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Every time I’ve seen nuclear stockpiles and the reduction thereof discussed, I’ve wondered: Assuming for some reason the United States needed to ramp back up to

Every time I’ve seen nuclear stockpiles and the reduction thereof discussed, I’ve wondered: Assuming for some reason the United States needed to ramp back up to an absurd number of warheads (ignore the MAD/political practicalities), how quickly could they do so? What’s the lead time or rate limiting factors in production? Because if they could start churning out a dozen or a hundred a week within a short period of time, why does the standing arsenal really matter? Does it really make a difference in global safety or geopolitics? I don’t know the first thing about the topic so this is all genuine curiosity, and I feel like the googling required to get an answer would put me on lists I don’t really feel like being on.

skellington 2y ago
There is no form of full scale nuclear war where the production apparatus for anything becomes a factor.
- slg 2y ago
  That is assuming nuclear war breaks out with zero warning. There is usually a build up to wars that could involve ramping up production of a nuclear arsenal before any nuclear weapons are actually used.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    What type of warning do you expect to see? We currently have a war in Ukraine involving between 2-4 of the major nuclear powers depending on how you want to count them (Russia, US, UK, China). Russia is bleeding heavily and it is hard to tell how close they are to some sort of internal crisis or collapse into groupthink by the military leaders. There have probably been Able Archer style near misses and we could have a repeat of the Cuban missile crisis without much changing. China is building up its nuclear arsenal and the political positioning in APAC suggests that a US-China war is on the cards. If we escalated in to full-scale nuclear war this July that'd be unexpected but we're way past 0 warning. There are lots of warnings. In terms of raw risk the last few years might be the biggest risk of a nuclear war breaking out that the species has ever faced.
    - inquirerGeneral 2y ago
      [dead]
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - slg 2y ago
      Maybe we aren't at 0 warning at the moment, but if there is a spectrum from 0 warning to imminent, we are close enough to 0 that the distinction doesn't really matter. The US, UK, and China are not actively fighting in Ukraine and even if they were, this wouldn't be the first time these countries have directly fought each other in a proxy war in the nuclear age. So unless you think the Russian military personnel that would actually carry out a full scale attack on the West would prefer destroying civilization to losing in Ukraine, I would expect some type of escalation beyond the position we have been in for the better part of the last 80 years.
      - roenxi 2y ago
        > I would expect some type of escalation beyond the position we have been in for the better part of the last 80 years. We have escalated beyond the point we have been in for the last 80 years. Russia have lost more troops than in any war since WWII. That is a lot of dead Slavs. Their strategic nuclear defences have already been attacked [0] and NATO currently appears to be organising direct strikes on Russian territory. They've made it quite clear that they want the war to continue until something in Russia breaks. When more warnings are you expecting to see? There are a lot of warnings out there. We could easily discover that someone tried to launch the nukes already in this conflict. It would be precedented; the situation is more tense than it ever has been before and we've had fortuitous near misses in similar situations. We're already in territory where we are rolling the dice for a catastrophe with low odds. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/world/europe/ukraine-drones-russia-nuclear.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/world/europe/ukraine-dron...
        TiredOfLife 2y ago
        Is that NATO currently in the room with you?
  - justin66 2y ago
    During times of escalating tensions with a resourceful geopolitical adversary, you would try to cool things off with diplomacy but simultaneously... start building lots of new nuclear weapons? Smart!
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > no form of full scale nuclear war where the production apparatus for anything becomes a factor Where full nuclear war means a full exchange of strategic fire, yes. For tactical nukes or bombardment of a non-retaliating state, less so.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    It's not clear there's any such thing as "tactical nukes" given that they're strategically useless, and it's actually not even clear there's such a thing as nuclear exchange that isn't full scale war. At least as told by Ellsberg in the Doomsday Machine, there was literally no mechanism for the US to launch a partial nuclear attack.
    - jncfhnb 2y ago
      That doesn’t make any sense. Just drop it by a conventional non ICBM method
    - hypeatei 2y ago
      > no mechanism for the US to launch a partial nuclear attack Yep, the trajectory to North Korea (from US mainland) has to pass over Russia and the Russians have to trust that it's not coming for them. Not that Russia would be okay with us striking NK in the first place, but you get the point.
      - fshbbdssbbgdd 2y ago
        Are you saying that just because the great circle from US to NK goes over Russia? Can we not fire on a less optimal trajectory? Or from a submarine?
      - crmd 2y ago
        You can fire an SLBM from the Pacific or the Sea of Japan without traversing Russia or China.
        2y ago
- pythonguython 2y ago
  Agreed. It’s over in half a day. Ramping up production is a rung on the escalation ladder. It’s generally good to have more rungs.
- chipweinberger 2y ago
