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Every time I’ve seen nuclear stockpiles and the reduction thereof discussed, I’ve wondered: Assuming for some reason the United States needed to ramp back up to an absurd number of warheads (ignore the MAD/political practicalities), how quickly could they do so? What’s the lead time or rate limiting factors in production?

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.

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It works the same as industrial capacity for things like planes or artillery shells. Once you ramp up production you can produce lots very quickly, the US produced 70,000 between 1945 and 1990, averaging 30 per week with a peak rate around 54 per week; but building out the factories to ramp up takes a long time - for the first 10 years the US averaged 6 per week. Most of the US's nuclear production capacity was dismantled. With WW2 levels of hustle and disregard for safety, we could probably build new facilities in around a year or two. These efforts would be pulling resources from attempts to ramp up production of other wartime necessities. Also you don't just need to build the nukes, you also need to build adequate delivery systems, which are all advanced aerospace manufacturing.

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.

I'm sure someone here knows -- how many actively procured munitions could have their payload swapped for a nuclear payload? Are there "rules" against building "nuclear compatible" munitions?

Yes. And yes. Treaties for arms reduction deal with not only warheads but also delivery vehicles. Protocols include mutual inspection of disabled vehicles, etc.

I have a hard time imagining that anybody with the resources to secure a nuclear warhead in the first place would later be prevented from using it just because it wasn't plug-n-play compatible with their existing trebuchets or whatever.

It's not about "later" it's about "now". You don't inspect standing stockpiles and delivery mechanisms to say "See? We will never have the capability to nuke you", you do so to show that you're not currently building and are not currently sitting on a pile of nukes.

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.

Are treaties still worth something? In a world where authoritarians defect the "global community" and start wars of conquests that violate MAD , are those papers and laws still worth something?

The "global community" was never a thing. In the fist decade of the UN some countries made an effort, quickely it became a power grab political nightmare that never actually resolved anything.

In my eyes they are. For what it is worth, with the exception of this recent period (Ukraine), both the US and Russia for the most part made pretty good-faith efforts to comply with what their diplomats signed. I'm sure there were undeclared vehicles that were not disclosed, but I imagine those are not that plentiful, and certainly not in the quantity that would make a strategic difference (thousands sitting spare, ready to fly, all it needs is a warhead mounted an hour before launch).

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).

Hmm yes but the other things you mention are made of steel which is plentiful.

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.

Pit production is likely the rate limiting factor.

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.

I guess mass produced nukes would rather be enriched uranium based, due to the far easier construction. No fiddly implosive lens assembly. No weird multi-phase cristallization that goes critical if you blink. Metal that is merely as dangerous and nasty as lead, magnesium or arsenic, not plutonium.

If you really want to go carpet-bombing with nukes, miniturization isn't as important as having a lot, quickly and reliably.

Enriching uranium is more expensive than making plutonium by a long shot. Modern nukes are two point implosion, not really fiddly. And when was the last criticality incident related to phase transition? Can't remember one.

> Enriching uranium is more expensive than making plutonium by a long shot

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.

[1] https://www.uxc.com/p/tools/FuelCalculator.aspx

That's worryingly cheap, but it also feels unlikely due to all the fuss made over stopping Iranian centrifuges.

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?

The webpage that calculator is on is maintained by a nuclear industry market research company, UxC. UxC does not itself run enrichment facilities, but Urenco does, and here's a calculator provided by them [1]. The output of the calculator is separation work units (SWU), the standard unit used in the industry. The two calculators produce exactly the same result.

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.

[1] https://www.urenco.com/swu-calculator

It's probably a lot easier if you're recycling the semi degraded stuff out of the outdated warheads that need to be dismantled anyways.

Does the U.S. make weapons-grade U235 anymore except for research? I thought gun-type fission weapons were phased out for safety and efficiency reasons. I also thought essentially all "fission" weapons today are fusion-boosted, and I thought the implosion type was the only production-ready design of fusion-boosted weapons.

The US isn't producing HEU anymore but still has a decent sized stockpile of it.

