6 ms·

3000 nukes is better than Cold War highs, but it's still massive overkill. Even with a 90% interception rate, 300 nukes would be enough to kill tens of million

3000 nukes is better than Cold War highs, but it's still massive overkill. Even with a 90% interception rate, 300 nukes would be enough to kill tens of millions of citizens of any country from the blast alone. If an enemy leader isn't deterred by that, 2700 extra nukes aren't going to change their mind.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> it's still massive overkill The bombs are there because “the only way to avoid being the victim of a nuclear first strike (that having the enemy hit you with their nukes) was being able to credibly deliver a second strike.” “Thus the absurd-sounding conclusion to fairly solid chain of logic: to avoid the use of nuclear weapons, you have to build so many nuclear weapons that it is impossible for a nuclear-armed opponent to destroy them all in a first strike, ensuring your second-strike lands. You build extra missiles for the purpose of not having to fire them.” https://acoup.blog/2022/03/11/collections-nuclear-deterrence-101/ https://acoup.blog/2022/03/11/collections-nuclear-deterrence...
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  You don't need a huge number of nuclear weapons to achieve this, you need nuclear weapons in secret and ideally changing locations (i.e. submarines)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - jncfhnb 2y ago
    Which is a lot more fallible than just having a huge number
  - golergka 2y ago
    Security through obscurity is fragile. Strength in numbers — less so.
  - justin66 2y ago
    The fixed missile silos out in the middle of nowhere (sorry Montana!) serve a lot of useful purposes. If you do not intend to be the one who pushes the button and destroys the entire world, it is nice having weapons like that precisely because the adversary can see whether or not you've fired them. If the enemy can see that your ICBMs haven't launched and your bombers aren't in range to fire their cruise missiles, they know you haven't gone all the way. Additionally, silos like that are something the adversary must target if they have any hope to survive, which is one less warhead they can drop somewhere else (an air base, fleet, city, or whatever). A submarine is inherently less predictable, yes, and in terms of ratcheting down tensions that is not always great.
    - 542354234235 2y ago
      One additional reason, that the enemy would have to destroy a large amount of American territory to realistically neutralize the threat. They can’t just target some military bases and subs in an attempt to cripple us while attempting to keep it limited. No half measures.
  - SkyPuncher 2y ago
    This doesn't work since you can't really prove that your opponent doesn't know the secret or changing locations - either out of sabotage or technical advancement.
    - nradov 2y ago
      I can't imagine any sort of sabotage that would make SSBNs easier to locate without also being obvious to the crew. As for technical advancements, what are you thinking of there within the current laws of physics? No other country has the economic resources to blanket the ocean with detection platforms. Some researchers have proposed using satellites to detect submarine wakes but that would take a huge constellation and could only even potentially work if the sub was moving fast at a shallow depth.
      - ls612 2y ago
        SSBN stealth could be at risk by mid-century if current technologies continue to advance in surveillance and information processing. That would be enormously destabilizing from a grand strategic perspective but is still very much a future worry not a contemporary problem yet.
        nradov 2y ago
        Which technologies specifically?
        ls612 2y ago
        The two which I’ve read are concerning are using the ferromagnetic material in a sub to detect tiny variations in the magnetic field using supercooled sensors and just better computers and acoustic sensors to extract more signal from well below the noise floor. There’s also some more science fiction level technologies proposed like using the nuclear signature of a sub’s reactor or using space based LIDAR to detect signs of the wake of a submerged submarine but I’ll defer judgment on those for now. But longer term I wouldn’t completely count them out.
      - 2y ago
