6 ms·

In light of the one that failed in November 2023, I'm glad this one worked.

gedy 2y ago
They've been testing launching these since the 60s, and they are honestly quite reliable given their complexity
echelon 2y ago
> In light of the one that failed in November 2023, That's concerning. If we rely on MAD for survival, we shouldn't signal weakness or unpreparedness with our nuclear arsenal. Nukes are such a double-edged sword. If nuclear proliferation continues, I wonder if the MAD doctrine will even work. All it would take is one suicidal despot or slip up to destroy the world. The fragile world hypothesis as an answer to the Fermi Paradox seems uncomfortably likely to me. (A "fragile universe" where the first aliens to initiate vacuum collapse to restart the universe also seems plausible.)
- arrowsmith 2y ago
  If you feel like you sleep too peacefully, try the book “Nuclear War” by Annie Jacobsen. It presents a very well-researched and plausible account of how nuclear war could unfold. It scared the shit out of me.
  - andbberger 2y ago
    I found it to be a poorly researched and implausible bit of hysteria. It's a sophomoric reddit post. The entire thing hedges on 1. US launching only a handful of mid course interceptors and they all fail, Aegis/SM-3, the most mature ABM system is not even mentioned. If I were the US DOD I would keep an Arleigh-Burke parked outside of North Korea at all times. 2. A North Korean submarine makes it to the coast of California without being tailed and isn't immediately destroyed by a sub after the initial salvo. 3. Russia keeps their phone on silent while nuclear war breaks out I don't lose sleep over this
    - OgsyedIE 2y ago
      It also has a gigantic pile of obvious errors about how the operational principles and communication chains differ for solid fuel rockets compared to liquid fuel rockets in launching and observing countries. You don't even need to go through coercive diplomacy papers or arms control books for this stuff, there are detailed primers for it on the likes of Globalsecurity.
- a3w 2y ago
  MAD is needed if two sides have an offensive first strike doctrine. USSR did not have one. China has an unclear one. NATO has an offensive one. After reading the official statements of nuclear use, with the US having "sink an airship carrier and find out", I thought: Are we the baddies? Rules as written, NATO is not interested in the survival of the human race, but in winning every war.
  - wat10000 2y ago
    MAD helps make sure they keep that doctrine, and make sure they're not lying about it.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Is survival of the human race worth it if some of the "baddies" get into power? USSR was not a great place to live. There is a lot about China I don't like. (there is also a lot about the US I don't like, but in theory at least I have some voice in changing it unlike the other two)
    - mmustapic 2y ago
      That’s not a choice to be made by superpower heads of state, but by individual people.
    - nemomarx 2y ago
      I think nuclear winter is probably worse than the soviets, yes?? the USSR eventually fell. you can't really recover from enough nukes.
      - t0mas88 2y ago
        From a game theory perspective for Europe the best policy is to agree to destroy all of humanity before accepting Russian control of Europe. Then the Russians can decide whether they still want to try and the US can decide between being collateral damage or helping Europe. Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your perspective, Europe is too divided and too civilised to make that threat and probably at this point not strong enough from a military perspective to execute on it.
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  > Nukes are such a double-edged sword. If nuclear proliferation continues, I wonder if the MAD doctrine will even work. Now that the USA has thrown up a giant middle finger to Europe & NATO, it sure seems like more countries are going to have to make their own nuclear weapons. No one is coming to help you Poland; that's the new American stance. So everyone start proliferating! It absolutely makes the situation much much much harder to manage. Now, and in a longer term as nations go through their own fits & tantrums over time. As, we see, happens.
  - drysine 2y ago
    >No one is coming to help you Poland; that's the new American stance. That's how the rest of the world lives praying that the US doesn't bomb them because they are not "democratic" enough.
    - jauntywundrkind 2y ago
      After world war 2, the US has never used anywhere near our real might. The cries that we are the terror here seems irredeemably false, propaganda at best. I find it gross as hell, but the "switchblade" drones we have favored have basically no collateral damage. And Biden stopped the drone warfare almost entirely. It's unclear to me what the complaint really is. I don't see it.
      - drysine 2y ago
        >After world war 2, the US has never used anywhere near our real might. The cries that we are the terror here seems irredeemably false Wait, are you asking to appreciate that the US stopped nuking cities?
      - defrost 2y ago
        Might be the birth defects from Agent Orange, the running children with napalm stuck to them, the tens of thousands of bomblets across several SE Asian contries, selling drugs to US citizens to fund weapons sales to groups destabilising other governments, . . . There's an entire laundry list of legit complaints about post WWII US actions. Made up weapons of mass destruction, ... it keeps on going. You can shrug all that off, sure, but there's certainly justification for others to see the US as a source of terror.
