7 ms·

The $1.5T Nuclear Weapons Program You've Never Heard Of

71 points by sohkamyung 3y ago

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
It's seems to me that on a planet dense with nuclear powers, not needing to maintain a vast arsenal would be an advantage. Sure, you need four or five big ones so you can start the chain reaction that ends all human civilization, just like your neighbors can, but since everybody else can be relied upon to complete the job once started--so the logic goes--it seems like the best move would be to have far fewer nukes than everybody thinks you do. Of course the problem with that is that somebody somewhere is going to manage to keep the money for all of the nukes people think you have, thereby squandering the advantage.
- rtkwe 3y ago
  Always have to think about what happens if everyone adopts your strategy or everyone but your adversary.
- frostburg 3y ago
  An arsenal that small is already subject to virtual attrition by current ABM efforts.
- __turbobrew__ 3y ago
  Makes you wonder what the efficacy of a dirty bomb which makes the surface of the earth uninhabitable with cobalt isotopes would be to nuclear deterrence.
  - arethuza 3y ago
    I believe the important bit is to let your enemy know that you have such a weapon and not wait until the Party Conference to share your surprise.
  - godelski 3y ago
    > the efficacy of a dirty bomb Surprisingly low. Dirty bombs are much more bang than they are sting. Definitely would leave people with cancer, but exceptionally short range and most would be the manufacturers. It's difficult to get enough radioactive material and distribute is in a large enough area with a conventional weapon (talking terrorist size not MOAB). There is a reason why despite a lot of missing USSR nuclear material no dirty bomb has ever been set off. Great tool of fear, but not as effective at harm. Not saying it is safe, but rather not as deadly as you might presume. It's also just significantly harder to manufacture, very high risk, expensive, and makes it far easier for you to get caught before detonating the device. That also contributes to their lack of use.
- zzzeek 3y ago
  Russia's ability to wage war on Ukraine is enabled entirely because they have a nuclear arsenal. The war would have been shut down almost immediately by the US / nato / etc. if they didn't have that threat.
  - jonhohle 3y ago
    Ironically, it would have been shut down almost immediately (never started?) if NATO didn’t have that threat.
    - rich_sasha 3y ago
      That was is not about any of Russia's legitimate concerns. It is about scratching Russia's imperial itch. Moreover, it pushed Ukraine further into the arms of the West, Finland straight into NATO and Sweden second in line. Just a follow-up of the 2014 invasion.
      - edgyquant 3y ago
        Don’t be ridiculous, you can disagree with the war and still understand nations have competing interests and Ukraine being in NATO comes at the expense of Russian interest.
        rich_sasha 3y ago
        I can understand interest, sure. But this wasn't it. First of all, it's not really clear to me how this is against Russia's deep interest. This gets bandied around a lot, but frankly Russia is already so close to NATO borders elsewhere (Norway, Baltics, Poland if you count Kaliningrad, and of course the Bering straight), and it barely matters with ICBMs around. A conventional war between Russia and NATO, where proximity matters, is totally implausible. I get that Russia would rather have an ally next door than a NATO country, but that it's a threat justifying neutralization is BS to me. Second, Russian losses in this war are enormous. I can't see how Russia thought this war would make it a safer place. They are delving deep into the reserves for a full scale war (like, with NATO), which now they won't have. Finally, this is off the back of a lot of esoteric Kremlin propaganda about how Ukraine has only ever been a part of "Greater Russia".
- bragr 3y ago
  This is basically the plot of Dr Strangelove. >the ambassador informs President Muffley that the Soviet Union created a doomsday machine as a nuclear deterrent; it consists of many buried bombs jacketed with "cobalt–thorium G", which are set to detonate automatically should any nuclear attack strike the country. The resulting nuclear fallout would then engulf the planet for 93 years, rendering the Earth's surface uninhabitable. The device cannot be deactivated, as it is programmed to explode if any such attempt is made.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    Which is itself basically the plot of actual Cold War nuclear planning
    - wongarsu 3y ago
      The mechanism of using a single doomsday weapon is somewhat unique, but the effect isn't that different from the actually implemented Dead Hand system that ensured that eliminating the Soviet command structure would trigger a rocket that sends out launch commands to all ICBMs. Though that was implemented years after the movie came out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand
      - sillywalk 3y ago
        I recall that the system existed to ensure that cooler heads (in Russia) could have more time to ensure that they were being actually being nuked i.e. it wasn't a false alarm, and that retaliation was guaranteed.
    - Gibbon1 3y ago
