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Are they providing the data they use anywhere? Are they just expecting that all Russian nukes will actually make it to the US? The US has been somewhat open ab

Are they providing the data they use anywhere? Are they just expecting that all Russian nukes will actually make it to the US? The US has been somewhat open about the immense difficulty of keeping it's nuclear arsenal working reliably and has demonstrated at least some capability to intercept nuclear payloads. Russian state of it's arsenal is likely going to be worse and the actual ability of the US to intercept is likely going to be better.

Aeolun 4y ago
I don’t think you can use unknowable things like ‘state of the nuclear arsenal’, or ‘potential ability to negate or intercept nuclear weapons’ in your simulation as they’re probably state secrets, even if you did somehow know what they were.
- data_maan 4y ago
  But you can trust the conclusion: you have a good chance of dying in such a scenario.
luma 4y ago
The US has been physically inspecting Russia's arsenal (and vice versa) under the terms of New START: https://www.state.gov/new-start/ https://www.state.gov/new-start/ These inspections don't actually test the functionality, but we should have a pretty good idea of the condition of their nuclear arsenal, as they have of ours, as that is part of how MAD works. From that page: Implementation: The information provided through the treaty’s implementation contributes to reducing the risk of strategic surprise, mistrust, and miscalculations that can result from excessive secrecy or decisions based on worst-case assumptions. Since the New START Treaty’s entry into force, as of late January 2022, the two parties have conducted: * 328 on-site inspections * 24,000+ notifications exchanged * 19 meetings of the Bilateral Consultative Commission, and * 42 biannual data exchanges on strategic offensive arms subject to the treaty. Treaty Duration: The treaty’s original duration was 10 years (until February 5, 2021), with the option for the Parties to agree to extend it for up to an additional five years. The United States and Russian Federation agreed on a five-year extension of New START to keep it in force through February 4, 2026. The treaty includes a withdrawal clause that is standard in arms control agreements. Russian Compliance: Although the United States has raised implementation-related questions and concerns with the Russian Federation through diplomatic channels and in the context of the BCC, the United States has determined annually since the treaty’s entry into force, across multiple administrations, the Russian Federation’s compliance with its treaty obligations. U.S. Compliance: The United States is in compliance with its New START obligations. The Russian Federation has criticized U.S. procedures used to convert B-52H heavy bombers and Trident-II SLBM launchers. The United States stands by its conversion procedures, which render the converted SLBM launchers and heavy bombers incapable of employing nuclear weapons thereby removing them from accountability under the treaty.
rgmerk 4y ago
The fact that it might be 20 million rather than 40 million Americans who might die immediately doesn’t exactly fill me with comfort.
- chiefalchemist 4y ago
  Keep in mind similar simulations underestimated climate change. They underestimated Covid. It would be naive to have faith in the 20 million estimate.
  - fallingknife 4y ago
    These 3 simulations are so much different from each other that you can't really extrapolate behavior of one from behavior of another. And, yeah, it would be naive to have faith in almost any simulation of this complexity. Also, what is your source that the climate simulations underestimated? It was my impression that global warming has been much less dramatic than people expected it to be back in the 90's.
    - data_maan 4y ago
      > it would be naive to have faith in almost any simulation of this complexity. Careful now. There is a thin line between no having faith in a simulation and dismissing it entirely. If you would take a look at last year's IPCC report in climate change you can see how dire the situation is, never mind that potentially in the 90s in was predicted to be even more dire. The point is that complex simulations do show the trend, and in light of extinction the most rational response would be to assume the worst outcome and work as hard as possible to avoid that. BTW "global warming" is linguistically a bad word, since it makes it seem that "oh well, it's just getting warmer". What is actually happening, among many things, is that weather will get more extreme (remember these one-in-a-thoisand-year events that now happen almost regularly, like the heat dome last year in SF https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Western_North_America_heat_wave https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Western_North_America_h... ? This is where it's going.)
      - 4y ago
pmoriarty 4y ago