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > You don't need a huge number of nuclear weapons to achieve this, you need nuclear weapons in secret and ideally changing locations (i.e. submarines) No. Most fundamentally because secret deterrents are, by definition, unverifiable.
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  They also have "dial-a-yield" now so the stockpile of larger weapons can be used on smaller targets without ridiculous fallout.
- buildsjets 2y ago
  Thus, the need for the Air Force to appropriate a multitrillion dollar black-box budget to develop a Sub-Supersonic Invisible and Noiseless Defensive Second-Strike Offensive Attack Bomber that flies faster than light so that you can bomb someone yesterday.
- PoignardAzur 2y ago
  I could argue the claim on its merits, eg that the world has changed since The Delicate Balance of Terror was written in (checks) 1958, that omnipresent satellite surveillance means that a first strike could never wipe out the enemy nuclear arsenal, etc. But I think that's giving Brett too much credit here. His argument rests purely in the realm of game theory and logical-sounding ideas. In actual practice, the US military has never in its existence ran an analysis of how many nuclear weapons would be necessary to achieve strategic objectives in any specific scenarios. Brett later points out that: > This buildup, driven by concerns beyond even deterrence did lead to absurdities: when the SIOP (‘Single Integrated Operational Plan’) for a nuclear war was assessed by General George Lee Butler in 1991, he declared it, “the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life,” Having more warheads than targets had lead to the assignment of absurd amounts of nuclear firepower on increasingly trivial targets. Brett notes this, but it doesn't seem to give him pause or to cause his to reevaluate the validity of the doctrines he cites, even though those doctrines were largely written to justify what he rightfully describes as absurdities. The US military has always, from the moment the nuclear bomb was invented, operated with the mindset of "more nukes is better". There is no conceivable number of nukes that would make the military go "okay, that's enough, we have enough to achieve our strategic objectives in any plausible scenario". As the quote above points out, giving them more nukes just makes them assign more per potential target. The only administration that chose to conduct a survey of the SAC's war plan for deploying nukes, the fucking Bush administration under Dick Cheney, found that the plan was ridiculously overkill (hence the quote above) which directly lead to the US signing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.[1] HN commenters in this thread are giving a bunch of rationalizations why the US's nuclear policy is perfectly reasonable game theory, but any times military analysts with clearance actually looked at the US's nuke arsenal and the plans to deploy it, their conclusion was the same: "We have way more than we need". [1] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/the-illogic-of-nuclear-escalation https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/the-illogic-of-nuclear-esc...
trynumber9 2y ago
They aren't targeting cities anymore but Russian and Chinese weapon installations. Consider the number of these. And that the ballistic missile defense is concentrated at these locations. It is surely more than 300.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  > They aren't targeting cities anymore Citation needed.
  - trynumber9 2y ago
    From when the US had 3x as many warheads https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-91-319fs.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-91-319fs.pdf
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      > We did not have access to the policy documents used by DOD’S war planners or the details of the U.S. strategic nuclear weapons targeting plans. This limited our ability to verify that the process of transforming policy into targeting options functions as described by DOD officials. This document is a description of the targeting process, which existed even when the actual output of that process was "every single city in Russia and China with a population greater than 50,000"
- PoignardAzur 2y ago
