A Sneak Peek at Eric Schlosser's New Book on Nuclear Weapons
motherjones.com
motherjones.com
This is not particularly true. Hypergolic fuel mixes are less efficient than LOX/LH2 (which is nontoxic (exhaust is water vapor) though still hazardous of course) and LOX/RP-1 (more or less nontoxic again. RP-1 is just fancy kerosene). The only real reasons to use them in first stages^ is that you can store them in the rocket (problematic with cryogenic fuels/oxidizers like LH2 and LOX since they will boil off over a short period of time) and the ignition system is simpler (not really a big deal).
LOX/RP-1 was actually used with earlier ICBMs like the Soviet R-7, the American Atlas. Storable hypergolic fuel mixes followed these, though now modern ICBMs are solid fuel rockets (storable, and safe for people on the ground).
Hypergolic fuel mixes have caused issues for non-military rockets too. During Apollo-Soyuz there was a leak of N2O2 into the Apollo capsule. Not a very good situation at all, but for that application they are really the best tool for the job. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo-Soyuz_Test_Project#Re-en...
^ Hypergolic fuels are also useful in engines that you need to start/stop multiple times, and in upper stages that need to store their fuel for a while.
http://www.amazon.com/Ignition-informal-history-liquid-prope...
There is a PDF available here, since it's a wee bit hard to get from Amazon: http://www.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with...
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_sa...
It's also interesting to note no where in the article do they talk about how the US has continually reduced its nuclear stockpile, or that we've been at the forefront of promoting non-proliferation.
What's also missing from the article is several policies from the Bush Administration which sought to update the technology we already have to keep the technology a lot safer and easier to maintain like the Reliable Replacement Warhead program:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliable_Replacement_Warhead_Pr...
"The Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) was a proposed new American nuclear warhead design and bomb family that was intended to be simple, reliable and to provide a long-lasting, low maintenance future nuclear force for the United States. Initiated by the United States Congress in 2004, it became a centerpiece of the plans of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to remake the nuclear weapons complex. In 2008, the Congress denied funding for the program, and in 2009 the Obama administration called for work on the program to cease."
Not sure. Nuclear weapons serve a purpose in war, that is to take out a large installation, an air force or a navy base, say, with just one hit. Then you send in ground troops. But whatever "host of middle eastern countries within grasp of nuclear technology" there may be, they still have no capability to invade North America. On the other hand, the United States have the capability to invade any Middle Eastern country. The scenario is very unlikely.
The real risk is false alarms, and the true heroes are Vassili Archipov and Stanislav Petrov. These, and their unknown American, British, French, Chinese, Indian, Pakistani and Israeli counterparts.
Not really, in a tactical sense in any war short of WWIII. No one can really use them without the threat of massive reprisal. No rational player would use them to take out an air force base.
Strategically, they're only really good for holding a gun to everyone's head (including your own). That can apply on a scale from the small and crazy (North Korea) to the huge, dysfunctional, and bankrupt (USSR).
You can, of course, use them if your opponent is not capable of a massive reprisal - which the Soviets weren't until the late 1960s (at least against the United States). That's why Curtis LeMay, and later Thomas Powers, were so keen to land a "Sunday punch" on the Soviets - fortunately the political leaders of the US (notably JFK during the Cuban crisis) would have nothing to do with such a plan - to their eternal credit.
A fairly interesting novel describing a world where LeMay had got his way is Resurrection Day:
And the USA, to be fair.
Would the US risk a major incident with China or Russia if India and Pakistan decide to lob small nuclear warheads at each other? What if one of those powers aligned with one side or the other?
The real risk is false flag ops. Say Tel Aviv vaporizes tomorrow and no one takes responsibility. Who do we nuke? They'll be demands we blast "somebody" of course. As everyone knows, the enemy of the day would probably be Iran. Now the Iraqis have no great love of the Iranians, so the logical thing for any upwind country to do, is when they obtain a special weapon, use it to frame a downwind country that's known to be further along the process than they are.