- openasocket 2y ago
  > That's extremely concerning. If we rely on MAD for survival, we should never signal weakness or unpreparedness with our nuclear arsenal. Not as much as you would think. Ballistic missiles are not the most reliable things in the world, you expect some degree of failures, especially at longer ranges. When Iran launched its massive ballistic missile barrage at Israel last year, I saw estimates that as many as half failed, either during boost phase or during the midcourse phase. And while that isn't great, it's not entirely unexpected. American ICBMs are expected to be more reliable than that, but we're probably talking about 70-80% in realistic conditions (My source is the "Iran and Israel's Missile War" episode of the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, where Dr. Lewis makes those statements. A quick google didn't give a written source). The reason this doesn't matter overly much is because the US (and other nuclear powers) have a lot of missiles. Even if your missiles have 50% reliability, if you just make twice as many missiles as you need there isn't really an issue. You still want your missiles as reliable as possible, of course, and you want your tests to be especially reliable for signaling purposes. But a failed test every now and then is not going to fundamentally alter the risk calculus.
- TransAtlToonz 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - wat10000 2y ago
    The past 80 years have been the most peaceful in history. Nukes work to bring peace. The problem is that you trade the virtual certainty of periodic destructive wars for a small but non-zero chance of an utterly apocalyptic war. The big question I don't see people asking is, what probability makes this tradeoff worthwhile? One in a hundred per year? One in a thousand? One in a million? Based on what I know about how these systems work, and the history of near misses, I suspect the probability is closer to one in a hundred than one in a million.
    - OgsyedIE 2y ago
      Regardless of whether limited exchanges are possible (and how the views on their relative impossibility differ across the relevant bodies), there's a very clear downside to being the weaker party in an lopsided distribution of arsenals, as has famously been exhibited twice already.
    - TransAtlToonz 2y ago
      > The past 80 years have been the most peaceful in history. This reminds me of that mlk bit about the white liberal who "prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice" We may be at peace, but not in terms that will hold when our grasp on power slips. Half the world wants us dead, and who can blame them? We've destroyed the world to enrich ourselves. We're not lady liberty, we're tony soprano. The DoD is likely the most evil institution in all of history. Perhaps tied with the political parties that are its flipside. When you factor in global warming, it's undeniable.
  - droopyEyelids 2y ago
    Hey if you want to sell them id like to try them
- baybal2 2y ago
  [dead]
- lmm 2y ago
  > That's concerning. If we rely on MAD for survival, we shouldn't signal weakness or unpreparedness with our nuclear arsenal. Live public demos are a signal of strength, not of weakness. The only way you can know the demo is real is if it fails at least occasionally.
  - autoexec 2y ago
    We've been showing a concerning amount of weakness lately. The government is in total chaos, we have navy planes and helicopters falling out of the sky, a navy aircraft carrier even managed to plow into another ship, inflation is out of control, we've got mystery drones in the sky, we're incapable of manufacturing and are almost totally dependent on china who also hacks the shit out of us, over half the population reads below a 6th grade level and our nation's science literacy is even worse, we can't get our own Astronauts off the ISS, and the population is suffering under record levels of household debt and homelessness. I expect to start seeing a lot more articles giving "signals of strength" to try and offset the many signs of weakness and failure which have been painting a target on us.
- nostrademons 2y ago
  There are three major conditions where MAD fails: 1) When there are lots of actors. As the number of potential threats go up, the probability that someone will act "irrationally" goes up combinatorially. This is why monopolies always act to benefit themselves, oligopolies usually act in their own interest, but competitive markets always have some defector that triggers a price war. 2) When one of the actors is dead anyway. MAD relies on total annihilation being a negative consequence. If total annihilation is what's going to happen to you anyway, you have no incentive not to launch the missiles. 3) When the responsible party for a launch can't be identified. If you launch but your other enemy gets blamed for it, you've killed two birds with one stone. Note that the U.S. government has very strong doctrines in place to avert each of these conditions. Nuclear non-proliferation, strong sanctions or military action on countries that are developing nuclear weapons, and nuclear secrecy are all to avert #1. American reliance on soft-power and us keeping dictators in power even when we don't like them are to avert #2. U.S. intelligence agencies are to avert #3. Despite all this, all three of these conditions are fraying. I'm not all that optimistic that we'll avert nuclear armageddon. The game theorists at RAND corporation knew what they were doing, though.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
robotnikman 2y ago
That's why there is a Nuclear Triad, giving multiple ways to deploy them in case one method fails.