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.

Plutonium is very corrosive and sensitive to phase changes so it needs to be refurbished and replaced regularly. The weapons grade plutonium lying around is probably not bomb ready.

I'd have to imagine that this material is stored in glass/argon. Corrosion should be controllable over long time horizons.

Without casting the military as lying, if they declare they have <x> weapons in substantive state to be used, and place them in missiles, then the implication is they maintain a stockpile of pits capable of meeting that supply, constantly.

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)

Well, surely we could train an AI to do the assembly. /s

Scientifc American deep dive into plutonium pit production in operation at a new facility at Los Alamos:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/behind-the-scenes...

Rocky Flats manufactured triggers. What’s pit production?

The core of the big modern (relative term here given these designs are pretty old by now) bombs are implosion fission devices that then trigger a secondary fusion explosion. The core of that primary bomb is a plutonium ball called a pit that gets crushed to trigger the initial explosion. Then the xrays released by that get reflected and use in a secondary fusion device in the tiny amount of time the shell of the bomb lasts.

https://ananuclear.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/53f947439e...

A bit better explanation:

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.

In case you didn't know what a pit was, like me:

“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?

There is no form of full scale nuclear war where the production apparatus for anything becomes a factor.

> no form of full scale nuclear war where the production apparatus for anything becomes a factor

Where full nuclear war means a full exchange of strategic fire, yes. For tactical nukes or bombardment of a non-retaliating state, less so.

It's not clear there's any such thing as "tactical nukes" given that they're strategically useless, and it's actually not even clear there's such a thing as nuclear exchange that isn't full scale war. At least as told by Ellsberg in the Doomsday Machine, there was literally no mechanism for the US to launch a partial nuclear attack.

> no mechanism for the US to launch a partial nuclear attack

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.

Are you saying that just because the great circle from US to NK goes over Russia? Can we not fire on a less optimal trajectory? Or from a submarine?

You can fire an SLBM from the Pacific or the Sea of Japan without traversing Russia or China.

Assuming you're striking first, yes. Nuclear subs take ~15 minutes to deploy, though, and that isn't the first option when counter striking. The U.S. president has six minutes to decide/launch a counter attack from the missile silos.

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.

On the other hand, NK is not launching a first strike that can take out all US land-bases ICBM sites anytime soon.

Isn't Jacobsen a bit of a crank? Some of her other books include ESP And Area 51.

I'm pretty sure she isn't. I take it as more of a research effort into highly classified areas of the government. She doesn't really push a narrative IMO.

NK's geographic position is interesting. Unless US boat is launching east from PRC's Yellow / Bohai sea / PLAN bastion, there isn't a trajectory to NK that doesn't look like it's heading towards PRC mainland. And even then, unless timed during summer months, prevailing winds is going to push fallout / radiation towards BJ. During winter downwind will drift to SKR / JP / east coast PRC. I don't know what proportional counter retaliation is, maybe a few nukes off CONUS west coast urban centres, but PRC isn't going to sit there and eat incidental radiation over major population centres even if target is NK.

Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to Russia that the US is attacking NK and not just nuking Kamchatka?

Can the trajectory of an ICBM be inferred by the height of it’s arc?

> Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to Russia that the US is attacking NK and not just nuking Kamchatka?

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.

Thanks, that’s helpful, I’ll checkout that book

Against North Korea why would the US even use an ICBM? Why not a B-2 flown from Guam or from the continental US?

I take tactical to mean something like "< 100 kilotons", meaning the damage would be much more limited than a large device. Those devices certainly exist. Where it's somewhat plausible a nation could use one and face some retaliation that doesn't escalate into a global doomsday.

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.

My gripe is not about the nomenclature but about the usefulness of such weapons.

That doesn’t make any sense. Just drop it by a conventional non ICBM method

All these other comments should just go read the book, it's worth it and a good, if horrifying read. What 'no mechanism' above means is that for many decades the SIOP consisted of 'launch everything'. The only way it was a 'plan' was to time the arrival times to avoid fratricide. This btw meant that even if there was a 'tactical' shooting event in Western Europe, all the targets in China would have been hit, even if they weren't involved. Needless to say, Japan was never informed of this....