I believe this is a major part of the motivation for the Iranians to build their own nukes. Obviously their neighbors benefit by framing them, so their only hope is to build a deterrent force before they get framed.
Who benefits if Pakistan and India degenerated into a limited nuke war? Well whoever that is, is somewhat likely to want to encourage it, which wouldn't take much.
This is the hidden danger of the US/Russia MAD scenario, we could take onesie-twosie potshots at each other with no retribution because someone else would be blamed (probably China) The fact this fairly likely scenario hasn't played out is pretty interesting.
we are a dumb species
"Hans Blix personally admonished Saddam for "cat and mouse" games and warned Iraq of "serious consequences" if it attempted to hinder or delay his mission.
In his report to the UN Security Council on 14 February 2003, Blix claimed that "If Iraq had provided the necessary cooperation in 1991, the phase of disarmament – under resolution 687 – could have been short and a decade of sanctions could have been avoided.""
He also famously got tricked by Sadam prior to the 1991 war ... any particular reason he should have gotten extra respect when he said the same thing again?
whether Blicks was himself a scientist is unusual but not relevant I guess - its just following the trail of evidence that matters.
Yes, Blix and company had a set of methods that in theory could detect active WMD programs.
But when put to the real world test before 1991, they utterly failed; per Wikipedia: "It was only after the first Gulf War that the full extent of Iraq's nuclear programs, which had switched from a plutonium based weapon design to a highly enriched uranium design after the destruction of [the] Osiraq [reactor], became known."
So there was no reason their subsequent pre-2003 invasion opinions that said exactly the same thing should have been given much weight, let alone be allowed to end the discussion with an invocation of "Science!".
(That was a particularly difficult situation, where Sadam himself believed he had some active programs but underlings where pocketing the money, and we still don't know exactly what he shipped to his neighboring Baath Party frenemies in Syria, just that there was a lot of it, and 1991 showed he was willing to send stuff that he'd otherwise lose to even his worse enemies (e.g. planes to Iran). For all we know, if Iraq was making binary munitions they could have been the source of the nerve gas apparently used by whomever in eastern suburbs of Damascus last month.)
Whereas isotope analysis after a nuclear warhead has been lit off is a conceptually much more straightforward thing. You're not e.g. trying to prove a negative, you know there was a device and that it came from somewhere, you're just trying to figure out the somewhere.
;-)
But the problem is:
1980s: Their Evidence turns out to be a False Negative
2000s ("Oughts"): Our Evidence is Negative.
If they'd said "Our Evidence is Positive" it would be interesting. But it being Negative isn't so useful, is it another False Negative, or this time a True Negative?
Even today we know it was in part a False Negative, since Sadam himself thought he had some active programs; I don't think their Negative was of the "Sadam's spending the money but his underlings are pocketing it" type, which is not the sort of thing they or anyone not running a spy organization could have determined prior to the invasion and subsequent interrogations of the parties concerned.
Retaliatory attacks on the wrong nuclear power means you're now fighting a nuclear war against two nations. The first will likely still be striking you, and you'll likely get more cities slagged by the nation you've incorrectly gone to war with.
I also tend to assume D.C. is a highest priority target, so who knows what the political situation would be.
Who?
Israel already has a significant nuclear arsenal and very capable delivery systems - and given their history who would grudge them this? [NB I say that as someone who theoretically lives within range of their weapons.]
Apart from Iran, who might soon be able to build fission bombs and who would have difficulty delivering them very far, who are to be included in this "host" of countries?
Israel bombed the plant site in Iraq with F-16s that had been in their possession for a very short time.
"continually reduced its nuclear stockpile, or that we've been at the forefront of promoting non-proliferation."
I'm amused. Its easy to promote other people not having weapons :). Its worth noting that the US is still the world's largest nuclear power. The RRW program would have featured replacing every existing weapon, probably the US resuming tests, and it was pretty expenvise - are you really surprised it got cancelled?
Also note that in fact Russia has more deployed warheads than the US currently.