      Growing up in the middle of the cold war and with some sense of history it dawned on me that the whole thing was an aberration. Geopolitically the world is usually not like that. I thought eventually the cold war order would fall apart and it did. Think reversion to the mean. Not the mean is perfect as one can see from current events. Got to say anytime someone whines that we can't afford some public works project like the California High speed rail I think of the much larger amount were spending on nukes. With $1.5T we could crisscross the US with high speed rail. Unlike nukes you personally might actually use it.
- spacemark 3y ago
  I think you overestimate the power of a nuclear weapon, or even dozens of them. It would take hundreds of targeted strikes to disable a nuclear-armed adversary. Having fewer nuclear weapons only means your major cities, military bases, and industrial assets will be leveled while the majority of your adversary's capabilities remain intact.
  - SiempreViernes 3y ago
    Pretending that counterforce is "disarming" is cute, but the public understanding of nuclear weapons as being countervalue is the more realistic view of what counterforce will actually do. And countervalue does indeed just need a few dozen weapons as city sizes are approximately powerlaws, so there just isn't that many large ones to hit.
    - spacemark 3y ago
      >there just isn't that many large ones to hit. Maybe not here in the US - we only have 10 cities with more than 1 million people. But China has 145 cities >1m. We would not be a threat to their industrial base with only a dozen nukes. Yes, a dozen nukes would cause many billions, perhaps even trillions in damage and horrific loss of life, but China would still have 125 other cities to keep their war machine moving. Deterrence through countervalue threats is great, but once that trigger has been pulled you still have the rest of the war to fight. No need to be condescending, by the way.
      - enterprise_cog 3y ago
        Once that trigger is pulled you have already lost the war. And just because China still has more large cities does not mean that they could effectively wage war.
  - Retric 3y ago
    Nukes are less directly damaging than people think, but the knock on effects are much worse. If your goal is simply to destroy a country as a functioning power you don’t need to kill every single person. Nuke a handful of major ports and you massively harm the US economy without killing that many people. Add major cities and things get really bad at even a dozen nukes. Sure, we would nuke the fuck out of anyone that launched such an attack but that doesn’t allow us to ignore such attacks.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  > it seems like the best move would be to have far fewer nukes than everybody thinks you do. I don't believe that this is possible if even one nation has a moderately competent intelligence agency. They may not have all the details, but if they have any economic data at all, their analysts can likely napkin-math to within 10% of the actual number. Any actual espionage would just further refine it. Hell, that's why there's fluoride in the drinking water... just so some Soviet spy couldn't figure out how many we had from fluoride numbers alone.
  - laszlokorte 3y ago
    Do you have a source at hand for the flouride in drinking water being linked to atomic weapons?
    - vGPU 3y ago
      It was actually. Lawsuits were filed against the DuPont factory. The link is a bit of a “doomer/conspiracy” site I think but the information is accurate. https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/magazine/entry/fluoride_toothpaste_and_the_a-bomb/ https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/magazine/entry...
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
      Figured it out on my own a few years back. Only answer that makes sense. It's used for very few things, and the output of those is published annually. If we're using more fluoride than that, the difference tells you annual (uranium, of course) bomb production. From there, the propaganda took off, any counter-narrative is conspiracy theory, and we now believe our own lies. Hell, the funny thing is I think almost all our current arsenal is plutonium... how long could uranium have even mattered? Not past the 1960s.
- cm2187 3y ago
  Ask Ukraine if they are better off without their nukes now. I have read somewhere that after the fall of the soviet union, some historians got access to some invasion plans for western europe. Apparently those plans excluded France and the UK.
  - arethuza 3y ago
    Probably "Seven Days to the Rhine": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_to_the_River_Rhine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_to_the_River_Rhine However, that was for a single exercise/simulation and the Warsaw Pact militaries probably had loads of other plans. My understanding is that militaries plan all manner of scenarios, some of which turn out to be less than great ideas e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable
    - hef19898 3y ago
      NATO had plans to defend against the Warsaw oact, NATO had plans to invade them. And the other way round, nothing special about it.
      - arethuza 3y ago
        Real problems can occur when you only have one plan: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB130/ https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB130/ Particularly if that plan, as Daniel Ellsberg described, would kill about a billion people.
        hef19898 3y ago
        Basically THE plan then?
        Vecr 3y ago
        SIOP, the Single Integrated Operation Plan.
      - 3y ago
- krisoft 3y ago
