America prepares for a new nuclear-arms race | Hacker News Reader

America prepares for a new nuclear-arms race

economist.com

25 pointsworstspotgain61 comments

This increases the likelihood of accidents and misinterpretations triggering a nuclear war, which is inevitable as long as these weapons exist.

The first bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945 and the world has successfully avoided incidents, accidents, etc. from spiraling out of control into a full-scale exchange for 79 years. Will this continue for 10 more months? 10 more years? 100 years or longer? Nobody knows, but the thing we do know is that there's a non-zero chance of the worst happening.

There's a book about incidents worth reading called "Command and Control": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_(book) that's worth reading if you want to better understand the risks we're dealing with by having nuclear weapons.

The problem is that reducing the (admitted) number to zero does not necessarily reduce the overall likelihood of use, given that knowledge cannot be erased.

Not disagreeing with anything you said, just curious if you have a proposed solution.

I think eliminating nuclear weapons is out of the question. We see that over and over again when nations that don't have nuclear weapons get dominated by nuclear nation-states, which sends a clear message to non-nuclear countries that they should develop nuclear weapons if they care about their sovereignty.

The next best thing is to try to slow down how fast the destruction unfolds.

There was actually an incident where NORAD's terminals lit up with a full scale nuclear attack from Russia. They only had a few minutes to determine whether or not to launch a counter-attack. During that time they found out somebody left a training tape on the "production system" and fortunately it ended there. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2020-0...

The world got lucky on that day. In my mind this incident is the same as the "configuration management errors" we see take down huge websites. It's just a matter of time.

My proposal would look something like at traditional arms treaty with limits to the size and number of warheads, but I'd also add to that a time dimension. Maybe we agree to allow 10's of weapons that can be deployed in minutes, then there's another tranche of 100's of weapons that take more time to prepare... perhaps it takes hours to deploy them, or days. This would give people more time to determine if the threat is real and possibly let cooler heads prevail.

I have no idea how that would be enforced and how nations would prevent other nations from having a secret stash of deployed nuclear weapons.

So much for build back better.

Always enough money for war and weapons, while the infrastructure, education, and health systems disintegrate.

Federal spending on transportation, education, health, and social services outnumbers defense spending by over 4 to 1.

https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function

And in my opinion, compared to the first half of the 20th century, pax Americana is well worth that 13.5% chunk of the budget. War is also bad for health.

You're blending some very different numbers there, social security and Medicare are huge, while federal spending on transportation is lower and education is a pittance.

We spend enormously on education; in most municipalities it's going to be the majority of your property tax bill†. The distinction is that education is primarily funded locally, and the military is entirely funded federally. If you add up all-source funding, they might be neck-and-neck.

† People get tripped up on this because school systems are often their own taxing bodies, so they look at their city budget or whatever and see huge line items for police and fire and nothing meaningful for schools, but if you go to your county you can probably get the breakdown of all your local taxing bodies on one page and see where that misconception is coming from.

"Federal spending", I said.

What's the point of pulling out federal spending? When the federal government decides to devolve a policy issue out to the states, that isn't necessarily indication of its importance as an issue. Law enforcement, for instance, is a hugely important national issue, and is almost entirely local. I assure you that Americans care deeply about having good fire departments; the federal government doesn't fund them.

OP linked to a breakdown of federal spending.

I'm not pursuing an angle here, just lending detail.

Got it, thanks.

Yes, I added them together, because that was the same comparison being made by the parent comment. The reason federal spending on them is low is because transportation and education are mostly within the administrative purview of the states.

Whether intentional or not, it’s a common rhetorical trick when talking about the US budget. You can make anything plausibly related to health and retirement or general welfare look huge by lumping it in with social security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Including Social Security in contexts where it probably shouldn’t be included is also used on its own to make other parts of the budget look smaller. Its funding source is separate from the general budget, so including it sometimes doesn’t make a lot of sense, depending on the topic at hand, but you’ll see it dragged in to make the pie larger and make other spending look smaller.

In what sense is Medicare spending not medical/health spending? How is that a "rhetorical trick"?

Lumping much smaller items in with any of the very small number of huge items in the budget can be misleading, is all, in a “ants are really heavy! Why, this other piece of material with an ant on it is a bit more than ten kilos!”, where the other thing is in fact a ten-kilo piece of steel, sort of way.

One can do things like say, “foreign aid is out of control! Why, our defense and foreign aid spending is XX% of the budget!” to imply that the foreign aid portion of that is more than a rounding error, which it is not.