Seriously, so what if they have nukes? Simply having them doesn't mean you can use them.
After all, that's what the Cold War demonstrated. If you're going to use them, you have to use them in numbers great enough to wipe out every city in every nation opposing you. In essence, your own use must be heavy enough to absolutely ensure no possibility of retaliation.
Accordingly, it's not enough for Tehran to nuke Tel Aviv. They also have to nuke every city in every nation that's part of NATO and they'd have to do so at the exact same time.
In the Soviet era, we mitigated a threat of this magnitude with the Nuclear Triad, which distributed our weapons on moving platforms around the globe, ensuring that even if we were obliterated by a Soviet attack, we could make our very last act one of equally devastating retaliation. The resulting situation, known as Mutually Assured Destruction (yes, MAD), was the thing that not only kept the Cold War cold, but ensured (in theory) that any direct conflicts that did break out would never go nuclear.
You must realize that there is absolutely no way for any middle eastern country to build arsenals and delivery platforms formidable enough to replicate the Soviet stance. And even if there were, the enormous gulf between the size of their economies and ours means they couldn't get a quarter of the way there without the US rearming - even from from scratch - and recreating the MAD dynamic.
The nuclear logic is simple: unless you can use them on a scale large enough to avoid any threat of retaliation, you cannot use them at all. You can't even threaten to use them without putting your own life at risk. In that regard, they're like trying to take hostages on an airplane post-9/11. Knowing what we all know now, every one of passengers will be thinking the exact same thing: corner the bastard and either cripple or kill him.
Like soldiers dressed in bright red coats, nuclear arms are a relic of age that has passed, never to return. The more openly we can acknowledge this, the better off the world will be.
Is there any other social, colony-creating species out there that has developed a similar mechanism for retaliation against some threat that also guarantees the wiping out of their own colony?
Incidentally, a lot of game theory was developed during the Cold War to analyze nuclear war.
"You had to make people think you would use [the bomb] even when you wouldn't."
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/dec/03/denis-h...
That was the cornerstone of Cold War propaganda. The leaders who'd do this weren't our own, they were the Soviet's. And as Godless Communists, they weren't even proper human beings to begin with, which made them even more dangerous. The only way to keep these monsters in check was to let them know that killing every one of us (which was surely their deepest desire) would also be the end of them.
In reality, this was just not the case. As the animated map of nuclear tests shows, the most threatening country on Earth was US, by a wide margin. We took an early, unchallenged lead in developing nuclear arms, and maintained it relentlessly for decades.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=856fWEltiXo
Watching this, it's hard to maintain the fiction that we were the good guys reluctantly responding to the looming Soviet threat. Put simply, there was no nuclear threat when we started arming ourselves heavily. In anything, you wonder why the Soviets took so long responding to the growing threat posed - without serious provocation - by the Americans.
Why bother replicating the Soviets? You flip flop from building multiple soviet naval carriers to the concept of nuclear arms in general, which is hard to read.
The delivery vehicle of the future is COTS shipping containers for inland cities, "anything that floats" for coastal cities.
You have to realize this is not 1900 anymore. World trade means that part of the world ships out millions of barrels of oil per day. Not literally inside individual barrels, but you might be surprised. And as the illegal drug trade and the illegal alien invasion shows, the US borders are basically wide open. No need for hollywood plots when UPS / fedex / DHL / USPS will do just as well.
Always think outside the box. More than a dozen years ago, how would Saudi Arabia knock down skyscrapers in NYC? That's insanity, they'd have to launch cruise missiles or build a battleship and successfully park it off the coast of NYC, or invade overland with bulldozers or something. The actual solution turned out to be a somewhat simpler social engineering hack against existing hostage rescue procedures.
So send out a fleet of 100 "fishing boats" to all the major ports. Each with innumerable radios to communicate with each other. And (at least) one capable of going boom.
Yes, I think the odds of someone replicating the USSR .mil, holodeck style, and then actually pressing the button are somewhat minimal. On the other hand, the odds of someone actually trying something equally effective are pretty good.