  It’s not a given that both sides have nuclear capability. megaton size has not been disclosed. The majority could be small nukes.
_visgean 2y ago
Isnt the enriching process super slow? https://education.cfr.org/learn/reading/how-do-countries-create-nuclear-weapons https://education.cfr.org/learn/reading/how-do-countries-cre... this article puts somewhere in months, but you are still limited by the number of centrifuges and probably some other factors.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ianburrell 2y ago
  The US has tons and tons plutonium from old nuclear weapons. Enough to build tens of thousands of nukes. Also, centrifuge aren’t used by advanced nations to make nukes. They use plutonium from spent reactor fuel. The US has lots of spent fuel that could be reprocessed for the plutonium.
  - baybal2 2y ago
    [dead]
lumost 2y ago
The final cost of an h-bomb at industrial scale was estimated at 10k in the 1960s (for low yield). However for practical purposes. One simply needs enough missiles and warheads of sufficient yield to overwhelm opposing interceptors, avoid risks of pre-emptive strike/miss-fires+500. After that there are rapidly diminishing returns for more warheads.
ianburrell 2y ago
The US has plenty of any conceivable war. There is probably long time to restart production since haven’t done it in a while. The big factor is that the deployment platforms are limited. There are 400 Minuteman III missiles sitting in silos. They could put more warheads on them, but those are sitting in storage. The same is true of Trident missiles on submarines. They could make nuclear gravity bombs but those aren’t really useful. We also have lots of those in storage.
GemesAS 2y ago
Pit production is likely the rate limiting factor. We disassembled a bunch of AFAPs so have a lot of weapons grade plutonium around. But Pu is nasty to work with & Rocky Flats--the previous pit production facility--closed down years ago. Pit production moved to Los Alamos but it is at a much reduced capability. Also, Pantex--where nuclear weapons are assembled--isn't exactly the model for speed & efficiency.
- holowoodman 2y ago
  I guess mass produced nukes would rather be enriched uranium based, due to the far easier construction. No fiddly implosive lens assembly. No weird multi-phase cristallization that goes critical if you blink. Metal that is merely as dangerous and nasty as lead, magnesium or arsenic, not plutonium. If you really want to go carpet-bombing with nukes, miniturization isn't as important as having a lot, quickly and reliably.
  - sadhorse 2y ago
    Enriching uranium is more expensive than making plutonium by a long shot. Modern nukes are two point implosion, not really fiddly. And when was the last criticality incident related to phase transition? Can't remember one.
    - credit_guy 2y ago
      > Enriching uranium is more expensive than making plutonium by a long shot I'm not sure. This used to be the case in WW2, but today enriching uranium is quite inexpensive. Here's an enrichment calculator [1]. The cost of enriching to 80% (weapons grade uranium) is $80000/kg, so you can enough uranium for a Hiroshima-style bomb for about $5 million. $5 million for a nuclear bomb is basically nothing. [1] https://www.uxc.com/p/tools/FuelCalculator.aspx https://www.uxc.com/p/tools/FuelCalculator.aspx
      - ben_w 2y ago
        That's worryingly cheap, but it also feels unlikely due to all the fuss made over stopping Iranian centrifuges. I assume that's something like the amortised cost over the lifetime of a factory dedicated to making them, rather than something which at least a few people on this forum can personally afford?
ranger_danger 2y ago
I suppose the easier solution (not that I'm advocating it) would be to lie about disposing of them in the first place.
justin66 2y ago
> Because if they could start churning out a dozen or a hundred a week within a short period of time, why does the standing arsenal really matter? Possessing an overwhelming amount of retaliatory force and the combined ability and willingness to deliver it immediately in the face of an enemy's first strike serves a useful purpose for deterrence. "Mutually assured destruction" means that both sides are prevented from attacking, because the other side can respond in kind. It's irrational for either side to attack, since everybody would just die. (and yes, MAD comes with its own problems) The ability to build a bunch of bombs in the future is entirely unrelated. I mean, who cares?
- HaZeust 2y ago
  I'd also like to add to this; that the ability to consecutively create additional warheads is not of any particular inherent value, especially when our reserve count is more than enough to wipe out any and all civilization - regardless of target diversity. It's not like missiles or ammo, where the more we produce in times of conflict, the more of an upper-hand we have. We've already reached the ceiling for the finite amount of nuclear warheads required to do the most conceivable damage. Beyond is irrelevant.
  - hollerith 2y ago
    What do you imagine happens when thousands of nukes explode? The Earth splits into pieces?
    - HaZeust 2y ago
      Nuclear winter??? Strange question.
      - hollerith 2y ago
        It's not a strange question: many falsehoods get repeated over and over on the internet and here on HN. The conversation around nuclear winter focused on burning petroleum storage tanks because (in contrast to burning houses and burning trees) those kinds of fires produce the darkest smoke with a particle size small enough to get high in the atmosphere and to stay in the atmosphere for a long time. "100 oil refinery fires would be sufficient to bring about a small scale, but still globally deleterious nuclear winter," said one prominent paper. Then Saddam lit 700 oil wells on fire (and deployed land mines to slow down firefighters with the result that it took 7 months to put the fires out), and although there was some slight cooling effect, you really had to go looking for it with precision instruments to detect it at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in_the_first_Gulf_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in...