I'm sorry, I'm still not following. Yes, Medicare spending is a huge component of total federal spending because Medicare has lots of beneficiaries. But that's true of schools and transportation and, yes, military (which is dominated by opex).

Weird, why don't US has decent train network across the country still and people are scrambling for clean water in places? China did it in 20 years while US rebuilt the WTC.

The US has the largest train network on the planet, even larger than the entire EU combined. It is just primarily used for cargo.

"Defense" spending (the US is currently involved in "defense" by its involvement in bombing Yemen, Gaza, Russia and other countries) is considered very narrowly - you don't count veteran's benefits as military spending. You don't count interest on the debt for past military spending as military spending. You don't consider international affairs spending, very wrapped up in military spending, as military spending. You don't count NASA's military work as military spending.

Everything is military spending if you consider anything two or three degrees removed as military spending.

THIS.

Well, technically those might be negative spending to the extent that they are arms sales not offset by any subsidy or aid. Certainly, the cost of disposal for many of the older shells would have been higher than sending them off to Ukraine has been.

Even the M4/M16 5.56 (223 cal) is now being replaced with the XM7 using 6.68mm ammo so that will all also have to be disposed of too (likely with the weapons). I don't want them on the streets here, and I'm not sure some wouldn't come back wherever in the world they're sent.

Arguing whether sending weapons to a government and if it is justified is a reasonable conversation, but trying to claim they are particularly expensive (when they aren't) dilutes that point. Further, NASA's military work is paid for from the defense (or black) budgets not the publicly available ones so I'm not sure that's a great argument either.

The US spends a trillion dollars per year on education, an astounding number compared to other countries even on a per capita basis. There are few issues that would be solved by diverting military spending to other already indefensibly bloated budgets.

It isn't an argument of should the government be spending this money on something else but more if the government should be spending this money at all. Particularly given the budget deficits.

What suggests that the money approved for infra, education, and health is getting diverted?

What suggests that there is suggestion of it being diverted?

The parent claims that the infrastructure is disintegrating even with all of the funding currently being given to it. Said with the implication that more funding for war magically appears when there is threat of war, but not when infrastructure is under threat.

The money doesn't have to be diverted. The Pentagon, who regularly fails audits, generally gets whatever they ask Congress for. Throw in concerns of a nuclear arms race and we'll print whatever money they ask for.

Agreed, on healthcare our government spends ~2x the amount it spends on defense.

Medicare: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W824RC1 ($0.99t)

Medicaid: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W729RC1 ($0.95t)

Defense: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FDEFX ($1.048t)

What should a good ratio be?

We also spend around way more per capita on health care than any other country. I bet both health care and defense expenditures could be reduced significantly if they were run with at least a little efficiency and less profit making by middlemen.

Depending on who you categorize as "middlemen", this health analysis is a common misconception: our outsized health care spending comes from providers, not insurers/payers. We just do more procedures (we lead the world in making procedures doable quickly and outpatient-ly) and pay our medical staff more.

Agreed, there's not some organization taking a fat cut, it's a matter of overall demand, namely subsidized demand. We hamstring our healthcare supply in a variety of ways while massively juicing demand, which leads to increased prices.

America spends $4.5t a year on healthcare[0].

~$2t of that comes from the government directing taxed dollars towards healthcare for certain classes, per my previous comment in this thread. If your goal is to reduce our per-capita healthcare spending I see a fairly brutal and swift solution that would halve our spending, and put us below most European countries[1].

This is conjecture on my part, but I would imagine the remaining spending would also fall as the consumers have to bid less money for access to the healthcare resources that are newly freed up.

Further conjecture, I believe we may be able to have our cake and eat it too if we reduce the years of study necessary to start practicing medicine, and reduce our roadblocks to importing foreign-trained doctors. The UK may be trying something similar[2].

[0]: https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo...

[1]: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

[2]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/nurses-doctors-deg...

The whole system is corrupt and overpriced. Hospitals, insurers, PBM and many others make a lot of profit by ripping off patients.

If you work the numbers out based on expected utilization levels, extending Medicare to all residents in the United States gets you an administrative overhead fraction that resembles that of private health insurance, so I'm skeptical that insurance has much to do with it.

That would defeat the purpose of our health care system and military-industrial complex.

it would be nice if America could do the minimum that the rest of NATO theoretically agree to and spend just 2% of GDP on defense. Right now that figure is 2.9%.