From a MAD game theoretic perspective that makes a lot of sense. To avoid non-essential use of nukes, only give policymakers the option of launching everything. Then they will only launch in extreme circumstances. Hopefully only circumstances where there are already missiles inbound.

This avoids the possibility of gradual nuclear escalation, which can be more easily miscalibrated.

This seems somewhat impractical, assuredly - plans would have been made in a dark drawer for the case that an earstwhile allied country became politically unstable.

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

There are a limited set of scenarios where a major nuclear state might use a tactical weapon against a lower-tier state. For example, if the USA got into a conflict with Iran and we had actionable intelligence that they were assembling a nuclear weapon in an underground bunker then we might take it out with a small number of tactical nuclear ground strikes. I'm not recommending this but you can game out scenarios where this seems like the least bad course of action.

B-2 bomber crews regularly train for this exact mission.

but why use a nuke? we have all sorts of non-nuclear weaponry. we have bunker busters that can penetrate hundreds of feet.

even if iran can't retaliate with nukes, the geopolitical cost would be insane.

Iran has some ultra tough concrete. I question if even our best bunker busters can penetrate them.

>"Iran’s underground nuclear facility could be between 80 meters (260 feet) and 100 meters (328 feet) below the surface... That could be a problem for the GBU-57 since the US Air Force stated that the bomb could rip through 60 meters (200 feet) of cement and ground before detonating. US officials have talked about detonating two of these bombs consecutively to guarantee the destruction of a location. However, the new depth of the Natanz tunnels still poses a significant obstacle." [1]

[1] https://www.eurasiantimes.com/us-flaunts-massive-ordnance-pe...

The US military has a long history of making technically true statements about it's weapons, but which are still misleading.

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.

This feels overly dismissive of the difficulty, but here is a more detailed article if you are interested.

https://www.twz.com/iranian-underground-nuclear-facility-may...

I can see how it comes off as dismissive my bad - it was intended to be a "take such analyses with a grain of salt if you aren't privvy to classified, relevant information".

Things would have to get very very dire to go the tactical nuke route for the US. Not only is there a fear of tactical nuclear war escalating to strategic war there's the fear of demonstrating tactical nuclear war is feasible. If it works and Iran's nuclear capability is destroyed and nothing else happens then it will be all to easy for another power to use tactical nukes and then nuclear weapons become a common component on the battlefield. That makes escalation to the big strategic weapons easier.

The main difference between tactical and strategic comes down to intended use. Tactical nukes are intended for battlefield use, strategic nukes are intended to end other civilizations. They also come in different delivery methods. For instance there are tactical nuclear landmines, artillery, and so on, whereas most strategic weapons are just going to be missiles and ICBMs in particular.

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.

> there are tactical nuclear landmines, artillery, and so on,

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.

I take the disarmament claims with some degree of skepticism. Alot of these weapons provide substantial flexibility and destructive capability, which superpowers are generally not fond of relinquishing. A lot of the nuclear disarmament stuff hit its peak in the years following the collapse of the USSR, at which point US and Russian relations looked very positive and optimistic moving forward. We're now back to lows not seen since the Cold War.

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

The question is "does the other side start launching their second strike against your cities once the first 'tactical' mushroom cloud is seen"?

Wargames have answered that quite clearly. Proud Prophet [1] is what you're looking for. All sorts of different approaches to nuclear engagement were trialed and they all ended up in the end of the world, or at least the end of North America, Europe, and most of the northern hemisphere, alongside just about everybody living there. The scenario you're describing would fall under the 'de-escalatory nuclear strike' category - same outcome. The outcome of these wargames is what drove the shift more towards seeking more of a de-escalatory approach with the USSR.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proud_Prophet

I dunno...too hypothetical a question to answer, since we already have enough nukes to destroy everything and nobody is going to reduce their arsenal to one.