somenameforme 2y ago
Let's talk about just how destructive nukes are, because I think most people grossly underestimate this. One bomb in Hiroshima killed hundreds of thousands. And that was a tiny little bomb relative to modern standards - 16kt of yield in a mid-sized city of ~350k people. Modern tactical weapons (weapons intended for battlefield use) can have yields exceeding 100kt. Strategic weapons (weapons intended to end other civilizations) go into the thousands of kt. The strongest weapon ever tested being "Tsar Bomba" which had a yield of 55,000kt, so a few thousand times greater yield than the Hiroshima nuke - which was by itself enough to instantly destroy a mid-sized city and kill more than 40% of its population. I think it's easy to lose scale/context when looking at things like nuclear test footage, so let's go the other direction. This [1] is the "Mother of All Bombs / MOAB / GBU-43" that was detonated in Afghanistan. It's the second largest conventional weapon ever fielded, weighing more than 20,000lbs and and 30+ft long (so that little blip on the screen is 30 ft for scale). It had a yield of 0.01kt. So now imagine something with literally hundreds of thousands of times greater yield - that's a modern nuke. Or, if it helps for visualization purposes, imagine hundreds of thousands of those raining down - same net effect. So if nuclear war ever breaks out it's not going to be countries using their nukes to target isolated (and nuclear fortified) launch silos and bunkers in the middle of nowhere - they're going to try to destroy the other country (targeting things like population, economic, health, agriculture), so that they can completely eliminate the threat. And suffice to say - it won't take many nukes. The only reason you'd have thousands is to overwhelm any sort of future-tech missile defense systems as well as to eliminate any possibility for an effective first strike attack attack against you. Although even the nukes themselves are also designed to deal with missile defenses, with one missile often breaking up into multiple independent warheads on approach. This also maximizes the damage for reasons outside the scope of the post. --- So the point of this is that thousands of nukes is already enough to basically destroy every single major city in the world and thus destroy basically every single country in the world. There's no scenario where suddenly you need to scale up to tens of thousands of nukes or whatever. In fact nations like North Korea already clearly have an effective deterrent with a stockpile that's in the tens of missiles. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6rSxJnpGNg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6rSxJnpGNg
- knappe 2y ago
fragmede 2y ago
> googling required to get an answer would put me on lists I don’t really feel like being on. But asking in the clear under the pseudonym "transcriptase" here isn't going to get you put on the exact same lists? How do you think this list making process works?
- transcriptase 2y ago
  I would assume that asking a question in the comments section of a relevant article, and making clear why I’m doing so is slightly less flag worthy than randomly googling questions about logistics and production.
  - TiredOfLife 2y ago
    If lists like that are being made, then Googling would put you on a huge automatic list that would be queried only as part of a targeted inquiry. But asking in comment section of relevant article would put you on a short "immediate action" list.
  - gosub100 2y ago
    You have good training for living under a police state, being submissive to authority and not asking why or having any concern for your rights. Your social credit score must be high. I'm curious did you learn this in "lockdown" drills in your elementary school?
- GJim 2y ago
  This is the 'chilling effect' in action.
toast0 2y ago
> Because if they could start churning out a dozen or a hundred a week within a short period of time, why does the standing arsenal really matter? There's probably a declared number where this matters, but the current number of warheads is high enough that's there's no need to make more. 3,000 is plenty to retaliate against an opponent with 30,000. More doesn't provide a benefit. Nuclear disarmament, as practiced by the US and Russia is a negotiation to reduce the number of warheads in a coordinated fashion so that it's possible to convince warmongers on both sides that it's reasonable. The benefits are primary a reduction in cost to maintain and secure the warheads and a significant reduction in the risk of accidents related to the warheads. Mutual destruction is still assured --- you'd need a lot fewer warheads for that and involvement of other nuclear states; but then your question of production capacity would be more interesting.
- yencabulator 2y ago
  > 3,000 is plenty to retaliate against an opponent with 30,000. More doesn't provide a benefit. I think a big part of this is that the long-distance missiles, when all of this was invented, were not very accurate. Sending 10 to do the job of 1 might have been necessary just to hit the intended targets. Modern missiles are quite capable of precision strikes.
  - chasd00 2y ago
    > Modern missiles are quite capable of precision strikes. yes, this is also why yields have dropped considerably. I'm not sure if there are any > 5 MT weapons in the US arsenal anymore. I think most are in the 500-750KT range, the missiles and delivery vehicle are accurate enough to produce the same result as the larger warheads and 5-7 (can't remember exactly) warheads can be carried by a single missile. So instead of having one missile launch one giant warhead that may hit 50 miles away from the target you have one missile launch 5-7 smaller warheads that hit within 50 meters of 5-7 different targets.
