The exhaustive number of articles, blog posts, twitter rants, instagram memes and comments which take <arbitrary military expenditure item> and then suggests that it is instead spent on <socially progressive item of choice> misses the fundamental issue here. Geopolitical facing military spending is often a facade.
Particularly with such unprecedented success of western-hostile nations in either misinformation, or propaganda relating to the pandemic, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the US has a hard mathematical spending allocation not unlike Britain pre WWII - having a navy that must be AT LEAST twice the strength of the next nations. That allocation was probably established before the cold war. This is critical for the projection of power. MAD is a shaky concept that isnt oft guaranteed.
Yes, these comparisons are kind of senseless. But spending so much money on atomic weapons is kind of bullshit!
These are weapons, if ever used again will probably take-out humanity because if some of those are flying to you, you will answer with everything you have.
In my opinion military spending should be reduced greatly. But if they want to invest so much invest them in technologies which may have more impact on other areas. Like the laser concept on navy ships.
This is akin to the idea that Bitcoin's energy use is fine because of the fact there's no military to defend it, however... I don't think the world adopting BTC and crypto currencies would cause armed forces to disappear so the point seems a bit moot to me?
I don't remember where this observation actually comes from but it's been said that the Military Industrial Complex always prepares "for the last war". So it makes perfect sense that we are spending so much on established doctrine and neglecting the modern information/disinformation conflict.
> The exhaustive number of articles, blog posts, twitter rants, instagram memes and comments which take <arbitrary military expenditure item> and then suggests that it is instead spent on <socially progressive item of choice> misses the fundamental issue here.
Not to mention, it's a false dilemma. The US is rich enough to spend $100 billion on a missile and $100 billion on whatever else it should be spent on.
The CARES act was $2,200 billion. The PPP was $484 billion. The last appropriations bill added another $900 billion for COVID relief. The house is getting ready to vote on another $1,900 billion bill here by the end of the month. This missile is less than 2% of what I've just listed. We clearly have the money for dealing with problems when we choose to.
No, it's got long term consequences that have not fully come around yet.
Government spending redistributes money and in some cases that's probably a good thing. In others not so much. But borrowing to do it is bad long term.
My understanding is a bit of inflation would actually be a good thing for the US at this point.
A weaker dollar means exports are more competitive and imports are less desirable which would boost American exports.
It's also a huge boon for the rest of the world which deals with dollars extensively.
Finally, most economists seem to have come around to the fact that our national debt is sustainable and the economic activity is more valuable than the interest payments on it.
Yes, the 'strategic' portions of our defense are basically the rock that keeps tigers away. They're more about credibility than anything else. It's easy to understand why they're perceived as a giant waste of GDP, considering that optimally they'd never get used.
The U.S hasn't built a new nuclear warhead in almost 30 years, any changes since have been modifying existing nuclear warheads. A new program had to happen eventually.
Where's the teacher salary comparisons for the $1.9 trillion dollar stimulus package anyways. With that much money we could almost convert our country's entire energy production to green energy.
Or we could have spent that "stimulus" on individuals or COVID treatment efforts, rather than e.g. $15billion to airlines that didn't need to be saved and that ended up firing workers anyways! If Delta failed its assets would be sold and a new airline would take its place... that's an area where the market does a great job so why fight it
It's not a new warhead, the article is covering the new delivery system. Warhead projects are all about updating the manufacturing processes in line with the stockpile stewardship mission of DOE.
The idea is that it is not an empty silo. The thinking is that if your opponent wants to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against you, they'll need to target all your nuclear missiles with theirs, to prevent you from retaliation. If you have lots of missiles spread out in otherwise non-strategic locations, you can make it harder for your opponent to preemptively strike you, as they'll have to destroy all these random missiles to prevent counter attack. In doing so, they would be failing to target densely populated areas, which would lower the efficacy of their attack.
Not saying I agree or disagree with it. But, that's the logic, anyway.
I don't think even the US has harbored the insane notion that you could strike all of the missile silos and avoid retaliation. The operating principal for nuclear missiles is Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
This goes double if nuclear submarines exist (they do). Plus nuclear bunkers are supposed to be hardened against nuclear strike. So they could absorb the hit and still launch. Nuclear weapons are actually pretty poor at destroying protected underground facilities. You need something completely different: a heavy piercing bunker buster bomb full of conventional explosives.