  > everybody else can be relied upon to complete the job once started--so the logic goes How does that logic goes? Is it some simplistic tale we tell children or an actual strategic calculation? > so you can start the chain reaction that ends all human civilization You know that the goal is not to end all human civilization? > it seems like the best move would be to have far fewer nukes than everybody thinks you do. It sounds like you haven't heard of the nuclear sponge and the shell game. Let's say you want to hit your adversary. And because you are not suicidal you want to do it in such a way that they can't hit you back in retaliation. "Simple!" You just aim a warhead at each of their rockets. Now how many warheads do you need to do that? About the same number as many rockets they have. One for each. Or maybe 2 if you are accounting for malfunctions. Or maybe 4 if you want to saturate their defenses. And because you can put multiple warheads on a single rocket this favours the attacker. Because the defender needs even more rockets to "soak up" the warheads of the attacker. And the defender needs even more than that so they can ensure a retaliation, which in turn stops the attacker from even trying in the first place. So that is why you need many missiles. This concept is the nuclear sponge. And of course this is super weapons race-y. Because if you need more missiles than your enemy, and your enemy need more missiles than you... there is a problem with that. So what you can do is that you build more missile launchers than you have missiles for. And you play a shell game. You have X launchers but only 40% of them are ever armed with a missile at any single time. And to prevent your enemy figuring out which ones are filled you play complicated distractions. For example you make sure the empty launchers are guarded just as much as the full ones. And you periodically go with a big truck to swap missiles around. Or maybe to swap nothing with nothing? Or to bring missiles to maintenance? Nobody knows, and nobody is supposed to know. If you do it well enough your enemy won't be confident in their knowledge on which launchers are filled so they have to hit all of them if they want to be the one who first throws a punch.
  - SiempreViernes 3y ago
    > Let's say you want to hit your adversary. And because you are not suicidal ... Uh, you have to declare at the start if the actor thinks starting a nuclear war is rational or not, none of this "Assume they thinks its a good idea, but also think that it's a bad idea".
  - 3y ago
- queuebert 3y ago
  > Sure, you need four or five big ones so you can start the chain reaction that ends all human civilization ... Or, say, one social network.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
anikan_vader 3y ago
>> you’ve never heard of I suspect most Americans with a passing interest in nuclear deterrence have heard of this. Moreover, the article is almost entirely about the sentinel land-based ICBM program, which is only 100 B of those 1.5 T. I would argue it is pretty shocking how cheap our nuclear deterrent is, especially compared to our conventional military budget (1.5 T per year). The article includes the suggestion that the land-based nuclear fleet may be superfluous, but does not even attempt to explore the game theory behind keeping it intact (E.g., nuclear missile failure rates, warhead fratricide, the historical difficulty of keeping a boomer fleet stealthy, etc.)
- 0xDEF 3y ago
  Many of the expensive US military programs are flyover state job creation programs masquerading as weapons programs.
  - subjectsigma 3y ago
    That would be plausible except that in my experience they are scrambling to hire people. There’s not nearly enough talent. Nobody wants to move to Nebraska or Utah. It would be kind of strange to create extra work in places where there’s already too much work.
    - gustavus 3y ago
      > Nobody wants to move to Nebraska or Utah. I wish nobody wanted to move to UT I could've stayed in the state, but that stupid California money with the stupid tech bros came in and now it's freaking packed.
    - techdmn 3y ago
      Somehow I have a hard time picturing a senator, member of Congress, governor or other high-level official turning down a pork barrel project for their state due to some difficulty hitting hiring goals.
    - FredPret 3y ago
thedigitalone 3y ago
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/ViRC1 https://ghostarchive.org/archive/ViRC1
thedaly 3y ago
Did I travel forward in time? The article is dated DECEMBER 1, 2023
- anikan_vader 3y ago
  Presumably an online pre-print.
mikewarot 3y ago
Solid lumps of Plutonium eventually end up with helium bubbles in them over time, which degrades their structural integrity. If we want to have reliable weapons over time, we'll have to make new Plutonium pits as time progresses. Here's the Military Industrial Complex's take on it https://discover.lanl.gov/publications/national-security-science/2021-winter/pit-production-explained/ https://discover.lanl.gov/publications/national-security-sci...
John7149 3y ago
These are likely just money laundering within government officials and military complex. None of it has been tested in real life war/battle. If you have seen how American-built decimated in Syria, Yemen and Ukraine, you would take this write up just some grain of salt. I recalled in 80s we had some cool star war laser defense. It even made it into Sid Meier Civ game as irrelevant near end game SDI. Today we largely know that was just fake news cooked by Reagan. Nearly 1T usd spend every year got stalemate by Putin's full of corruptions 60B budget. Meanwhile Russia and China demonstrated their satellite killer programs recently. Even their hypersonic missiles scared American pacific carriers to park a few thousand miles away from Chinese shores. Ah, and that B21 raider...

