I have seen recently several discussions in the HN/Substack blog milleau about nuclear war “not being that bad.” Hitting the delete button on nearly every major city in Russia, the United States and and Europe is pretty bad.
For the flee to New Zealand crowd; I am quite curious what will happen when everyone with access to a long range airliner or business jet heads in that direction…
Related, NZ could do with some serious thinking about its inability to enforce airspace sovereignty.
The biggest takeaway people should have from this video is that a modern nuclear strike is effectively an overwhelming Denial of Service attack against emergency services, infrastructure, and supply chain... all at once, on an immense scale.
Enough so that quickly scaling a "proper response" just isn't possible. Even if just a single large city (500K+ pop) was hit with a single, typical modern warhead (200-300kt), the results would be covered in history books for the rest of the millennium.
A large scale exchange? The best you could hope for is that you're living in the Southern hemisphere to avoid the immediate horror, though the next 20 years would still be horrific.
Everyone knows that NZ us a haven for rich westerners with luxurious bunkers, which may be enough to make it a target.
For the crowd simply hoping for some variation of On the Beach, you should be aware that a nuclear war in the 2020s would almost certainly see Australia targeted by Chinese nukes.
> rich westerners with luxurious bunkers, which may be enough to make it a target.
In an apocalypse scenario, they are just extra mouths to feed - I wouldn't waste any missiles to target rich people's mansions in any country, but the locals might have plans for them...
The way things are going, New Zealand might catch a few nukes if for no other reason than to punish all the powerful people that fled there before the shooting started.
There is an entire subreddit devoted to maps without NZ on it. I guess they hope Russians have one of these maps and kinda forgot about that place altogether
> I have seen recently several discussions in the HN/Substack blog milleau about nuclear war “not being that bad.”
I think that was a fear of death cope. Downplaying such events reduces the temporary anxiety of thinking about living in a world where nukes have been unleashed.
It's hard to overstate how annihilating these weapons are to the areas that are struck by them, and how decimating they are even to the population areas not directly struck but heavily dependent on the major population centers.
Under the doctrine of counterforce targeting, major cities wouldn't be attacked so optimistic scenarios estimate "only" 20M dead in a US-Russia exchange. Of course that's just one possible doctrine that Russia could follow. The real issue is not any one number but the probabilities of different scenarios.
Merely live in spitting distance of some strategic targets, then you don't have to worry about suffering for long. Thanks to Naval Base Kitsap, I don't think I'll have to worry about the basics if a nuclear war breaks out.
Yup, something like 1/3rd the entire US arsenal is there. Also, it’s kinda wild/fun to look at the vastness of the bunkers they have by the submarine pens; there are multiple rail lines going North/south that all link up to the pens.
GMD only has 44 interceptors. I'm pretty sure I'd be hit.
>goofy attitude
Just a little gallows humor. As for planning, I have enough canned food and bottled water in my closet to last about a week. But that's more a plan for lockdowns/etc than for a nuclear war. As long as I live here, I earnestly don't think there is much sense in planning for that.
I think it's more dark humor / coping with death than a plan. if that were someone's serious plan, they would probably consider killing themselves if the bomb didn't do it for them.
Correct. Even if I survived the immediate blast effects, I think I would be in for a painful and unavoidable death from nuclear poisoning. I don't have a fallout shelter. The best I could do is close all my windows, but those would be shattered I'm sure. And seeing as I live in a 5-over-1, I think my building wouldn't survive anyway. The [normally reasonable] fire safety of these primarily-wood buildings depends on a functioning sprinkler system, which assumes municipal water still works. That won't be the case in a nuclear war.
The only realistic plan for this scenario is to leave before the war even starts.
> I have seen recently several discussions in the HN/Substack blog milleau about nuclear war “not being that bad.”
I started noticing this sentiment on Reddit sometime last year. Usually with some jingoistic fantasy about whatever country the news media told them to hate.