That is assuming nuclear war breaks out with zero warning. There is usually a build up to wars that could involve ramping up production of a nuclear arsenal before any nuclear weapons are actually used.

What type of warning do you expect to see? We currently have a war in Ukraine involving between 2-4 of the major nuclear powers depending on how you want to count them (Russia, US, UK, China). Russia is bleeding heavily and it is hard to tell how close they are to some sort of internal crisis or collapse into groupthink by the military leaders. There have probably been Able Archer style near misses and we could have a repeat of the Cuban missile crisis without much changing. China is building up its nuclear arsenal and the political positioning in APAC suggests that a US-China war is on the cards.

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.

Maybe we aren't at 0 warning at the moment, but if there is a spectrum from 0 warning to imminent, we are close enough to 0 that the distinction doesn't really matter. The US, UK, and China are not actively fighting in Ukraine and even if they were, this wouldn't be the first time these countries have directly fought each other in a proxy war in the nuclear age. So unless you think the Russian military personnel that would actually carry out a full scale attack on the West would prefer destroying civilization to losing in Ukraine, I would expect some type of escalation beyond the position we have been in for the better part of the last 80 years.

> I would expect some type of escalation beyond the position we have been in for the better part of the last 80 years.

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...

Is that NATO currently in the room with you?

This is purpose of NATO - to prevent the lines on the map from changing. Ukraine may not be a member of NATO officially but it doesn't need to be - the Soviet era reason for Ukraine is the same as the NATO, a buffer state.

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.

Nope. NATO did change the lines on the map.

But thanks for playing.

The USSR asked to join NATO, which was quite funny to learn about.

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.

Perhaps, he saw the result of NATO aggression against Serbia?

"Russian paratroopers seized Slatina airport to become the first peacekeeping force in the war zone" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_bombing_of_Yugoslavia

Which was a surprise at the time, and left some convinced it was a UN rather than NATO operation.

One or more nuclear powers has been at war for basically the entire nuclear era. They have all had wars in which they have "lost more troops than in any war since WWII". Even if this is the end of the Putin regime, this wouldn't even be the first time that the Soviet Union/Russia collapsed. I don't know what the path you think you see from where we are now to "full scale nuclear war", but it seems incredibly silly to suggest "the situation is more tense than it ever has been before", especially after you have already name checked Able Archer and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

> I don't know what the path you think you see from where we are now to "full scale nuclear war", but it seems incredibly silly to suggest "the situation is more tense than it ever has been before", especially after you have already name checked Able Archer and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

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.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis the US dropped depth charges in the vicinity of the Soviet submarine B-59. This was meant as a sign to surface, but it was interpreted by the sub as an attack suggesting war had already broken out. The Soviet rules of engagement allowed for the launch of nuclear weapons in this situation if all three of the sub's highest ranking officers agreed. Two of them were in agreement, but Vasily Arkhipov disagreed. His decision that day single-handedly stopped nuclear war.

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.

That is kinda my point though - you don't seem able to predict that sort of thing with foresight. Before the Cuban missile crisis you wouldn't have seen a path to nuclear war. During the crisis you probably wouldn't have seen a path. For 40 years [0] after the crisis you wouldn't have believed there was a path.

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.

> Before the Cuban missile crisis you wouldn't have seen a path to nuclear war. During the crisis you probably wouldn't have seen a path.

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?

> The whole reason it was labeled a "crisis" was because it made the path to war incredibly short.

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.

> fairly civil dispute over where people stationed military assets

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?

It nearly led to nuclear war. Obviously it was a provocation. The USSR was trying to provoke the US as far as I read the story.

But compared to the Ukraine war it was a pretty civil dispute. Nobody was intended to get hurt.

> They've made it quite clear that they want the war to continue until something in Russia breaks.

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.

That's simply not going to happen. The West isn't sending enough military aid to tip the scales, and this is an existential war for Russia and they are managing it well enough.

The likelihood of it is kinda irrelevant, if it were to happen I expect it would satisfy "The West", hence the want the war to continue part sounds wrong.