  - oremolten 2y ago
    This is a big part of why the long lines bunkers/sites were abandoned. Once the accuracy increased to more than 1mi the resilience of the bunkers and sites were folly. (built to withstand multiple mt within 1mi)
jalapenos 2y ago
Nukes tend to blow up all your stuff quite a bit faster than you can build more of it.
_aavaa_ 2y ago
Given the surprise with FOGBANK, I don’t have high hopes for it going fast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank
jjk166 2y ago
It works the same as industrial capacity for things like planes or artillery shells. Once you ramp up production you can produce lots very quickly, the US produced 70,000 between 1945 and 1990, averaging 30 per week with a peak rate around 54 per week; but building out the factories to ramp up takes a long time - for the first 10 years the US averaged 6 per week. Most of the US's nuclear production capacity was dismantled. With WW2 levels of hustle and disregard for safety, we could probably build new facilities in around a year or two. These efforts would be pulling resources from attempts to ramp up production of other wartime necessities. Also you don't just need to build the nukes, you also need to build adequate delivery systems, which are all advanced aerospace manufacturing. If you eliminate your arsenal and then decide later you want it back, you're giving adversaries a lot of time to beat you to the punch, all the while advertising that you are pursuing nuclear as opposed to conventional weapons to fight your war.
- lbotos 2y ago
  I'm sure someone here knows -- how many actively procured munitions could have their payload swapped for a nuclear payload? Are there "rules" against building "nuclear compatible" munitions?
  - 1992spacemovie 2y ago
    Yes. And yes. Treaties for arms reduction deal with not only warheads but also delivery vehicles. Protocols include mutual inspection of disabled vehicles, etc.
    - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      I have a hard time imagining that anybody with the resources to secure a nuclear warhead in the first place would later be prevented from using it just because it wasn't plug-n-play compatible with their existing trebuchets or whatever.
      - jvanderbot 2y ago
chasd00 2y ago
full scale nuclear war where the full quantity of warheads is used would be over in maybe 1hr tops. Initial attack, detection, response. Then probably another attack and another response from remaining SLICBMs and then that would be it. I don't think any capacity to create more would survive or change the outcome and therefore is not much of a deterrent.
- fatbird 2y ago
  Force replenishment in the event of nuclear war is a moot question, but if someone can go from 100 to 1,000 warheads in a couple months, that has a lot of relevance in a growing crisis--what would Russia have done in 2022 if Ukraine had kept the ability to manufacture them and was able to build 100/year?
  - chasd00 2y ago
    That's a good point, i read this thread top to bottom because this topic has always been fascinating to me. Others have brought up how war wouldn't go from 0 to missiles flying immediately, there would be a crisis and build-up period. So I can see something like that ability to mass produce nuclear weapons and demonstrate it acting as a deterrent and therefore be useful.I can't think of an instance off the top of my head where a massive arms build up caused the other side to back down though. To your specific point, I think if Ukraine had the keys to even one nuclear weapon and Russia believed they'd use it the invasion would never have happened in the first place.
  - scott_w 2y ago
    I know you asked a slightly different question but I watched a video about Ukraine’s nukes and the reality is they could never deploy them without Russia. The codes always stayed with Moscow and Russia would have forcibly maintained a presence on Ukrainian soil to protect their nukes. Ukraine returning the nukes was a pragmatic move that, at the time, removed Russian military presence from Ukrainian territory. Think about it another way: the USA maintains nuclear weapons on other country’s territory. They sure as hell staff those sites with US troops!
pipodeclown 2y ago
Standing stockpiles matter in a ever changing and destabilising world. We can't imagine it now but what if the US (or any other nuclear power) started to destabalise, maybe end up in a civil war, fracture up into smaller pieces, what ever. The less nuclear weapons you have lying around during and after that process the less opportunities for things to go terribly wrong.
dekhn 2y ago
Like many other things in the US that we don't do any more, if you found the right people (many of whom are retired) and gave them the right amount of money (copious) and eliminated all the "pesky" bottlenecks (environmental analyses, legal challenges, etc), it would take a year to start producing weapons. On the other hand, that's how we ended up with Hanford Site.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  This has not shown to be the case as we have seen with American artillery shell production. The companies are not yet ramping up, because they don't want the ground cut out from under them if the war ends early next year and congress decides to cut any funding. Turns out having fickle, lazy, stupid, feckless politicians have the ability to destroy projects with the stroke of a pen on a whim after every election means nobody is willing to put up their own investment, and having a business sector that is largely run by shithead middle management types who have never worked a day in their lives that wasn't just balancing a spreadsheet are unwilling to do something because it doesn't promise a HIGH ENOUGH return on investment. God forbid you don't make ALL the profit.
mattmaroon 2y ago
My guess would be fast enough if you’re talking about a Cold War, not fast enough if you’re talking about a hot one.