gedy 2y ago

They've been testing launching these since the 60s, and they are honestly quite reliable given their complexity

> In light of the one that failed in November 2023, That's concerning. If we rely on MAD for survival, we shouldn't signal weakness or unpreparedness with our nuclear arsenal. Nukes are such a double-edged sword. If nuclear proliferation continues, I wonder if the MAD doctrine will even work. All it would take is one suicidal despot or slip up to destroy the world. The fragile world hypothesis as an answer to the Fermi Paradox seems uncomfortably likely to me. (A "fragile universe" where the first aliens to initiate vacuum collapse to restart the universe also seems plausible.)

arrowsmith 2y ago
If you feel like you sleep too peacefully, try the book “Nuclear War” by Annie Jacobsen. It presents a very well-researched and plausible account of how nuclear war could unfold. It scared the shit out of me.
- andbberger 2y ago
  I found it to be a poorly researched and implausible bit of hysteria. It's a sophomoric reddit post. The entire thing hedges on 1. US launching only a handful of mid course interceptors and they all fail, Aegis/SM-3, the most mature ABM system is not even mentioned. If I were the US DOD I would keep an Arleigh-Burke parked outside of North Korea at all times. 2. A North Korean submarine makes it to the coast of California without being tailed and isn't immediately destroyed by a sub after the initial salvo. 3. Russia keeps their phone on silent while nuclear war breaks out I don't lose sleep over this
  - OgsyedIE 2y ago
    It also has a gigantic pile of obvious errors about how the operational principles and communication chains differ for solid fuel rockets compared to liquid fuel rockets in launching and observing countries. You don't even need to go through coercive diplomacy papers or arms control books for this stuff, there are detailed primers for it on the likes of Globalsecurity.
a3w 2y ago
MAD is needed if two sides have an offensive first strike doctrine. USSR did not have one. China has an unclear one. NATO has an offensive one. After reading the official statements of nuclear use, with the US having "sink an airship carrier and find out", I thought: Are we the baddies? Rules as written, NATO is not interested in the survival of the human race, but in winning every war.
- wat10000 2y ago
  MAD helps make sure they keep that doctrine, and make sure they're not lying about it.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Is survival of the human race worth it if some of the "baddies" get into power? USSR was not a great place to live. There is a lot about China I don't like. (there is also a lot about the US I don't like, but in theory at least I have some voice in changing it unlike the other two)
  - mmustapic 2y ago
    That’s not a choice to be made by superpower heads of state, but by individual people.
  - nemomarx 2y ago
    I think nuclear winter is probably worse than the soviets, yes?? the USSR eventually fell. you can't really recover from enough nukes.
    - t0mas88 2y ago
      From a game theory perspective for Europe the best policy is to agree to destroy all of humanity before accepting Russian control of Europe. Then the Russians can decide whether they still want to try and the US can decide between being collateral damage or helping Europe. Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your perspective, Europe is too divided and too civilised to make that threat and probably at this point not strong enough from a military perspective to execute on it.
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
> Nukes are such a double-edged sword. If nuclear proliferation continues, I wonder if the MAD doctrine will even work. Now that the USA has thrown up a giant middle finger to Europe & NATO, it sure seems like more countries are going to have to make their own nuclear weapons. No one is coming to help you Poland; that's the new American stance. So everyone start proliferating! It absolutely makes the situation much much much harder to manage. Now, and in a longer term as nations go through their own fits & tantrums over time. As, we see, happens.
- drysine 2y ago
  >No one is coming to help you Poland; that's the new American stance. That's how the rest of the world lives praying that the US doesn't bomb them because they are not "democratic" enough.
  - jauntywundrkind 2y ago
    After world war 2, the US has never used anywhere near our real might. The cries that we are the terror here seems irredeemably false, propaganda at best. I find it gross as hell, but the "switchblade" drones we have favored have basically no collateral damage. And Biden stopped the drone warfare almost entirely. It's unclear to me what the complaint really is. I don't see it.
    - drysine 2y ago
      >After world war 2, the US has never used anywhere near our real might. The cries that we are the terror here seems irredeemably false Wait, are you asking to appreciate that the US stopped nuking cities?
    - defrost 2y ago
      Might be the birth defects from Agent Orange, the running children with napalm stuck to them, the tens of thousands of bomblets across several SE Asian contries, selling drugs to US citizens to fund weapons sales to groups destabilising other governments, . . . There's an entire laundry list of legit complaints about post WWII US actions. Made up weapons of mass destruction, ... it keeps on going. You can shrug all that off, sure, but there's certainly justification for others to see the US as a source of terror.
openasocket 2y ago
