 30 ft for scale). It had a yield of 0.01kt. So now imagine something with literally hundreds of thousands of times greater yield - that's a modern nuke. Or, if it helps for visualization purposes, imagine hundreds of thousands of those raining down - same net effect.
So if nuclear war ever breaks out it's not going to be countries using their nukes to target isolated (and nuclear fortified) launch silos and bunkers in the middle of nowhere - they're going to try to destroy the other country (targeting things like population, economic, health, agriculture), so that they can completely eliminate the threat. And suffice to say - it won't take many nukes. The only reason you'd have thousands is to overwhelm any sort of future-tech missile defense systems as well as to eliminate any possibility for an effective first strike attack attack against you. Although even the nukes themselves are also designed to deal with missile defenses, with one missile often breaking up into multiple independent warheads on approach. This also maximizes the damage for reasons outside the scope of the post.
---
So the point of this is that thousands of nukes is already enough to basically destroy every single major city in the world and thus destroy basically every single country in the world. There's no scenario where suddenly you need to scale up to tens of thousands of nukes or whatever. In fact nations like North Korea already clearly have an effective deterrent with a stockpile that's in the tens of missiles.
another fun fact, the drop plane had only a 50% chance of survival with the 50MT version. They weren't _that_ worried about the crew's fate.
There are at least two falsehoods here. Of course missile silos will be targeted if it's possible to do so. If you're the Russians you might need to make an honest assessment of whether your weapons are accurate enough to destroy a hardened silo, but the US believes they can target silos (and has since at least the eighties).
And prioritizing destruction of enemy population over destruction of the enemy's nuclear weapons and other military assets would just be dumb.
US Cold War targets have been declassified. [1] That was from an era with less effective detection, and also where launching would generally involve planes, so airfields were targeted, but again you can see the extreme focus on agriculture, industry, medical, economic, and many targets simply labeled "population." The USSR's target list would have looked, more or less, identical. Modern target lists likely aren't even bothering with silos and just going for complete destruction of the enemy civilization.
Nuclear war, has as a prerequisite, the end of any sort of norms. It's not about destroying the opponent's military, but about literally destroying the opponent's country. Military can be rebuilt and redeployed - by targeting population, industry, economic, medical, population, and so on you completely eliminate the enemy's ability to ever be a threat again.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/23/us/politics/1950s-us-nucl...
[1] - https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb538-Cold-War-Nuclear... (a much more informative, but less approachable article/datacache)
In the case of US silos, it sure is. Nobody believes the doors on those silos would survive a direct hit (edit: meaning, a hit with a US warhead's sort of CEP accuracy), but if the warhead lands a mile away...
> The first is that they are deep underground and fortified to withstand nuclear blasts.
If you have any references indicating that Russian ICBM silos have been deemed by the US to be indestructible, I would like to read about that. It is possible to build a bunker deep underground that is difficult to destroy with a single warhead, yes, but what we're talking about is actual silos where ICBMs are deployed.
> but again you can see the extreme focus on agriculture, industry, medical, economic, and many targets simply labeled "population."
I see that being referenced as one potential target (category number 275, out of how many I'm not sure) of many. Not the subject of "extreme focus" as you've said here, nor a target that would be prioritized over the enemy's military assets, as you suggest in a parent comment.
(the real war crime is the design of that website)
> Modern target lists likely aren't even bothering with silos and just going for complete destruction of the enemy civilization.
I guess this is the gist of my disagreement with your comments. I have no idea why you would believe this. I'm not suggesting the people who do this kind of planning are humanitarians, nor am I suggesting I expect many people to survive a big nuclear exchange. My disagreement is: the idea silos would not be targeted by a party launching a first strike, in favor of hitting soft targets, is silly.
edit: there's enough wrong here that I could go a little crazy with responses. here's just a little more.
> There are also other practical issues - you don't know where every silo is,
If you're the US government, you view it as your job to know where all the silos, and to the fullest extent possible all the warheads, are. (and if you're the adversary, you're interested in using your silos as a tool for deterrence and negotiation, which wouldn't work if they all existed in secret)
> there are likely dummy silos meaning you end up completely wasting a high yield weapon, and so on.
Russia's strategy has included road-mobile ICBMs that are deliberately difficult to track, but if they've ever built fake silos, I've never heard about it. During the cold war that would have been problematic - the treaties involved inspecting silos. Post-cold war... I don't know, what's the point? In any case, do you have any evidence that this is something they've done?
I guess a cynical person could wonder about how well maintained those Russian ICBMs are today, and whether they're all really "fake silos." ahem You read pretty negative things, but I've never seen anything that seemed better than rank speculation.
A "dummy" silo does not mean a fake silo, though those may also be used, but simply a silo without a live weapon. Silos are cheap and be constructed extremely rapidly. Beyond dummies, there's also the issues of them having already launched their payload, hardened against attacks (which does not mean immune), and so on. Then there's also the nuclear triad in that weapons will also be coming from the sea and possibly from the air as well.
