14 ms·

> in 1985 the USA had 21,000+ nuclear weapons, USSR 39,000+. This is one of the facts from this era which seems completely irrational to me. Considering the da

> in 1985 the USA had 21,000+ nuclear weapons, USSR 39,000+. This is one of the facts from this era which seems completely irrational to me. Considering the damage each one of these devices can do why do you need so many. Lets presume you're in fact a genocidal maniac (i didn't say the roleplaying would be difficult America) 1 bomb per enemy military installation and 1 bomb per population centre over 100k population friend, foe, own country included. Why do you need the other 18,000 bombs?

dingaling 6y ago
> Why do you need the other 18,000 bombs? Second-wave strategic targets ( surviving silos, airfields, ports and C3 facilities ) Tactical targets ( tank formations , POL depots, troop assembly areas, aviation FOBs ) Naval targets ( submarines, surface vessels, sonar installations ) Mobility targets ( bridges, valleys, tunnels ) Plus accounting for failed weapons, losses en route, missed targets...
- tremon 6y ago
  If you have made so many enemies that you need 18,000 nuclear bombs to feel safe, I question your attitude to life.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    As others have said - the primary reason is that you need 1+ nukes to take out the other side's launch sites, and the other side knows this so they spread the siloses across their whole territory - so now you need 1+ nukes for every silo they have (or suspect they have), and they need 1+ nukes for every silo you have (or suspect you have), and this is a positive feedback loop.
    - littlestymaar 6y ago
      By the time your nukes get to the silos, they will most likely be empty already though.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Which is the reason you want to have more nukes than they have silos - to be able to hit all of them at once in a surprise attack (also called "first strike").
        littlestymaar 6y ago
        Which won't save you against their SSBN… Granted, they have much less warheads in submarines than in silos, but that's still far enough to obliterate every city above 100.000 inhabitant in your country.
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Indeed, which is why submarines are the linchpin of modern MAD. But they weren't always present; the buildup of nuclear arsenal started when the options were limited to ICBMs and strategic bombers.
        varjag 6y ago
        Efficiency of submarine fleets were always hard to calculate, based largely on guesses about the adversary's true anti-submarine capabilities.
  - chasd00 6y ago
    i don't see any real reasons, i bet lunch the main idea was to be able to credibly publish a bar graph showing your count larger than that of your enemies.
hacker_9 6y ago
Power begets more power.
loopz 6y ago
These people and their logic started WW1 and WW2. The only thing keeping them abay is that with even conventional warfare, you end up with Syria.
atomashpolskiy 6y ago
Maybe because silos are an important target for the attacking side? So you want to have many in order to reduce the risk of being left without arms in case your enemy attacks first?
- serpix 6y ago
  Absolute madness, you and your enemy will be dead anyway from the fallout and nuclear winter.
  - graeme 6y ago
    Yes, MADness. Because the attack entails utter destruction, it would be irrational to attack, so no one attacks. Bernard Brodie, naval strategist, figured this all out as the inevitable endpoint of nuclear weapons in 1946. People have been trying to get around it ever since, but there is no way around it. Disarm, and a handful of nukes rule the world. If armed, the only way to avoid war is to make it utterly irrational. And offence has an apparently permanent advantage over defence with MIRVs, as it will cost more to shoot down a rocket than to launch it, so missile defence doesn’t work as a strategy to exit MAD. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Brodie_(military_strategist) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Brodie_(military_str...
    - tomjen3 6y ago
      > And offence has an apparently permanent advantage over defence with MIRVs, as it will cost more to shoot down a rocket than to launch it, so missile defence doesn’t work as a strategy to exit MAD. But not shooting a missile down is massively, massively more expensive. If the missile scare on Hawaii had been real and North Korea had launched a single nuclear missile and the US had shot it down, do you think anyone would have cared about the cost? Even if it is, say, twice the cost to shoot down a missile as to launch it the US can afford more than twice the cost the Russians and much more than North Korea.
      - graeme 6y ago
simonh 6y ago
The best way to destroy an enemy nuclear weapon is by hitting it with one of your nuclear weapons. Add on top of that your other strategic targets and a reserve, and the fact that their calculation is the same as yours, and you can see where this is going.
- swarnie_ 6y ago
  With weapons distributed amongst all USSR holdings this implies the US was willing to nuke everything from Poland to north Vietnam.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    Yes, that was the stated objective.
  - simonh 6y ago
    And the USSR was willing to nuke everything from Turkey to South Korea (going the long way).
  - rocqua 6y ago
    Of course they would be. Nuking the USSR would involve resigning yourself to the murder of hundreds of millions. It also means accepting that the USSR will do whatever they can to retaliate with nukes. In that context, you are already so resigned at killing others over your own safety, that hitting a few other countries is a no-brainer.
  - XorNot 6y ago
    The US in fact did have a serious problem with nuclear warplan targeting during the Cold War - there was essentially never a reason you could give to take a target off the list, so the plan for a good deal of time was essentially something like "hit every single conceivable target several times" (to account for failed bombs or losses en route). It was actually one of Dick Cheney's initiatives to create a process which would remove targets from the nuclear warplan's to get the number of weapons used down to a manageable number - and end the feedback of "oh no we've assigned all the weapons - we need more weapons in case there's more targets". EDIT: A critical element with nuclear warplan's is that you don't have one bomb per target - you generally have several bombs per target via different delivery systems with different priorities, because the key element of MAD is survivability - there has to always be a guarantee in your adversary's mind that they cannot destroy enough capability to create a winning scenario for them.