It's a psychological coping thing. A lot of people, in particular younger ones born after the cold war have never actually been in a situation where their own physical safety is threatened by brute violence or seen the world around them fall apart. See also "covid is just the flu, right guys?" phenomenon. Substack bloggers in particular with their Pollyanna-ish tendencies take these things badly.
I dunno what discussions you are referring to specifically, but the mainstream belief is that all-out nuclear war would end in nuclear winter. I have seen some posts/articles recently contesting that, which are (quietly) supported by the scientific community. we don't know for sure that nuclear winter wouldn't happen, but the foundations of the original theory have come into question under the last few decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_d...
I don't really see a meaningful distinction between "end of the human race" and merely "end of civilization as we know it", but it's interesting to learn about the current debate among experts.
This reminds me of how little sense the US national defense budget makes. You would think that if something represents half the threat, addressing it should be half the budget. Yet nuclear missiles represent nearly all the threat to the United States, so why doesn't 75% of the defense budget go toward anti-missile systems development and deployment? At the moment, the US still has zero chance of defending against a single MIRV'd ICBM, let alone the hundreds that Russia would use. What fraction of the US defense budget is spent on anti-ICBMs? 9.2 billion dollars, or 1.3%.
Because its far easier to launch a missle than to catch a nuclear weapon mid air. It wouldn't even prevent damage or loss of life. nuclear weapons are big enough to affect airplanes even
In part that’s because large scale ballistic weapon defense has generally been viewed by experts as destabilizing and accelerating the arms race. It’s a little technical why that is so, but interesting to read — regardless of one’s ultimate views.
This. The mutually assured destruction doctrine works because both parties knows that the party which does the first strike will be obliterated by the other party's second strike, so neither party wants to be the one to strike first. However, if party A should get too good of an ICBM defence system, mutually assured destruction would stop functioning; party A could conceivably fire a first strike with the knowledge that party B wouldn't be able to retaliate with a second strike. This would make it in party B's interest to do a first strike before party A's anti-ballistic missile systems are functional (EDIT: or something like that; essentially, it breaks the entire MAD mechanism, I shouldn't make it sound like any particular outcome is likely.)
There was a whole anti-ballistic missile treaty which banned the US and the USSR (and then its successor states) from developing anti-ballistic missile systems. George W. Bush withdrew the US from the treaty in 2002.
I can understand each logical step of MAD, but if you look at the whole picture it really does seem kind of silly. Like, why not both agree to allow the other to place a stationary gigantic nuke in each major metro area under the control of the other, and call it a day? Of course that seems absurd, but it's not more absurd than not developing anti-ICBM weapons. And think of the savings it could have produced? I haven't looked at actual numbers but there has to be a phenomenal amount of resources that have fueled MAD over the last ~60 years. Now that I think about it, an even more cost effective measure would be the ancient practice of exchanging hostages. Each top political or military official has a loved one live in the other country while they're in office. Also sounds absurd at first, but probably would have been just as effective at avoiding war which is all MAD is good for anyways.
Yeah, it's obviously not great. But it seems to be a kind of stable local optimum, where any step any single party could independently take to get rid of MAD would be against that party's interest. Honestly, barring widespread global nuclear disarmament, it feels like the nuclear weapons hat is out of the bag -- and at that point, it's a choice between MAD and nuclear armageddon.
> Like, why not both agree to allow the other to place a stationary gigantic nuke in each major metro area under the control of the other, and call it a day?
Because then the solution would be to disable all of the other country's nukes simultaneously and then trigger your own.
MAD isn't a doctrine. US doctrine is simply Assured Destruction. Russian doctrine is escalate to deescalate. Neither doctrine actually contemplates that mutual destruction is a good thing.
> Mutual assured destruction (MAD) is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy ...
I'm unable to find anything about the "Assured Destruction" doctrine which isn't about MAD. If you have some links I should read to learn more, please do send them. But presumably, the US's official doctrine is that if Russia sends in a first strike, the US will retaliate with a second strike? And presumably Russia's official doctrine is the same? If that's the case, isn't that just the MAD doctrine, even if it's under a different name officially? Or has both countries officially said that a first strike won't be followed up by a second strike?
