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Nukes ready to fly
- jacquesm 12y agoThat's got to be one of the saddest infographics ever made. I don't like infographics, they tend to simplify complex things to the point of uselessness. But this one is in the 'food for thought' category, one of those things that we think is solidly in the past when actually it is very much in the present. Pakistan/India is the most worrisome combination in that graph.
- signa11 12y ago> Pakistan/India is the most worrisome combination in that graph. why, you chose to include 'India' is kind of interesting. may you please elaborate ? afaik, India (and China) are, still, following the NFU (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use) policy.
- jacquesm 12y agoBecause they've been in a low level war for a long time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmir_conflict http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmir_conflict
- muyuu 12y agoThis war has most likely stayed low level because both countries are aware of their nuclear capability. Probably not the happiest of developments but an all-out war is unlikely between nuclear powers.
- frandroid 12y agoExcept that India and Pakistan did have a low-intensity war _right after_ their reciprocal nuclear tests in 1998. Also, India has whooped Pakistan's ass every time they have been at war, both before and after nuclear weapons, so Pakistan has a much smaller incentive to trigger an all-out war. India isn't interested in capturing Pakistan and tilt its own demographic balance.
- muyuu 12y agoNothing of that contradicts the premise of what I said. Neither India or Pakistan would jeopardise the very existence of the other nation, because rather than just lie down and die they'd get a farewell message from the other side.
- latch 12y agoI assume he's including it because of its relation with Pakistan. For whatever reason Pakistan is a concern, India will remain a concern for its willingness to retaliate. (Note, I'm not saying they'd be wrong or right to retaliate, I'm simply sharing your parent's point of view that it's a worrisome combination).
- Tarang 12y agoJust something to keep in mind NFU's are just pledges. Russia, just out of the Soviet union had the pledge only to drop it. If you look at the countries that have the pledge its none of the earlier adopters (Nato or former Soviet states). This is important because it signifies that the pledge is more of a political statement to provide comfort to existing nuclear states at the time the pledge was made. India similarly changed its pledge to only apply against nuclear states more recently.
- nl 12y agoI'm not sure who fired first matters too much when you are on the receiving end. This is a serious point: the most serious "near misses" during the cold war were mostly caused by errors in early warning systems or procedures. Given the instability of Pakistan there is a non-zero chance that a non-government-authorised launch could occur. What would India's response be to that?
- interesting_guy 12y agogay
- esalman 12y agoDon't be too sad, earth is not drawn to scale :)
- falcolas 12y agoIn terms of long term destructive capacity... the scale might not actually be that far off.
- ekianjo 12y agoAt the same time, unless they are used as a desperate weapon against an undefeatable opponent, most likely nuclear weapons are relatively pointless, because they cause escalation and way too much collateral damage. Conventional means are largely sufficient to destroy military equipment, and nuclear war has for only purpose to destroy civilians more than anything else. However, I am more concerned about the accidental use of nuclear weapons because of current procedures and measures in place. See the excellent book "Command and Control"...
- aaronem 12y agoHaving read it, I found the point Schlosser made to be that, while working with nuclear weapons (and more specifically with large liquid-fueled rockets) is a profession relatively rich in personal danger for those who pursue it, the danger of accidental nuclear detonation per se is mitigated practically unto negligibility by the measures put in place to prevent it -- otherwise, at least one of the accidents he relates in such loving detail would've had a yield measurable in kilotons.
- sehugg 12y agoNot as negligible as we were previously led to believe. There have been at least five "incidents" each of which could have started WWIII -- and as far as physical safeguards, a single switch once kept a bomb from detonating on our own soil: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bomb-north-carolina-1961 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bom...
- aaronem 12y agoAnd yet WWIII hasn't started, and there have been no accidental nuclear detonations since we started building the weapons in the first place. Nuclear engineering, like any field of industrial or weapons technology, has inherent dangers. That's why both civilian and military engineering disciplines include safeguards. On the civilian side, the profit-motivated nature of nuclear engineering has resulted in a variety of serious industrial accidents, which have produced a widespread but erroneous perception that the technology is just too dangerous to have, when in fact it's merely too dangerous to have in the hands of people who care only about making money off it. On the military side, conversely, the safeguards around nuclear weapons have, thus far at least, been exactly as effective as we need them to be, and nuclear warheads are as safe as anything can be that's inherently dangerous. That's not to say they are perfectly safe, but neither is anything else; all life is risk, and I'd much rather take the risk of having them, than of not having them and being at the mercy of someone who does. (And military power reactors tend to be a lot safer than civilian ones as well, thanks to an engineering safety culture which I gather is best described as fanatical. Me, I'm in favor of purchasing all civilian-owned nuclear power reactors and placing them in the hands of an eighth federal uniformed service, the US Nucleonics Service, staffed with Navy-trained engineers and operated as a cost center of government. But I appreciate that makes me sort of weird.)