The goal of this obfuscation and deception is not to avoid masking how many weapons you have, but rather to prevent the enemy from being able to meaningfully disrupt your nuclear retaliation capability; in other words - to protect yourself against a nuclear first strike. In modern times it's unlikely either side believes they can significantly disrupt the opponent's nuclear retaliation capability (unlike in the past when strikes would generally have come from the air and had far lesser range overall), and so it simply makes much more logical sense to optimize the damage caused by your own strikes in pursuit of your opponent's "systematic destruction."
But asking in the clear under the pseudonym "transcriptase" here isn't going to get you put on the exact same lists? How do you think this list making process works?
There's probably a declared number where this matters, but the current number of warheads is high enough that's there's no need to make more. 3,000 is plenty to retaliate against an opponent with 30,000. More doesn't provide a benefit.
Nuclear disarmament, as practiced by the US and Russia is a negotiation to reduce the number of warheads in a coordinated fashion so that it's possible to convince warmongers on both sides that it's reasonable. The benefits are primary a reduction in cost to maintain and secure the warheads and a significant reduction in the risk of accidents related to the warheads. Mutual destruction is still assured --- you'd need a lot fewer warheads for that and involvement of other nuclear states; but then your question of production capacity would be more interesting.
I think a big part of this is that the long-distance missiles, when all of this was invented, were not very accurate. Sending 10 to do the job of 1 might have been necessary just to hit the intended targets.
Modern missiles are quite capable of precision strikes.
yes, this is also why yields have dropped considerably. I'm not sure if there are any > 5 MT weapons in the US arsenal anymore. I think most are in the 500-750KT range, the missiles and delivery vehicle are accurate enough to produce the same result as the larger warheads and 5-7 (can't remember exactly) warheads can be carried by a single missile. So instead of having one missile launch one giant warhead that may hit 50 miles away from the target you have one missile launch 5-7 smaller warheads that hit within 50 meters of 5-7 different targets.
If you eliminate your arsenal and then decide later you want it back, you're giving adversaries a lot of time to beat you to the punch, all the while advertising that you are pursuing nuclear as opposed to conventional weapons to fight your war.
As mentioned probably two posts up, any ramp up would be obvious to adversaries, have some lead time, and would take away from other production efforts.
I view arms control as a reduction of the number of variables in play (launch vehicles, warheads, etc). Both sides will always retain their God-given right to unleash nuclear holocaust, but both sides also reason they don't need 10,000+ warheads to do that. They can accomplish that goal with far less nukes than war planning 40 - 50 years ago called for. Partly that is due to accuracy having increased rapidly since gen 1 ICBM. There is a great book about missile guidance and accuracy, it is called "Inventing Accuracy". If you can't find a local copy or can't afford it, the Internet Archive has a PDF you can check out and read. Really insightful as to the "why" we don't require 30,000 nukes (1965) -- we only require ~5000 today and the enhanced accuracy makes them even more potent than prior bomb designs (which had a much larger yield).
Things like uranium and plutonium require digging up a lot of earth to obtain a tiny bit and the enrichment process is very complex and laborious as well.
I wonder if this really ramps up so easily.
To your specific point, I think if Ukraine had the keys to even one nuclear weapon and Russia believed they'd use it the invasion would never have happened in the first place.
Ukraine returning the nukes was a pragmatic move that, at the time, removed Russian military presence from Ukrainian territory. Think about it another way: the USA maintains nuclear weapons on other country’s territory. They sure as hell staff those sites with US troops!
Arming codes gives a nation time to recover or destroy them, but it’s not a long term solution.
More generally a handful of soldiers isn’t the full might of a countries military. Bribes, blockade until they run out of supplies, or just shoot them.
As to bombing 130 nuclear silos with non nuclear ordnance is problematic and doesn’t destroy the enriched uranium which means building a bomb from the wreckage isn’t nearly as expensive as starting from scratch. None of this came into play because the Ukraine government was still reasonably friendly at the time.
You seem to be missing the key point that I've repeated twice already.
UKRAINE DID NOT WANT RUSSIAN TROOPS IN THEIR TERRITORY.
There was no path to Ukraine maintaining the nuclear weapons while also NOT having the Russian troops on Ukrainian land. The discussion of "oh, they can re-wire the weapons" would have trigged IMMEDIATE WAR with Russia. Ukraine DID NOT WANT TO DO THIS.
I really don't understand why you're bringing up any other information because what I've written is the start and the end of the discussion.
Clearly war was one option to remove Russian troops. Saying there’s no options, is a vast oversimplification.
Call up the troupes on the phone and say we’re unhappy about those ICBM’s in our territory where going to start artillery bombardment noon tomorrow and suggest you leave before then.
Please explain how instigating a war with Russia leads to less troops on Ukrainian land.
There’s been 2 recent wars between Russia and Ukraine without any nukes involved. Nuclear bombardment of a country on your border isn’t such a great idea of a whole host of reasons.
“Leave us your nukes or we’ll take them by force.”
Talk me through the next steps.
As things stabilized inside Russia it quickly became too late, but actually shelling the location of using an EOD team to ‘destroy’ the nukes puts a different spin on things.