It amounts to : the primary point of the US arsenal is deterrence. As such, we will assure that we can destroy the enemy as necessary.
Russian doctrine had explicitly contemplated the first use of nuclear weapons "in response to large-scale aggression utilizing conventional weapons in situations critical to the national security of the Russian Federation." So if they get in a war and start losing.
The critical part of MAD is a so called balance of terror. But the US doesn't use nuclear weapons because it's afraid of getting nuked in return, and Russia believes that they can win a nuclear war. So it's both not doctrine (because it's not how either military plans to use forces) and not real (because the preconditions don't exist).
My own two cents: I think the United States has perceived Russia as a defeated military power with economic and internal political weaknesses. Therefore, effort should be spent there over a military one.
So one could look at where the CIA spends money to see if effort is put there over strictly military. Not that the Pentagon has been audited lately or anything...
Its incredibly bloated, but you have to consider the second-level effects of US Military spending, like our ability to project economic policy on the world, or prop up the domestic economy.
US Defense spending is the biggest welfare program in human history and both political parties fully support it.
Honestly, it seems like mostly welfare for everyone else. The rest of the western world is only now caring about having their own functioning militaries again after decades
Generally, yes we would want most of the people working on the production side of the military complex employed by our government in some way, and working on our toughest problems. Sadly that's not what their effort is going into now.
This may be wildly incorrect, but a good offense may be the best defense. Seemingly all other military spending is the nuclear deterrent. An overly basic example: Nuking a country with 90% of money spent on defense means that country's retaliation will be pretty weak. Might be worth nuking them.
Nuking a country where 90% of money is spent on offensive capabilities means the retaliation will be extreme. Probably not worth nuking as you will get attacked back much harder.
Missile defense is a dicey topic. In the 1980s the Soviet Union realized that they could not afford their own anti-missile systems, or make their ICBMs resistant to US anti-missile systems. This was partly responsible for increased tensions as the Soviet Union faced an existential threat of losing a nuclear war.
They responded by participating in arms reduction treaties which had the same effect as the US building an anti-missile system which could intercept 95% of Russian weapons. If the US built a full missile defense umbrella, adversaries would respond by building enough weapons to defeat the umbrella.
Israel’s iron dome can reasonably protect a decent portion of Israel. Destitute Gazans can still overwhelm it. If you don’t really care what you hit, missiles are very inexpensive.
It can do so because the number of missiles coming in at it are few.
In the end, dummy IBCMs are easy to build, and it will be hard for any system to shoot them all down if there are a thousand dummies for every live missile. Missile defense it ultimately impossible, IMO.
Until 1947, the US Department of Defense was called the Department of War. I think your confusion is rooted in the misconceptions this renaming was designed to foster. The United States has the ability to wage numerous simultaneous wars around the world. That's the capability all that money buys, the ability to stomp any conventional military force anywhere in the world, numerous times at once. Morality aside, it makes a lot of sense. It's only nonsensical when you take the 'Defense' name at face value.
That understanding is too simplistic. 1947 was two years after the end of WW2, the second time in half a century that the US got dragged into a massive European war. From a defense perspective, it's better to keep the fighting on someone else's territory. If Hitler or Stalin or Putin rolls over Europe, North America will be next. There's nothing nonsensical about putting a stop to that early.
Also, Europeans are our friends. It's right to help defend them.
Well if defense means fighting wars in other countries rather than in America itself, then there's no confusion. The US Military is very good at defending both American strategic interests abroad, and defending America's allies. It becomes nonsensical when you think of "defense" as repelling invasions of American soil.
> Also, Europeans are our friends. It's right to help defend them.
You've read too much into my comment. I support NATO and believe America is generally a force for good.
you wrote: "The United States has the ability to wage numerous simultaneous wars around the world"
An example of those wars is Afganistan. Yes, the US managed to destroy the country but could not win the war. Russia also destroyed Ukraine and probably will not win the war.
