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Speaking as a former Navy submariner, this isn't going to happen. The surface Navy doesn't have the background or training to handle nuclear weapons - nukes are

by jedc 9y ago

Speaking as a former Navy submariner, this isn't going to happen. The surface Navy doesn't have the background or training to handle nuclear weapons - nukes are (and should be) taken extraordinarily seriously. They're not just an add-on weapon, they simply have to be the core of what that ship does in order to be treated properly.

IntronExon 9y ago
Good point, and then there’s just the question of, why do it at all? Nuclear weapons on a submarine makes sense as a deterrent against first strikes, but a surface ship is as much of a target as a silo or ground based mobile launch platform. The whole idea reeks of BSD in the worst way.
- cameldrv 9y ago
  Because surface ships have better communications with shore, and would be more likely to receive a message quickly if AEHF, MILSTAR, and TACAMO are all destroyed in a surprise attack. That's useful both for ordering a retaliatory launch, and detecting if the ship has been attacked/destroyed. The Russians have also deployed a similar missile on surface ships, and the land based version is in violation of the INF treaty. There is a desire to show that we are willing to respond to an escalation, and to counter it without violating the treaty ourselves.
  - dotancohen 9y ago
    > There is a desire to show that we are willing to respond to an escalation You mean to say that there is a desire to show that the US is willing to escalate, too.
    - eksu 9y ago
      If we’re not willing to escalate there’s no nuclear deterrence.
- forapurpose 9y ago
  I think it's a very bad idea, and I suspect it's merely the amateur misapplication of a faddish tactic, escalation, to every time and purpose, by people carried away with ideology and politics and who have forgotten boundaries of reason and consequence. That said, an existential problem the US Navy is facing (along with all branches of all militaries) is that precision, long-range missile technology is maturing and becoming widely available, making much of the Navy's massive capital investment, it's surface fleet, obsolete. How big a deal is it? Think of it this way (based only on reading foreign policy journals; I'm no expert in any sense): * Long ago, naval battles were fought by sailors boarding each others' ships and fighting hand-to-hand. * When cannon were developed and the tech matured, the enemy could sink you long before you got close enough to board them. The superior range of cannons made the boarding actions obsolete. Ships without cannon were merely floating coffins for their personnel. Eventually, cannon (guns) range increased to around a couple of dozen miles in battleships. * The cannon dominated the seas for generations, but were quickly made obsolete by planes flying off the decks of large ships, with ranges of hundreds of miles. IIRC, at the Battle of Midway in WWII, the first battle to heavily involve aircraft carriers, the Japanese battleships never even saw an American ship much less have a chance to shoot a cannon at one. The battleships were merely floating coffins for their personnel. These days, U.S. aircraft carriers' planes have a range of around 500 miles without refueling. * Precision missiles do or will have a range of thousands of miles. Those nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, the core of U.S. military power projection, naval power and strategy, each carrying maybe $15-20 billion in capital plus ~5,000 lives, will become nothing more than floating coffins. The Chinese military is investing heavily in this prospect; those aircraft carriers have long protected Taiwan, and the Chinese government is investing heavily in missile batteries to make sure the carriers never get within range of a battle in Taiwan. Precision long-range missiles introduce another game-changing problem: they are far cheaper to attack with than to defend against. Right now, there is no effective defense against a large salvo of precision missiles; even 1,000 high-end missiles might cost $1 billion - a great bargain for sinking an aircraft carrier, whose defenses might have to shoot down 99% or more in order to survive. One counter-measure the US Navy is investing in is "distributed lethality": rather than concentrating investment and capability in one very attractive target (aircraft carriers), they want to put missiles and other capabilities on every ship, from destroyers to cargo ships, so the enemy can't take down your naval power with a few missiles. That's part of the reason, I would guess, for nuclear cruise missiles on Zumwalt destroyers.
Caveman_Coder 9y ago
How hard would it be to get a couple of Senior MTs and SSBN weapons officers to go to those surface ships? Then they'd at least have personnel experienced in handling nuclear weapons.
- ENOTTY 9y ago
  It's not just a matter of personnel and the equipment. There's a whole infrastructure, including logistics, legal, security, etc, supporting these weapons that would need to be replicated or expanded for surface vessels.