"Are they just expecting that all Russian nukes will actually make it to the US?" Russia and the US have something like 5000 nukes each. Many if not all of those nukes are way more powerful than the ones that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even if only a small fraction of them make it, they'd likely be enough to completely destroy every major city in both countries... and cities are where almost the entire population lives. Plenty of remote areas will likely be hit too, because that's where the missile launch sites and military bases are. All those huge "impregnable" bunkers you see in movies that were supposed to house governments in case of nuclear war were quietly decommissioned because it was realized that they couldn't survive hits from modern nuclear weapons and there's no way to hide them from today's surveillance technology. So in an all-out nuclear war probably most everyone in Russia and the US would die from direct hits.. and that doesn't include knock-on effects from radiation poisoning and fallout, nuclear winter, complete infrastructural and governmental collapse (ie. no clean water to drink, all the animals dead, no food and perhaps even no ability to grow food). As for other countries, I'd read that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the UK general in charge of his country's nuclear arsenal met his Russian counterpart and him whether he thought the movie Threads was an accurate depiction of what would happen in a nuclear war between the two countries. The Russian general laughed and said the entire UK was designated an overkill zone.
- mrcheesebreeze 4y ago
  yeah people don't seem to understand the reality of nuclear war, how much nations want to avoid it, and that russia isn't a paper tiger like the news claims. Russia is a near equal to america in its nuclear tech and absolutely has the firepower needed to induce MAD back at us. Its the dumbest thing to think for a second that its a good idea to push for any kind of war with russia because it runs the risk of a game over for all nations involved. places like the uk are absolutely done for, the whole island would be a mess.
- B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
  > the movie Threads Had to look it up, seems the movie was seen as optimistic ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(1984_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(1984_film): "[...] a dramatic account of nuclear war and its effects in Britain, specifically on the city of Sheffield in Northern England. [...] A third and final attack targets primary economic targets such as the Tinsley Viaduct. This third attack causes massive structural damage to Sheffield; the blast and heat kill an estimated 12 to 30 million people in the U.K. in the wider exchange. [...]"
lordgroff 4y ago
This comment terrifies me to the bone. Note: I'm a long term Eastern European immigrant (not Russian or Ukrainian). Unlike most of HN, I have been in a war, it's much worse than most civilians imagine it. Much. One of the things we knew during the cold war was that nuclear war would be the ruin of society. It was rightly feared. Keeping the peace between the two nuclear powers wasn't seen as a sign of weakness, everyone realized the alternative. Aside from the immediate millions of deaths, the longer term (ie after the first day) effects would be capital C Catastrophic, even if the threat of nuclear winter was overstated. I read this as: oh it wouldn't be so bad. We could probably shoot many of them; and many won't make it, probably. This is incredibly optimistic; Russia has started modernization of its nuclear arsenal long before us because it has a stronger reliance on nuclear deterrence in defensive capability than we do. At the time of writing this, this is also the top voted comment. Simply terrifying. Every day I have the fear we're going to head straight into the new Cuban missile crisis and one that we may not be so lucky to escape.
- mrcheesebreeze 4y ago
  we are probably heading towards that because the usa did the same thing that caused it already. The crisis happened because the usa put bombs in turkiye which is super close to the ussr. Now the usa has bombs in turkiye and other nato members near russia. The issue is that we can't handle what we dish out, I guarantee if russia station nukes further than we stationed them to russia that we would freak out and threaten nuclear apocalypse. the usa makes unnecessary enemies by acting hypocritical and basically pushing other nations around. At one point we could have gotten russia in nato and could have slowly influenced it to be like the rest of nato. Instead we gave them the middle finger and created a jaded enemy that wants to be the ussr again because we treated them as the ussr.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    "we gave them the middle finger and created a jaded enemy that wants to be the ussr again because we treated them as the ussr" After the fall of the Soviet Union, the US gave Russia a tremendous amount of money in hopes it would aid its transition to a modern democracy... much of that money just disappeared and the former Soviet elites stole or bought up much of what used to belong to the state in the newly privatized economy. Meanwhile the KGB and organized crime in Russia joined forces and turned the country in to a corrupt dictatorship, which had a chip on its shoulder against the West and looked backwards to the glory days of the empire of the Soviet Union. While all this was going on, the US considered the Cold War over and actually changed its military strategy to focus on fighting many small urban conflicts and terrorists rather than facing the USSR in a world war. It also scaled down its nuclear capabilities tremendously. The US wouldn't have done any of these things had it wanted to "give Russia the middle finger".