The USA would do nothing because why would they defend an antagonistic state trying to become a nuclear power?
If you think otherwise, you really aren’t living in the same reality as the rest of us.
How do I know this would have happened? Ukraine chose to give them back. They did the same calculation but, unlike you, they understand how things really work and what would really have happened.
Nuclear proliferation is the main reason I am pessimistic about nuclear power as the main global solution to decarbonizing. I don't think a world with 200 threshold nuclear states is a good idea, nor would that be in the interests of any of the major powers, most smaller countries should be aiming for a 100% renewables grid.
On the other hand, that's how we ended up with Hanford Site.
Turns out having fickle, lazy, stupid, feckless politicians have the ability to destroy projects with the stroke of a pen on a whim after every election means nobody is willing to put up their own investment, and having a business sector that is largely run by shithead middle management types who have never worked a day in their lives that wasn't just balancing a spreadsheet are unwilling to do something because it doesn't promise a HIGH ENOUGH return on investment.
God forbid you don't make ALL the profit.
At least the transparency can start a discussion hopefully.
If you want to saber rattle, you test new systems like hypersonic missiles that are capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Or you perform “military exercises” to show how capable and/or stealthy your nuclear subs and bombers are.
That's the entire point of nuclear weapons, isnit?
Edit: Unexplained downvotes are hopefully for my unclear wording. MAD is the doctrine of the US, but other places have doctrines ranging from "don't disturb our geopolitical sacred cow" to "escalation in armed conflict." Obviously there's reason to wonder whether everyone, pushed hard enough, would resort to nuclear weapons (an important consideration before putting an enemy on 'death ground'), but having stated policy that the weapons are not on the table is better than a stated policy that use would be justified “… also in the case of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons, when the very existence of the state is put under threat”, as Putin signed in 2020.
https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/read-the-fine-print-russias-...
> Between 2010 and 2018, the US government publicly disclosed the size of the nuclear weapons stockpile; however, in 2019 and 2020, the Trump administration rejected requests from the Federation of American Scientists to declassify the latest stockpile numbers (Aftergood 2019; Kristensen 2019a, 2020b). In 2021, the Biden administration restored the United States’ previous transparency levels by declassifying both numbers for the entire history of the US nuclear arsenal until September 2020—including the missing years of the Trump administration.
Source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2024.2...
Apart from the absolute number, is the collection of current weapons "more effective" (whatever that would mean -- some sort of fit for purpose) than the ~23K warheads at the end of the cold war? Or is it simply a subset of the devices in 1989, with some maintenance since then?
I believe the US is designing a new warhead, maybe the first since the end of the cold war (source, discussion at the nuclear testing museum in Las Vegas last month, perhaps not the most reliable source). What about delivery?
https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/12/in-search-of-a-bi...
The scientist Edward Teller, according to one account, kept a blackboard in his office at Los Alamos during World War II with a list of hypothetical nuclear weapons on it. The last item on his list was the largest one he could imagine. The method of “delivery” — weapon-designer jargon for how you get your bomb from here to there, the target — was listed as “Backyard.” As the scientist who related this anecdote explained, “since that particular design would probably kill everyone on Earth, there was no use carting it anywhere.”
Also nuclear winter is somewhat controversial, I don’t know what the latest model results are.
However, most of the delivery mechanisms are reaching block obsolescence and will need new replacements soon: the Columbia class ballistic missile submarine to replace the Ohios, the B-21 Raider to replace the B-2, the GBSD to replace the Minuteman III, and the LRSO to replace the ALCM from the same B-52s that flew in 1963 (literally the last year of production for a B-52). It's probably going to be something like a trillion dollars over 30 years, is what outside analysts figure. Because basically Stratcom has been saying "we'll just keep doing what we did in 1989, but smaller" since 1991, and the service lives of all the equipment has run out, and so everything needs to replaced at the same time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renovation_of_the_nuclear_weap... for the price tag.
~$20 Billion requested for fiscal 2025.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
Even with a 90% interception rate, 300 nukes would be enough to kill tens of millions of citizens of any country from the blast alone. If an enemy leader isn't deterred by that, 2700 extra nukes aren't going to change their mind.
The bombs are there because “the only way to avoid being the victim of a nuclear first strike (that having the enemy hit you with their nukes) was being able to credibly deliver a second strike.”
“Thus the absurd-sounding conclusion to fairly solid chain of logic: to avoid the use of nuclear weapons, you have to build so many nuclear weapons that it is impossible for a nuclear-armed opponent to destroy them all in a first strike, ensuring your second-strike lands. You build extra missiles for the purpose of not having to fire them.”
https://acoup.blog/2022/03/11/collections-nuclear-deterrence...
A submarine is inherently less predictable, yes, and in terms of ratcheting down tensions that is not always great.
There’s also some more science fiction level technologies proposed like using the nuclear signature of a sub’s reactor or using space based LIDAR to detect signs of the wake of a submerged submarine but I’ll defer judgment on those for now. But longer term I wouldn’t completely count them out.