skellington 2y ago

There is no form of full scale nuclear war where the production apparatus for anything becomes a factor.

slg 2y ago
That is assuming nuclear war breaks out with zero warning. There is usually a build up to wars that could involve ramping up production of a nuclear arsenal before any nuclear weapons are actually used.
- roenxi 2y ago
  What type of warning do you expect to see? We currently have a war in Ukraine involving between 2-4 of the major nuclear powers depending on how you want to count them (Russia, US, UK, China). Russia is bleeding heavily and it is hard to tell how close they are to some sort of internal crisis or collapse into groupthink by the military leaders. There have probably been Able Archer style near misses and we could have a repeat of the Cuban missile crisis without much changing. China is building up its nuclear arsenal and the political positioning in APAC suggests that a US-China war is on the cards. If we escalated in to full-scale nuclear war this July that'd be unexpected but we're way past 0 warning. There are lots of warnings. In terms of raw risk the last few years might be the biggest risk of a nuclear war breaking out that the species has ever faced.
  - inquirerGeneral 2y ago
    [dead]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - slg 2y ago
    Maybe we aren't at 0 warning at the moment, but if there is a spectrum from 0 warning to imminent, we are close enough to 0 that the distinction doesn't really matter. The US, UK, and China are not actively fighting in Ukraine and even if they were, this wouldn't be the first time these countries have directly fought each other in a proxy war in the nuclear age. So unless you think the Russian military personnel that would actually carry out a full scale attack on the West would prefer destroying civilization to losing in Ukraine, I would expect some type of escalation beyond the position we have been in for the better part of the last 80 years.
    - roenxi 2y ago
      > I would expect some type of escalation beyond the position we have been in for the better part of the last 80 years. We have escalated beyond the point we have been in for the last 80 years. Russia have lost more troops than in any war since WWII. That is a lot of dead Slavs. Their strategic nuclear defences have already been attacked [0] and NATO currently appears to be organising direct strikes on Russian territory. They've made it quite clear that they want the war to continue until something in Russia breaks. When more warnings are you expecting to see? There are a lot of warnings out there. We could easily discover that someone tried to launch the nukes already in this conflict. It would be precedented; the situation is more tense than it ever has been before and we've had fortuitous near misses in similar situations. We're already in territory where we are rolling the dice for a catastrophe with low odds. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/world/europe/ukraine-drones-russia-nuclear.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/world/europe/ukraine-dron...
      - TiredOfLife 2y ago
        Is that NATO currently in the room with you?
- justin66 2y ago
  During times of escalating tensions with a resourceful geopolitical adversary, you would try to cool things off with diplomacy but simultaneously... start building lots of new nuclear weapons? Smart!
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> no form of full scale nuclear war where the production apparatus for anything becomes a factor Where full nuclear war means a full exchange of strategic fire, yes. For tactical nukes or bombardment of a non-retaliating state, less so.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  It's not clear there's any such thing as "tactical nukes" given that they're strategically useless, and it's actually not even clear there's such a thing as nuclear exchange that isn't full scale war. At least as told by Ellsberg in the Doomsday Machine, there was literally no mechanism for the US to launch a partial nuclear attack.
  - jncfhnb 2y ago
    That doesn’t make any sense. Just drop it by a conventional non ICBM method
  - hypeatei 2y ago
    > no mechanism for the US to launch a partial nuclear attack Yep, the trajectory to North Korea (from US mainland) has to pass over Russia and the Russians have to trust that it's not coming for them. Not that Russia would be okay with us striking NK in the first place, but you get the point.
    - fshbbdssbbgdd 2y ago
      Are you saying that just because the great circle from US to NK goes over Russia? Can we not fire on a less optimal trajectory? Or from a submarine?
    - crmd 2y ago
      You can fire an SLBM from the Pacific or the Sea of Japan without traversing Russia or China.
      - 2y ago
pythonguython 2y ago
Agreed. It’s over in half a day. Ramping up production is a rung on the escalation ladder. It’s generally good to have more rungs.
chipweinberger 2y ago
It’s not a given that both sides have nuclear capability. megaton size has not been disclosed. The majority could be small nukes.