71 points by sohkamyung 3y ago

It's seems to me that on a planet dense with nuclear powers, not needing to maintain a vast arsenal would be an advantage. Sure, you need four or five big ones so you can start the chain reaction that ends all human civilization, just like your neighbors can, but since everybody else can be relied upon to complete the job once started--so the logic goes--it seems like the best move would be to have far fewer nukes than everybody thinks you do. Of course the problem with that is that somebody somewhere is going to manage to keep the money for all of the nukes people think you have, thereby squandering the advantage.

rtkwe 3y ago
Always have to think about what happens if everyone adopts your strategy or everyone but your adversary.
frostburg 3y ago
An arsenal that small is already subject to virtual attrition by current ABM efforts.
__turbobrew__ 3y ago
Makes you wonder what the efficacy of a dirty bomb which makes the surface of the earth uninhabitable with cobalt isotopes would be to nuclear deterrence.
- arethuza 3y ago
  I believe the important bit is to let your enemy know that you have such a weapon and not wait until the Party Conference to share your surprise.
- godelski 3y ago
  > the efficacy of a dirty bomb Surprisingly low. Dirty bombs are much more bang than they are sting. Definitely would leave people with cancer, but exceptionally short range and most would be the manufacturers. It's difficult to get enough radioactive material and distribute is in a large enough area with a conventional weapon (talking terrorist size not MOAB). There is a reason why despite a lot of missing USSR nuclear material no dirty bomb has ever been set off. Great tool of fear, but not as effective at harm. Not saying it is safe, but rather not as deadly as you might presume. It's also just significantly harder to manufacture, very high risk, expensive, and makes it far easier for you to get caught before detonating the device. That also contributes to their lack of use.
zzzeek 3y ago
Russia's ability to wage war on Ukraine is enabled entirely because they have a nuclear arsenal. The war would have been shut down almost immediately by the US / nato / etc. if they didn't have that threat.
- jonhohle 3y ago
  Ironically, it would have been shut down almost immediately (never started?) if NATO didn’t have that threat.
  - rich_sasha 3y ago
    That was is not about any of Russia's legitimate concerns. It is about scratching Russia's imperial itch. Moreover, it pushed Ukraine further into the arms of the West, Finland straight into NATO and Sweden second in line. Just a follow-up of the 2014 invasion.
    - edgyquant 3y ago
      Don’t be ridiculous, you can disagree with the war and still understand nations have competing interests and Ukraine being in NATO comes at the expense of Russian interest.
      - rich_sasha 3y ago
        I can understand interest, sure. But this wasn't it. First of all, it's not really clear to me how this is against Russia's deep interest. This gets bandied around a lot, but frankly Russia is already so close to NATO borders elsewhere (Norway, Baltics, Poland if you count Kaliningrad, and of course the Bering straight), and it barely matters with ICBMs around. A conventional war between Russia and NATO, where proximity matters, is totally implausible. I get that Russia would rather have an ally next door than a NATO country, but that it's a threat justifying neutralization is BS to me. Second, Russian losses in this war are enormous. I can't see how Russia thought this war would make it a safer place. They are delving deep into the reserves for a full scale war (like, with NATO), which now they won't have. Finally, this is off the back of a lot of esoteric Kremlin propaganda about how Ukraine has only ever been a part of "Greater Russia".
bragr 3y ago
This is basically the plot of Dr Strangelove. >the ambassador informs President Muffley that the Soviet Union created a doomsday machine as a nuclear deterrent; it consists of many buried bombs jacketed with "cobalt–thorium G", which are set to detonate automatically should any nuclear attack strike the country. The resulting nuclear fallout would then engulf the planet for 93 years, rendering the Earth's surface uninhabitable. The device cannot be deactivated, as it is programmed to explode if any such attempt is made.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Which is itself basically the plot of actual Cold War nuclear planning
  - wongarsu 3y ago