causi 4y ago
the actual ability of the US to intercept is likely going to be better. Unlikely. The Russians have an actually effective interception system: nuclear-tipped interceptor missiles. For political or environmental reasons, the US doesn't use those. Everything we use has at best a fifty percent interception rate and the Russians have more reentry vehicles than we have interceptor missiles.
- mrcheesebreeze 4y ago
  yeah thats a good point, russia has crappy tanks and stuff but a lot of that is they used their military spending on nuclear weapons. they know its their best trump card and they want to "win" by killing us more efficiently.
pasabagi 4y ago
Most experts seems to think that interception is basically impossible to do reliably with current technology, even before you get into the question of countermeasures, and that with the sheer quantity of warheads, it's basically a given that a large majority would land. Whether the entire six thousand or so warheads would explode, or the one-and-a-half thousand deployed missiles would actually reach their targets is anyone's guess. However, bearing in mind that even one nuclear explosion is capable of killing about a million people, if detonated in an urban center, it really just takes a comparative handful of working weapons, say 1-2%, to kill as many people outright, in the initial explosions, as the number that died in the whole of WW2[0]. [0]: 1-2% of 6000 = 60-120, 60 to 120 * 1million = 60 to 120 million, around the same ballpark as deaths in WW2. That's obviously just the initial direct deaths, there would obviously be many more (an order of magnitude, at least) from follow-on effects. And this is ridiculously low-balling the estimate for how many of the warheads would be delivered to target: a more realistic estimate would be like, 90%.
orbifold 4y ago
Russia has hypersonic reentry vehicles, they are pretty much impossible to intercept (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-28_Sarmat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-28_Sarmat), each of these MIRV contains 10-15 nuclear warheads or an unspecified number of hypersonic glide vehicles (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avangard_(hypersonic_glide_vehicle) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avangard_(hypersonic_glide_v... )with nuclear payloads. They figured out the hydrodynamics to make the hypersonic glide vehicles work, I believe the US is roughly a decade behind on that. Note that this requires genuinely hard math to do and the US funding on this was temporarily suspended because it was thought to be infeasible.
- isatty 4y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_Global_Strike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_Global_Strike Suggests that the US is not behind. If Wikipedia has that information it is likely that we’re already several decades ahead, in fact.
  - orbifold 4y ago
    The publicly known US tests of hypersonic gliders all failed or rather disintegrated, as I said there is a genuinely hard problem to be solved here and the US stopped research into it in the 80s for quite a while.
- jandrewrogers 4y ago
  There is nothing that makes hypersonic reentry vehicles uniquely difficult to intercept, I'm not sure why anyone would assume that. The US considered this a solved problem in the 1980s. As for the US being "behind", the US was developing and testing endo-atmospheric hypersonic missile platforms as far back as the 1980s. Russia et al designed hypersonic weapons with significantly compromised terminal guidance performance, a compromise the US will not accept in operational systems. Terminal guidance is the hardest technical problem when designing long-range endo-atmospheric hypersonic weapons. That the US is starting to move these systems toward production after 30-40 years of research suggests that they've solved the problem of terminal guidance to their satisfaction.
lamontcg 4y ago
> Russian state of it's arsenal is likely going to be worse Up until recently Russia was sending up American astronauts on Soyuz rockets to the ISS because they had a reliable system (based on the R7 ICBM) and we didn't. > and the actual ability of the US to intercept is likely going to be better. Intercepting ICBMs is orders of magnitudes more difficult than intercepting theater weapons like scuds because of the velocities involved. This simulation was of 10% of each nations arsenal. If Russia launches 20% of their arsenal then it should make up for any amount of failure (and interception is likely to be negligible). Worries me that we have so much motivated thinking trying to discount the risks of nuclear war these days. That's how you wind up in a nuclear war just like the one suggested here.