lwhi 6y ago
The doctrine was M.A.D. .. or mutually assured distruction[1]. I believe the (arguably crazy) idea was that the weapons wouldn't ever be used. The fact that each nuclear superpower has a similar amount of weapons assured that the equalibrium would stop the worst from happening. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
- yesenadam 6y ago
  That page says "Although the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, the MAD doctrine continues to be applied." I get the feeling that's not generally known. Isn't that kind of extremely weird? I've never seen discussion of it on HN, for example, or maybe what to do about the prospect of living indefinitely under the threat of MAD. With more countries with nuclear weapons all the time. Well, you read here about people not wanting to have kids because of global warming, but not because of that. Is it just too big a problem to even think about?
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    It's not generally known, particularly by the generation that was born at the tail end of the Cold War (like myself), and by people born later. We grew up without the fear of that particular flavor of Armageddon. But MAD is still what keeps the world relatively peaceful. It also gives rise to certain paradoxes - like any attempt to create a better defense against nuclear weapons is also the biggest threat to mankind, because it risks breaking the MAD doctrine and thus inviting a nuclear first strike. For MAD to work, countries in their equivalence class (e.g. US, Russia and China are one class) need to be in lock step with their capabilities, so that no one can be struck without the attacker risking annihilation.
    - yesenadam 6y ago
      > But MAD is still what keeps the world relatively peaceful. There seems a kind of anthropic principle here - it seems successful, but we wouldn't be here talking about it if it had gone terribly wrong, which has come very close to happening more than a few times, apparently. The risk of that is >0, but the cost is...infinite. That doesn't seem obviously worth the gamble, to say the least.
Tuna-Fish 6y ago
For both sides, the most important job for the nukes was counter-force, that is, blowing up the enemy nukes. Both sides understood this, so they deployed their own nukes so sparsely that you generally need one to take out one, and since they still expected to lose a lot of them, they built spares.
- chasd00 6y ago
  to me, it was the invention of SLBMs that truly but the concept of a first-strike advantage to bed. With subs under the water in the world's oceans armed with dozes of missiles each armed with multiple warheads the concept of taking out your enemy before they can retaliate is gone. IMO, if MAD fails it will be an accident that triggers a run away chain of events leading to nuclear war. We've come close many many times to total nuclear war due to miscommunication, simulation errors, procedural errors, etc.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
It'll kill the whole world - eventually, but for an effective first or second strike you want to take out the enemy as fast as possible, instead of wait for the fallout and climate change to take over. Mind you, a single nuke on e.g. DC or NY would cripple the country already, especially if there's minimal warning.
bambax 6y ago
It doesn't have anything to do with efficiency. It's a pissing contest. You want the largest number because it gives you bragging rights.
jessaustin 6y ago
Why do you need the other 18,000 bombs? Every bomb must be purchased from the armaments manufacturers who actually control our society. The same who originally bamboozled Truman into damning our species. Your question is equivalent to "why do they want more money?"
- graeme 6y ago
  Any money is in selling bombs that are used, so you can sell more. Not much money in nukes, and you can very by stock exchange listings. This kind of conspiracy thinking utterly ignores the horrifying logic of MAD. Read a bit about Bernard Brodie, pre-eminent strategist, he laid it all out for why deterrence was sadly the only way to go and that we must live in a state of mutually assured destruction. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Brodie_(military_strategist) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Brodie_(military_str...
  - yesenadam 6y ago
    > Any money is in selling bombs that are used, so you can sell more. Not much money in nukes World nuclear arms spending hit $73bn last year – half of it by US. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/13/nuclear-weapons-world-record-spending https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/13/nuclear-weapon... "The U.S. government is now estimated to have 6,800 nuclear weapons at its disposal, but America hasn’t actually built a new warhead or bomb since the 1990s. “It has refurbished several types in recent years to extend their lifetime,”...The B61-12 atomic bombs, for instance, are to undergo a life-extension program that will cost roughly $9.5 billion. There are 400 to 500 of these bombs... which means refurbishing one will cost about $20 million. W-80 warheads, another type being refurbished, are estimated to cost $75 million each ... the total cost of the W-80 life extension plan will be $7.3 billion to $9.9 billion over 17 years." https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/08/heres-how-much-a-nuclear-weapon-costs.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/08/heres-how-much-a-nuclear-wea... Sounds like serious money to me. More details about which companies are making the most money and how: http://www.nuclearweaponsmoney.org/corporations/ http://www.nuclearweaponsmoney.org/corporations/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/01/02/20-companies-profiting-the-most-from-war/40902917/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/01/02/20-companies...
nickthemagicman 6y ago
Russia invented the largest nuke ever and are still innovating in the space with the new Satan 2 missile that can pretty much wipe out the eastern seaboard. So America isn't the only homicidal maniac. Putin gives us a run for our money.