  I already gave another in-depth reply, so I'll keep this one short: the idea that the current US nuclear arsenal would be fully needed to cripple Russia or China's military and industrial capacity is ridiculous, and has been thoroughly rejected any time military analysts were actually asked by the government to make a survey of the US's nuclear plans (which is, not that often). You don't need to bomb every station of a train line to cripple the line. If you want to stop car production, you don't need to blow up the car factory, the bolt factory, the windshield factory, and every single rare earth mine in the country. Yet those are the kind of assumptions the US doctrine relies on. Quoting from [1]: again: > Another jaw-dropping example: One part of the nuclear war plan called for destroying the Soviet tank army. As a result, JSTPS aimed a lot of weapons at not only the tanks themselves, but also the factory that produced the tanks, the steel mill that supplied the factory, the ore-processing facility that supplied the steel mill, and the mine that furnished the ore. [1] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/the-illogic-of-nuclear-escalation https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/the-illogic-of-nuclear-esc...
dyauspitr 2y ago
Good. It needs to be a threat with plenty of teeth.
jupp0r 2y ago
There is no system in existence that would provide a 90% interception rate. Existing anti ballistic missile systems are designed to intercept smaller attacks with low single digit warheads, no MIRVs and no decoys not a full scale attack.
keybored 2y ago
I can’t believe that people still believe in MAD. It’s such a galaxy brain theory that weapons of mass destruction will actually make us safer because that other guy over there have them as well. And the theory will only be conclusively disproven if someone pushes the button.
- distortedsignal 2y ago
  It kept war out of central Europe from 1945 until 2022 (I'm not 100% sure we shouldn't count Georgia/Bosnia/Chechnia/Kosovo, so I'll say "central Europe"). I don't think two nuclear armed powers have ever declared war on each other - despite two nuclear armed powers currently being in active conflict (India and China) and another few being incredibly geopolitically unfriendly (India/Pakistan and Israel/Iran). The whole idea behind MAD initially was that if Russia decided to get ideas in Europe, the Western powers would stop them with a nuclear curtain. That's why France has a "warning shot" nuclear doctrine, and the US hasn't ruled out Nuclear First Strike. IMO, for what it was trying to stop, it worked. Ask people in China and India - it seems to be working for them as well. EDIT: as an amendment to this: would Russia have been so bold as to invade Ukraine if the 1994 surrender of Ukraine's nuclear arsenal hadn't happened?
  - keybored 2y ago
    Like I said. A lack of war will be taken as direct evidence that it works (not any other causes). And the only way to disprove it conclusively is if we all wipe each other out.
    - distortedsignal 2y ago
      I guess my issue with your statement is that it seems almost impossible to disprove short of someone doing the unthinkable. We have history to suggest (note: not prove) that MAD works. It’s kinda like economics. We can’t really prove anything in economics works the way we think it does, but we have a bunch of REALLY GOOD suggestions to support our hypotheses. MAD isn’t a natural law - it’s a social construct, very much like economics.
elcritch 2y ago
Oddly it seems useful for the US to have that large of a stockpile. Perhaps it's from watching too many sci-fi movies, but having a bunch of nukes on hand in the event of a massive asteroid on a trajectory to hit earth seems useful to me. Alternatively if non-linear greenhouse process cause something like "all clouds disappearing suddenly", then nukes could be part of a last ditch effort to induce a nuclear winter to allow us time to find Ling term solutions. Lastly, it is the USA. Why have 300 weapons when you can have 3,000.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> it's still massive overkill The bombs are there because “the only way to avoid being the victim of a nuclear first strike (that having the enemy hit you with their nukes) was being able to credibly deliver a second strike.” “Thus the absurd-sounding conclusion to fairly solid chain of logic: to avoid the use of nuclear weapons, you have to build so many nuclear weapons that it is impossible for a nuclear-armed opponent to destroy them all in a first strike, ensuring your second-strike lands. You build extra missiles for the purpose of not having to fire them.” https://acoup.blog/2022/03/11/collections-nuclear-deterrence-101/ https://acoup.blog/2022/03/11/collections-nuclear-deterrence...