I did specify "any conventional military force"; 'winning' an occupation/insurgency is quite another matter, particularly when the 'win conditions' are political rather than military. And doubly true when those political win conditions are poorly defined in the first place.
But trust me, defense industry lobbyists are very eager for the US Government to spend even more money to address these shortcomings...
The ability for the U.S. to wage numerous simultaneous wars is about the cold war. It's effectively the basis for NATO's deterrent effect, reducing the number and scale of wars in Europe and Asia compared to the pre-NATO era.
The Department of War was essentially the department of the Army: the Department of Defense merged the Department of the Army with the Department of the Navy, and rolled in the newly separate Air Force.
Enemy launches warheads single file (one behind another at a specific distance) towards a target. Your defense system sends up a missile to destroy that warhead, effectively. Now you have a smoke screen and sensor blackout at altitude X.
Oh look, you’ve detected a new nuke exiting the smoke screen. Now you can blow that one up, but the smoke screen moves closer to the intended target. Repeat until a nuke hits you.
I believe this dynamic is exactly what MRVs were designed for. One missile with numerous war heads, arriving on target one after another in rapid succession (independent targeting came later.)
There are some videos of MIRV reentries on youtube that really something to see. Seeing those bright lights come down from the sky in a line, one after another, is simultaneously chilling and awe inspiring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7X89a531CY
A debris field of sufficient size is also noisy. MIRVs can have a couple decoy warheads whose job it is is to just release debris to create radar noise.
Theoretically, yes. But that is part of the point of improving the signal processing. And there's 4-5 different radars looking at stuff coming over the pole at Fylingdales, Thule, Clear, Cavalier, possibly at sea, depending.
Money would be best spent targeting the problem. Russia and its people is not the problem, Putin, Kim Jong-Un or whoever the current crackpot dictator with nuclear weapons is. Assassinating a single person, while morally reprehensible, is preferable to destroying a civilization.
Missile defence is a fantasy that is impossible to build except against the simplest of rockets. Even Israel's Iron Dome and Arrow systems regularly fail against homemade rockets. The military industrial complex continues to perpetuate that fantasy to receive further R&D funding.
You didn't see the results of last year conflict? Iron Dome was overwhelmed but still managed to give pretty good defence and Iron Beam is much cheaper and quicker.
ICBMs travel 30 times faster than a bullet and 7 times faster than a hypersonic scramjet cruise missile. If we're talking MIRVs that can randomly dodge before they hit their targets, that is a stupidly hard problem. Better to try to cure cancer and just not get into a nuclear war.
Nuclear weapons are widely seen as a stabilizing force by aerious security experts, and while their ultimate elimination is a worthy ethical ideal, it is obviously impossible in the present global environment. This link is from one of the abolishment campaign back in 2019. The world has become more not less dangerous since for France, UK, and US - and their many allies whose territorial integrity is assured by US nuclear weapons.
least-Fun simulation ever, but i'm sure the creators did alot of research into troop movements to paint this picture so great job.
The only thing that it doesn't take into account the weapons we've developed since then. Like Cyber, Anti-Air "Iron Dome", satelite responses, etc.
It's crazy how many zero-days are hoarded instead of fixed. It's crazy how interconnected and reliant on technology we are.
Take out a city with a nuke, that's really bad. But disable wifi, electricity, water, oil or any other nessecity and instead of destroying that city you watch that city destroy itself.
What's that weird unit MM? What I could find is an incorrect (multiplied not added) use of the roman 1000 used for money-millions. That would be pretty cheap in this context.
The invasion of Ukraine had a curious effect on me. Before, when I read about the 50s and some (US) generals advocating for a nuclear first strike against Soviet Russia, I was dumbfounded. How could military leaders be so fucking stupid? How could someone remotely intelligent even contemplate a nuclear exchange, let alone a first strike?