  - Caveman_Coder 9y ago
    Of course it requires more than experienced personnel, but the person I was responding to made it sound like the Navy doesn't have people with the experience to run such a program which is what I was arguing against...the Navy has many personnel experienced with nuclear weapon system maintenance, operation, program management, etc. from which they can draw from... Mods on existing ships has been done before...logistics/legal/security for boats with nuclear weapons are already well established and these converted ships would probably have to be either relocated to where the SSBNs reside or new facilities would be built that mirror the SSBN bases...in any case, I don't see it as being "impossible" to accomplish.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
nradov 9y ago
Back in the 1960s the surface Navy did briefly have some nuclear antiaircraft missiles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-2_Terrier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-2_Terrier
- dingaling 9y ago
  And in the same era they were also cooperating with NATO to put Polaris SLBM tubes on surface ships as the Multilateral Force ( MLF ). Both the USN cruiser Long Beach and the Italian Andrea Dorias were fitted for-but-not-with Polaris. Edit: upon research, actually Long Beach had her tube space replaced during construction.
  - arethuza 9y ago
    Out of interest, are you from the UK? The reason I ask is that I've seen the phrase "fitted for-but-not-with" quite a lot in discussions of UK military matters.
    - dingaling 9y ago
      Yes indeed. We UKians often use it sardonically, for example our new carriers are FFBNW aeroplanes...
dba7dba 9y ago
I agree. We have bombers for a reason. Have they already forgotten about USS Cole??
kevinskii 9y ago
Speaking as another former Navy submariner, I respectfully disagree. This could very well happen. I knew of at least one conventional boat that was upgraded in fairly short order. Whether or not it should have been is a separate question.
- Caveman_Coder 9y ago
  It isn't that tall of an order and the Navy certainly has talented and capable individuals that can execute a conversion...it has a pretty large talent pool to draw from...just because the "surface fleet" hasn't done it before, it doesn't mean they couldn't ever do it.
  - cameldrv 9y ago
    The surface fleet most certainly has done it before. U.S. surface ships used to carry nuclear Tomahawks, depth charges, torpedoes and surface to air missiles. Carriers carried nuclear gravity bombs. This all ended in 1991, but many of the same ships are still in service.
- angry_octet 9y ago
  The Virginia class has 16 Tomahawk tubes, it shouldn't be a huge effort to retrofit some tubes to be capable of having TLAM/N. But would that meet the safety standards required for nuclear armaments?
vilhelm_s 9y ago
Until 1991, the surface navy did carry nuclear weapons, e.g. cruise missiles, nuclear anti-air missiles, nuclear depth charges, and tactical nuclear weapons for aircraft on aircraft carriers. In 1991 these were offloaded, but until 2010 the attack submarines still had the capability of carrying nuclear cruise missiles (the nuclear tomahawk), although the missiles themselves were in storage. [1] I still remember the 1980s when American navy ships visiting Europe were generally assumed to carry nuclear weapons (and caused protests), it was not so long ago. [1] https://fas.org/blogs/security/2016/02/nuclear-weapons-at-sea/ https://fas.org/blogs/security/2016/02/nuclear-weapons-at-se...
- aoki 9y ago
  yes - "...neither confirm nor deny..."
- Simon_says 9y ago
  > nuclear depth charges Wow, that's one I haven't heard before. Sounds radical.
  - angry_octet 9y ago
    ASROC. It was a missile that IIRC went up to 40km, then plunged into the ocean, detonating at some depth. A countermeasure to nuclear cruise missile boats, which could launch from considerable distances.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    It’s an interesting consequence of the fact that nuclear bomb technology got really good well before electronics and computers did. There was a period of a decade or two where the ability to put a bomb close to a target wasn’t really there, but the ability did exist to make a small bomb with a really big bang. The solution is logical even if crazy: use a nuke, and then it’s ok if you can barely get the weapon within a quarter mile of your target. Thus we saw nuclear depth charges, nuclear torpedoes, nuclear anti-aircraft missiles, nuclear anti-missile missiles, and even nuclear bazookas.
- gsnedders 9y ago
aoki 9y ago
it was never a secret that many of the surface navy's combatants were nuclear-capable for the entire duration of the cold war - stuff like ASROC/W44, but also TLAM-N. as a DD SWO in the early 90s, i went through some of the same surety inspections as you guys. (that said, i think that platform proliferation is a terrible idea, and since deploying such platforms anywhere but blue water makes little sense, you'd effectively be reducing the already marginal deployable strength of the current surface force. the SWOs have too much to cover already.)

