Is it possible that over the years the number of nuclear devices per warhead has increased?
1, 4, 8, etc. per warhead, thereby increasing your capability while claiming a reduction?
1, 4, 8, etc. per warhead, thereby increasing your capability while claiming a reduction?
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.
[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).
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.
> 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.