That said, IMO hardly matters, sea/air leg of triad can be replaced by redundant / distributed land, not silos but road mobile TELs in hardened shelters probably for MUCH cheaper per warhead - PLA/PLARF model. Can have 1000s of cheap TEL trucks / fake warheads to play shell game and be just as impossible to decapitation strike as a few SSNs with 20 missiles. Mobile land leg just politically not sensible because it means unambigiously painting target on homeland, not just empty silo fields in bumfuck nowhere. IMO half the reason of sea/air leg now is they're out of sight/out of mind doing distant patrols. No one wants to see a nuclear TEL driving down the highway and process implications. If anti missile defense improves, cost/benefit of limited magazine SSNs gets even worse - a tube on a 2.5B+ nuke boat cost 100m to acquire + likely very expensive operation costs per shot to field. You can buy 500+ HEMTT 8x8 to hull around solid fuel ICBMs for that price. PRC can probably buy 1,000. Economics of nuke boats as delivery platforms outside of psychology does not seem to make sense, but civilian psychology when it comes to nuclear planning is very important.
Darpa toying with ACTUV expliclity because it was _dirt_ cheap vs relying on large surface combatants + air for ASW - small hulls with 10-20k per day operating cost vs 500k-800k per day ASW destroyer (US costs). It would be cheap to build out a fleet of ~50 small autonomous / minimally manned surface/subsurface fleet to follow the handful of SSNs on deployment at any given time. 30-80 ACTUV for surface ASW (US costs) is already 5-10 shadowing each deterrent patrol SSN. Economy of scale enters picture even if nuclear powered - danger is mostly political, parking reactors in adversaries EEZs. PLA relative cost vs USN acquiring/maintaining SSNs likely much cheaper / lopsided. Look at PRC's 80 type 22s that existed basically on the hope that it can deter the 1-2 carriers US normally throws in theatre.
As for mobile TEL / mobile land triad, like 30k+ HEMTT+LVSR has been built, and that's just Oshkosh Defense building tactical trucks. # of USD 300-500k heavy/tactical trucks globally in 100,000s. Add in land infra/tunnel/harden costs and you won't get close to 100m per shot. Can probably get Oshkosh to hammer out budget decoy TELs with autonomous driving without any of the the expensive TEL/launch hardware. Say what you will about US industry, US auto still pretty capable of building things that roll on wheels vs US ship building. SSNX is projected to be 5-7B per unit (200m+ per launch tube), that buys you a lot of road mobile launchers. E: USN plants to acquire like 30 of them. I would be very surprised PLAN needs to spend 150-200B on a ASW UAV fleet to counter that. That's ~400-600 054s frigates. An ACTUV drone would cost fraction of manned frigates. I think you're dramatically underestimating just how expensive US SSN force is / will projected to be and how economics will incentivize scope of counters.
No. Most fundamentally because secret deterrents are, by definition, unverifiable.
But I think that's giving Brett too much credit here. His argument rests purely in the realm of game theory and logical-sounding ideas. In actual practice, the US military has never in its existence ran an analysis of how many nuclear weapons would be necessary to achieve strategic objectives in any specific scenarios.
Brett later points out that:
> This buildup, driven by concerns beyond even deterrence did lead to absurdities: when the SIOP (‘Single Integrated Operational Plan’) for a nuclear war was assessed by General George Lee Butler in 1991, he declared it, “the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life,” Having more warheads than targets had lead to the assignment of absurd amounts of nuclear firepower on increasingly trivial targets.
Brett notes this, but it doesn't seem to give him pause or to cause his to reevaluate the validity of the doctrines he cites, even though those doctrines were largely written to justify what he rightfully describes as absurdities.
The US military has always, from the moment the nuclear bomb was invented, operated with the mindset of "more nukes is better". There is no conceivable number of nukes that would make the military go "okay, that's enough, we have enough to achieve our strategic objectives in any plausible scenario". As the quote above points out, giving them more nukes just makes them assign more per potential target.
The only administration that chose to conduct a survey of the SAC's war plan for deploying nukes, the fucking Bush administration under Dick Cheney, found that the plan was ridiculously overkill (hence the quote above) which directly lead to the US signing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.[1]
HN commenters in this thread are giving a bunch of rationalizations why the US's nuclear policy is perfectly reasonable game theory, but any times military analysts with clearance actually looked at the US's nuke arsenal and the plans to deploy it, their conclusion was the same: "We have way more than we need".
[1] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/the-illogic-of-nuclear-esc...
Citation needed.
This document is a description of the targeting process, which existed even when the actual output of that process was "every single city in Russia and China with a population greater than 50,000"
You don't need to bomb every station of a train line to cripple the line. If you want to stop car production, you don't need to blow up the car factory, the bolt factory, the windshield factory, and every single rare earth mine in the country.
Yet those are the kind of assumptions the US doctrine relies on.