by jedc 9y ago

IntronExon 9y ago

Good point, and then there’s just the question of, why do it at all? Nuclear weapons on a submarine makes sense as a deterrent against first strikes, but a surface ship is as much of a target as a silo or ground based mobile launch platform. The whole idea reeks of BSD in the worst way.

cameldrv 9y ago
Because surface ships have better communications with shore, and would be more likely to receive a message quickly if AEHF, MILSTAR, and TACAMO are all destroyed in a surprise attack. That's useful both for ordering a retaliatory launch, and detecting if the ship has been attacked/destroyed. The Russians have also deployed a similar missile on surface ships, and the land based version is in violation of the INF treaty. There is a desire to show that we are willing to respond to an escalation, and to counter it without violating the treaty ourselves.
- dotancohen 9y ago
  > There is a desire to show that we are willing to respond to an escalation You mean to say that there is a desire to show that the US is willing to escalate, too.
  - eksu 9y ago
    If we’re not willing to escalate there’s no nuclear deterrence.
forapurpose 9y ago
I think it's a very bad idea, and I suspect it's merely the amateur misapplication of a faddish tactic, escalation, to every time and purpose, by people carried away with ideology and politics and who have forgotten boundaries of reason and consequence. That said, an existential problem the US Navy is facing (along with all branches of all militaries) is that precision, long-range missile technology is maturing and becoming widely available, making much of the Navy's massive capital investment, it's surface fleet, obsolete. How big a deal is it? Think of it this way (based only on reading foreign policy journals; I'm no expert in any sense): * Long ago, naval battles were fought by sailors boarding each others' ships and fighting hand-to-hand. * When cannon were developed and the tech matured, the enemy could sink you long before you got close enough to board them. The superior range of cannons made the boarding actions obsolete. Ships without cannon were merely floating coffins for their personnel. Eventually, cannon (guns) range increased to around a couple of dozen miles in battleships. * The cannon dominated the seas for generations, but were quickly made obsolete by planes flying off the decks of large ships, with ranges of hundreds of miles. IIRC, at the Battle of Midway in WWII, the first battle to heavily involve aircraft carriers, the Japanese battleships never even saw an American ship much less have a chance to shoot a cannon at one. The battleships were merely floating coffins for their personnel. These days, U.S. aircraft carriers' planes have a range of around 500 miles without refueling. * Precision missiles do or will have a range of thousands of miles. Those nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, the core of U.S. military power projection, naval power and strategy, each carrying maybe $15-20 billion in capital plus ~5,000 lives, will become nothing more than floating coffins. The Chinese military is investing heavily in this prospect; those aircraft carriers have long protected Taiwan, and the Chinese government is investing heavily in missile batteries to make sure the carriers never get within range of a battle in Taiwan. Precision long-range missiles introduce another game-changing problem: they are far cheaper to attack with than to defend against. Right now, there is no effective defense against a large salvo of precision missiles; even 1,000 high-end missiles might cost $1 billion - a great bargain for sinking an aircraft carrier, whose defenses might have to shoot down 99% or more in order to survive. One counter-measure the US Navy is investing in is "distributed lethality": rather than concentrating investment and capability in one very attractive target (aircraft carriers), they want to put missiles and other capabilities on every ship, from destroyers to cargo ships, so the enemy can't take down your naval power with a few missiles. That's part of the reason, I would guess, for nuclear cruise missiles on Zumwalt destroyers.

Caveman_Coder 9y ago

How hard would it be to get a couple of Senior MTs and SSBN weapons officers to go to those surface ships? Then they'd at least have personnel experienced in handling nuclear weapons.

