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Nuclear deterrence is limited by geography
- petermcneeley 9y agoSurely I am missing something. Nuclear subs and Space deployments make these slides moot.
- tyingq 9y agoSubmarines are covered on slide 4.
- vtange 9y agoThe post did mention Nuclear subs. It cautioned that relying on them will add stress and risk to them since they had to be position/deployed constantly in specific areas of the Pacific to fulfill their role.
- stevarino 9y agoWhich was weird, as subs are used to going out for months on end. Does he think submarines hang out at port all the time?
- nikdaheratik 9y agoThe slides went into this in some detail and assumed the audience was familiar with the issues. Namely: 1. The Pacific nuclear deterrence is currently based in WA. This means that deployments that cross the pacific would be much longer and much farther from base. Even subs that go out for months on end need to be resupplied. The proposed solution to this would be moving those subs to Hawaii. 2. The majority of the US sub deterrence is based in the Atlantic, because that's closer to Moscow. If you have a limited amount of subs, you would need to move some from there to cover the Pacific, which means you have less deterrence in the US-Russia standoff even if it gives you more options for US-NK or US-China.
- Johnny555 9y agoOhio class subs have a reported quiet cruising speed of 20 knots (23mph), so it would only take about 8 days to travel across the Pacific. Basing the sub in Hawaii might shave a couple days off of that. Doesn't seem like it would make much of a difference in a 90 day SSBN deployment.
- dingaling 9y ago1. On paper the Trident D-5 can hit North Korea whilst the SSBNs are sitting in dock in Washington state. That's probably an unrealistic range with a useful payload, but there's certainly no need to cross the Pacific. 2. "As of 2016, nine Trident-armed submarines are deployed in the Pacific and five in the Atlantic."
- nikdaheratik 9y ago1. Yes, but they would still need to cross further into the Pacific if they wanted to reach NK without passing over Russia. The slides showed more or less the issue with the angles needed for that. 2. You may be right, I'm not an expert on deployment locations, of course a source would still be nice.
- hansthehorse 9y agoEach missle sub has two crews that man it in a 3 month rotation. When the sub returns there is a quick refit and resupply, everything that broke and couldn't be fixed at sea is repaired and it goes back out. The turn-around is very quick.
- shangxiao 9y agoSpace deployments are banned by the Outer Space Treaty [1]. Slide 3 mentions Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) which was not banned by the Outer Space Treaty but subsequently by SALT II. Interestingly enough the US never ratified SALT II [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment_System#The_FOBS_and_SALT_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gambiting 9y agoI also don't understand why the missiles couldn't fly over the pacific and over japan, never crossing Russian territory? What am I missing here?
- planteen 9y agoI think they follow great circle routes. LGM-30 deployments all cross Russia & China to NK: http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=fnj-cys/mot/gtf http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=fnj-cys/mot/gtf
- gambiting 9y agoBut seeing as NK is launching towards and over Japan, it looks like if they were to launch they would go "direct" over pacific, not over the arctic circle? Are they avoiding angering Russia too?
- planteen 9y agoPresumably Russia would not be pleased if NK launched a missile over it. NK is aiming for the Pacific over Japan in the latest tests. So what do you mean "direct" over the Pacific? Direct to the continental US? NK can't hit the US other than Guam with their current range. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwasong-12#/media/File:North_Korean_missile_range.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwasong-12#/media/File:North_K...
- vtange 9y agoSince we have Trump on board, the post might be even more interesting with a slide 10: let South Korea/Japan go nuclear, in face of the political issues.
- tyingq 9y agoSome stuxnet type hack that makes the next test missile travel west might be interesting.
- forapurpose 9y agoThe U.S. was conducting such attacks through the Obama administration and NK's missile tests were failing frequently. I haven't heard anyone even question what happened to that program.
- grzm 9y agoI remember hearing about this program with respect to Trump earlier this year. Here are a couple of references. * https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/world/asia/north-korea-missile-program-sabotage.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/world/asia/north-korea-mi... * https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/world/asia/north-korea-missile-program-sabotage.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/world/asia/north-korea-mi... I haven't heard or read anything more recently, but I haven't dug into it either.
- westmeal 9y agoThis is actually a great way to defend against an enemy. You have plausible deniability in case they get suspicious it was your country all along and by the time they check it doesn't matter because it's a missile and missiles go boom.
- andy_ppp 9y agoDo you mean let South Korea/Japan build nuclear weapons or start a war that wipes them off the earth? I'm certain Japan (the people and even the government) would be against this and you'd wonder if China would start thinking preemptively if they were to start.
- andy_ppp 9y agoBrilliant slides and explanations. I really hope that President Trump understand the nuance here. Sigh.