llamaimperative 2y ago
You don't need a huge number of nuclear weapons to achieve this, you need nuclear weapons in secret and ideally changing locations (i.e. submarines)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  Which is a lot more fallible than just having a huge number
- golergka 2y ago
  Security through obscurity is fragile. Strength in numbers — less so.
- justin66 2y ago
  The fixed missile silos out in the middle of nowhere (sorry Montana!) serve a lot of useful purposes. If you do not intend to be the one who pushes the button and destroys the entire world, it is nice having weapons like that precisely because the adversary can see whether or not you've fired them. If the enemy can see that your ICBMs haven't launched and your bombers aren't in range to fire their cruise missiles, they know you haven't gone all the way. Additionally, silos like that are something the adversary must target if they have any hope to survive, which is one less warhead they can drop somewhere else (an air base, fleet, city, or whatever). A submarine is inherently less predictable, yes, and in terms of ratcheting down tensions that is not always great.
  - 542354234235 2y ago
    One additional reason, that the enemy would have to destroy a large amount of American territory to realistically neutralize the threat. They can’t just target some military bases and subs in an attempt to cripple us while attempting to keep it limited. No half measures.
- SkyPuncher 2y ago
  This doesn't work since you can't really prove that your opponent doesn't know the secret or changing locations - either out of sabotage or technical advancement.
  - nradov 2y ago
    I can't imagine any sort of sabotage that would make SSBNs easier to locate without also being obvious to the crew. As for technical advancements, what are you thinking of there within the current laws of physics? No other country has the economic resources to blanket the ocean with detection platforms. Some researchers have proposed using satellites to detect submarine wakes but that would take a huge constellation and could only even potentially work if the sub was moving fast at a shallow depth.
    - ls612 2y ago
      SSBN stealth could be at risk by mid-century if current technologies continue to advance in surveillance and information processing. That would be enormously destabilizing from a grand strategic perspective but is still very much a future worry not a contemporary problem yet.
      - nradov 2y ago
        Which technologies specifically?
        ls612 2y ago
        The two which I’ve read are concerning are using the ferromagnetic material in a sub to detect tiny variations in the magnetic field using supercooled sensors and just better computers and acoustic sensors to extract more signal from well below the noise floor. There’s also some more science fiction level technologies proposed like using the nuclear signature of a sub’s reactor or using space based LIDAR to detect signs of the wake of a submerged submarine but I’ll defer judgment on those for now. But longer term I wouldn’t completely count them out.
    - 2y ago
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > You don't need a huge number of nuclear weapons to achieve this, you need nuclear weapons in secret and ideally changing locations (i.e. submarines) No. Most fundamentally because secret deterrents are, by definition, unverifiable.
ranger_danger 2y ago
They also have "dial-a-yield" now so the stockpile of larger weapons can be used on smaller targets without ridiculous fallout.
buildsjets 2y ago
Thus, the need for the Air Force to appropriate a multitrillion dollar black-box budget to develop a Sub-Supersonic Invisible and Noiseless Defensive Second-Strike Offensive Attack Bomber that flies faster than light so that you can bomb someone yesterday.
PoignardAzur 2y ago
I could argue the claim on its merits, eg that the world has changed since The Delicate Balance of Terror was written in (checks) 1958, that omnipresent satellite surveillance means that a first strike could never wipe out the enemy nuclear arsenal, etc. But I think that's giving Brett too much credit here. His argument rests purely in the realm of game theory and logical-sounding ideas. In actual practice, the US military has never in its existence ran an analysis of how many nuclear weapons would be necessary to achieve strategic objectives in any specific scenarios. Brett later points out that: > This buildup, driven by concerns beyond even deterrence did lead to absurdities: when the SIOP (‘Single Integrated Operational Plan’) for a nuclear war was assessed by General George Lee Butler in 1991, he declared it, “the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life,” Having more warheads than targets had lead to the assignment of absurd amounts of nuclear firepower on increasingly trivial targets. Brett notes this, but it doesn't seem to give him pause or to cause his to reevaluate the validity of the doctrines he cites, even though those doctrines were largely written to justify what he rightfully describes as absurdities. The US military has always, from the moment the nuclear bomb was invented, operated with the mindset of "more nukes is better". There is no conceivable number of nukes that would make the military go "okay, that's enough, we have enough to achieve our strategic objectives in any plausible scenario". As the quote above points out, giving them more nukes just makes them assign more per potential target. The only administration that chose to conduct a survey of the SAC's war plan for deploying nukes, the fucking Bush administration under Dick Cheney, found that the plan was ridiculously overkill (hence the quote above) which directly lead to the US signing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.[1] HN commenters in this thread are giving a bunch of rationalizations why the US's nuclear policy is perfectly reasonable game theory, but any times military analysts with clearance actually looked at the US's nuke arsenal and the plans to deploy it, their conclusion was the same: "We have way more than we need". [1] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/the-illogic-of-nuclear-escalation https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/the-illogic-of-nuclear-esc...