Nowadays, the apparent incompetence of the Russian army, compared with the apparent utter irrationality of the Russian leadership got me thinking. Assuming that Russia loses the next big battle and ends up in the defensive, it's totally possible that the Russian leadership decides to deploy tactical nukes in an attempt to "escalate to deescalate". Such a scenario can very easily lead to a NATO-Russia war and consequently to a large-scale nuclear exchange. Hence, a nuclear first strike doesn't look so outlandish anymore. After all, the incompetence of the Russian army has been proven, so maybe their second strike would be somehow survivable.
It's an odd train of thoughts, but presented with the facts of Russia's irrational invasion of Ukraine and its utter incompetence in military strategy, it's hard to argue that it's not at least reasonable.
Using nukes at all is an escalation. Not something you want to roll the dice on given the scale of destruction and the window of time in which things would go very downhill.
Tactical nukes are indeed the big worry. By the way people talk, I don't think most people appreciate the difference between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons. Tactical nuclear weapons aren't "end of the world" (but we certainly benefit from collectively pretending that they are!). The use of tactical nuclear weapons would fall right in line with Russia's apparent goal in Ukraine - turn it into a destroyed shithole incapable of economic development ("neutrality"). Use of tactical nukes would trigger NATO Article 4, but it seems that Russia actually wants to go to war with EU/US ("NATO") to justify their struggle (analogous to NK's "Juche"), and so I'd think we'd still be left with the same calculus regarding escalation to strategic nukes.
Unfortunately the only workable strategy seems to be containment and hoping the wheels come off domestically ("SU 2.0"). This doesn't mean we should heed Putler's boasting about his phallic red button in response to any aid to Ukraine, but it does mean a long period of watching genocide and other organized crimes against humanity while waiting for those wheels to work themselves off.
This war has also made me change my perspective on working on weapons, etc. I've always been more of a "how could you justify spending your life working on weapons?" person, but after Russia invaded and started a needless war, I've been thankful that the US and others have been able to provide weapon systems for Ukraine to defend itself. I wish we lived in a world where weapons development was unnecessary but as long as madmen like Putin can single-handedly order a senseless invasion, we obviously need to be well armed.
But it's an apt comparison. Putin's Russia had prepared 40,000 body bags, mobile crematoriums, and had updated mass grave standards ahead of what they had believed was going to be a low casualty operation for taking over Ukraine. There's just no way of going about it: Russia was prepared to commit mass wholesale genocide of Ukrainians. The only reason why he had not succeeded was Ukrainian resolve and western weapons which they were armed with. Otherwise we'd be witnessing Katyn 2.0 from satellite view.
The logic is simple, post WW2, the US was the only one with the bomb and could have secured a monopoly on power, but it didn't and here we are. In Einstein's biography, I found out he was a proponent of all nations ceding their military power to a single entity like the UN, but obviously this didn't and wouldn't happen since it would end the idea of sovereignty. Clearly though we will never have world security unless something like this happens. Even if we get through this crisis, it will only be a matter of time before another arises (maybe China, India, Pakistan etc.).
As recently as last year I have read people proclaiming that war was "obsolete" because it was too expensive because we are too economically intertwined, but apparently this is not a big enough of a deterrent for some leaders, so again we can never count on this idea again, it was naive.
> As recently as last year I have read people proclaiming that war was "obsolete" because it was too expensive because we are too economically intertwined, but apparently this is not a big enough of a deterrent for some leaders, so again we can never count on this idea again, it was naive.
You might be right about this, but I'm not yet writing it off. So far, it seems the most affected countries are not as integrated as the others, like Sri Lanka, and Pakistan (of course them more so than Sri Lanka).
When it hits an economically integrated country with power, then we'll see what happens.
> The logic is simple, post WW2, the US was the only one with the bomb and could have secured a monopoly on power, but it didn't and here we are.
How? The nuclear umbrella makes sense as a defensive strategy: you can't advance when entire divisions can be destroyed by nuclear weapons. It doesn't make sense as an offensive strategy on the operational level. It might work on the strategic level, but that would be such a horrible war crime you would essentially throw away any chance of maintaining popular legitimacy.