Quoting from [1]: again:
> Another jaw-dropping example: One part of the nuclear war plan called for destroying the Soviet tank army. As a result, JSTPS aimed a lot of weapons at not only the tanks themselves, but also the factory that produced the tanks, the steel mill that supplied the factory, the ore-processing facility that supplied the steel mill, and the mine that furnished the ore.
[1] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/the-illogic-of-nuclear-esc...
And the theory will only be conclusively disproven if someone pushes the button.
I don't think two nuclear armed powers have ever declared war on each other - despite two nuclear armed powers currently being in active conflict (India and China) and another few being incredibly geopolitically unfriendly (India/Pakistan and Israel/Iran).
The whole idea behind MAD initially was that if Russia decided to get ideas in Europe, the Western powers would stop them with a nuclear curtain. That's why France has a "warning shot" nuclear doctrine, and the US hasn't ruled out Nuclear First Strike.
IMO, for what it was trying to stop, it worked. Ask people in China and India - it seems to be working for them as well.
EDIT: as an amendment to this: would Russia have been so bold as to invade Ukraine if the 1994 surrender of Ukraine's nuclear arsenal hadn't happened?
It’s kinda like economics. We can’t really prove anything in economics works the way we think it does, but we have a bunch of REALLY GOOD suggestions to support our hypotheses.
MAD isn’t a natural law - it’s a social construct, very much like economics.
Alternatively if non-linear greenhouse process cause something like "all clouds disappearing suddenly", then nukes could be part of a last ditch effort to induce a nuclear winter to allow us time to find Ling term solutions.
Lastly, it is the USA. Why have 300 weapons when you can have 3,000.
Current warheads = 3.7k
I wonder how long a nuke in storage lasts - ie, how much work does it take to maintain a stockpile of x nukes, and if you can turn those swords into ploughshares relatively easily.
Decades, certainly. All but the first few generations of bombs were designed for long periods of storage.
Notably, many of the TOP500 supercomputers were built with the singular goal of simulating the ageing of nuclear weapons in storage.
If a supercomputer is owned by the DoE or SANDIA, then that's what it is for.
> turn those swords into ploughshares relatively easily.
Yes! Cold-war era warheads from both the Soviet Union and the US have been used as nuclear fuel. A notable one was the Megatons to Megawatts program: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program
The plutonium in bombs is essentially "super high grade" reactor fuel. Even degraded after decades in storage it is still far, far better than what is typically used. It just needs to be converted into the MOX (metal oxide) fuel pellets and then used in a reactor, pretty much as-is.
One good example would be NERSC at LBL- it's unclassified research only, and their series of supercomputers were never intended to simulate ageing nuclear weapons.
Hard to say exactly what goes on in the classified supercomputers, but they certainly weren't spending much of their time simulating aging nuclear weapons- that was the ostensible reason.
US weapons also rely on tritium gas "boosting" to operate reliably and efficiently [2], and tritium decays with only a 12.3 year half life. The gas reservoirs of weapons need their tritium replaced at significantly shorter intervals. Even manufacturing enough tritium to maintain the stockpile has become a challenge because the US has retired its Cold War era weapons-material reactors that used to operate at Hanford and Savannah River. Currently the US uses a power reactor owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority to make tritium for weapons [3].
It's possible to make nuclear weapons (even thermonuclear weapons) with only uranium 235 for fissile material and no stored tritium. Such weapons could last a much longer time without active maintenance, since U-235 decays thousands of times slower than Pu-239. However, they would be larger and heavier for the same explosive yield, which complicates delivery. They would also lose certain safety features. Finally, without being able to perform full scale tests, it is doubtful that the US would have the confidence to replace its current high-maintenance weapons stockpile with a new generation of low-maintenance weapons.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockpile_stewardship
[2] https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq4-3.html#Nfaq4.3....
[3] https://www.wvlt.tv/2022/05/24/watts-bar-lone-source-nuclear... "Watts Bar lone source of a nuclear weapon material; TVA increasing production"
If you too would like to know way more about nuclear weapons than is useful in civilian life, I'd recommend reading:
Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb
The nuclear weapons FAQ, authored by Carey Sublette, a hobbyist researcher who is extraordinarily dedicated to understanding nuclear weapons from declassified documents and physical principles: https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html
Anne C. Fitzpatrick's dissertation Igniting the Light Elements: The Los Alamos Thermonuclear Weapon Project, 1942-1952: https://www.osti.gov/biblio/10596
The Arms Control Wonk blog/podcast: https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/
Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein's blog Restricted Data: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/
The nuclear weapons subreddit, particularly posts on it authored by Alex Wellerstein, Carey Sublette, and a few others whose names currently escape me: https://old.reddit.com/r/nuclearweapons/
Chuck Hansen's book "U.S Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History" (out of print, sadly; will have to pay $$$ or find a scanned pirate copy) and his massive book/PDF "The Swords of Armageddon" available for purchase here: http://www.uscoldwar.com/
Extrapolating from the general sad state of the weapon systems in use by Russians where they are at this point unpacking tanks made in 1950, the quality of maintenance on their vehicles, and is difficult to plausibly claim that all the ancient rusty USSR stuff across the strategic rocket barrier is in any sort of usable shape.