ENOTTY 9y ago
It's not just a matter of personnel and the equipment. There's a whole infrastructure, including logistics, legal, security, etc, supporting these weapons that would need to be replicated or expanded for surface vessels.
- Caveman_Coder 9y ago
  Of course it requires more than experienced personnel, but the person I was responding to made it sound like the Navy doesn't have people with the experience to run such a program which is what I was arguing against...the Navy has many personnel experienced with nuclear weapon system maintenance, operation, program management, etc. from which they can draw from... Mods on existing ships has been done before...logistics/legal/security for boats with nuclear weapons are already well established and these converted ships would probably have to be either relocated to where the SSBNs reside or new facilities would be built that mirror the SSBN bases...in any case, I don't see it as being "impossible" to accomplish.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

nradov 9y ago

Back in the 1960s the surface Navy did briefly have some nuclear antiaircraft missiles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-2_Terrier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-2_Terrier

dingaling 9y ago
And in the same era they were also cooperating with NATO to put Polaris SLBM tubes on surface ships as the Multilateral Force ( MLF ). Both the USN cruiser Long Beach and the Italian Andrea Dorias were fitted for-but-not-with Polaris. Edit: upon research, actually Long Beach had her tube space replaced during construction.
- arethuza 9y ago
  Out of interest, are you from the UK? The reason I ask is that I've seen the phrase "fitted for-but-not-with" quite a lot in discussions of UK military matters.
  - dingaling 9y ago
    Yes indeed. We UKians often use it sardonically, for example our new carriers are FFBNW aeroplanes...

dba7dba 9y ago

I agree. We have bombers for a reason. Have they already forgotten about USS Cole??

kevinskii 9y ago

Speaking as another former Navy submariner, I respectfully disagree. This could very well happen. I knew of at least one conventional boat that was upgraded in fairly short order. Whether or not it should have been is a separate question.

Caveman_Coder 9y ago
It isn't that tall of an order and the Navy certainly has talented and capable individuals that can execute a conversion...it has a pretty large talent pool to draw from...just because the "surface fleet" hasn't done it before, it doesn't mean they couldn't ever do it.
- cameldrv 9y ago
  The surface fleet most certainly has done it before. U.S. surface ships used to carry nuclear Tomahawks, depth charges, torpedoes and surface to air missiles. Carriers carried nuclear gravity bombs. This all ended in 1991, but many of the same ships are still in service.
angry_octet 9y ago
The Virginia class has 16 Tomahawk tubes, it shouldn't be a huge effort to retrofit some tubes to be capable of having TLAM/N. But would that meet the safety standards required for nuclear armaments?

vilhelm_s 9y ago

Until 1991, the surface navy did carry nuclear weapons, e.g. cruise missiles, nuclear anti-air missiles, nuclear depth charges, and tactical nuclear weapons for aircraft on aircraft carriers. In 1991 these were offloaded, but until 2010 the attack submarines still had the capability of carrying nuclear cruise missiles (the nuclear tomahawk), although the missiles themselves were in storage. [1] I still remember the 1980s when American navy ships visiting Europe were generally assumed to carry nuclear weapons (and caused protests), it was not so long ago. [1] https://fas.org/blogs/security/2016/02/nuclear-weapons-at-sea/ https://fas.org/blogs/security/2016/02/nuclear-weapons-at-se...

aoki 9y ago
yes - "...neither confirm nor deny..."
Simon_says 9y ago
> nuclear depth charges Wow, that's one I haven't heard before. Sounds radical.
- angry_octet 9y ago
  ASROC. It was a missile that IIRC went up to 40km, then plunged into the ocean, detonating at some depth. A countermeasure to nuclear cruise missile boats, which could launch from considerable distances.
- mikeash 9y ago
  It’s an interesting consequence of the fact that nuclear bomb technology got really good well before electronics and computers did. There was a period of a decade or two where the ability to put a bomb close to a target wasn’t really there, but the ability did exist to make a small bomb with a really big bang. The solution is logical even if crazy: use a nuke, and then it’s ok if you can barely get the weapon within a quarter mile of your target. Thus we saw nuclear depth charges, nuclear torpedoes, nuclear anti-aircraft missiles, nuclear anti-missile missiles, and even nuclear bazookas.
gsnedders 9y ago

aoki 9y ago

it was never a secret that many of the surface navy's combatants were nuclear-capable for the entire duration of the cold war - stuff like ASROC/W44, but also TLAM-N. as a DD SWO in the early 90s, i went through some of the same surety inspections as you guys. (that said, i think that platform proliferation is a terrible idea, and since deploying such platforms anywhere but blue water makes little sense, you'd effectively be reducing the already marginal deployable strength of the current surface force. the SWOs have too much to cover already.)