trynumber9 2y ago

They aren't targeting cities anymore but Russian and Chinese weapon installations. Consider the number of these. And that the ballistic missile defense is concentrated at these locations. It is surely more than 300.

llamaimperative 2y ago
> They aren't targeting cities anymore Citation needed.
- trynumber9 2y ago
  From when the US had 3x as many warheads https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-91-319fs.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-91-319fs.pdf
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    > We did not have access to the policy documents used by DOD’S war planners or the details of the U.S. strategic nuclear weapons targeting plans. This limited our ability to verify that the process of transforming policy into targeting options functions as described by DOD officials. This document is a description of the targeting process, which existed even when the actual output of that process was "every single city in Russia and China with a population greater than 50,000"
PoignardAzur 2y ago
I already gave another in-depth reply, so I'll keep this one short: the idea that the current US nuclear arsenal would be fully needed to cripple Russia or China's military and industrial capacity is ridiculous, and has been thoroughly rejected any time military analysts were actually asked by the government to make a survey of the US's nuclear plans (which is, not that often). You don't need to bomb every station of a train line to cripple the line. If you want to stop car production, you don't need to blow up the car factory, the bolt factory, the windshield factory, and every single rare earth mine in the country. Yet those are the kind of assumptions the US doctrine relies on. Quoting from [1]: again: > Another jaw-dropping example: One part of the nuclear war plan called for destroying the Soviet tank army. As a result, JSTPS aimed a lot of weapons at not only the tanks themselves, but also the factory that produced the tanks, the steel mill that supplied the factory, the ore-processing facility that supplied the steel mill, and the mine that furnished the ore. [1] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/the-illogic-of-nuclear-escalation https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/the-illogic-of-nuclear-esc...

dyauspitr 2y ago

Good. It needs to be a threat with plenty of teeth.

jupp0r 2y ago

There is no system in existence that would provide a 90% interception rate. Existing anti ballistic missile systems are designed to intercept smaller attacks with low single digit warheads, no MIRVs and no decoys not a full scale attack.

keybored 2y ago

I can’t believe that people still believe in MAD. It’s such a galaxy brain theory that weapons of mass destruction will actually make us safer because that other guy over there have them as well. And the theory will only be conclusively disproven if someone pushes the button.

distortedsignal 2y ago
It kept war out of central Europe from 1945 until 2022 (I'm not 100% sure we shouldn't count Georgia/Bosnia/Chechnia/Kosovo, so I'll say "central Europe"). I don't think two nuclear armed powers have ever declared war on each other - despite two nuclear armed powers currently being in active conflict (India and China) and another few being incredibly geopolitically unfriendly (India/Pakistan and Israel/Iran). The whole idea behind MAD initially was that if Russia decided to get ideas in Europe, the Western powers would stop them with a nuclear curtain. That's why France has a "warning shot" nuclear doctrine, and the US hasn't ruled out Nuclear First Strike. IMO, for what it was trying to stop, it worked. Ask people in China and India - it seems to be working for them as well. EDIT: as an amendment to this: would Russia have been so bold as to invade Ukraine if the 1994 surrender of Ukraine's nuclear arsenal hadn't happened?
- keybored 2y ago
  Like I said. A lack of war will be taken as direct evidence that it works (not any other causes). And the only way to disprove it conclusively is if we all wipe each other out.
  - distortedsignal 2y ago
    I guess my issue with your statement is that it seems almost impossible to disprove short of someone doing the unthinkable. We have history to suggest (note: not prove) that MAD works. It’s kinda like economics. We can’t really prove anything in economics works the way we think it does, but we have a bunch of REALLY GOOD suggestions to support our hypotheses. MAD isn’t a natural law - it’s a social construct, very much like economics.

elcritch 2y ago

Oddly it seems useful for the US to have that large of a stockpile. Perhaps it's from watching too many sci-fi movies, but having a bunch of nukes on hand in the event of a massive asteroid on a trajectory to hit earth seems useful to me. Alternatively if non-linear greenhouse process cause something like "all clouds disappearing suddenly", then nukes could be part of a last ditch effort to induce a nuclear winter to allow us time to find Ling term solutions. Lastly, it is the USA. Why have 300 weapons when you can have 3,000.