Now, if an order to launch is given, some rockets may launch, some of those may actually fly, some of those flying actually get somewhere, and perhaps some of THOSE may actually detonate should they reach the target, and maybe if you're lucky at the designed yield. The percentages in that funnel that aren't known. And nobody [perhaps except some crazies] wants to find them out because even one in the middle of big city is enough.
There is no more ancient rusty USSR stuff -- at least in the Kremlin's strategic nuclear arsenal:
According to one comment I saw here a few weeks ago, Russia's nukes are probably made of wood.
I suggest searching the web for "Russian nuclear weapons modernization", restricting yourself to credible news outlets.
Opinions are fine, but the evidence against your opinion is currently stronger.
https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2024/0...
I think you're likely wrong about that last part. I would be willing to bet that certain US 3-letter agencies know very well what the percentages in that funnel are. It's clearly enough that the west is careful about direct confrontation with Russia.
Some choice quotes: "Vladimir Putin has the old politburo to thank for the huge stockpiles of weapons that were built up during the cold war"
"Russia’s ability to build new tanks or infantry fighting vehicles, or even to refurbish old ones, is hampered by the difficulty of getting components. <...> The lack of high-quality ball-bearings is also a constraint."
"They [military firms] also largely depend on machine tools imported years ago from Germany and Sweden, many of which are now old and hard to maintain."
Given that the country has no ability to produce ball bearings - and in other news, even nails, and can only cast gun barrels in single digits on western equipment, consider me HIGHLY skeptical that any rocket modernization that was supposed to have transpired has gleaming ready to fly stuff. More likely the money was "razpil" (разпилено) - literally "sawn off".
Still, lets hope we don't have to find out
Does it matter?
The thing about a nuclear *deterrent* is that it doesn't have to work. There just has to be a realistic possibility that (at least some of it) it might.
That's peace time thinking. Little Boy was detonated over Hiroshima without ever having performed a full scale test of the design. Our knowledge and modeling capabilities today are more than sufficient to produce and stockpile a new design that is guaranteed to work -- without testing an actual weapon -- if that somehow became necessary.
There are many reasons why a nuclear power such as the US is unlikely to consider doing this, but lack of confidence in weapon design or manufacture is not among those reasons.
The major deterrant is the LGM-30G Minuteman III [1]. Most of our rockets use liquid propellants. Since the alert window is under 10 minutes, you can't keep a liquid-fuelled rocket permanently fueled so the Minuteman was developed as a solid rocket fuel booster.
There's a whole team responsible for maintaining the boosters and warheads of this first line of defense [2].
But there are a variety of other systems. Some dropped by strategic bombers, others on mobile launchers, shorter range missiles deployed in Europe (eg MRBMs in Turkey), nuclear weapons deployed on submarines and so on. Also you have a mix of types. AFAIK the US was moved away from highly-enriched uranium weapons in favor of plutonium. Or at least, HEU reactors have shut down. Maybe there's a sufficient stockpile? Also, a lot of these weapons will be thernonuclear so you have to worry about the production and storage of tritium. IIRC a lot of tritium is a byproduct of plutonium production.
Maintaining a significant nuclear arsenal is actually really complex and expensive.
Huh? The Titan II was developed to do precisely that and worked that way for decades, they were liquid-fuelled and kept fuelled in their silos.
But you are right that the Titan II is liquid fueled and was kept permanently fueled in the silo. I’m not entirely sure how to resolve those two facts. The Wikipedia page about the Titan II does mention multiple accidents and fatalities related to propellant leaks, so I’m guessing that they were just more risky to operate?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_ex...
This should be required reading.
You absolutely can! The Soviet doctrine was to use storable liquid propellants in their ICBMs - typically unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) as the fuel and nitrogen tetroxide as the oxidiser. I don’t know if they need the fuel/oxidiser replaced periodically but that combination is storable for over a decade.
The US went with solid rockets as they are more reliable - no turbines or valves etc - at the expense of performance, but the US perfected making large solid rockets before the USSR. The USSR however perfected oxidiser-rich staged combustion which extracted a lot more performance.
Storable liquid propellants are still used on satellites and deep space missions that need to perform large course corrections during their missions.
> Most of our rockets use liquid propellants.
Which ones? As far as I know the US only has solid fuel nuclear armed missiles. The Minuteman and the Trident.
> others on mobile launchers, shorter range missiles deployed in Europe (eg MRBMs in Turkey),
The US only has aircraft dropped bombs in Europe. The US retired their nuclear capable rockets and cruise missiles under the INF treaty in 1988. They retired their nuclear artillery etc at the end of the Cold War.
The (liquid fuelled) Jupiter missiles were removed from Turkey in 1962 after the Cuban missile crisis, in exchange for the USSR removing their nukes from Cuba, though there are still US nukes in Turkey.
> Also, a lot of these weapons will be thernonuclear
All of them are.
Russia's nuclear stockpile -- at least the strategic warheads -- have all been built anew since the end of the Cold War. The US is also modernizing its stockpile in the same way, but it has not finished yet.