Plus, even if you were magically successful in destroying all of your opponent's nukes without retaliation you've still completely wrecked the environment. Fallout and nuclear winter are still going to ruin your victory.
Mutually assured destruction is not a policy. The actual US policy is assured destruction: use WMDs on us and we will destroy you, and e will posture or things to be able to assure that we can.
If an enemy attacks the US, and the silos are empty by the time the missiles arrive, then the enemy is dead. The only way for the enemy to live is to destroy all of the silos without being detected. Having a large number of silos makes this basically impossible.
US has early warning system better than anybody's else, and only 50 spare missiles stored in military bases which will already be taken out in any first strike scenario.
It's many things. One is obviously deterrence, but mostly it's a show. We're reminding the world that we hold the key to our mutual destruction, which interestingly leads to longer periods of peace (in a big picture kind of way). How many wars would the US have seen in the last 70 years if they didn't have nukes? They'd probably have been invaded by now and some US cities may not even exist or would be rebuilt very differently (maybe we'd have better infrastructure by now :) ). Things would be very different without nukes. We take them for granted, but shows like this are necessary to keep things in check, because an alternative reminder would be a detonation of one of these things, and with the exception of some lunatics, most don't want to see them go off.
The other part is that these projects are pretty much jobs programs for the masses of engineers and phds that we keep cranking out without a very good idea of what to do with all this intellectual capital. It's a very expensive jobs program granted, and they serve the purpose of maintaining the military industrial complex.
Could this money be better spent? Absolutely. Do we have a sufficient majority to vote for structural reforms? Nope. So bombs it is then until enough people vote against it.
I'm not trying to nitpick, just curious about how this works?
Some years pass, and the russians just forget that the US have nukes?
Then they start planning an invasion, but cancel it after they read in the "new york times" about some modernization effort, and remember that the us still have nukes?
It's a display of power. We've been stuck in a certain mindset from the Cold War and habits are hard to break. Over time we've dialed back on the heat (we don't do live tests anymore for instance and we are not actively developing new warheads). But there's still a whole military industrial complex that is not going to go away anytime soon. So you do this new missile. It keeps people employed, it shallowly reminds other powers that we're still doing perfunctory defense stuff.
America was last invaded in 1812, so it's not at all clear to me that, absent nuclear weapons, it would have been invaded in the latter half of the 1900s.
Their absence would have made a conventional war in Europe with the USSR more likely, and perhaps this would have lead to an invasion of Alaska. I don't see a scenario where any credible belligerent could have projected power into the US mainland.
I do agree that the net effect of nuclear weapons has been less human death, including of US citizens. But invasion is farfetched.
You could get Latin America to go in with proper support from other nations. The US went on a power trip squashing socialist governments there throughout the second half of the 20th century. I think the ingredients were there. It just takes a more active imagination.
Counterfactual history is a fun game, but there aren't any rules.
I think it's more likely, for instance, that Cuba would have just been invaded and 'restored' after its Communist revolution, since the Russians wouldn't have had the ability to project the kind of power that they did during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But like, who knows? Maybe Colombia would have conquered the entire Spanish speaking world and tried the Rio Grande.
I think throwing the "$100 billion over 50 years" number around is somewhat misleading without comparing to the cost of keeping Minuteman III alive for another 50 years.
Most of that cost is gonna be maintenance/sustainment/operations, which we're paying already for with the current squadrons. And it's possible (although I wouldn't count on it) that a new system would be more maintainable than the existing one. For example if keeping Minuteman III alive would've required the US to spend a billion dollars to build a new 5.5" floppy drive factory, that would give GBSD an opportunity to recoup some of the R&D costs
One of the arguments made is that land-based missiles should be retired entirely, because they are less effective and strategically riskier than submarines and bombers.
Such a retirement would make the extension of Minuteman III moot.
The land based ICBM force has had little utility since submarine launched ballistic missiles reached maturity. SLBMs guarantee devastating retaliation if another nation initiates nuclear war. Bomber-delivered nuclear weapons offer flexibility including last minute re-targeting or mission abort.
What does the land based ICBM force offer that bombers and submarines don't? Pork for rural areas and missile contractors, according to this article. I should have figured that out on my own sooner.
How many foreign controlled nuclear weapons are currently on us soil?