Aeolun 4y ago

I don’t think you can use unknowable things like ‘state of the nuclear arsenal’, or ‘potential ability to negate or intercept nuclear weapons’ in your simulation as they’re probably state secrets, even if you did somehow know what they were.

data_maan 4y ago
But you can trust the conclusion: you have a good chance of dying in such a scenario.

luma 4y ago

The US has been physically inspecting Russia's arsenal (and vice versa) under the terms of New START: https://www.state.gov/new-start/ https://www.state.gov/new-start/ These inspections don't actually test the functionality, but we should have a pretty good idea of the condition of their nuclear arsenal, as they have of ours, as that is part of how MAD works. From that page: Implementation: The information provided through the treaty’s implementation contributes to reducing the risk of strategic surprise, mistrust, and miscalculations that can result from excessive secrecy or decisions based on worst-case assumptions. Since the New START Treaty’s entry into force, as of late January 2022, the two parties have conducted: * 328 on-site inspections * 24,000+ notifications exchanged * 19 meetings of the Bilateral Consultative Commission, and * 42 biannual data exchanges on strategic offensive arms subject to the treaty. Treaty Duration: The treaty’s original duration was 10 years (until February 5, 2021), with the option for the Parties to agree to extend it for up to an additional five years. The United States and Russian Federation agreed on a five-year extension of New START to keep it in force through February 4, 2026. The treaty includes a withdrawal clause that is standard in arms control agreements. Russian Compliance: Although the United States has raised implementation-related questions and concerns with the Russian Federation through diplomatic channels and in the context of the BCC, the United States has determined annually since the treaty’s entry into force, across multiple administrations, the Russian Federation’s compliance with its treaty obligations. U.S. Compliance: The United States is in compliance with its New START obligations. The Russian Federation has criticized U.S. procedures used to convert B-52H heavy bombers and Trident-II SLBM launchers. The United States stands by its conversion procedures, which render the converted SLBM launchers and heavy bombers incapable of employing nuclear weapons thereby removing them from accountability under the treaty.

rgmerk 4y ago

The fact that it might be 20 million rather than 40 million Americans who might die immediately doesn’t exactly fill me with comfort.

chiefalchemist 4y ago
Keep in mind similar simulations underestimated climate change. They underestimated Covid. It would be naive to have faith in the 20 million estimate.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  These 3 simulations are so much different from each other that you can't really extrapolate behavior of one from behavior of another. And, yeah, it would be naive to have faith in almost any simulation of this complexity. Also, what is your source that the climate simulations underestimated? It was my impression that global warming has been much less dramatic than people expected it to be back in the 90's.
  - data_maan 4y ago
    > it would be naive to have faith in almost any simulation of this complexity. Careful now. There is a thin line between no having faith in a simulation and dismissing it entirely. If you would take a look at last year's IPCC report in climate change you can see how dire the situation is, never mind that potentially in the 90s in was predicted to be even more dire. The point is that complex simulations do show the trend, and in light of extinction the most rational response would be to assume the worst outcome and work as hard as possible to avoid that. BTW "global warming" is linguistically a bad word, since it makes it seem that "oh well, it's just getting warmer". What is actually happening, among many things, is that weather will get more extreme (remember these one-in-a-thoisand-year events that now happen almost regularly, like the heat dome last year in SF https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Western_North_America_heat_wave https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Western_North_America_h... ? This is where it's going.)
    - 4y ago