"built anew": made with all new components except that the fissile material is recycled from an old Cold-War-era warhead. (They probably re-cast and re-machine the fissile material.)
The reader might be asking, How can Russia, a poor country, afford that? Well, nukes aren't that expensive once you have the fissile material and the design and manufacturing expertise and infrastructure. The pay for the soldiers to guard the nukes and constantly be on the ready to launch them is more expensive, according to one report I saw recently (and Russia has low personnel costs).
1, 4, 8, etc. per warhead, thereby increasing your capability while claiming a reduction?
Are you thinking MIRV where multiple nuclear warheads are mounted to missile? The US has down rated lots of SLBMs and ICBMs recently. Many of the warheads in storage are from missiles. They could put them back, but then they would show in the active count.
Of course if the war doesn't come as a surprise but with a lot of buildup, then you can remount everything over a few weeks.
Also, the US is still following New START treaty after Russsia pulled out.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targe...
It looks like it was deployed back in 2009 on the warheads on Trident SLBMs. From [0]:
"Before the invention of this new fuzing mechanism, even the most accurate ballistic missile warheads might not detonate close enough to targets hardened against nuclear attack to destroy them. But the new super-fuze is designed to destroy fixed targets by detonating above and around a target in a much more effective way. Warheads that would otherwise overfly a target and land too far away will now, because of the new fuzing system, detonate above the target.
The result of this fuzing scheme is a significant increase in the probability that a warhead will explode close enough to destroy the target even though the accuracy of the missile-warhead system has itself not improved.
As a consequence, the US submarine force today is much more capable than it was previously against hardened targets such as Russian ICBM silos. A decade ago, only about 20 percent of US submarine warheads had hard-target kill capability; today they all do."
[0] https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni...
But even that's not true. The hardened targets are designed to be hardened against the capability of the potential attacker, that whole arms race thing.
We dropped vast tonnage of dumb bombs in WWII simply because we had to contend with a) getting the bombers through in the first place, and b) ensuring the designated target was effectively damaged.
Replace a fleet of B-17s with a B-2 and some precision munitions, and you get a net win of effectiveness.
Same with nuclear weapons. When you can miss by a country mile, you need a warhead sized so that it doesn't really matter. Better precision in guidance and fuzing is a "good" thing.
The dark side, smaller weapons, potentially, are "more usable" with "fewer side affects" (which is also a "good" and "bad" thing).
That being said, there are LOTS of ways to deliver warheads. The one that scares me the most is that the Russians have hidden ones pre-positioned in our 40 biggest cities or so.
Fun Fact: The russians don't even have to fire their missiles to wipe us all out. They could set them all off in their silos and create a nuclear winter that would accomplish the same thing.
edit: Sorry to pile on, you went from 0 to 3 replies in the time it took me to write this.
Reagan's so-called "trust, but verify" policy.
I find it difficult to accept that any party to those agreements would actually reduce anything without having equivalent plans B, C, and D.
I am not a weapons expert so thank you for your insight.
Of course it isn't foolproof, and each party can and will maybe try to sneak a few more warheads somewhere. But those inspections at least provide some rough limit on the sneakiness, because if they had more than X% more, we would have noticed or so...
There's a lot about nuclear winter that is controversial, but having nuclear weapons go off in their silos is one thing that almost everybody can agree can't cause a nuclear winter. The basic premise of nuclear winter is a) nuclear explosions on cities cause massive uncontrollable firestorms b) that pump soot into the stratosphere c) which causes massive global cooling. If any one of those links in the chain fails to hold, then nuclear winter just can't occur. A nuclear weapon going off in its silo will be more of a massive earthworks project than a firestorm, especially if the silo isn't located in the heart of a city with lots of juicy combustible material to cook off all at once.
I find it hard to believe you seriously consider this, even in the absurd world of MAD-driven decisions.
Simply put, for it to be even remotely likely would require that none of these devices had as of yet been discovered, nor the intelligence nor logistics surrounding them been compromised or otherwise intercepted.
Consider that if such a situation were to be true, and uncovered, that the only possible responses would be either immediate action to have them removed, immediate retaliation, or allowing them to exist. In the first two scenarios, the weapons are no longer relevant, whether because they’re removed or war has started. In the final scenario, we’re functionally at the same place as we are with the traditional nuclear triad, albeit far closer to the precipice due to reasons made clear in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
All of this to say, the challenges, costs, and risks of enacting such a situation, as utterly ridicule-worthy in their totality as they are, can perhaps be hand-waved away by pointing to other Cold War era events. However, to argue this has actually been done, despite the entire lack of any strategic benefit, and the immeasurable net loss of position and risk to the Russians that results? Come on.
> MIRV ICMB produced and deployed by the United States from 1985 to 2005. The missile could carry up to twelve Mark 21 reentry vehicles (although treaties limited its actual payload to 10), each armed with a 300-kiloton W87 warhead. Initial plans called for building and deploying 100 MX ICBMs, but budgetary concerns limited the final procurement; only 50 entered service. Disarmament treaties signed after the Peacekeeper's development led to its withdrawal from service in 2005.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-118_Peacekeeper
So, that's what we had been doing for a couple decades. The most crazy ass nuclear cluster bomb.