Why spend billions developing rockets or stealth bombers when you can just load one up on a civilian boat, land on your enemies shore, and truck it to a safehouse in your target city. Let is sit there until you need to detonate it.
Given the amount of attention that has been paid to just this sort of scenario for more than two decades (along with prodigious spending on detection capability at ports) I would bet large sums that the answer to that is 0 or possibly 1. The danger of what you suggest is in getting caught, and the terribly unpleasant consequences of same; if I were in charge when some country tried that my first question would be if we knew where every family member of the leadership of that country slept...
Considering the low cost and high potential reward it's a reasonable bet that all sides are either doing this or working on it.
And considering how easy it is to bypass ports while smuggling drugs, the idea that port monitoring will prevent it is unconvincing.
For obvious reasons, no side will announce its efforts publicly. Nor will any side announce discovery of other efforts until a hot war starts to seem like a good idea.
Not to mention the entire reason to launch a first strike is to take out ICBMs. Remove ICBMs from the equation and there is almost no incentive to initiate a first strike.
You're agreeing with me. The entire purpose of a first strike is to destroy land based ICBMs so the enemy cannot retaliate and thus winning you the war. The purpose of the other two points of the nuclear triad is to make it so retaliation is always possible.
The big advantages of land based ICBM’s over the other are as follows.
With respect to bombers, they are a lot more certain. With modern anti-aircraft systems, it is uncertain how many bombers would actually make it through.
With respect to SLBM, they are less prone to destruction in normal warfare. What happens if an enemy destroys a ballistic submarine? Do you go to nuclear war over that? What about two? With land based ICBMs to destroy one, you basically need to attack it with a nuclear level weapon in the middle of the country making your intentions clear.
Finally, as mentioned in the article, the land based ICBMs absorb a lot of the enemy nuclear arsenal, since there are a lot of them dispersed over a wide geographic area.
With respect to SLBM, they are less prone to destruction in normal warfare. What happens if an enemy destroys a ballistic submarine? Do you go to nuclear war over that? What about two?
The only way that I see this question arising is if there were direct, open warfare with another highly capable nuclear weapons state. But if the US has gone to war with such a NWS, I think that the logic of rational deterrence has already failed on at least one side -- even if neither side has yet used nuclear arms. Outcomes after that point can't be calculated on the basis of rational cost-benefit analysis because rationality is no longer the driving force.
I find the logic of mutually assured destruction sound as far as it goes. Empirically, it seems correlated with a long period free of (direct) warfare between great powers. But I fear that this mechanism is brittle. It's one accident or leadership cognitive error away from shattering.
Cost. Missile silos are by far the cheapest source of nuclear weapons for the US. That's why there are only 20 B-2 bombers, and 14 Trident submarines in service right now.
Treaty obligations limit the count of American nuclear weapons before costs do. Minuteman III ICBMs are technically capable of carrying multiple independent reentry vehicles but treaty compliance means that they all carry one warhead in practice. Trident II SLBMs are still deployed in MIRV'd configurations -- though with fewer warheads than they are technically capable of -- so in practice there are more warheads deliverable by the American submarine fleet than by its land based ICBMs.
Of the 280 submarine launch tubes, only 212 were counted as deployed with as many Trident II missiles loaded. The treaty counts a missile as deployed if it is in a launch tube regardless of whether the submarine is deployed at sea. The United States has declared that it will not deploy more than 240 missiles at any time. Assuming each deployed submarine carries a full missile load, the 212 deployed missiles correspond to 10 submarines fully loaded with a total of 200 missiles. The remaining 12 deployed missiles were onboard one or two submarines loading or offloading missiles at the time the count was made.
The data shows that the 212 deployed missiles carried a total of 945 warheads, or an average of 4 to 5 warheads per missile, corresponding to 70 percent of the 1,344 deployed warheads as of September 1, 2017.
The New START data shows the United States now has just under 400 Minuteman III ICBMs in silos, down from 405 in March 2017. Normally the Air Force strides to have 400 deployed but one missile was undergoing maintenance.
Although the number of deployed ICBMs had declined from 450 to 400, the total numbers of missiles and silos have not. The data shows the Air Force has the same number of missiles and silos as in March 2017 because 50 empty silos are “kept warm” and ready to load 50 non-deployed missiles if necessary. Reduction of deployed ICBMs started in 2016, five years after the New START was signed. And the actual ICBM force is the same size as when the treaty was signed.