_visgean 2y ago

Isnt the enriching process super slow? https://education.cfr.org/learn/reading/how-do-countries-create-nuclear-weapons https://education.cfr.org/learn/reading/how-do-countries-cre... this article puts somewhere in months, but you are still limited by the number of centrifuges and probably some other factors.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ianburrell 2y ago
The US has tons and tons plutonium from old nuclear weapons. Enough to build tens of thousands of nukes. Also, centrifuge aren’t used by advanced nations to make nukes. They use plutonium from spent reactor fuel. The US has lots of spent fuel that could be reprocessed for the plutonium.
- baybal2 2y ago
  [dead]

lumost 2y ago

The final cost of an h-bomb at industrial scale was estimated at 10k in the 1960s (for low yield). However for practical purposes. One simply needs enough missiles and warheads of sufficient yield to overwhelm opposing interceptors, avoid risks of pre-emptive strike/miss-fires+500. After that there are rapidly diminishing returns for more warheads.

ianburrell 2y ago

The US has plenty of any conceivable war. There is probably long time to restart production since haven’t done it in a while. The big factor is that the deployment platforms are limited. There are 400 Minuteman III missiles sitting in silos. They could put more warheads on them, but those are sitting in storage. The same is true of Trident missiles on submarines. They could make nuclear gravity bombs but those aren’t really useful. We also have lots of those in storage.

GemesAS 2y ago

Pit production is likely the rate limiting factor. We disassembled a bunch of AFAPs so have a lot of weapons grade plutonium around. But Pu is nasty to work with & Rocky Flats--the previous pit production facility--closed down years ago. Pit production moved to Los Alamos but it is at a much reduced capability. Also, Pantex--where nuclear weapons are assembled--isn't exactly the model for speed & efficiency.

holowoodman 2y ago
I guess mass produced nukes would rather be enriched uranium based, due to the far easier construction. No fiddly implosive lens assembly. No weird multi-phase cristallization that goes critical if you blink. Metal that is merely as dangerous and nasty as lead, magnesium or arsenic, not plutonium. If you really want to go carpet-bombing with nukes, miniturization isn't as important as having a lot, quickly and reliably.
- sadhorse 2y ago
  Enriching uranium is more expensive than making plutonium by a long shot. Modern nukes are two point implosion, not really fiddly. And when was the last criticality incident related to phase transition? Can't remember one.
  - credit_guy 2y ago
    > Enriching uranium is more expensive than making plutonium by a long shot I'm not sure. This used to be the case in WW2, but today enriching uranium is quite inexpensive. Here's an enrichment calculator [1]. The cost of enriching to 80% (weapons grade uranium) is $80000/kg, so you can enough uranium for a Hiroshima-style bomb for about $5 million. $5 million for a nuclear bomb is basically nothing. [1] https://www.uxc.com/p/tools/FuelCalculator.aspx https://www.uxc.com/p/tools/FuelCalculator.aspx
    - ben_w 2y ago
      That's worryingly cheap, but it also feels unlikely due to all the fuss made over stopping Iranian centrifuges. I assume that's something like the amortised cost over the lifetime of a factory dedicated to making them, rather than something which at least a few people on this forum can personally afford?

ranger_danger 2y ago

I suppose the easier solution (not that I'm advocating it) would be to lie about disposing of them in the first place.

justin66 2y ago

> Because if they could start churning out a dozen or a hundred a week within a short period of time, why does the standing arsenal really matter? Possessing an overwhelming amount of retaliatory force and the combined ability and willingness to deliver it immediately in the face of an enemy's first strike serves a useful purpose for deterrence. "Mutually assured destruction" means that both sides are prevented from attacking, because the other side can respond in kind. It's irrational for either side to attack, since everybody would just die. (and yes, MAD comes with its own problems) The ability to build a bunch of bombs in the future is entirely unrelated. I mean, who cares?

HaZeust 2y ago
I'd also like to add to this; that the ability to consecutively create additional warheads is not of any particular inherent value, especially when our reserve count is more than enough to wipe out any and all civilization - regardless of target diversity. It's not like missiles or ammo, where the more we produce in times of conflict, the more of an upper-hand we have. We've already reached the ceiling for the finite amount of nuclear warheads required to do the most conceivable damage. Beyond is irrelevant.
- hollerith 2y ago
  What do you imagine happens when thousands of nukes explode? The Earth splits into pieces?
  - HaZeust 2y ago
    Nuclear winter??? Strange question.
    - hollerith 2y ago
      It's not a strange question: many falsehoods get repeated over and over on the internet and here on HN. The conversation around nuclear winter focused on burning petroleum storage tanks because (in contrast to burning houses and burning trees) those kinds of fires produce the darkest smoke with a particle size small enough to get high in the atmosphere and to stay in the atmosphere for a long time. "100 oil refinery fires would be sufficient to bring about a small scale, but still globally deleterious nuclear winter," said one prominent paper. Then Saddam lit 700 oil wells on fire (and deployed land mines to slow down firefighters with the result that it took 7 months to put the fires out), and although there was some slight cooling effect, you really had to go looking for it with precision instruments to detect it at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in_the_first_Gulf_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in...