Looking back with a purely amoral, realpolitik perspective perhaps at the end of WW2 the US should have leveraged it's temporary monopoly on nuclear weapons to conquer the USSR and impose a true Pax Americana on the entire world? There were a few political and military leaders at the time who advocated exactly that but they were seen as fringe warmongers and no one else wanted to attack an erstwhile ally. Would the world be better or worse off today if we had followed that path? I don't presume to know the answer but it's interesting to speculate in an alternate history sense.
That proposal is not realistic. The U.S. had a very small number of nuclear weapons available. If I remember correctly, the number remained in the single digits for several years after 1945. To "conquer the USSR" would have required thousands of nuclear weapons, and they were not available nor was it possible to make that many.
And regarding a non-nuclear war, the U.S. was pretty tired of fighting by the end of WW2.
This invasion of Ukraine has had a different effect on me, and that is that the level of incompetence displayed by Russia's armed forces is staggering and leaves me wondering how Russia at this point could launch an overseas war (nuclear or conventional) against the United States at all.
The amount of technology that must go right and logistics involved to successfully deliver a nuclear weapon to a foreign overseas country is enormously difficult. I now seriously wonder if Russia is actually capable of delivering 10% of their first strike weapons to the United States in an attack.
Please, please do not underestimate anyone. Let's remember that it is Russia who successfully puts astronauts up in space on like daily basis (to paint a picture). They are the only nation who has constant human presence in space for the last 35 or so years. To think they are not capable of maintaining their nuclear arsenal and hitting targets is very naive.
Let's be objective here. Ukraine is the second largest country (by area) and seventh largest (by population) in Europe. They have a powerful and well trained army with extensive combat experience in the last 8 years. They have strong dug lines on the front and fortified lines around and in largest cities.
Am I the only one who would expect the us to launch on China as well in this case of scenario. I mean every enemy country with nukes would be attacked in all out nuclear war.
Biden’S nuclear posture review; Every four years, the US government revises it’s nuclear policies in a Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) ... Bill Gertz of the Washington Times reports:
The Pentagon will eliminate the sole nuclear gravity bomb in the U.S. strategic weapons arsenal capable of blasting deeply buried underground structures as part of the Biden administration‘s review of strategic weapons policy, according to U.S. officials. The retirement of the B83 bomb, a megatonclass weapon delivered by B-2 stealth bombers, was disclosed to Congress last month as part of the Biden administration’s classified nuclear posture review, a major reassessment of strategic forces and their employment. The bomb is “costly to maintain
and of increasingly limited value,” a senior defense official told The Washington Times.
“Limited value?” Not so. Both Russia and China have deep underground nuclear missile bunkers and manufacturing and storage facilities that only
this weapon can attack. Even our land based and sub-launched warheads can’t penetrate these hardened facilities...
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadFor the flee to New Zealand crowd; I am quite curious what will happen when everyone with access to a long range airliner or business jet heads in that direction…
Related, NZ could do with some serious thinking about its inability to enforce airspace sovereignty.
Enough so that quickly scaling a "proper response" just isn't possible. Even if just a single large city (500K+ pop) was hit with a single, typical modern warhead (200-300kt), the results would be covered in history books for the rest of the millennium.
A large scale exchange? The best you could hope for is that you're living in the Southern hemisphere to avoid the immediate horror, though the next 20 years would still be horrific.
For the crowd simply hoping for some variation of On the Beach, you should be aware that a nuclear war in the 2020s would almost certainly see Australia targeted by Chinese nukes.
In an apocalypse scenario, they are just extra mouths to feed - I wouldn't waste any missiles to target rich people's mansions in any country, but the locals might have plans for them...
I think that was a fear of death cope. Downplaying such events reduces the temporary anxiety of thinking about living in a world where nukes have been unleashed.
It's hard to overstate how annihilating these weapons are to the areas that are struck by them, and how decimating they are even to the population areas not directly struck but heavily dependent on the major population centers.
Fwiw I’d be more disappointed by a belligerent navy coming to show up our strategic shortcomings.
Hope ya have a farm. GL trying to get through an airport, GL trying to drive anywhere.