The 399 deployed ICBMs carried 399 W78/Mk12A or W87/Mk21 warheads. Although normally loaded with only one warhead each, the Trump NPR confirms that “a portion of the ICBM force can be uploaded” if necessary. We estimate the ICBM force has the capacity to carry a maximum of 800 warheads.
"New Data Shows Detail About Final Phase of US New START Treaty Reductions"
Land based missiles aren’t very useful in second strike scenarios because your enemy has already cratered your missile fields in North Dakota. Submarines launched missiles exist entirely for this true second strike capability, one that can’t easily be dispatched with. We must maintain that (presuming we want to maintain second strike capability). That means the land based missiles really are only useful as a first strike function. We take on huge risks at great cost for no good reason. Better to use that $100 billion elsewhere such as R&D for the submarine force.
> Land based missiles aren’t very useful in second strike scenarios because your enemy has already cratered your missile fields in North Dakota.
That's why you need your infrared, and radar satellites.
> Submarines launched missiles exist entirely for this true second strike capability, one that can’t easily be dispatched with.
At the peak of cold war, up to a half of US SSBNs fleet was tailed by union's submarines. With giant advances in sensing, and computing since the cold war, SSBNs became much easier targets.
It's foregone conclusion that your deterrence is stronger if you increase the number of ways you can attack.
Much like other fundamental mistakes in the article it makes one relevant to the nuclear triad you're discussing as well.
> 3,800 warheads [..] for practical purposes, after the first few, they quickly grow redundant. “Once you've dropped a couple of nuclear bombs on a city, if you drop a couple more, all you do is make the rubble shake,”
I'm frankly not sure if this is deliberately disingenuous, intended to be hyperbole, or a fundamental lack of understanding of the situation or some combination of all three, but, this is exceptionally wrong.
The reason you have 3,800 warheads isn't to aim them all at one city. Remember just as the soviets target our nuclear missile silos we must target theirs. Moreover, having such an extensive fleet of missiles ensures that even if we were caught entirely off-guard and the soviets did an impossibly good job of targeting our nuclear forces, and say took out 90% of nuclear strike capabilities we would still have sufficient capabilities to utterly devastate them.
This is why the nuclear triad exists.
How effective would a soviet first strike be at targeting our SSBNs? Can they really track and destroy them at will? Maybe.
How effective would it be against our missile silos? Do they know where they all are? Probably. Can they get their bombs on the ground before we can get ours into the air? Maybe.
How effective would a soviet strike be against our bomber fleets? Do they know where to strike? Perhaps. Can they disable or destroy our bomber fleets before we can get them into the air? Maybe.
But, what are the odds that they can do ALL three simultaneously? Very, very unlikely.
And therein lies the truth of deterrence and nuclear detente. If the enemy understands that even in their best case 99% victory scenario you still possess enough capability to utterly devastate them they can and will not risk it.
Land-based ICBM forces can cost significantly less money to procure and maintain than an equivalent force of SLBMs or bomber-launched standoff missiles.
Also, both SLBMs and bomber-launched weapons are vulnerable to tactical countermeasures. Fast-attack submarines do routinely shadow patrolling ballestic missile subs, with a credible intent of attacking and destroying the missile subs if a wartime launch appears imminent. Both bombers and air-launched standoff weapons are vulnerable to interceptor fighters and ground-based SAMs... Whereas nobody has really managed to crack the problem of successfully intercepting a mass MIRVed ICBM attack in the terminal flight phase.
But the biggest issue is that we never really know whether our enemies have developed some new capability (be it technological, procedural, or intelligence-derived) that would critically compromise the effectiveness of a major weapons system. If we put all our eggs in one basket, we become more vulnerable to a catastrophic, war-losing breakdown like that.
> and turn the area into a charred wasteland, unfarmable and uninhabitable for centuries to come.
I believe the lad test understanding is that it would not be like this. Most likely, after a year, if you plowed under the topsoil, you could get back to farming.
I think it depends on the level of contamination and the isotopes. You could need to remove up to 18" top soil depending on a bunch of factors. Some places don't have that much, and the soil underneath is not suitable for farming.