somenameforme 2y ago

Let's talk about just how destructive nukes are, because I think most people grossly underestimate this. One bomb in Hiroshima killed hundreds of thousands. And that was a tiny little bomb relative to modern standards - 16kt of yield in a mid-sized city of ~350k people. Modern tactical weapons (weapons intended for battlefield use) can have yields exceeding 100kt. Strategic weapons (weapons intended to end other civilizations) go into the thousands of kt. The strongest weapon ever tested being "Tsar Bomba" which had a yield of 55,000kt, so a few thousand times greater yield than the Hiroshima nuke - which was by itself enough to instantly destroy a mid-sized city and kill more than 40% of its population. I think it's easy to lose scale/context when looking at things like nuclear test footage, so let's go the other direction. This [1] is the "Mother of All Bombs / MOAB / GBU-43" that was detonated in Afghanistan. It's the second largest conventional weapon ever fielded, weighing more than 20,000lbs and and 30+ft long (so that little blip on the screen is 30 ft for scale). It had a yield of 0.01kt. So now imagine something with literally hundreds of thousands of times greater yield - that's a modern nuke. Or, if it helps for visualization purposes, imagine hundreds of thousands of those raining down - same net effect. So if nuclear war ever breaks out it's not going to be countries using their nukes to target isolated (and nuclear fortified) launch silos and bunkers in the middle of nowhere - they're going to try to destroy the other country (targeting things like population, economic, health, agriculture), so that they can completely eliminate the threat. And suffice to say - it won't take many nukes. The only reason you'd have thousands is to overwhelm any sort of future-tech missile defense systems as well as to eliminate any possibility for an effective first strike attack attack against you. Although even the nukes themselves are also designed to deal with missile defenses, with one missile often breaking up into multiple independent warheads on approach. This also maximizes the damage for reasons outside the scope of the post. --- So the point of this is that thousands of nukes is already enough to basically destroy every single major city in the world and thus destroy basically every single country in the world. There's no scenario where suddenly you need to scale up to tens of thousands of nukes or whatever. In fact nations like North Korea already clearly have an effective deterrent with a stockpile that's in the tens of missiles. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6rSxJnpGNg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6rSxJnpGNg

knappe 2y ago

fragmede 2y ago

> googling required to get an answer would put me on lists I don’t really feel like being on. But asking in the clear under the pseudonym "transcriptase" here isn't going to get you put on the exact same lists? How do you think this list making process works?

transcriptase 2y ago
I would assume that asking a question in the comments section of a relevant article, and making clear why I’m doing so is slightly less flag worthy than randomly googling questions about logistics and production.
- TiredOfLife 2y ago
  If lists like that are being made, then Googling would put you on a huge automatic list that would be queried only as part of a targeted inquiry. But asking in comment section of relevant article would put you on a short "immediate action" list.
- gosub100 2y ago
  You have good training for living under a police state, being submissive to authority and not asking why or having any concern for your rights. Your social credit score must be high. I'm curious did you learn this in "lockdown" drills in your elementary school?
GJim 2y ago
This is the 'chilling effect' in action.

toast0 2y ago

> Because if they could start churning out a dozen or a hundred a week within a short period of time, why does the standing arsenal really matter? There's probably a declared number where this matters, but the current number of warheads is high enough that's there's no need to make more. 3,000 is plenty to retaliate against an opponent with 30,000. More doesn't provide a benefit. Nuclear disarmament, as practiced by the US and Russia is a negotiation to reduce the number of warheads in a coordinated fashion so that it's possible to convince warmongers on both sides that it's reasonable. The benefits are primary a reduction in cost to maintain and secure the warheads and a significant reduction in the risk of accidents related to the warheads. Mutual destruction is still assured --- you'd need a lot fewer warheads for that and involvement of other nuclear states; but then your question of production capacity would be more interesting.

yencabulator 2y ago
> 3,000 is plenty to retaliate against an opponent with 30,000. More doesn't provide a benefit. I think a big part of this is that the long-distance missiles, when all of this was invented, were not very accurate. Sending 10 to do the job of 1 might have been necessary just to hit the intended targets. Modern missiles are quite capable of precision strikes.
- chasd00 2y ago
  > Modern missiles are quite capable of precision strikes. yes, this is also why yields have dropped considerably. I'm not sure if there are any > 5 MT weapons in the US arsenal anymore. I think most are in the 500-750KT range, the missiles and delivery vehicle are accurate enough to produce the same result as the larger warheads and 5-7 (can't remember exactly) warheads can be carried by a single missile. So instead of having one missile launch one giant warhead that may hit 50 miles away from the target you have one missile launch 5-7 smaller warheads that hit within 50 meters of 5-7 different targets.
- oremolten 2y ago
  This is a big part of why the long lines bunkers/sites were abandoned. Once the accuracy increased to more than 1mi the resilience of the bunkers and sites were folly. (built to withstand multiple mt within 1mi)

jalapenos 2y ago

Nukes tend to blow up all your stuff quite a bit faster than you can build more of it.