We thought we were standing on the shoulders of giants, turns out we where standing on cards.
Seems like such a goofy attitude/plan, so many failure modes.
>goofy attitude
Just a little gallows humor. As for planning, I have enough canned food and bottled water in my closet to last about a week. But that's more a plan for lockdowns/etc than for a nuclear war. As long as I live here, I earnestly don't think there is much sense in planning for that.
The only realistic plan for this scenario is to leave before the war even starts.
I started noticing this sentiment on Reddit sometime last year. Usually with some jingoistic fantasy about whatever country the news media told them to hate.
I don't really see a meaningful distinction between "end of the human race" and merely "end of civilization as we know it", but it's interesting to learn about the current debate among experts.
Particularly not when as big of a chunk of our population believes the rapture is coming in their lifetimes.
https://breakingdefense.com/2022/02/no-us-missile-defense-sy...
There was a whole anti-ballistic missile treaty which banned the US and the USSR (and then its successor states) from developing anti-ballistic missile systems. George W. Bush withdrew the US from the treaty in 2002.
Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Ballistic_Missile_Treaty
Because then the solution would be to disable all of the other country's nukes simultaneously and then trigger your own.
> Mutual assured destruction (MAD) is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy ...
I'm unable to find anything about the "Assured Destruction" doctrine which isn't about MAD. If you have some links I should read to learn more, please do send them. But presumably, the US's official doctrine is that if Russia sends in a first strike, the US will retaliate with a second strike? And presumably Russia's official doctrine is the same? If that's the case, isn't that just the MAD doctrine, even if it's under a different name officially? Or has both countries officially said that a first strike won't be followed up by a second strike?
MAD is a game theory construct. It may inform doctrine, but it doesn't actually dictate how we employ forces. US doctrine can be found in the nuclear posture review : https://media.defense.gov/2018/Feb/02/2001872877/-1/-1/1/EXE...
It amounts to : the primary point of the US arsenal is deterrence. As such, we will assure that we can destroy the enemy as necessary.
Russian doctrine had explicitly contemplated the first use of nuclear weapons "in response to large-scale aggression utilizing conventional weapons in situations critical to the national security of the Russian Federation." So if they get in a war and start losing.
The critical part of MAD is a so called balance of terror. But the US doesn't use nuclear weapons because it's afraid of getting nuked in return, and Russia believes that they can win a nuclear war. So it's both not doctrine (because it's not how either military plans to use forces) and not real (because the preconditions don't exist).
So one could look at where the CIA spends money to see if effort is put there over strictly military. Not that the Pentagon has been audited lately or anything...
US Defense spending is the biggest welfare program in human history and both political parties fully support it.
But is it welfare for the right people?
Nuking a country where 90% of money is spent on offensive capabilities means the retaliation will be extreme. Probably not worth nuking as you will get attacked back much harder.
They responded by participating in arms reduction treaties which had the same effect as the US building an anti-missile system which could intercept 95% of Russian weapons. If the US built a full missile defense umbrella, adversaries would respond by building enough weapons to defeat the umbrella.
Could the adversaries afford that ?
In the end, dummy IBCMs are easy to build, and it will be hard for any system to shoot them all down if there are a thousand dummies for every live missile. Missile defense it ultimately impossible, IMO.
Also, Europeans are our friends. It's right to help defend them.
> Also, Europeans are our friends. It's right to help defend them.
You've read too much into my comment. I support NATO and believe America is generally a force for good.
An example of those wars is Afganistan. Yes, the US managed to destroy the country but could not win the war. Russia also destroyed Ukraine and probably will not win the war.
But trust me, defense industry lobbyists are very eager for the US Government to spend even more money to address these shortcomings...
That’s a downright lie.
I am in Ukraine and I do not feel like I am in a destroyed country.
Enemy launches warheads single file (one behind another at a specific distance) towards a target. Your defense system sends up a missile to destroy that warhead, effectively. Now you have a smoke screen and sensor blackout at altitude X.