- nebula 12y agoVery interesting that Pakistan, a much smaller country( by all measures) has a larger stockpile of nukes than its larger neighbor India.
- frandroid 12y agoThe larger the threat by the opposite country, the larger the deterrent you need. In Pakistan's case, it was India's entry in the nuclear club that spurred it to develop its own capacity.
- InclinedPlane 12y agoI'm not so sure. So far the threat of nuclear annihilation has seemed to reduce the incidence of major wars, but perhaps that's merely correlation. It is interesting how nuclear war focuses the mind. In previous generations a cavalier attitude was often taken about war, often because nobody believes they will be on the losing side of a war. But with nuclear war there are no winners, only differing degrees of losing. In truth most war is the same, but it's difficult for most folks to see it that way.
- Shivetya 12y agothis only works with rational actors. there are some powers aspiring to nuclear weapons that are not rational, some are openly irrational and use that as leverage
- InclinedPlane 12y agoI would agree with that as well. Perhaps the reduction in conventional warfare due to nuclear weapons might be a short-lived phase. Given that Iran has as much capability to produce nuclear weapons now as the US did in 1945, and North Korea already has a nuclear stockpile, and many other countries have the technology to begin building nuclear weapons with a lead time of at most a year or two, one can't help but be concerned.
- a3n 12y agoI think a lot of people have died in the "low-grade" proxy wars that have taken the place of major wars, as well as the chronic unsupervised regional conflicts. If we had major wars, then the major wars would take the place of the proxy and chronic wars, through direct replacement. American general: "Yay, now we can kill Russians openly, instead of paying our unreliable clients to kill their unreliable clients!" The problem isn't how we kill each other; we always find a a way. The problem is that we are killing each other.
- lmm 12y ago> I think a lot of people have died in the "low-grade" proxy wars that have taken the place of major wars, as well as the chronic unsupervised regional conflicts. A lot of people, yes. But far far fewer than died in the major wars that preceded them.
- ouiya 12y agoSome of it is possible because US govt. provides Pakistan with multiple billion dollars everywhere to aid them in their fight against terror. Irony
- bhdz 12y agoIt seems a lot of world leader's words are backed by nuclear weapons...
- arethuza 12y agoI seem to remember that the UK downgraded the yield of its Trident warheads to be in the range 0.3, 5–10 and 100 kt - Wikipedia has this as "speculative" but I do remember it being reported a while back. [The wildly different yields apparently coming from unboosted primary, boosted primary and full "multi-stage" - presumably the latter being achieved by removing the secondary].
- dingaling 12y ago> I seem to remember that the UK downgraded the yield of its Trident warheads Only some of them, guessed at roughly half on each boat. A partial replacement for tactical WE177.
- meric 12y agoHow many times can each countries' nuclear weapons cover the land area of the Earth?
- darkFunction 12y agoIt's interesting that the UK uses solely submarine-launched missiles and the rest of the world isn't represented by nuclear submarines at all. I would imagine there are a few advantages to submarines, such as stealth, range, ability to lie dormant or operate far from home for long periods, etc. Why only the UK? Are plane-delivered warheads 'better' in some tactical capacity? Or does the delivery essentially not really matter and each country is using their most economical technology? Also, it's a really sad infographic. I visited Hiroshima last year and it was heartbreaking (also a very beautiful city).
- TsiCClawOfLight 12y agoAm I missing something? Don't the US, Russia and France also have SLBMs?
- TheSpiceIsLife 12y agoTrident II are submarine launched. Trident II missile is listed for the US also. Pretty sure Russia has submarine launched nuclear missiles too.
- adwf 12y agoIt's all about strategy. There are two main paths that any nuclear war could take: The first is all-out war, we're all screwed regardless of strategy. The second is a more limited tactical war where the aim is to try and take out the oppositions nuclear capability first and then focus on their military. Unlike the USA, the UK has only a very small landmass to hide big ICBM sites and they will always be near some sort of major population centre. In a limited war scenario, it therefore makes sense to not have any fixed silos but to keep it all at sea and hidden. They may be able to nuke our submarine bases and catch the subs at rest, but we have a standing policy to always have at least one of the subs at sea at all times. I guess you could argue in favour of air launched missiles from the back of a carrier, but then you go to all the expense of maintaining multiple launch systems, etc. Even the current Trident system is frequently criticised for its cost, so that's another reason to keep it limited and simple.