_aavaa_ 2y ago

Given the surprise with FOGBANK, I don’t have high hopes for it going fast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank

jjk166 2y ago

It works the same as industrial capacity for things like planes or artillery shells. Once you ramp up production you can produce lots very quickly, the US produced 70,000 between 1945 and 1990, averaging 30 per week with a peak rate around 54 per week; but building out the factories to ramp up takes a long time - for the first 10 years the US averaged 6 per week. Most of the US's nuclear production capacity was dismantled. With WW2 levels of hustle and disregard for safety, we could probably build new facilities in around a year or two. These efforts would be pulling resources from attempts to ramp up production of other wartime necessities. Also you don't just need to build the nukes, you also need to build adequate delivery systems, which are all advanced aerospace manufacturing. If you eliminate your arsenal and then decide later you want it back, you're giving adversaries a lot of time to beat you to the punch, all the while advertising that you are pursuing nuclear as opposed to conventional weapons to fight your war.

lbotos 2y ago
I'm sure someone here knows -- how many actively procured munitions could have their payload swapped for a nuclear payload? Are there "rules" against building "nuclear compatible" munitions?
- 1992spacemovie 2y ago
  Yes. And yes. Treaties for arms reduction deal with not only warheads but also delivery vehicles. Protocols include mutual inspection of disabled vehicles, etc.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    I have a hard time imagining that anybody with the resources to secure a nuclear warhead in the first place would later be prevented from using it just because it wasn't plug-n-play compatible with their existing trebuchets or whatever.
    - jvanderbot 2y ago

chasd00 2y ago

full scale nuclear war where the full quantity of warheads is used would be over in maybe 1hr tops. Initial attack, detection, response. Then probably another attack and another response from remaining SLICBMs and then that would be it. I don't think any capacity to create more would survive or change the outcome and therefore is not much of a deterrent.

fatbird 2y ago
Force replenishment in the event of nuclear war is a moot question, but if someone can go from 100 to 1,000 warheads in a couple months, that has a lot of relevance in a growing crisis--what would Russia have done in 2022 if Ukraine had kept the ability to manufacture them and was able to build 100/year?
- chasd00 2y ago
  That's a good point, i read this thread top to bottom because this topic has always been fascinating to me. Others have brought up how war wouldn't go from 0 to missiles flying immediately, there would be a crisis and build-up period. So I can see something like that ability to mass produce nuclear weapons and demonstrate it acting as a deterrent and therefore be useful.I can't think of an instance off the top of my head where a massive arms build up caused the other side to back down though. To your specific point, I think if Ukraine had the keys to even one nuclear weapon and Russia believed they'd use it the invasion would never have happened in the first place.
- scott_w 2y ago
  I know you asked a slightly different question but I watched a video about Ukraine’s nukes and the reality is they could never deploy them without Russia. The codes always stayed with Moscow and Russia would have forcibly maintained a presence on Ukrainian soil to protect their nukes. Ukraine returning the nukes was a pragmatic move that, at the time, removed Russian military presence from Ukrainian territory. Think about it another way: the USA maintains nuclear weapons on other country’s territory. They sure as hell staff those sites with US troops!

pipodeclown 2y ago

Standing stockpiles matter in a ever changing and destabilising world. We can't imagine it now but what if the US (or any other nuclear power) started to destabalise, maybe end up in a civil war, fracture up into smaller pieces, what ever. The less nuclear weapons you have lying around during and after that process the less opportunities for things to go terribly wrong.

dekhn 2y ago

Like many other things in the US that we don't do any more, if you found the right people (many of whom are retired) and gave them the right amount of money (copious) and eliminated all the "pesky" bottlenecks (environmental analyses, legal challenges, etc), it would take a year to start producing weapons. On the other hand, that's how we ended up with Hanford Site.

mrguyorama 2y ago
This has not shown to be the case as we have seen with American artillery shell production. The companies are not yet ramping up, because they don't want the ground cut out from under them if the war ends early next year and congress decides to cut any funding. Turns out having fickle, lazy, stupid, feckless politicians have the ability to destroy projects with the stroke of a pen on a whim after every election means nobody is willing to put up their own investment, and having a business sector that is largely run by shithead middle management types who have never worked a day in their lives that wasn't just balancing a spreadsheet are unwilling to do something because it doesn't promise a HIGH ENOUGH return on investment. God forbid you don't make ALL the profit.

mattmaroon 2y ago

My guess would be fast enough if you’re talking about a Cold War, not fast enough if you’re talking about a hot one.