For a political statement, a nation could make it very clearly demonstrated you have, say, a dozen. "Yo, Bush the Third, err, I mean, Obama, pick a number between 1 and 12" and then some desert gets zapped. Then ship a disarmed, shut off one to a high value target via USPS or any other service. It'll cost two working models and you need perhaps a dozen packed up and well hidden to be effective. I would imagine the reaction would never be declassified, and I'll be surprised if it hasn't already happened.
"For a political statement, a nation could make it very clearly demonstrated you have, say, a dozen."
Uh, these aren't even proper English sentences. Pardon me for not taking the rest of your paranoid fever dreams about shipping nukes via UPS even a tiny bit seriously.
Anyway, the question is not whether any of this is technically possible, but weather any of it can be done without danger of absolutely crushing retaliation. And as we all know, from the DOJ to the Pentagon, if there's one area in which the US Government excels, it's completely, insanely over-the-top retaliation.
I fail to see that as a problem. Lets say you're an Iraqi and you don't much like the Iranians. So you load up a truck with a special package, drive across the border to a local Iranian post office, and then wait for the insanely over the top retaliation directed at your enemy.
Note that we never fight back against the people who attack us, at least not since Pearl Harbor or so. Bunch of Saudis knock down some skyscrapers, well, lets hit Afghanistan, after all the Soviets were so successful there I'm sure we'll do better. So if some Iraqis used the Iranian postal service to mail a care package to the US, we'd probably respond by invading Syria, or Venezuela. I'm not sure thats entirely a bad idea as a policy... being unpredictable means you're hard to manipulate.
> For a political statement, a nation could make it very clearly demonstrated you have, say, a dozen. ... It'll cost two working models and you need perhaps a dozen packed up and well hidden to be effective. I would imagine the reaction would never be declassified, and I'll be surprised if it hasn't already happened.
This is the logic of nuclear blackmail, and in general of brinkmanship. It has been used before, if the relevant Wikipedia page is to be believed.
It is a dangerous and unpredictable threat. The Cold War strategy asserted that only mutually assured destruction would be sufficient to bring about peace. A dozen nuclear bombs, under that logic, is not enough. If it were, the results of the Cuban Missile Crisis would have been a lot different. If it were then the US would not have built its huge arsenal of nuclear warheads - 12 per nation would have been enough.
You say "always think outside the box", but nothing you've mentioned is outside of the box. In fact, it's boringly in the box. First off, there's nothing special about containerized shipping. A 1 MT bomb weighs less than a ton, and you could bring that in via tramp freighter or even private sailboat.
It's almost needless to say, but we also had a lot of cargo ships in 1900. The Halifax Explosion of 1917 was equivalent to about 2.9 kilotons, and that was with conventional explosive. Blow up that ship at a wharf in NYC and it will take down skyscrapers.
For that matter, look to drug smugglers. A single speedboat in June was captured, with 3 tons of cocaine on it. Narco-submarines are believe to carry in several hundred tons of cocaine per year. A 49-foot sailboat was recently intercepted 400 nautical miles off the US coast, on the way from Venezuela to Canada with 621 kg of drugs on board. Any of these are enough to deliver a megaton bomb.
"More than a dozen years ago, how would Saudi Arabia knock down skyscrapers in NYC? That's insanity, they'd have to launch cruise missiles or build a battleship and successfully park it off the coast of NYC, or invade overland with bulldozers or something."
This is not true. You need only to look to the movies of more than a dozen years ago to learn about some alternatives.
"The Peacemaker" has a Yugoslav named Dušan Gavrić who comes close to exploding a nuclear device at the UN.
"The Sum of All Fears" has a group of Palestinians who set off a nuclear bomb at the Superbowl in Denver.
I pointed out movies to show that the alternatives were part of popular culture, but I could stick with real-life.
The W54 warhead weighed about 23 kg and had a yield up to 1 kiloton. It was used to make a backpack nuke - the Special Atomic Demolition Munition. This could take down a few blocks of NYC.