Now we're still trying to replace the LGM-30 Minutemen ICBMs we have had since 1962: Northrop Grumman's LGM-35 Sentinel. And it's taking forever & costing an unbelievable sum ($200B, $210M/missile including ground systems, although they're back to the drawing board to try to get costs down). https://www.defensenews.com/air/2024/07/08/pentagon-keeps-co...
This is after Minuteman was ~$7m/missile, a super-cheap cast-solid-fuel design, with McNamera shutting down efforts on more expensive & fancy Atlas and Titan missiles. Weighing 1/9th the weight of the monstrous Soviet R7. One persistent dude (Hall) convinced everyone we didn't need fancy we needed a survivable competent second strike capable missile swarm. Minuteman is wild. There are some great submissions on it; the communication network submission from three days ago was fabulous & shows very much a Paul Baram of RAND/Arpanet style network resiliency idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41019604
Also of note, Minuteman's original D-17B computer is also quite the thing. There are some great submissions on it. It uses an early hard-disk like thing as working memory. It uses diode-resistor logic (DRL) since diode-transistor-logic (DTL) wasn't reliable enough yet. Incredibly stunningly built guidance computer that was core to a reliable totally cutting edge inertial guidance system.
Anyhow yeah, we built them decommissioned utterly crazy multi-warhead missiles. And are trying and having trouble going back and building a new single warhead ICBM.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_and_USSR_nuclear_sto...
And of course, as the sister comment said, an announcement of dick-size.
https://www.newsweek.com/american-b52-bombers-historic-nato-...
The head-on hit-a-bullet-with-another-bullet-is missile still impossible, although many would like us to believe they are already here. Nuh uh.
Plus those are still useless against nukes delivered inside ton of cocaine.
amenhotep: "You said Hitler was a great man."
https://world-defense.com/threads/thaad-terminal-high-altitu...
sorry I couldn't resist
There is currently a perception of a disparity of capabilities in tactical nukes. There is parity in strategic nukes because of the New Start treaty [1].
Here's a report to the US Senate about the tactical nukes [2] produced in April 2024, and here's a quote by Putin lifted from that report:
> On June 16, 2023, President Putin declared, “We have more such [tactical] nuclear weapons than NATO countries. They know about it and never stop trying to persuade us to start nuclear reduction talks. Like hell we will …. It is our competitive advantage.”
Then how many tactical nukes do Russia and the US have? The perception was that Russia has between 1000 and 2000 and the US just a few hundred, but the numbers were uncertain.
I think this report sends the message that the US has thousands of such tactical weapons, not just a few hundred. The message is not exactly spelled out but here's my reading.
The only current tactical nuke in the US arsenal is the B61 [3]. More than 3000 were built, but it's not clear how many are still available today. The latest versions are B61-12 and B61-13, of which 400 were supposed to be made (in total, not each). The current number of B61-12 and B61-13 is not available, and I saw an estimate of 100 [4].
With this report, we can infer the total number of B61. How? The number of strategic warheads is capped at 1550. The latest US report [5] is that the number as of January this year was 1419, but this includes heavy bombers (B52, B1 and B2), of which there are 60, so actual deployed strategic warheads are 1359.
The total number in the nuclear stockpile according to this new transparency report is 3748. The report explains what this number represents:
> all types of nuclear weapons, including deployed and non-deployed, and strategic and non-strategic.
I can't find number of non-deployed strategic warheads, but I think it should be very small, otherwise the arms treaty is a total joke. The difference between deployed and non-deployed is quite minimal, for example the non-deployed weapons have their tritium bottles removed.
So my guess is that the majority of the 2389 number above is B61 tactical nukes. Not all of them are deployed or active, but they can become so in a very short timespan.
I think this is the message that the US is trying to send.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_START
[2] https://www.state.gov/report-on-the-status-of-tactical-nonst...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B61_nuclear_bomb
[4] https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nuclear-weapons-who-h...
[5] https://www.state.gov/2023-report-to-congress-on-implementat...
Perhaps. I don't think it the disparity really matters that much. Either Nuclear deterrence works or it doesn't. Once the first nuke goes off, all bets are off.
> US allies are worried that maybe the US nuclear umbrella is not that strong after all.
I imagine that US allies do worry, I suppose that has been the case since NATO's inception. But I don't think it's about the strength of the umbrella. It is the willingness to, after having offered shelter under it, actually employ nuclear weapons.
Ukraine, is another question. If Russia employs tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, I don't think having a few hundred more B-61s (or a few thousand more tactical nukes to be deployed by hypothetical means) would be relevant. There are only so many aircraft that are equipped to fly them, crews trained to use them, and only so many "targets" to hit, before targets becomes another word for cities.
At least initially, I assume that any US/NATO nuclear response would be on Russian targets occupying Ukrainian soil, hoping to avoid retaliation.
All this is so depressing and scary.