    The mechanism of using a single doomsday weapon is somewhat unique, but the effect isn't that different from the actually implemented Dead Hand system that ensured that eliminating the Soviet command structure would trigger a rocket that sends out launch commands to all ICBMs. Though that was implemented years after the movie came out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand
    - sillywalk 3y ago
      I recall that the system existed to ensure that cooler heads (in Russia) could have more time to ensure that they were being actually being nuked i.e. it wasn't a false alarm, and that retaliation was guaranteed.
  - Gibbon1 3y ago
    Growing up in the middle of the cold war and with some sense of history it dawned on me that the whole thing was an aberration. Geopolitically the world is usually not like that. I thought eventually the cold war order would fall apart and it did. Think reversion to the mean. Not the mean is perfect as one can see from current events. Got to say anytime someone whines that we can't afford some public works project like the California High speed rail I think of the much larger amount were spending on nukes. With $1.5T we could crisscross the US with high speed rail. Unlike nukes you personally might actually use it.
spacemark 3y ago
I think you overestimate the power of a nuclear weapon, or even dozens of them. It would take hundreds of targeted strikes to disable a nuclear-armed adversary. Having fewer nuclear weapons only means your major cities, military bases, and industrial assets will be leveled while the majority of your adversary's capabilities remain intact.
- SiempreViernes 3y ago
  Pretending that counterforce is "disarming" is cute, but the public understanding of nuclear weapons as being countervalue is the more realistic view of what counterforce will actually do. And countervalue does indeed just need a few dozen weapons as city sizes are approximately powerlaws, so there just isn't that many large ones to hit.
  - spacemark 3y ago
    >there just isn't that many large ones to hit. Maybe not here in the US - we only have 10 cities with more than 1 million people. But China has 145 cities >1m. We would not be a threat to their industrial base with only a dozen nukes. Yes, a dozen nukes would cause many billions, perhaps even trillions in damage and horrific loss of life, but China would still have 125 other cities to keep their war machine moving. Deterrence through countervalue threats is great, but once that trigger has been pulled you still have the rest of the war to fight. No need to be condescending, by the way.
    - enterprise_cog 3y ago
      Once that trigger is pulled you have already lost the war. And just because China still has more large cities does not mean that they could effectively wage war.
- Retric 3y ago
  Nukes are less directly damaging than people think, but the knock on effects are much worse. If your goal is simply to destroy a country as a functioning power you don’t need to kill every single person. Nuke a handful of major ports and you massively harm the US economy without killing that many people. Add major cities and things get really bad at even a dozen nukes. Sure, we would nuke the fuck out of anyone that launched such an attack but that doesn’t allow us to ignore such attacks.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
> it seems like the best move would be to have far fewer nukes than everybody thinks you do. I don't believe that this is possible if even one nation has a moderately competent intelligence agency. They may not have all the details, but if they have any economic data at all, their analysts can likely napkin-math to within 10% of the actual number. Any actual espionage would just further refine it. Hell, that's why there's fluoride in the drinking water... just so some Soviet spy couldn't figure out how many we had from fluoride numbers alone.
- laszlokorte 3y ago
  Do you have a source at hand for the flouride in drinking water being linked to atomic weapons?
  - vGPU 3y ago
    It was actually. Lawsuits were filed against the DuPont factory. The link is a bit of a “doomer/conspiracy” site I think but the information is accurate. https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/magazine/entry/fluoride_toothpaste_and_the_a-bomb/ https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/magazine/entry...