dingaling 6y ago

> Why do you need the other 18,000 bombs? Second-wave strategic targets ( surviving silos, airfields, ports and C3 facilities ) Tactical targets ( tank formations , POL depots, troop assembly areas, aviation FOBs ) Naval targets ( submarines, surface vessels, sonar installations ) Mobility targets ( bridges, valleys, tunnels ) Plus accounting for failed weapons, losses en route, missed targets...

tremon 6y ago
If you have made so many enemies that you need 18,000 nuclear bombs to feel safe, I question your attitude to life.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  As others have said - the primary reason is that you need 1+ nukes to take out the other side's launch sites, and the other side knows this so they spread the siloses across their whole territory - so now you need 1+ nukes for every silo they have (or suspect they have), and they need 1+ nukes for every silo you have (or suspect you have), and this is a positive feedback loop.
  - littlestymaar 6y ago
    By the time your nukes get to the silos, they will most likely be empty already though.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Which is the reason you want to have more nukes than they have silos - to be able to hit all of them at once in a surprise attack (also called "first strike").
      - littlestymaar 6y ago
        Which won't save you against their SSBN… Granted, they have much less warheads in submarines than in silos, but that's still far enough to obliterate every city above 100.000 inhabitant in your country.
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Indeed, which is why submarines are the linchpin of modern MAD. But they weren't always present; the buildup of nuclear arsenal started when the options were limited to ICBMs and strategic bombers.
        varjag 6y ago
        Efficiency of submarine fleets were always hard to calculate, based largely on guesses about the adversary's true anti-submarine capabilities.
- chasd00 6y ago
  i don't see any real reasons, i bet lunch the main idea was to be able to credibly publish a bar graph showing your count larger than that of your enemies.