> They've made it quite clear that they want the war to continue until something in Russia breaks.

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 really don’t understand tankie logic. The nation that has been your geopolitical rival for a century is suddenly the beacon of western civilisation and ideals, despite stating they hate you and everything you stand for, and then attacking a country for merely thinking of allying with you!?

“I believe everything this former KGB operative says about my government! Finally, a neutral party without self-interests who can reveal the truth!”

How often you you come across people saying any of that, though? That is a straw man position of the people pointing out that this conflict was quite a likely outcome of NATO's persistent expansion and that the strategic pressure on Russia has been extraordinarily damaging to US interests, European interests, Russian interests and the global security situation. The only people who ended up benefiting from NATO expansion so far have been India and to a lesser extent China.

> How often you you come across people saying any of that, though?

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.)

> organizing direct strikes in Russian territory

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.

It makes more sense when you figure it’s projection.

That’s when it gets scary too.

Russia has very good influence operations and seeds this type of propaganda. It’s all over on social media.

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.

Nuclear war is the one situation Putin can't guarantee his own survival, which is ultimately the only metric he cares about.

The chances of a Russian fizzle are very high given the maintenance issues with the regular army, but nobody wants to take that bet.

From ChatGPT: Normalcy bias is when people underestimate the possibility and impact of a disaster, believing things will always stay the same. It leads to inaction and unpreparedness during emergencies.

“Civilization destruction” isn’t a realistic scenario and I think people need to get over that. It’s not the 1980s. It’s almost certain what would actually happen is one or two pop off in a conflict zone like Ukraine and then nukes start getting used tactically like conventional weapons.

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.

>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...

People can barely afford to exist now, not only would there be real wealth destruction through the course of the destructive war there would be a significant reverse wealth effect kicking in. A veritable economic implosion. WWII had a stimulus wealth effect following on from a Great Depression deflationary super-cycle capped by being able to destroy the completion by having them bomb each other. WWIII has none of those, so any belief that the impact to the average individual could be less than completely ruinous is completely misplaced.

I think it's common knowledge that preventing a tactical nuclear war from escalating to a strategic nuclear war is basically impossible. Even a tactical nuke targeting a military base in its entirety is strategic enough to warrant a response targeting an industrial center (city). Then there you have it, the strategic nukes launch on population centers.

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.

>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.

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.

Nukes aren't magic, but they are very compact:

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."

This line of thinking is both wrong and frightening. Military escalation is always messy and uncertain, and history is full of wars that escalated beyond either side's overall interest. Imperfect information, poor decisions, and tactically reasonable but strategically catastrophic decisions are all ways that can lead to things getting out of hand.

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.

Interestingly the very reason why nuclear weapons and the logic of their deployment are so dangerous and unstable, so much that two geopolitical adversaries with lots at stake actually agreed on never using them, led us nowadays to underestimate the danger of nuclear arsenals because in so many years "nothing bad happened". Human psychology is just not very well adapted to stay in perpetual alertness. We tend to normalize situations unfold over long periods of time.

> 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.

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".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0N7TpqZI-E

> (Russia, US, UK, China)

+France

France being the only sensible one putting Putin back in his place by telling him "we also have nuclear warheads" instead of "we avoid escalation". That's how nuclear deterrent is supposed to work.

That strategy would work if you weren’t trying to reason with a Soviet-era psychopath whose only concern is his own legacy. If he’s on his last legs tomorrow you don’t think his final move will be nuclear revenge? This man has demonstrated that he will kill anyone who gets in his way, even his own citizens, in brutal ways.

That "psychopath" (more exactly - sociopath) values his palaces and riches more than burning in a nuclear war. I.e. he can bluff and blackmail, but he is a coward who is obsessed with money and hedonistic pursuits. That's why the idea conveyed to him that if he makes any nuclear attack he personally will be immediately killed (by conventional weapons) made him tone his idiotic threats down by a lot. Those who see their legacy in palaces with golden toilet brushes aren't going to die as martyrs.