And of course the first attempt to take down the World Trade Center was in 1993 using car bombs. That failed, but in principle that could be used to take down a skyscraper.
So in real-life and in the movies there were many other options beyond cruise missiles, battleships, or bulldozers.
That's not true. The U.S. bombing of Japan demonstrated that you can use nuclear weapons in conventional war as long as the other side doesn't have any (or doesn't have very many). That's a good reason to have lots of nuclear weapons on hand against other countries that might have just a few.
Reality is that we have enough conventional arms to obliterate any country that threatens us in any credible way. In addition to the world's most conventionally lethal military, we also have the world's biggest economy. Even if we did disarm dramatically (e.g. cutting the military budget in half and decommissioning all our nukes), no country could take advantage of that given how quickly we could rearm, if needed.
We are safe. Very safe. We don't need nukes.
How then does the US having nuclear weapons change things?
A country, using nuclear weapons, destroys a major American city, taking millions of American lives in the process.
America still has at least ten other major cities spread across several time zones, along with the world's largest economy, which supports the world's most conventionally lethal military, which has over a thousand bases around the world. In spite of the attack, the country - in which three hundred million are still alive and kicking - remains very powerful and very rich. Only now, it's very, very angry.
In this scenario, would you consider America to be (a) Unlikely to retaliate (b) Likely to retaliate in some limited way after long, anguished deliberation (c) Likely to retaliate swiftly, but on a strictly limited basis, or (d) Likely to firebomb whoever did it back to the stone age with extreme prejudice and absolutely zero hesitation or regret?
Given that the obvious answer is D, how - exactly - is the nuclear weapon used in the attack an "equalizer"?
Remember, that term is most commonly used in relation to handguns, which allow a smaller, weaker person to cripple or kill a much larger, stronger assailant. Key factor: cripple or kill, not "diminish only slightly while making volcanically furious."
This, by the way, was a point made by Machiavelli. He strongly advised Princes against attacking others unless they planned to do so with such intensity that they could be sure that their opponents (and the sons of their opponents) would NEVER recover. "Nothing is more dangerous" he cautioned "than a lightly wounded enemy."
In other words, destroying a city - even a major one - won't do. If you want to attack America and survive, you really do need to take down the entire economy. And it that's your goal, you should skip nuclear engineering altogether and just get a job on Wall Street.
Use it against US naval forces, or strategic facilities. Or just light it up somewhere convenient.
That only works as long as your allies have nukes and are willing to use them on your behalf. Uncertainty is one of the more dangerous things when it comes to balance of force.
Even assuming that other nations held on to the things. The question then becomes whether your enemy's allies would actually strike at you if you held something in reserve. Who's going to go first in striking back at you when they know that their payment for that's going to be their twenty largest cities? Who's that loyal that they'll get millions of their own killed for however many remain of yours?
You can't be sure, and your enemy can't be sure, quite how that's going to work out. Someone with their back against the wall in some sense; religiously, economically - whatever; may well reason the uncertainty there is better than the certainty of defeat along some other line.
Alternately, do we really want to give Russia, China, Pakistan and India the power to dictate terms to us and our allies?
Even if the Iranians detonated a nuke in Times Square (which, come on), we wouldn't respond with a mass atrocity of our own. We'd invade, yes. And we'd absofuckinglutly destroy the Revolutionary Guard. But indiscriminate mass murder extending into the millions?
Get real.
Also, how does having nuclear arms allow these countries to "dictate terms" to us our allies? What, sign this trade deal or we'll nuke you?
Even without nuclear arms, the Pentagon runs the largest and most lethal military force ever assembled in all of human existence. So yes, we're perfectly safe without our nukes, even if others have them. Also, we're rich enough and technologically sophisticated enough to rebuild our stocks very, very quickly if anyone is foolish enough to threaten us with armageddon. But again, why bother, when we have so many other ways to respond?
It's not whether we are, it's whether they think we might.
> Even without nuclear arms, the Pentagon runs the largest and most lethal military force ever assembled in all of human existence
Well, not without nukes. I'd bet on Russia or China's nukes over the US conventional military any day.