I’d be excited to see 1.24 million elementary school teachers launched across the world to retaliate after a nuclear strike. It would be the crown jewel in a long streak of aeronautical achievements by the US establishment.
Stupid question : Why not spend $100 Bn instead on fundamental fusion reactor research and put some testing facilities in rural Wyoming? I’m sure many could disagree w/ this on similar grounds (“why not spend on healthcare”), but the use of the money is similar enough and could employ some of the same locals that modernizing ICBMs would.
> The reasons for the GBSD are historical, political, and to a significant extent economic.
There is nothing historical about communism and its desire to take over everything. Putin's origin is from pure communism, just like every other leader in any country that used to be in the Soviet block. Does the author really think that just because they changed clothes and names, they changed their identity?
Lower the guard and a punch will follow. Cold War was not won and it's not over, it's merely extended under an unspoken armistice.
Anyone finding themselves interested in this stuff should pick themselves up a copy of Daniel Ellsberg’s book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. He elaborates a lot of the history of our nuclear strategy and development of arsenals, and why land based missiles don’t make sense.
It's always seemed to me that it might be an idea to reduce weapons of deterrence down to what is needed to do the job. What do we need to actually stop Russia or China launching a nuclear attack? Maybe 5 bombs that could take out Moscow, St Petersburg, Vladivostok and couple of bases would probably be adequate to put them off. Apart from the extra cost of a super dooper vapourise everything system, it increases the risks if a Dr Stangelove situation goes down.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadParticularly with such unprecedented success of western-hostile nations in either misinformation, or propaganda relating to the pandemic, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the US has a hard mathematical spending allocation not unlike Britain pre WWII - having a navy that must be AT LEAST twice the strength of the next nations. That allocation was probably established before the cold war. This is critical for the projection of power. MAD is a shaky concept that isnt oft guaranteed.
IIRC it was a two major war policy for a while not sure what it is now.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/two-theatre-war
In my opinion military spending should be reduced greatly. But if they want to invest so much invest them in technologies which may have more impact on other areas. Like the laser concept on navy ships.
But if the US does this unilaterally, its nuclear warheads are the last thing spending should be reduced on.
It would be great if all countries mutually agreed to do this, but I won't hold my breath waiting for it to happen.
I don't see the connection here.
Not to mention, it's a false dilemma. The US is rich enough to spend $100 billion on a missile and $100 billion on whatever else it should be spent on.
The CARES act was $2,200 billion. The PPP was $484 billion. The last appropriations bill added another $900 billion for COVID relief. The house is getting ready to vote on another $1,900 billion bill here by the end of the month. This missile is less than 2% of what I've just listed. We clearly have the money for dealing with problems when we choose to.
Government spending redistributes money and in some cases that's probably a good thing. In others not so much. But borrowing to do it is bad long term.
A weaker dollar means exports are more competitive and imports are less desirable which would boost American exports.
It's also a huge boon for the rest of the world which deals with dollars extensively.
Finally, most economists seem to have come around to the fact that our national debt is sustainable and the economic activity is more valuable than the interest payments on it.
It also destroys the wealth of those not holding assets and robs the poor by lowering their inflation adjusted income.
But USD being such a big saving currency internationally, US will have really hard time to dial in inflation level.
It may be 5-6% or it may hit 10%+. Nobody know how both people, and bankers around the world will react to first significant USD weakening in decades.
Where's the teacher salary comparisons for the $1.9 trillion dollar stimulus package anyways. With that much money we could almost convert our country's entire energy production to green energy.
What enemy would spend munitions on an empty silo, while knowing that the you already shot all your arsenal?
With radar, and infrared satellites everywhere, attacking a second strike weapon makes no sense.
Any attacker in sane mind will fully focus on offensive.
Not saying I agree or disagree with it. But, that's the logic, anyway.
This goes double if nuclear submarines exist (they do). Plus nuclear bunkers are supposed to be hardened against nuclear strike. So they could absorb the hit and still launch. Nuclear weapons are actually pretty poor at destroying protected underground facilities. You need something completely different: a heavy piercing bunker buster bomb full of conventional explosives.
Plus, even if you were magically successful in destroying all of your opponent's nukes without retaliation you've still completely wrecked the environment. Fallout and nuclear winter are still going to ruin your victory.
Like "getting all the missiles already launched by the time enemy missiles arrive" empty?