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.

Can't enjoy palaces and riches if you're on your death bed. Think about it. You've been a dictator for 20 years and killed anybody who stood in your way. Delusion has set in and you're convinced you've been poisoned by your enemy. Why wouldn't you get revenge while you still can?

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.

He'll try to enjoy them until the last moment, or flee to Africa in the style of Nazis fleeing to South America and such. That's his whole mentality - a thug who can only intimidate and blackmail but is an essence a coward.

> 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.

> biggest risk of a nuclear war breaking out that the species has ever faced

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 a nuclear exchange over these relatively small-ish issues would be peak idiocy

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.

We have the warning. Now would be the time to start building more weapons. Maybe that is what the transparency report is about, so we can show that we've done so next year?

During times of escalating tensions with a resourceful geopolitical adversary, you would try to cool things off with diplomacy but simultaneously... start building lots of new nuclear weapons?

Smart!

Agreed. It’s over in half a day. Ramping up production is a rung on the escalation ladder. It’s generally good to have more rungs.

It’s not a given that both sides have nuclear capability.

megaton size has not been disclosed. The majority could be small nukes.

full scale nuclear war where the full quantity of warheads is used would be over in maybe 1hr tops. Initial attack, detection, response. Then probably another attack and another response from remaining SLICBMs and then that would be it. I don't think any capacity to create more would survive or change the outcome and therefore is not much of a deterrent.

Force replenishment in the event of nuclear war is a moot question, but if someone can go from 100 to 1,000 warheads in a couple months, that has a lot of relevance in a growing crisis--what would Russia have done in 2022 if Ukraine had kept the ability to manufacture them and was able to build 100/year?

That's a good point, i read this thread top to bottom because this topic has always been fascinating to me. Others have brought up how war wouldn't go from 0 to missiles flying immediately, there would be a crisis and build-up period. So I can see something like that ability to mass produce nuclear weapons and demonstrate it acting as a deterrent and therefore be useful.I can't think of an instance off the top of my head where a massive arms build up caused the other side to back down though.

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.

I know you asked a slightly different question but I watched a video about Ukraine’s nukes and the reality is they could never deploy them without Russia. The codes always stayed with Moscow and Russia would have forcibly maintained a presence on Ukrainian soil to protect their nukes.

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!

If USA maintains nukes in Turkey that does not mean they have enough troops in Turkey to protect the base against the entire Turkish military, should they decide to steamroll it. They rely on nuclear codes more than they rely on tanks to stop nukes falling into the wrong hands.

They don't actually have to. The 5th and 6th fleet coupled with the various large air bases in the vicinity would have little trouble it pancaking the entire site before the Turks managed to make off with anything if it really came down to it. It's tanks all the way down.

Turkey allows those troops to be there. Ukraine did not want Russian troops on their soil. Forcibly ejecting those troops would have likely triggered a confrontation with a far more competent Russian military than the one we see today.

Replacing the electronics is fairly trivial compared to building an atomic weapon from scratch.

Arming codes gives a nation time to recover or destroy them, but it’s not a long term solution.

How do you do that when the Russian military won't let you near the weapons?

Ukraine had physical control of these weapons. They handed them over in 1994, 3 years after the fall of the USSR for assurances Russia would respect their borders.

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.

Everything I read stated that Russian military was in possession of the weapons, but they were located within Ukraine. Perhaps bribery was an option, but Russia had the ability to destroy them at any time, either by scuttling them or bombing them.

Operational control yes, but the assumption was these weapons where sitting in a friendly territory. Ukraine definitely had enough control for diplomacy to come into play. ~1,700 nuclear warheads spread across a large number of different sites is a nightmare to try and secure when the country was effectively falling apart.

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.

> the assumption was these weapons where sitting in a friendly territory

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.

> no path

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.

Apparently that path came with consequences that made it less attractive than giving it all up.

Many options were less attractive, but the government also had very close ties with Russia at the time so there was an impetus to find an excuse to hand them over.