> Also, how does having nuclear arms allow these countries to "dictate terms" to us our allies? What, sign this trade deal or we'll nuke you?
There's a quote about this from the 90's when we were trying to use our conventional military to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, something like "in the end, you care about Los Angeles a lot more than you care about Taipei". It means that the US can't just start a war with China or threaten them with nuclear attack because a state of MAD exists. And your solution is that we should empower China to threaten us? Because whether or not we have nuclear weapons, China still knows we care about Los Angeles more than Taipei.
No, what they're thinking is "If we attack America, or allow America to be attacked with nuclear arms we supply, will we end up dead as a result?" And the very obvious answer is "Yes, yes you will. And if you try to disappear with your families, they will probably die too."
American military commanders do not regard leaders of the Revolutionary Guard as social equals with whom they share the bonds of class. They will hunt them and kill them like animals. We know it. They know it. Everybody knows it.
>Well, not without nukes. I'd bet on Russia or China's nukes over the US conventional military any day.
To do what? Protect Iran from retaliation? Thanks to economic integration, neither country could afford to harm America this severely. China especially.
The larger point is that, even without nukes, we are an exceedingly dangerous country to attack. While the American people can and do balk at the prospect of constant aggression coming from the hawks in Washington, they can be counted on to support absolutely devastating levels of violence if attacked directly.
> It means that the US can't just start a war with China or threaten them with nuclear attack because a state of MAD exists.
No, threatening one city is not 'destruction' in the MAD sense. Mutually Assured Destruction is the logical outcome of nuclear conflict in which the only way to avoid retaliation is to wipe the enemy off the map, in a surprise first-strike. The Nuclear Triad was developed as a counter-strategy to ensure that this wasn't possible. Even if a Soviet first-strike did leave every man, woman, and child dead, the Triad (composed of ICBMs, perpetually-airborne fleets of B-52s and several Trident subs) meant we'd still retain the power to respond in kind. The exchange would mark the last act of both nations. In essence, it was a suicide pact that treated the rest of humanity as collateral damage.
That's not even remotely close to what was being promised in the conversation over Taiwan. More to the point, the conversation didn't end there, since China cares about having the US as a market more than it cares about having Taiwan as a provence.
The conversation clearly didn't end there because the Chinese changed tactics with Taiwan (they're actually talking to each other sometimes) and our aircraft carriers sailed away from the Taiwan Straits. It was more their way of saying "you can't dictate terms to us" rather than "we will dictate terms to you".
Nor are nuclear weapons needed to keep the peace with Russia, which is a shadow of what it was as the Soviet Empire. Indeed, even then their primary concern was containing the American threat. As far as the arms race is concerned, that was very much something America started. It took several years for the Soviets to join, and several more for them to even try to match us, which they never came close to doing. Unlike the Space Race, where we were playing catch up, the arms race was one in which we were ahead, by a very wide margin, from the very beginning. They were responding to our lead. We were not responding to theirs.
I know Americans don't like to think of themselves as the belligerent party, but in the case of nuclear weapons pointed at the USSR, we really were. Even the Cuban missile crisis, which we like to think of as an unprovoked escalation, was a direct response to our own truly unprovoked escalation (placing missiles in Turkey aimed at Moscow). Having seen the error of our ways (well, sort of) and more importantly, having seen the Soviet Union collapse entirely, we can safely dismantle our arsenal, knowing full well that the biggest threat to world peace following WW2 was always us.
Indeed, having first gotten rid of our own, we could help the increasingly impoverished Russians make the world safer by helping them get rid of theirs. The truth is that we were the ones who brought the scourge of nuclear weapons upon the world. We were the ones who sparked the Arms Race. And we remain the only country to have used them in combat. Frankly, leading efforts to rid the world of these things is the least we can do.