US has early warning system better than anybody's else, and only 50 spare missiles stored in military bases which will already be taken out in any first strike scenario.
The other part is that these projects are pretty much jobs programs for the masses of engineers and phds that we keep cranking out without a very good idea of what to do with all this intellectual capital. It's a very expensive jobs program granted, and they serve the purpose of maintaining the military industrial complex.
Could this money be better spent? Absolutely. Do we have a sufficient majority to vote for structural reforms? Nope. So bombs it is then until enough people vote against it.
Some years pass, and the russians just forget that the US have nukes?
Then they start planning an invasion, but cancel it after they read in the "new york times" about some modernization effort, and remember that the us still have nukes?
Their absence would have made a conventional war in Europe with the USSR more likely, and perhaps this would have lead to an invasion of Alaska. I don't see a scenario where any credible belligerent could have projected power into the US mainland.
I do agree that the net effect of nuclear weapons has been less human death, including of US citizens. But invasion is farfetched.
I think it's more likely, for instance, that Cuba would have just been invaded and 'restored' after its Communist revolution, since the Russians wouldn't have had the ability to project the kind of power that they did during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But like, who knows? Maybe Colombia would have conquered the entire Spanish speaking world and tried the Rio Grande.
Most of that cost is gonna be maintenance/sustainment/operations, which we're paying already for with the current squadrons. And it's possible (although I wouldn't count on it) that a new system would be more maintainable than the existing one. For example if keeping Minuteman III alive would've required the US to spend a billion dollars to build a new 5.5" floppy drive factory, that would give GBSD an opportunity to recoup some of the R&D costs
Such a retirement would make the extension of Minuteman III moot.
What does the land based ICBM force offer that bombers and submarines don't? Pork for rural areas and missile contractors, according to this article. I should have figured that out on my own sooner.
The fact that the land is sparsely inhabited doesn't mean the densely inhabited parts of the country don't depend on it.
Why spend billions developing rockets or stealth bombers when you can just load one up on a civilian boat, land on your enemies shore, and truck it to a safehouse in your target city. Let is sit there until you need to detonate it.
And considering how easy it is to bypass ports while smuggling drugs, the idea that port monitoring will prevent it is unconvincing.
For obvious reasons, no side will announce its efforts publicly. Nor will any side announce discovery of other efforts until a hot war starts to seem like a good idea.
The US has already started forcing the CCP to divest US ports because of this scenario.
You will not attack first if you have no confidence in gaining even a marginal victory, or solid favourable stalemate.
You don't want to weaken you enemy's reluctance to engage in attrition warfare if your objective is to win a battle, and not a war.
With respect to bombers, they are a lot more certain. With modern anti-aircraft systems, it is uncertain how many bombers would actually make it through.
With respect to SLBM, they are less prone to destruction in normal warfare. What happens if an enemy destroys a ballistic submarine? Do you go to nuclear war over that? What about two? With land based ICBMs to destroy one, you basically need to attack it with a nuclear level weapon in the middle of the country making your intentions clear.
Finally, as mentioned in the article, the land based ICBMs absorb a lot of the enemy nuclear arsenal, since there are a lot of them dispersed over a wide geographic area.
The only way that I see this question arising is if there were direct, open warfare with another highly capable nuclear weapons state. But if the US has gone to war with such a NWS, I think that the logic of rational deterrence has already failed on at least one side -- even if neither side has yet used nuclear arms. Outcomes after that point can't be calculated on the basis of rational cost-benefit analysis because rationality is no longer the driving force.
I find the logic of mutually assured destruction sound as far as it goes. Empirically, it seems correlated with a long period free of (direct) warfare between great powers. But I fear that this mechanism is brittle. It's one accident or leadership cognitive error away from shattering.
Of the 280 submarine launch tubes, only 212 were counted as deployed with as many Trident II missiles loaded. The treaty counts a missile as deployed if it is in a launch tube regardless of whether the submarine is deployed at sea. The United States has declared that it will not deploy more than 240 missiles at any time. Assuming each deployed submarine carries a full missile load, the 212 deployed missiles correspond to 10 submarines fully loaded with a total of 200 missiles. The remaining 12 deployed missiles were onboard one or two submarines loading or offloading missiles at the time the count was made.
The data shows that the 212 deployed missiles carried a total of 945 warheads, or an average of 4 to 5 warheads per missile, corresponding to 70 percent of the 1,344 deployed warheads as of September 1, 2017.