Yes, the option in that case was “get nuked into fucking oblivion by the Russians” and know the USA would not have stepped in. I’m sure the Ukrainian top brass spent a long time wargaming that one </sarcasm>

Please explain how instigating a war with Russia leads to less troops on Ukrainian land.

Leave we are going to start shelling that location tomorrow isn’t a declaration of war, it’s a threat. What happens afterwards can vary quite a bit, rather than your simplistic understanding of how the world works. Starting a war when the country was in the middle of a total economic collapse was hardly a viable option for Russia at the time.

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.

What do you think Russia’s response to that would be?

“Leave us your nukes or we’ll take them by force.”

Talk me through the next steps.

Timing is a big deal here the day after USSR dissolved likely would have gotten them to leave. Our nukes is an arbitrary viewpoint, it’s not like the USSR limited nuke production to inside Russia.

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.

You’re living in a fantasy world if you really think this. We’d have seen Ukraine cease to exist by 1993. If Russia wasn’t in a state to fight conventionally, they’d have nuked Ukraine.

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.

Correct but it's still a deterrent to a conventional invasion even if it doesn't deter a nuclear first strike. Japan and South Korea are nuclear threshold states and that would factor into China's decision making.

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.

It could have been interesting if tying our grids to, and providing some amount of free energy to, non-nuclear states was a concession given for non-proliferation treaties.

It literally was but the pariah states don't really have a need to a lot of nuclear reactors.

> googling required to get an answer would put me on lists I don’t really feel like being on.

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?

I would assume that asking a question in the comments section of a relevant article, and making clear why I’m doing so is slightly less flag worthy than randomly googling questions about logistics and production.

If lists like that are being made, then Googling would put you on a huge automatic list that would be queried only as part of a targeted inquiry. But asking in comment section of relevant article would put you on a short "immediate action" list.

You have good training for living under a police state, being submissive to authority and not asking why or having any concern for your rights. Your social credit score must be high. I'm curious did you learn this in "lockdown" drills in your elementary school?

This is the 'chilling effect' in action.

> 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?

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?

I'd also like to add to this; that the ability to consecutively create additional warheads is not of any particular inherent value, especially when our reserve count is more than enough to wipe out any and all civilization - regardless of target diversity.

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.

What do you imagine happens when thousands of nukes explode? The Earth splits into pieces?

Nuclear winter??? Strange question.

It's not a strange question: many falsehoods get repeated over and over on the internet and here on HN.

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...

Who said anything about petroleum storage tanks? The conversation around nuclear winter in relation to nukes is because it's an understood consequence of 100-some Hiroshima-sized warheads being detonated between two major city centers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Climatic_effect...

>Who said anything about petroleum storage tanks?

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 a completely serious question, what about the non-influencer scientists, the ones doing actual detailed physical modelling, what were they saying?

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.

I can't speak to the actual research but after reading various declassified documents from the Soviet Union and Maoist China, I can say truthfully that they did not believe the world would end with a nuclear exchange. Both countries had 1st strike scenarios - both believed some aspect of their government and country would survive.

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

If you have any links handy for the documents from China and the USSR, I’d love to read that.

I don't recall petroleum fires being a huge part of the dialog, back when nuclear winter was a big public topic, such that I'd bring it up first thing and to the exclusion of other concerns.

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.

I saw 9/11 cloud on TV. That was one building.

If Earth's megacities get nuked I refuse to believe that it would not have consequences for the climate.

When Canada was on fire last year, we had smoke all down the east coast. I don't know if it affected the temperature, but it sure affected the environment. it doesn't need to go full ashen-winter to fuck up plant growth cycles for farms and whatnot, I'm sure.

I never claimed it wouldn't have consequences for the climate, but there is a big difference between that and the assertion I am replying to, namely, "our reserve count [our current inventory of nukes] is more than enough to wipe out any and all civilization".

Since when is Carl Sagan a climatologist?

The US has plenty of any conceivable war. There is probably long time to restart production since haven’t done it in a while.

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.