hacker_9 6y ago

Power begets more power.

loopz 6y ago

These people and their logic started WW1 and WW2. The only thing keeping them abay is that with even conventional warfare, you end up with Syria.

atomashpolskiy 6y ago

Maybe because silos are an important target for the attacking side? So you want to have many in order to reduce the risk of being left without arms in case your enemy attacks first?

serpix 6y ago
Absolute madness, you and your enemy will be dead anyway from the fallout and nuclear winter.
- graeme 6y ago
  Yes, MADness. Because the attack entails utter destruction, it would be irrational to attack, so no one attacks. Bernard Brodie, naval strategist, figured this all out as the inevitable endpoint of nuclear weapons in 1946. People have been trying to get around it ever since, but there is no way around it. Disarm, and a handful of nukes rule the world. If armed, the only way to avoid war is to make it utterly irrational. And offence has an apparently permanent advantage over defence with MIRVs, as it will cost more to shoot down a rocket than to launch it, so missile defence doesn’t work as a strategy to exit MAD. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Brodie_(military_strategist) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Brodie_(military_str...
  - tomjen3 6y ago
    > And offence has an apparently permanent advantage over defence with MIRVs, as it will cost more to shoot down a rocket than to launch it, so missile defence doesn’t work as a strategy to exit MAD. But not shooting a missile down is massively, massively more expensive. If the missile scare on Hawaii had been real and North Korea had launched a single nuclear missile and the US had shot it down, do you think anyone would have cared about the cost? Even if it is, say, twice the cost to shoot down a missile as to launch it the US can afford more than twice the cost the Russians and much more than North Korea.
    - graeme 6y ago

simonh 6y ago

The best way to destroy an enemy nuclear weapon is by hitting it with one of your nuclear weapons. Add on top of that your other strategic targets and a reserve, and the fact that their calculation is the same as yours, and you can see where this is going.

swarnie_ 6y ago
With weapons distributed amongst all USSR holdings this implies the US was willing to nuke everything from Poland to north Vietnam.
- pjc50 6y ago
  Yes, that was the stated objective.
- simonh 6y ago
  And the USSR was willing to nuke everything from Turkey to South Korea (going the long way).
- rocqua 6y ago
  Of course they would be. Nuking the USSR would involve resigning yourself to the murder of hundreds of millions. It also means accepting that the USSR will do whatever they can to retaliate with nukes. In that context, you are already so resigned at killing others over your own safety, that hitting a few other countries is a no-brainer.
- XorNot 6y ago
  The US in fact did have a serious problem with nuclear warplan targeting during the Cold War - there was essentially never a reason you could give to take a target off the list, so the plan for a good deal of time was essentially something like "hit every single conceivable target several times" (to account for failed bombs or losses en route). It was actually one of Dick Cheney's initiatives to create a process which would remove targets from the nuclear warplan's to get the number of weapons used down to a manageable number - and end the feedback of "oh no we've assigned all the weapons - we need more weapons in case there's more targets". EDIT: A critical element with nuclear warplan's is that you don't have one bomb per target - you generally have several bombs per target via different delivery systems with different priorities, because the key element of MAD is survivability - there has to always be a guarantee in your adversary's mind that they cannot destroy enough capability to create a winning scenario for them.

lwhi 6y ago

The doctrine was M.A.D. .. or mutually assured distruction[1]. I believe the (arguably crazy) idea was that the weapons wouldn't ever be used. The fact that each nuclear superpower has a similar amount of weapons assured that the equalibrium would stop the worst from happening. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction