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    Figured it out on my own a few years back. Only answer that makes sense. It's used for very few things, and the output of those is published annually. If we're using more fluoride than that, the difference tells you annual (uranium, of course) bomb production. From there, the propaganda took off, any counter-narrative is conspiracy theory, and we now believe our own lies. Hell, the funny thing is I think almost all our current arsenal is plutonium... how long could uranium have even mattered? Not past the 1960s.
cm2187 3y ago
Ask Ukraine if they are better off without their nukes now. I have read somewhere that after the fall of the soviet union, some historians got access to some invasion plans for western europe. Apparently those plans excluded France and the UK.
- arethuza 3y ago
  Probably "Seven Days to the Rhine": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_to_the_River_Rhine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_to_the_River_Rhine However, that was for a single exercise/simulation and the Warsaw Pact militaries probably had loads of other plans. My understanding is that militaries plan all manner of scenarios, some of which turn out to be less than great ideas e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable
  - hef19898 3y ago
    NATO had plans to defend against the Warsaw oact, NATO had plans to invade them. And the other way round, nothing special about it.
    - arethuza 3y ago
      Real problems can occur when you only have one plan: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB130/ https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB130/ Particularly if that plan, as Daniel Ellsberg described, would kill about a billion people.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        Basically THE plan then?
        Vecr 3y ago
        SIOP, the Single Integrated Operation Plan.
    - 3y ago
krisoft 3y ago
> everybody else can be relied upon to complete the job once started--so the logic goes How does that logic goes? Is it some simplistic tale we tell children or an actual strategic calculation? > so you can start the chain reaction that ends all human civilization You know that the goal is not to end all human civilization? > it seems like the best move would be to have far fewer nukes than everybody thinks you do. It sounds like you haven't heard of the nuclear sponge and the shell game. Let's say you want to hit your adversary. And because you are not suicidal you want to do it in such a way that they can't hit you back in retaliation. "Simple!" You just aim a warhead at each of their rockets. Now how many warheads do you need to do that? About the same number as many rockets they have. One for each. Or maybe 2 if you are accounting for malfunctions. Or maybe 4 if you want to saturate their defenses. And because you can put multiple warheads on a single rocket this favours the attacker. Because the defender needs even more rockets to "soak up" the warheads of the attacker. And the defender needs even more than that so they can ensure a retaliation, which in turn stops the attacker from even trying in the first place. So that is why you need many missiles. This concept is the nuclear sponge. And of course this is super weapons race-y. Because if you need more missiles than your enemy, and your enemy need more missiles than you... there is a problem with that. So what you can do is that you build more missile launchers than you have missiles for. And you play a shell game. You have X launchers but only 40% of them are ever armed with a missile at any single time. And to prevent your enemy figuring out which ones are filled you play complicated distractions. For example you make sure the empty launchers are guarded just as much as the full ones. And you periodically go with a big truck to swap missiles around. Or maybe to swap nothing with nothing? Or to bring missiles to maintenance? Nobody knows, and nobody is supposed to know. If you do it well enough your enemy won't be confident in their knowledge on which launchers are filled so they have to hit all of them if they want to be the one who first throws a punch.
- SiempreViernes 3y ago
  > Let's say you want to hit your adversary. And because you are not suicidal ... Uh, you have to declare at the start if the actor thinks starting a nuclear war is rational or not, none of this "Assume they thinks its a good idea, but also think that it's a bad idea".
- 3y ago
queuebert 3y ago
> Sure, you need four or five big ones so you can start the chain reaction that ends all human civilization ... Or, say, one social network.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