Standing stockpiles matter in a ever changing and destabilising world. We can't imagine it now but what if the US (or any other nuclear power) started to destabalise, maybe end up in a civil war, fracture up into smaller pieces, what ever. The less nuclear weapons you have lying around during and after that process the less opportunities for things to go terribly wrong.

> 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?

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.

> 3,000 is plenty to retaliate against an opponent with 30,000. More doesn't provide a benefit.

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.

> 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.

This is a big part of why the long lines bunkers/sites were abandoned. Once the accuracy increased to more than 1mi the resilience of the bunkers and sites were folly. (built to withstand multiple mt within 1mi)

Let's talk about just how destructive nukes are, because I think most people grossly underestimate this. One bomb in Hiroshima killed hundreds of thousands. And that was a tiny little bomb relative to modern standards - 16kt of yield in a mid-sized city of ~350k people. Modern tactical weapons (weapons intended for battlefield use) can have yields exceeding 100kt. Strategic weapons (weapons intended to end other civilizations) go into the thousands of kt. The strongest weapon ever tested being "Tsar Bomba" which had a yield of 55,000kt, so a few thousand times greater yield than the Hiroshima nuke - which was by itself enough to instantly destroy a mid-sized city and kill more than 40% of its population.

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.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6rSxJnpGNg

To add to this, the Tsar Bomba was so large, it created a shock wave that circled the globe _3_ times.

Another fun Tsar Bomba fact. If you build a thermonuclear weapon’s bomb casing out of U238, the fast neutrons released by the fission/fusion reactions cause the U238 to fission, increasing the yield by about 50%, while also increasing the fallout. The Tsar Bomba variant tested was utilizing a lead casing, because the Soviets were worried that the 100MT version would kill the crew dropping it, and irradiate a significant amount of territory. It is weird to think about how the one tested was the half strength version.

> Soviets were worried that the 100MT version would kill the crew dropping it,

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.

> 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.

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.

It's not just about accuracy. Targeting silos comes with multiple problems. The first is that they are deep underground and fortified to withstand nuclear blasts. The second is that even if you believe you can disable a silo, there's a very good chance that by the time your nuke gets there - what was in the silo has already been launched. There are also other practical issues - you don't know where every silo is, there are likely dummy silos meaning you end up completely wasting a high yield weapon, and so on.

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)

> It's not about accuracy.

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.

Reread the source. We were aiming for quote, the "systematic destruction" of urban industrial targets. To be clear, that quote is coming from the released documents, not the site covering it. We were explicitly targeting population in each and every city, alongside other non-military targets.

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."

You don’t have to imagine, here’s a web site that lets you model the impact: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/. I positioned the “moderate” 1MT single warhead strikes at all nearby army and naval bases and concluded that I won’t be incinerated right away, but will die of radiation sickness and starvation instead.

Isnt the enriching process super slow? https://education.cfr.org/learn/reading/how-do-countries-cre... this article puts somewhere in months, but you are still limited by the number of centrifuges and probably some other factors.

The US has tons and tons plutonium from old nuclear weapons. Enough to build tens of thousands of 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 final cost of an h-bomb at industrial scale was estimated at 10k in the 1960s (for low yield).

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.

Given the surprise with FOGBANK, I don’t have high hopes for it going fast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank

Like many other things in the US that we don't do any more, if you found the right people (many of whom are retired) and gave them the right amount of money (copious) and eliminated all the "pesky" bottlenecks (environmental analyses, legal challenges, etc), it would take a year to start producing weapons.

On the other hand, that's how we ended up with Hanford Site.

This has not shown to be the case as we have seen with American artillery shell production. The companies are not yet ramping up, because they don't want the ground cut out from under them if the war ends early next year and congress decides to cut any funding.

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.

I suppose the easier solution (not that I'm advocating it) would be to lie about disposing of them in the first place.

My guess would be fast enough if you’re talking about a Cold War, not fast enough if you’re talking about a hot one.

Nukes tend to blow up all your stuff quite a bit faster than you can build more of it.

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