- NamTaf 9y agoThe big unmentioned thing here is that what would Russia do to respond to an ICBM flying over them from the South? If they have an engage-on-detection doctrine, is that only pointed north towards the US or would it still apply from something originating from NK? In essence, does Russia become a similar defensive blanket for the US?
- olympus 9y agoNo, one of the first things that is considered when deciding if an unknown missile is hostile is to look at its point of origin (comically abbreviated POO). If a missile originates from NK, then Russia would first assume it is headed for the US. They would need to gather trajectory information indicating that the missile was heading for a Russian target before they did anything. They would be pissed at North Korea for starting WWIII, but would probably just let the missile fly overhead and try to take advantage of the political situation later.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- cameldrv 9y agoJeffrey Lewis often has smart things to say, but sometimes his articles make no sense, at least from a technical, on their face, perspective. If nukes really do fly, whether they fly over Russia or not is totally irrelevant. At a minimum, given only a heading, Russia would see that only the far east could be conceivably attacked, which is not a threat to the Russian nation, or its nuclear deterrent, and would not be the action of a power trying to attack Russia. In reality, satellites and radars would also be able to measure velocity, and this, even only with satellite and without radar, would make it clear that the target was NK. Russia might lodge a protest about its airspace being violated, but this would be comically minor compared to the rest of the diplomatic issues to be resolved after an actual nuclear attack.
- KGIII 9y agoWould the missile be in the atmosphere at the time it passes over Russia, or would it still be in space? I hit up Google and it wasn't helpful in answering this question. If it is still in space, I'm not sure that Russia really has much ground to stand in, with regards to complaining.
- olympus 9y agoThis really has nothing to do with the altitude of the missile. Any ICBM that the US sends over Russia without talking with them first would be an extreme provocation, and would give Russia justification to do whatever they wanted (hopefully WWIII wouldn't result, but lots of other bad things could happen). This is not the same scale as North Korea test firing a missile over Japan (and look how nervous Japan got). Pre-coordinating a strike with Russia removes the time advantage that ICBMs have over bombers, and it would be a rare situation where Russia would give permission to let an American nuke overfly its territory. Similarly, if Russia shot an ICBM over US territory at any altitude, the US would freak out and be justified in sanctioning the crap out of Russia. Unfortunately, the US is not in the way of any of Russia's targets (unless the target is the US), so it's mostly a one-way consideration.
- KGIII 9y ago
- pidge 9y agoIncidentally, there’s actually a map projection where all “great circle” routes (shortest paths on a sphere, ie missile paths) are straight lines. It’s called the gnomonic projection, and it could have been used to illustrate the Russian-overflight issue more clearly. Although it’s limited to only showing half of a sphere at a time, so it doesn’t solve the problem of illustrating a southern around-the-world route. An azimuthal equidistant projection centered at the launch site or target would work for that.
- cousin_it 9y agoThe existence of the gnomonic projection isn't very surprising, as it's just the perspective projection used by all artists to go from a spherical field of view to a flat plane. That way it's also easy to understand why it can't handle more than half of the sphere.
- jacobolus 9y agoTo the grandparent poster: A gnomonic projection is not the most useful for these particular maps, because the distances are so long that distortion starts getting out of control. Better would be some kind of azimuthal projection centered on North Korea (azimuthal equidistant perhaps), with other segments (those not including NK as an endpoint) drawn as the appropriate great circle arcs.
- pluma 9y agoCan someone explain in simple language why we still think nuclear deterrence is a good idea? Is any nation on Earth myopic enough to think that responding to a nuclear attack with a nuclear escalation is a viable strategy? Making North Korea easier to hit by US nukes won't make them step down. North Korea is scared senseless and backed into a corner (they've been at war with the US for the better part of a century and preparing for an invasion by an enemy that is several times their size), trying to scare them further won't prevent them from doing anything stupid. Maybe I'm missing something but this sounds like it's only concerned with maintaining American military dominance rather than guaranteeing peaceful coexistence or at least the continued existence of the human race. Nuclear weapons are neither necessary nor sufficient to win a war against North Korea. If the conflict were to ever go nuclear, nuking North Korea won't make the country back down -- it will only alienate China, South Korea (or what's left of it) and Japan. Not to mention the entire International Community.
- planteen 9y agoNuclear deterrence has been a controversial topic for 50 years. There have always been arguments for nuclear disarmament instead. I took the point of this article to be that the ICBM portion of the US triad does not work on NK since a missile must overfly China or Russia. I personally don't think there is much risk of war with NK. NK has everything to lose and nothing to gain by starting any sort of war.