yesenadam 6y ago
That page says "Although the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, the MAD doctrine continues to be applied." I get the feeling that's not generally known. Isn't that kind of extremely weird? I've never seen discussion of it on HN, for example, or maybe what to do about the prospect of living indefinitely under the threat of MAD. With more countries with nuclear weapons all the time. Well, you read here about people not wanting to have kids because of global warming, but not because of that. Is it just too big a problem to even think about?
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  It's not generally known, particularly by the generation that was born at the tail end of the Cold War (like myself), and by people born later. We grew up without the fear of that particular flavor of Armageddon. But MAD is still what keeps the world relatively peaceful. It also gives rise to certain paradoxes - like any attempt to create a better defense against nuclear weapons is also the biggest threat to mankind, because it risks breaking the MAD doctrine and thus inviting a nuclear first strike. For MAD to work, countries in their equivalence class (e.g. US, Russia and China are one class) need to be in lock step with their capabilities, so that no one can be struck without the attacker risking annihilation.
  - yesenadam 6y ago
    > But MAD is still what keeps the world relatively peaceful. There seems a kind of anthropic principle here - it seems successful, but we wouldn't be here talking about it if it had gone terribly wrong, which has come very close to happening more than a few times, apparently. The risk of that is >0, but the cost is...infinite. That doesn't seem obviously worth the gamble, to say the least.

Tuna-Fish 6y ago

For both sides, the most important job for the nukes was counter-force, that is, blowing up the enemy nukes. Both sides understood this, so they deployed their own nukes so sparsely that you generally need one to take out one, and since they still expected to lose a lot of them, they built spares.

chasd00 6y ago
to me, it was the invention of SLBMs that truly but the concept of a first-strike advantage to bed. With subs under the water in the world's oceans armed with dozes of missiles each armed with multiple warheads the concept of taking out your enemy before they can retaliate is gone. IMO, if MAD fails it will be an accident that triggers a run away chain of events leading to nuclear war. We've come close many many times to total nuclear war due to miscommunication, simulation errors, procedural errors, etc.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

It'll kill the whole world - eventually, but for an effective first or second strike you want to take out the enemy as fast as possible, instead of wait for the fallout and climate change to take over. Mind you, a single nuke on e.g. DC or NY would cripple the country already, especially if there's minimal warning.

bambax 6y ago

It doesn't have anything to do with efficiency. It's a pissing contest. You want the largest number because it gives you bragging rights.

jessaustin 6y ago

Why do you need the other 18,000 bombs? Every bomb must be purchased from the armaments manufacturers who actually control our society. The same who originally bamboozled Truman into damning our species. Your question is equivalent to "why do they want more money?"

graeme 6y ago
Any money is in selling bombs that are used, so you can sell more. Not much money in nukes, and you can very by stock exchange listings. This kind of conspiracy thinking utterly ignores the horrifying logic of MAD. Read a bit about Bernard Brodie, pre-eminent strategist, he laid it all out for why deterrence was sadly the only way to go and that we must live in a state of mutually assured destruction. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Brodie_(military_strategist) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Brodie_(military_str...
- yesenadam 6y ago
  > Any money is in selling bombs that are used, so you can sell more. Not much money in nukes World nuclear arms spending hit $73bn last year – half of it by US. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/13/nuclear-weapons-world-record-spending https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/13/nuclear-weapon... "The U.S. government is now estimated to have 6,800 nuclear weapons at its disposal, but America hasn’t actually built a new warhead or bomb since the 1990s. “It has refurbished several types in recent years to extend their lifetime,”...The B61-12 atomic bombs, for instance, are to undergo a life-extension program that will cost roughly $9.5 billion. There are 400 to 500 of these bombs... which means refurbishing one will cost about $20 million. W-80 warheads, another type being refurbished, are estimated to cost $75 million each ... the total cost of the W-80 life extension plan will be $7.3 billion to $9.9 billion over 17 years." https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/08/heres-how-much-a-nuclear-weapon-costs.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/08/heres-how-much-a-nuclear-wea... Sounds like serious money to me. More details about which companies are making the most money and how: http://www.nuclearweaponsmoney.org/corporations/ http://www.nuclearweaponsmoney.org/corporations/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/01/02/20-companies-profiting-the-most-from-war/40902917/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/01/02/20-companies...

nickthemagicman 6y ago

Russia invented the largest nuke ever and are still innovating in the space with the new Satan 2 missile that can pretty much wipe out the eastern seaboard. So America isn't the only homicidal maniac. Putin gives us a run for our money.