Oh look, you’ve detected a new nuke exiting the smoke screen. Now you can blow that one up, but the smoke screen moves closer to the intended target. Repeat until a nuke hits you.
There are some videos of MIRV reentries on youtube that really something to see. Seeing those bright lights come down from the sky in a line, one after another, is simultaneously chilling and awe inspiring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7X89a531CY
Nukes produce broadband noise. Improved radars let you get much better signal to noise and see through it anyway.
And the warheads you're streaming in need to actually detonate to give noise. Otherwise you just get a debris field.
This is a thought that keeps me up at night.
The only thing that it doesn't take into account the weapons we've developed since then. Like Cyber, Anti-Air "Iron Dome", satelite responses, etc.
It's crazy how many zero-days are hoarded instead of fixed. It's crazy how interconnected and reliant on technology we are.
Take out a city with a nuke, that's really bad. But disable wifi, electricity, water, oil or any other nessecity and instead of destroying that city you watch that city destroy itself.
Maybe its something like Mega-huMans?
> MM ("thousand thousands", from Latin "Mille" ...)
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%2C000%2C000
For example, 'pp' to represent 'pages'.
Nowadays, the apparent incompetence of the Russian army, compared with the apparent utter irrationality of the Russian leadership got me thinking. Assuming that Russia loses the next big battle and ends up in the defensive, it's totally possible that the Russian leadership decides to deploy tactical nukes in an attempt to "escalate to deescalate". Such a scenario can very easily lead to a NATO-Russia war and consequently to a large-scale nuclear exchange. Hence, a nuclear first strike doesn't look so outlandish anymore. After all, the incompetence of the Russian army has been proven, so maybe their second strike would be somehow survivable.
It's an odd train of thoughts, but presented with the facts of Russia's irrational invasion of Ukraine and its utter incompetence in military strategy, it's hard to argue that it's not at least reasonable.
Unfortunately the only workable strategy seems to be containment and hoping the wheels come off domestically ("SU 2.0"). This doesn't mean we should heed Putler's boasting about his phallic red button in response to any aid to Ukraine, but it does mean a long period of watching genocide and other organized crimes against humanity while waiting for those wheels to work themselves off.
As recently as last year I have read people proclaiming that war was "obsolete" because it was too expensive because we are too economically intertwined, but apparently this is not a big enough of a deterrent for some leaders, so again we can never count on this idea again, it was naive.
You might be right about this, but I'm not yet writing it off. So far, it seems the most affected countries are not as integrated as the others, like Sri Lanka, and Pakistan (of course them more so than Sri Lanka).
When it hits an economically integrated country with power, then we'll see what happens.
How? The nuclear umbrella makes sense as a defensive strategy: you can't advance when entire divisions can be destroyed by nuclear weapons. It doesn't make sense as an offensive strategy on the operational level. It might work on the strategic level, but that would be such a horrible war crime you would essentially throw away any chance of maintaining popular legitimacy.
The amount of technology that must go right and logistics involved to successfully deliver a nuclear weapon to a foreign overseas country is enormously difficult. I now seriously wonder if Russia is actually capable of delivering 10% of their first strike weapons to the United States in an attack.
The Pentagon will eliminate the sole nuclear gravity bomb in the U.S. strategic weapons arsenal capable of blasting deeply buried underground structures as part of the Biden administration‘s review of strategic weapons policy, according to U.S. officials. The retirement of the B83 bomb, a megatonclass weapon delivered by B-2 stealth bombers, was disclosed to Congress last month as part of the Biden administration’s classified nuclear posture review, a major reassessment of strategic forces and their employment. The bomb is “costly to maintain and of increasingly limited value,” a senior defense official told The Washington Times.
“Limited value?” Not so. Both Russia and China have deep underground nuclear missile bunkers and manufacturing and storage facilities that only this weapon can attack. Even our land based and sub-launched warheads can’t penetrate these hardened facilities...
Source Joel Skousen Latest WAB
Bunker, Stein, und Eisen dicht, aber deine Maske nicht! Dam Dam. Dam Dam.