The New START data shows the United States now has just under 400 Minuteman III ICBMs in silos, down from 405 in March 2017. Normally the Air Force strides to have 400 deployed but one missile was undergoing maintenance.
Although the number of deployed ICBMs had declined from 450 to 400, the total numbers of missiles and silos have not. The data shows the Air Force has the same number of missiles and silos as in March 2017 because 50 empty silos are “kept warm” and ready to load 50 non-deployed missiles if necessary. Reduction of deployed ICBMs started in 2016, five years after the New START was signed. And the actual ICBM force is the same size as when the treaty was signed.
The 399 deployed ICBMs carried 399 W78/Mk12A or W87/Mk21 warheads. Although normally loaded with only one warhead each, the Trump NPR confirms that “a portion of the ICBM force can be uploaded” if necessary. We estimate the ICBM force has the capacity to carry a maximum of 800 warheads.
"New Data Shows Detail About Final Phase of US New START Treaty Reductions"
https://fas.org/blogs/security/2018/01/new-start-full-data/
That's why you need your infrared, and radar satellites.
> Submarines launched missiles exist entirely for this true second strike capability, one that can’t easily be dispatched with.
At the peak of cold war, up to a half of US SSBNs fleet was tailed by union's submarines. With giant advances in sensing, and computing since the cold war, SSBNs became much easier targets.
It's foregone conclusion that your deterrence is stronger if you increase the number of ways you can attack.
> 3,800 warheads [..] for practical purposes, after the first few, they quickly grow redundant. “Once you've dropped a couple of nuclear bombs on a city, if you drop a couple more, all you do is make the rubble shake,”
I'm frankly not sure if this is deliberately disingenuous, intended to be hyperbole, or a fundamental lack of understanding of the situation or some combination of all three, but, this is exceptionally wrong.
The reason you have 3,800 warheads isn't to aim them all at one city. Remember just as the soviets target our nuclear missile silos we must target theirs. Moreover, having such an extensive fleet of missiles ensures that even if we were caught entirely off-guard and the soviets did an impossibly good job of targeting our nuclear forces, and say took out 90% of nuclear strike capabilities we would still have sufficient capabilities to utterly devastate them.
This is why the nuclear triad exists.
How effective would a soviet first strike be at targeting our SSBNs? Can they really track and destroy them at will? Maybe.
How effective would it be against our missile silos? Do they know where they all are? Probably. Can they get their bombs on the ground before we can get ours into the air? Maybe.
How effective would a soviet strike be against our bomber fleets? Do they know where to strike? Perhaps. Can they disable or destroy our bomber fleets before we can get them into the air? Maybe.
But, what are the odds that they can do ALL three simultaneously? Very, very unlikely.
And therein lies the truth of deterrence and nuclear detente. If the enemy understands that even in their best case 99% victory scenario you still possess enough capability to utterly devastate them they can and will not risk it.
Also, both SLBMs and bomber-launched weapons are vulnerable to tactical countermeasures. Fast-attack submarines do routinely shadow patrolling ballestic missile subs, with a credible intent of attacking and destroying the missile subs if a wartime launch appears imminent. Both bombers and air-launched standoff weapons are vulnerable to interceptor fighters and ground-based SAMs... Whereas nobody has really managed to crack the problem of successfully intercepting a mass MIRVed ICBM attack in the terminal flight phase.
But the biggest issue is that we never really know whether our enemies have developed some new capability (be it technological, procedural, or intelligence-derived) that would critically compromise the effectiveness of a major weapons system. If we put all our eggs in one basket, we become more vulnerable to a catastrophic, war-losing breakdown like that.
I believe the lad test understanding is that it would not be like this. Most likely, after a year, if you plowed under the topsoil, you could get back to farming.
https://www.cnet.com/news/harvard-astronomy-professor-avi-lo...
There is nothing historical about communism and its desire to take over everything. Putin's origin is from pure communism, just like every other leader in any country that used to be in the Soviet block. Does the author really think that just because they changed clothes and names, they changed their identity?
Lower the guard and a punch will follow. Cold War was not won and it's not over, it's merely extended under an unspoken armistice.
You never know, if there is still a few cockroaches still alive after the 500th bomb you drop, you still have 100th more...