Clinging to outdated and conspicuously unworkable "balance of power" arrangements simply isn't in our interests. And having removed the biggest threat from the table, without demands for reciprocity, we not only project massive confidence, we also make others look foolish by fearfully and pointlessly holding onto theirs. Truth be told, we all have better things to do with our money.
It may actually be a good thing for the Middle East to acquire nuclear weapon. It just might soften the US militant zeal a bit.
At least one study claims a conflict with few as 100 detonations could result in enough fallout to trigger a 10-year global famine:
My god. That alone is enough to scare me. Why on earth would you create a single weapon so powerful when you aren't limited to only one? I guess I don't fully grasp the concept of an arms race because no matter how I think about it that just seems grossly irresponsible.
So should a missile (of several targeted against Moscow) make it through the ABM system, it would still have to destroy a very hard target. And so you need a big bomb to ensure destruction.
But from my limited knowledge, bigger and bigger nukes wouldn't make a difference against deep hardened bunkers since they don't penetrate before detonation. When you look at pictures of atomic bomb damage you don't see deep craters, you see a wide area of surface level damage.
You need to watch Ghostbusters II. :)
†http://books.google.com/books?id=rsB-5-e0RwgC&pg=PA65&dq=sub...
Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro-2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_a_Real_Killing:_Rocky_Fl...
The Tybee Island B-47 crash was an incident on February 5, 1958, in which the United States Air Force lost a 7,600-pound (3,400 kg) Mark 15 nuclear bomb in the waters off Tybee Island near Savannah, Georgia, United States. During a practice exercise, the B-47 bomber carrying the bomb collided in midair with an F-86 fighter plane. To protect the aircrew from a possible detonation in the event of a crash, the bomb was jettisoned. Following several unsuccessful searches, the bomb was presumed lost somewhere in Wassaw Sound off the shores of Tybee Island.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Tybee_Island_mid-air_colli...
We need to at least retain the land ICBM because they are responsible for most of the aim points for an enemy counter force strike. They are basically the size of several states, and sink hundreds or thousands of missiles, making a first strike implausible for anyone except the Russians.
With the SSBN force, they are pretty safe while at sea, but supported from two bases, each of which could be destroyed by a single missile. If you had 10 weapons, you could basically take out all long term US strategic forces, except for at-sea SSBN, if you got rid of the land ICBMs. The submarines would then be in a horrible position of "use them or lose them."
I think you could accomplish this by keeping the entire force on lower alert, which has largely been the case since the fall of the USSR.
On your second comment, I'm actually surprised that those two bases are that vulnerable. I was under the impression that they would be fortified the same way Russian naval bases like Object 825 GTS, one of the bases for nuclear armed submarines, is.
Sub pens would be a much more difficult problem; note also the relative incompressiblity of water compared to air.
If you're really really serious about this sort of thing, you need a defense in depth of active defenses. For deterrence it doesn't matter if all or even any of them work in practice, just that the perception that your strikes will very possibly fail.
And/or if you maintain enough targets, enough systems, with interlocking constraints making a time-on-target for all of them well neigh impossible, well, that's why we still maintain the triad.
Bombers are critically important because you can launch them in all sorts of circumstances including ones short of war without their necessarily even being able to have their warheads go boom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_action_link). They're also obviously not vulnerable to ABM systems except the dual use ones. Or various gambits that make the space though which ballistic missiles have to travel hostile, e.g. zero intelligence "gravel".
When the stakes are survival, redundancy is your friend.
I hadn't thought about this aspect. If you assume your opponent has a limited number of missiles (because of treaties and/or intelligence gathering), you build your own missile launchers not only as a weapon system, but as targets to divert incoming missiles away from cities. They can't not target them without leaving a retaliatory capability in place.
Where tests of large H-bombs were done at ground level there were huge amounts of fallout created. However, these tests were usually in very remote places with nobody around in the few hundred miles downwind. However, there were still serious problems with fallout:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._George,_Utah#Nuclear_conta...
"Naturally, the government made her and her family agree
never to say, or even speculate aloud about why it was
done when they paid for the surgery..."
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test-Ban_...
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/interview-eric-s...