- rjsw 12y ago
- TheSpiceIsLife 12y agoDespite, or maybe because of, the several thousand nuclear weapons ready to be deployed at short notice we get this from Steven Pinker in his book 'The Better Angels of Our Nature': • Zero is the number of times that nuclear weapons have been used in conflict. Five great powers possess them, and all of them have waged wars. Yet no nuclear device has been set off in anger. It’s not just that the great powers avoided the mutual suicide of an all-out nuclear war. They also avoided using the smaller, “tactical” nuclear weapons, many of them comparable to conventional explosives, on the battlefield or in the bombing of enemy facilities. And the United States refrained from using its nuclear arsenal in the late 1940s when it held a nuclear monopoly and did not have to worry about mutually assured destruction. I’ve been quantifying violence throughout this book using proportions. If one were to calculate the amount of destruction that nations have actually perpetrated as a proportion of how much they could perpetrate, given the destructive capacity available to them, the post-war decades would be many orders of magnitudes more peaceable than any time in history. Amazing.
- jacquesm 12y ago> Zero is the number of times that nuclear weapons have been used in conflict. Two is the number of times that nuclear weapons have been used in conflict.
- davidw 12y agoIf we concede that the guy is not completely ignorant of world history, he must be referring to something else, although admittedly it's not clear from the cited passage.
- TheSpiceIsLife 12y agoPinker is making the distinction that the two cases you refer to weren't used in conflict, as such. They were used against civilian targets, not on the battlefield.
- jacquesm 12y agoAlmost all nukes are targeted at civilians. WW II not a conflict?
- known 12y agoYou don't need nuclear weapons; Just Drop A "Heat bomb" In Antarctic Ice Sheets. You'll Drown The World.
- frozenport 12y agoThis doesn't exist? Also nuclear weapons make a lot of heat...
- zamalek 12y ago> You'll Drown The World. No you wouldn't, it would only increase the sea level by about 65m. You'd indiscriminately kill a lot of people (including your own) making it a useless weapon. There would be hefty amounts of survivors (billions), again making it useless if you were going for all-out genocide. The ruined climate might do something to kill off the human race, though.
- muyuu 12y agoSome landlocked nations would be virtually unaffected but the sea level itself, though. There's also countries that have most of their main cities in the interior (Russia being one).
- TeMPOraL 12y agoWell, people from the affected countries will be forced to migrate away from sea, so I don't think the landlocked (or large) countries would be safe - on the contrary, they'll be facing a massive invasion of desperate people. This might turn into a "nuke'em all or get conquered" scenario.
- known 12y agoIts complicated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nye http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nye
- Iv 12y agoOh? I thought the Israeli arsenal was a closely kept secret. What are the sources on that?
- Intermernet 12y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordechai_Vanunu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordechai_Vanunu
- Iv 12y agoThanks. So this basically means that this data dates from 1986, right?
- Intermernet 12y agoFollowing the source links, it seems they may be using this comment from here http://bos.sagepub.com/content/71/1/85.full.pdf+html http://bos.sagepub.com/content/71/1/85.full.pdf+html: >"Most recently, in December 2014, the Notebook did an exhaustive review of Israel's nuclear arsenal and concluded that claims it has 200 to 400 warheads are probably exaggerated and that the country's stockpile is more likely in the range of roughly 80 nuclear warheads (Kristensen and Norris, 2014b). Getting the size and composition right is important because it hints at Israeli intentions, and can therefore have a significant effect on threat perceptions in the Middle East and the potential nuclear aspirations of other countries in the region"
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- codeshaman 12y agoNorth Korea is missing from the infographic. An interesting aspect: behind all those nukes, are plans of how to deploy them with maximum destructive power over an enemy, within minutes. If you live in western city, then it is probably targeted to receive a couple of nukes.
- ekianjo 12y agoIt's missing but I wonder how many nukes they actually have. And the way they use them is rather like terrorists. They threaten their use, and get financial aid and food in exchange of not doing anything with them. It's like International-level racket.
- mikeash 12y agoNorth Korea likely has no deliverable nukes, which I believe this is meant to cover.
- beagle90 12y agoOn a positive note: those Nukes are probably what has stood between many state v state wars which may have taken place over the past 60 years had the assured destruction not been there.
- ekianjo 12y agoThat's a difficult assumption to prove, and we have had extremely bloody conflicts nonetheless (Vietnam for once) during the Cold War even without the use of nukes.
- chii 12y agoI think it's reasonable to assume that a larger land war would've taken place, had there not been the threat of nuclear war limiting the cold war to a very localized region. I would prefer proxy wars over all out war, all said.