anikan_vader 3y ago

>> you’ve never heard of I suspect most Americans with a passing interest in nuclear deterrence have heard of this. Moreover, the article is almost entirely about the sentinel land-based ICBM program, which is only 100 B of those 1.5 T. I would argue it is pretty shocking how cheap our nuclear deterrent is, especially compared to our conventional military budget (1.5 T per year). The article includes the suggestion that the land-based nuclear fleet may be superfluous, but does not even attempt to explore the game theory behind keeping it intact (E.g., nuclear missile failure rates, warhead fratricide, the historical difficulty of keeping a boomer fleet stealthy, etc.)

0xDEF 3y ago
Many of the expensive US military programs are flyover state job creation programs masquerading as weapons programs.
- subjectsigma 3y ago
  That would be plausible except that in my experience they are scrambling to hire people. There’s not nearly enough talent. Nobody wants to move to Nebraska or Utah. It would be kind of strange to create extra work in places where there’s already too much work.
  - gustavus 3y ago
    > Nobody wants to move to Nebraska or Utah. I wish nobody wanted to move to UT I could've stayed in the state, but that stupid California money with the stupid tech bros came in and now it's freaking packed.
  - techdmn 3y ago
    Somehow I have a hard time picturing a senator, member of Congress, governor or other high-level official turning down a pork barrel project for their state due to some difficulty hitting hiring goals.
  - FredPret 3y ago

thedigitalone 3y ago

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/ViRC1 https://ghostarchive.org/archive/ViRC1

thedaly 3y ago

Did I travel forward in time? The article is dated DECEMBER 1, 2023

anikan_vader 3y ago
Presumably an online pre-print.

mikewarot 3y ago

Solid lumps of Plutonium eventually end up with helium bubbles in them over time, which degrades their structural integrity. If we want to have reliable weapons over time, we'll have to make new Plutonium pits as time progresses. Here's the Military Industrial Complex's take on it https://discover.lanl.gov/publications/national-security-science/2021-winter/pit-production-explained/ https://discover.lanl.gov/publications/national-security-sci...

John7149 3y ago

These are likely just money laundering within government officials and military complex. None of it has been tested in real life war/battle. If you have seen how American-built decimated in Syria, Yemen and Ukraine, you would take this write up just some grain of salt. I recalled in 80s we had some cool star war laser defense. It even made it into Sid Meier Civ game as irrelevant near end game SDI. Today we largely know that was just fake news cooked by Reagan. Nearly 1T usd spend every year got stalemate by Putin's full of corruptions 60B budget. Meanwhile Russia and China demonstrated their satellite killer programs recently. Even their hypersonic missiles scared American pacific carriers to park a few thousand miles away from Chinese shores. Ah, and that B21 raider...