pmoriarty 4y ago

"Are they just expecting that all Russian nukes will actually make it to the US?" Russia and the US have something like 5000 nukes each. Many if not all of those nukes are way more powerful than the ones that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even if only a small fraction of them make it, they'd likely be enough to completely destroy every major city in both countries... and cities are where almost the entire population lives. Plenty of remote areas will likely be hit too, because that's where the missile launch sites and military bases are. All those huge "impregnable" bunkers you see in movies that were supposed to house governments in case of nuclear war were quietly decommissioned because it was realized that they couldn't survive hits from modern nuclear weapons and there's no way to hide them from today's surveillance technology. So in an all-out nuclear war probably most everyone in Russia and the US would die from direct hits.. and that doesn't include knock-on effects from radiation poisoning and fallout, nuclear winter, complete infrastructural and governmental collapse (ie. no clean water to drink, all the animals dead, no food and perhaps even no ability to grow food). As for other countries, I'd read that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the UK general in charge of his country's nuclear arsenal met his Russian counterpart and him whether he thought the movie Threads was an accurate depiction of what would happen in a nuclear war between the two countries. The Russian general laughed and said the entire UK was designated an overkill zone.

mrcheesebreeze 4y ago
yeah people don't seem to understand the reality of nuclear war, how much nations want to avoid it, and that russia isn't a paper tiger like the news claims. Russia is a near equal to america in its nuclear tech and absolutely has the firepower needed to induce MAD back at us. Its the dumbest thing to think for a second that its a good idea to push for any kind of war with russia because it runs the risk of a game over for all nations involved. places like the uk are absolutely done for, the whole island would be a mess.
B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
> the movie Threads Had to look it up, seems the movie was seen as optimistic ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(1984_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(1984_film): "[...] a dramatic account of nuclear war and its effects in Britain, specifically on the city of Sheffield in Northern England. [...] A third and final attack targets primary economic targets such as the Tinsley Viaduct. This third attack causes massive structural damage to Sheffield; the blast and heat kill an estimated 12 to 30 million people in the U.K. in the wider exchange. [...]"

lordgroff 4y ago

This comment terrifies me to the bone. Note: I'm a long term Eastern European immigrant (not Russian or Ukrainian). Unlike most of HN, I have been in a war, it's much worse than most civilians imagine it. Much. One of the things we knew during the cold war was that nuclear war would be the ruin of society. It was rightly feared. Keeping the peace between the two nuclear powers wasn't seen as a sign of weakness, everyone realized the alternative. Aside from the immediate millions of deaths, the longer term (ie after the first day) effects would be capital C Catastrophic, even if the threat of nuclear winter was overstated. I read this as: oh it wouldn't be so bad. We could probably shoot many of them; and many won't make it, probably. This is incredibly optimistic; Russia has started modernization of its nuclear arsenal long before us because it has a stronger reliance on nuclear deterrence in defensive capability than we do. At the time of writing this, this is also the top voted comment. Simply terrifying. Every day I have the fear we're going to head straight into the new Cuban missile crisis and one that we may not be so lucky to escape.

mrcheesebreeze 4y ago
we are probably heading towards that because the usa did the same thing that caused it already. The crisis happened because the usa put bombs in turkiye which is super close to the ussr. Now the usa has bombs in turkiye and other nato members near russia. The issue is that we can't handle what we dish out, I guarantee if russia station nukes further than we stationed them to russia that we would freak out and threaten nuclear apocalypse. the usa makes unnecessary enemies by acting hypocritical and basically pushing other nations around. At one point we could have gotten russia in nato and could have slowly influenced it to be like the rest of nato. Instead we gave them the middle finger and created a jaded enemy that wants to be the ussr again because we treated them as the ussr.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  "we gave them the middle finger and created a jaded enemy that wants to be the ussr again because we treated them as the ussr" After the fall of the Soviet Union, the US gave Russia a tremendous amount of money in hopes it would aid its transition to a modern democracy... much of that money just disappeared and the former Soviet elites stole or bought up much of what used to belong to the state in the newly privatized economy. Meanwhile the KGB and organized crime in Russia joined forces and turned the country in to a corrupt dictatorship, which had a chip on its shoulder against the West and looked backwards to the glory days of the empire of the Soviet Union. While all this was going on, the US considered the Cold War over and actually changed its military strategy to focus on fighting many small urban conflicts and terrorists rather than facing the USSR in a world war. It also scaled down its nuclear capabilities tremendously. The US wouldn't have done any of these things had it wanted to "give Russia the middle finger".