- ekianjo 12y ago> assume that a larger land war would've taken place, You seem to forget that wars are expensive, very expensive. The US was already running bankrupt before the end of WW2, nobody in any sane state of mind wants an all out war unless they can avoid to do so.
- orbifold 12y agoThe US emerged as the wealthiest nation in Human history fro m WW2 (~50% of the worlds wealth), so this statement is somewhat surprising.
- wtbob 12y agoWe emerged as the wealthiest nation because the rest of the civilised world had been reduced to rubble. It's really easy to have the best, most productive economy in the world when one's manufacturing base is untouched and one has suffered a relatively small injury to one's workforce. Germans were starving to death in 1946; Brits were still rationing meat and food in 1954, and cheese for decades to come. Wars are not in general good for the economy: they result in the destruction of capital and of labour.
- ifdefdebug 12y agoThe colors are just like back in the cold war. The blue are the "good" nukes and the red are the "bad" nukes. That's what it looks like.
- daledavies 12y agoWhy would a country need several hundred (or even thousand) nukes, surely a handful would be enough?
- pjc50 12y agoThe numbers calculated for the US and USSR would have been done on the basis of enough nukes to hit every single facility capable of retaliation and all cities over a certain size after allowing for failures and anti-missile systems.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoSo that you can never destroy them before some get launched at you. Though I suspect that, in case of US and USSR, at some point it turned into a longest nuclear penis contest.
- VLM 12y agoThe numbers seem mostly made up. 288 trident II... well OK at 24 per Ohio SSBN thats implying 12 subs are ready to launch 100% of their missiles at all times. However there are only 14 Ohio SSBNs. And the rotation is 2.5 months on patrol (figure maybe 2 months effective?) and 1 month in port. I imagine a giant crane lowering supplies into the sub might block launched missiles... I don't think they have the compressed air online to launch while in port, although maybe... So more realistically, assuming no long term refits the navy has maybe 7 or so in position ready to launch. So WRT the infographic, maybe 168 ready to launch. However. Everything from here on is classified so I'm speculating. There are tactical conditions where trying to launch will merely get yourself sunk before launching. So you've got a ASW destroyer and helos overhead pounding the sea with active sonar because we're having a nuclear war here. Speaking of nuclear war, during a nuclear war being on board a deployed SSBN is probably somewhat hazardous duty, so "we" probably don't have 14 floating SSBNs for very long. Also peculiar range issues and launch geometry issues, if theoretically we're at war with China, a launch trajectory passing directly over Moscow is going to totally freak out the Russians at the worst imaginable time. Also from a strategic standpoint using up your entire force in one attack is really dumb. Also there are weather related issues, if you're in high seas you might have launch issues. Sure you can pop a missile out the tube but if it starts its launch in the air sideways thats a mission failure. So I think in actual warfare maybe only 2 subs get to launch, at best. Suddenly we're down to 48 missiles in the air from the 288 infographic. Best case. Good argument for one. Or 24 missiles. Again more classified BS. The best NASA and the russians can do under ideal conditions is launch maybe half of the time on time without a failure. Of course they put a lot of money into being reliable, but... I feel 50% successful launches might be semi-realistic? I mean, every attack sub and ASW helicopter is going to be all over you the instant the first missile launches, the odds of surviving until the 24th missile launches seem low, which is why we don't deploy subs will 500 tubes because tubes 200-500 will never survive to fire... If some 50 cent integrated circuit fails or some valve, its non trivial to fix the missile while underway and you might not have the spare parts. I stand by about 50% estimate. The MIRV thing means at re-entry you can attack nearby targets, so the equivalent of Saint Paul and Minneapolis are both in big trouble, but for trajectory and aerospace reasons its hard to hit Seattle and DC at the same time. So you can pack multiple warheads on a missile, but you really only get maybe 30 targets outta 24 missiles. Why do you think we spread our missile launch fields all over the upper midwest instead of putting them all in one county in Texas? Finally we know from semi-public test results that not every test goes perfectly, so I have a gut feeling that in a real nuclear war no holds barred, high radiation environment, 25 or so hits is reasonable. Hopefully thats enough to discourage any belligerent from starting a war they'd lose. You can see the motivation to not decrease stocks by 10x or 100x because that takes the odds of 25 hits down to 2.5 hits or 0.25 hits. Decrease the number of nukes by 100x and we'll kill dozens of millions within one generation in WW3, guaranteed, not much changes in human nature. Compared to dozens of millions of human lives, building a couple hundred ICBMs is really cheap insurance!
- omerhj 12y agoMartin Hellman (yes, the co-inventor of public key cryptography) has a fascinating blog about the risks of stumbling into a nuclear war: https://nuclearrisk.wordpress.com/ https://nuclearrisk.wordpress.com/
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]