> That's extremely concerning. If we rely on MAD for survival, we should never signal weakness or unpreparedness with our nuclear arsenal. Not as much as you would think. Ballistic missiles are not the most reliable things in the world, you expect some degree of failures, especially at longer ranges. When Iran launched its massive ballistic missile barrage at Israel last year, I saw estimates that as many as half failed, either during boost phase or during the midcourse phase. And while that isn't great, it's not entirely unexpected. American ICBMs are expected to be more reliable than that, but we're probably talking about 70-80% in realistic conditions (My source is the "Iran and Israel's Missile War" episode of the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, where Dr. Lewis makes those statements. A quick google didn't give a written source). The reason this doesn't matter overly much is because the US (and other nuclear powers) have a lot of missiles. Even if your missiles have 50% reliability, if you just make twice as many missiles as you need there isn't really an issue. You still want your missiles as reliable as possible, of course, and you want your tests to be especially reliable for signaling purposes. But a failed test every now and then is not going to fundamentally alter the risk calculus.
TransAtlToonz 2y ago
[flagged]
- wat10000 2y ago
  The past 80 years have been the most peaceful in history. Nukes work to bring peace. The problem is that you trade the virtual certainty of periodic destructive wars for a small but non-zero chance of an utterly apocalyptic war. The big question I don't see people asking is, what probability makes this tradeoff worthwhile? One in a hundred per year? One in a thousand? One in a million? Based on what I know about how these systems work, and the history of near misses, I suspect the probability is closer to one in a hundred than one in a million.
  - OgsyedIE 2y ago
    Regardless of whether limited exchanges are possible (and how the views on their relative impossibility differ across the relevant bodies), there's a very clear downside to being the weaker party in an lopsided distribution of arsenals, as has famously been exhibited twice already.
  - TransAtlToonz 2y ago
    > The past 80 years have been the most peaceful in history. This reminds me of that mlk bit about the white liberal who "prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice" We may be at peace, but not in terms that will hold when our grasp on power slips. Half the world wants us dead, and who can blame them? We've destroyed the world to enrich ourselves. We're not lady liberty, we're tony soprano. The DoD is likely the most evil institution in all of history. Perhaps tied with the political parties that are its flipside. When you factor in global warming, it's undeniable.
- droopyEyelids 2y ago
  Hey if you want to sell them id like to try them
baybal2 2y ago
[dead]
lmm 2y ago
> That's concerning. If we rely on MAD for survival, we shouldn't signal weakness or unpreparedness with our nuclear arsenal. Live public demos are a signal of strength, not of weakness. The only way you can know the demo is real is if it fails at least occasionally.
- autoexec 2y ago
  We've been showing a concerning amount of weakness lately. The government is in total chaos, we have navy planes and helicopters falling out of the sky, a navy aircraft carrier even managed to plow into another ship, inflation is out of control, we've got mystery drones in the sky, we're incapable of manufacturing and are almost totally dependent on china who also hacks the shit out of us, over half the population reads below a 6th grade level and our nation's science literacy is even worse, we can't get our own Astronauts off the ISS, and the population is suffering under record levels of household debt and homelessness. I expect to start seeing a lot more articles giving "signals of strength" to try and offset the many signs of weakness and failure which have been painting a target on us.
nostrademons 2y ago
There are three major conditions where MAD fails: 1) When there are lots of actors. As the number of potential threats go up, the probability that someone will act "irrationally" goes up combinatorially. This is why monopolies always act to benefit themselves, oligopolies usually act in their own interest, but competitive markets always have some defector that triggers a price war. 2) When one of the actors is dead anyway. MAD relies on total annihilation being a negative consequence. If total annihilation is what's going to happen to you anyway, you have no incentive not to launch the missiles. 3) When the responsible party for a launch can't be identified. If you launch but your other enemy gets blamed for it, you've killed two birds with one stone. Note that the U.S. government has very strong doctrines in place to avert each of these conditions. Nuclear non-proliferation, strong sanctions or military action on countries that are developing nuclear weapons, and nuclear secrecy are all to avert #1. American reliance on soft-power and us keeping dictators in power even when we don't like them are to avert #2. U.S. intelligence agencies are to avert #3. Despite all this, all three of these conditions are fraying. I'm not all that optimistic that we'll avert nuclear armageddon. The game theorists at RAND corporation knew what they were doing, though.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

robotnikman 2y ago

That's why there is a Nuclear Triad, giving multiple ways to deploy them in case one method fails.