Consider that most industrialized countries would have nukes by now if the US hadn't guaranteed to come to their aid if they are attacked by a nuclear power in exchange for their not trying to acquire nukes.

Unfortunately among higher order mammals one being above the rest usually is one of the few ways to have peace.

A reminder that "money for weapons" is also a major 50-states jobs program; there are reasons having nothing to do with bellicosity that kind of spending is sticky.

You could take that same money and fund jobs to build things that don't kill people

Yes, and you would end up firing hundreds of thousands of voters. By and large Americans don't even agree with the overt merits of the policy you're proposing, but even if they did.

Why is it that "creative destruction" is so celebrated here right up until you propose eliminating jobs that murder people (either in the direct manner, or indirectly by needlessly denying them care etc) and replacing them with jobs that don't do that. Suddenly all that "people will adapt, people will need to retrain" shit goes right out the window in place of "won't somebody please think of number?"

I don't personally care, though unlike you I believe that the median United States citizen does benefit from our global military supremacy and that it's probably worth what we're spending to maintain that position. But the point I'm making is more banal than that: people do not like "creative destruction". We have a lot of stupid weapons programs that aren't doing anything meaningful to preserve our ability to project force; we keep spending money on them because voters in the districts they're built would freak out at the prospect of their towns being gutted. That's not a normative claim!

As is so often the case, the real, useful answer to all of this stuff is that it simply isn't up to message board nerds like us to make these calls, and our axiomatically-derived top-down economic plans are worth all the paper they're not printed on. My point is simply that there's more to military spending than a values statement about military force.

> unlike you I believe that the median United States citizen does benefit from our global military supremacy

Oh no I agree with this. I think the cost/benefit ratio is going up, but it's still less than one. I just happen to think that exporting 2x misery abroad to alleviate x misery here is not a viable long-term strategy. Moreover, I think it's hideous to celebrate it as though you're getting some great deal, even if you do get material benefits from the arrangement.

> That's not a normative claim!

You should try making some. Or at least think about them.

I get more normative the more I think I understand issues. On stuff like this, I'm really just trying to figure out what's actually happening, and noting that the standard-issue rhetoric is concealing a lot of verifiable positive claims.

Yeah because nationalization of non-defense industries leads inevitably to corruption, waste, and either complete destruction or incredible mismanagement of whatever value the nationalized industry previously created. Every time. Every student of history of the last two hundred years knows this.

Sorry, I'm not seeing the connection to nationalized industries. Arms manufacturing isn't nationalized.

My read on the hypothetical described in the first paragraph is that a) an indefinite stalemate with Ukraine would defer this possibility to a time world circumstances will be different, b) trajectory of US industrial manufacturing expansion following CHIPS act will relegate Taiwan to medium importance and once in that position the US will not risk all-out-war to protect it, c) North Korea matters most if the former scenarios are in play, relations with China will still be cold without a war but they would not be keen to sanction NK aggression owing to potential response

I think the scenario laid out in the first paragraph would literally be World War III.

America’s doctrine is to be ready for WW3 so that we don’t accidentally have to fight WW3. If everyone knows that we can fight them even while at war elsewhere, it discourages any great power wars from starting.

Yep and will more than likely happen if any superpowers engage in direct war.

https://archive.is/jcjx2

Everyone near a ex empire is currently scrambling for nukes.

Not Ukraine: when Washington started providing aid to Ukraine, it no doubt made it clear what it expected from Kiev in return (unless the US foreign policy establishment is even more incompetent than I have suspected) and almost certainly, Kiev's not trying to acquire nukes was one of the explicit expectations.

All the nuclear power plants today are concentrated on the US east coast. Could it be a defensive posture against ICBMs flying from the Pacific Ocean?

I’m not sure I follow. Is the argument just that nuclear power plants are related to nuclear weapons because both use fission to do their jobs? Why would such power plants be a primary target for city-killer “strategic nuclear weapons” more than, say, an entire city?

In any case, isn’t the shortest path [0] from the missile fields [1] over the arctic?

For what it’s worth, though, I’d vaguely understood that distribution [2] to involve a combination of seismic instability on the West coast and populations too sparse to be worthwhile in the inland areas of the vast American West.

[0] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=jgn-jfk

[1] https://fas.org/publication/a-closer-look-at-chinas-missile-...

[2] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph241/manuel1/images/...

It doesn't matter where the nuclear power plants are. If nuclear war starts the world ends.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com