causi 4y ago

the actual ability of the US to intercept is likely going to be better. Unlikely. The Russians have an actually effective interception system: nuclear-tipped interceptor missiles. For political or environmental reasons, the US doesn't use those. Everything we use has at best a fifty percent interception rate and the Russians have more reentry vehicles than we have interceptor missiles.

mrcheesebreeze 4y ago
yeah thats a good point, russia has crappy tanks and stuff but a lot of that is they used their military spending on nuclear weapons. they know its their best trump card and they want to "win" by killing us more efficiently.

pasabagi 4y ago

Most experts seems to think that interception is basically impossible to do reliably with current technology, even before you get into the question of countermeasures, and that with the sheer quantity of warheads, it's basically a given that a large majority would land. Whether the entire six thousand or so warheads would explode, or the one-and-a-half thousand deployed missiles would actually reach their targets is anyone's guess. However, bearing in mind that even one nuclear explosion is capable of killing about a million people, if detonated in an urban center, it really just takes a comparative handful of working weapons, say 1-2%, to kill as many people outright, in the initial explosions, as the number that died in the whole of WW2[0]. [0]: 1-2% of 6000 = 60-120, 60 to 120 * 1million = 60 to 120 million, around the same ballpark as deaths in WW2. That's obviously just the initial direct deaths, there would obviously be many more (an order of magnitude, at least) from follow-on effects. And this is ridiculously low-balling the estimate for how many of the warheads would be delivered to target: a more realistic estimate would be like, 90%.

orbifold 4y ago

Russia has hypersonic reentry vehicles, they are pretty much impossible to intercept (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-28_Sarmat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-28_Sarmat), each of these MIRV contains 10-15 nuclear warheads or an unspecified number of hypersonic glide vehicles (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avangard_(hypersonic_glide_vehicle) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avangard_(hypersonic_glide_v... )with nuclear payloads. They figured out the hydrodynamics to make the hypersonic glide vehicles work, I believe the US is roughly a decade behind on that. Note that this requires genuinely hard math to do and the US funding on this was temporarily suspended because it was thought to be infeasible.

isatty 4y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_Global_Strike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_Global_Strike Suggests that the US is not behind. If Wikipedia has that information it is likely that we’re already several decades ahead, in fact.
- orbifold 4y ago
  The publicly known US tests of hypersonic gliders all failed or rather disintegrated, as I said there is a genuinely hard problem to be solved here and the US stopped research into it in the 80s for quite a while.
jandrewrogers 4y ago
There is nothing that makes hypersonic reentry vehicles uniquely difficult to intercept, I'm not sure why anyone would assume that. The US considered this a solved problem in the 1980s. As for the US being "behind", the US was developing and testing endo-atmospheric hypersonic missile platforms as far back as the 1980s. Russia et al designed hypersonic weapons with significantly compromised terminal guidance performance, a compromise the US will not accept in operational systems. Terminal guidance is the hardest technical problem when designing long-range endo-atmospheric hypersonic weapons. That the US is starting to move these systems toward production after 30-40 years of research suggests that they've solved the problem of terminal guidance to their satisfaction.

lamontcg 4y ago

> Russian state of it's arsenal is likely going to be worse Up until recently Russia was sending up American astronauts on Soyuz rockets to the ISS because they had a reliable system (based on the R7 ICBM) and we didn't. > and the actual ability of the US to intercept is likely going to be better. Intercepting ICBMs is orders of magnitudes more difficult than intercepting theater weapons like scuds because of the velocities involved. This simulation was of 10% of each nations arsenal. If Russia launches 20% of their arsenal then it should make up for any amount of failure (and interception is likely to be negligible). Worries me that we have so much motivated thinking trying to discount the risks of nuclear war these days. That's how you wind up in a nuclear war just like the one suggested here.