> A system which stops 50% of incoming missiles means that only half as many people will die in a nuclear war,
That doesn't make sense. The population isn't evenly distributed, and a target can have multiple missiles directed at it.
New START set the number of warheads to 1,550.
The 500 largest US cities have a population (2016) of 103,020,808. https://www.cdc.gov/places/about/500-cities-2016-2019/pdfs/5... . (Note LA, Long Beach, and Anaheim are different cities, when I should be using metropolitan areas, so my estimate is low-balling things.)
With 6x coverage of the largest cities, and 2x coverage of the smallest, that's a good chance of ~100 million deaths, even with a 50% missile intercept rate.
While a 0% intercept rate will still leave many people alive, in the sparsest parts of the US - not a factor of 2.
> [footnote] but the number of targets is cut by 50% either way
Note how targets are places or cities, not people. Nuking Gann Valley, South Dakota kills far fewer people, and causes far less disruption, than nuking Seattle.
> Obviously, these are one-off tests in ideal conditions
Last I knew, we had no good numbers for realistic conditions. I last looked at this years ago. At the time they were doing things like including a transmitter with the missile, and excluding chaff and other counter-measures.
Clearly if real-world numbers were a 5% then the entire calculation is wrong.
> The last half-century has seen very little in the way of better decoy technology, and massive improvements in discrimination.
Citation needed in how those improvements affect the overall intercept rate, and the cost/benefit of running an expensive defense system vs. building a few more nukes.
> In practice, no leader this side of Stalin is likely to court those kind of losses unless they really need to, no matter how much they stand to gain from it
Really now?
No one like Curtis LeMay - willing to nuke Vietnam if that were needed to end the war - will ever become president?
And ... won't that encourage North Korea to build more bombs? Because the argument seems to be that with 99% effectiveness, the 30 to 40 nuclear weapons they currently have gives a ~33% of having a strike in the US. So the US could nuke North Korea and risk it. Which means North Korea should build more nukes.
Ditto for every other smaller nuclear power.
> whose opposition often seemed to flow more from political opposition to Reagan than from a technical evaluation of the merits of the system
We've spent how many billions of dollars since the 1980s, to build a missile defense system, and we still don't have something that could handle a 1980s-era Soviet attack?
I would say that:
Israel has experienced realistic conditions.
Any of the local hotbeds over the last few decades (Iraq, Ukraine, etc) have had realistic conditions, which are now decades old or haven't resulted in any success (effective defense).
There's no good reason to expect to be able to protect any given area from a missile attack. If the coverage is good enough in a small area, a nuke right out side the defense range will do enough secondary damage to render it irrelevant. To illustrate, if you want to destroy Israel, the practical approach is to fire a nuke at Palestine.
Israel has defended against slow starting, small tin-rockets from known locations. It has not defended against extremely fast ICBMs, which can detonate and create immense destruction even from a considerable height.
> There's no good reason to expect to be able to protect any given area from a missile attack.
The defense systems in the linked-to article are meant to intercept and destroy missiles far enough away that even if they explode at that point they do not cause damage to the target.
Try NUKEMAP again, with a 147 km altitude (use "Advanced options", select Airburst settings of "burst height", and enter 147 with "km" in the pulldown menu. You won't even see the 1psi over-pressure damage at that height.)
If a nuclear warhead is intercepted, it generally doesn't detonate. It requires a very carefully-timed and managed sequence of events to make a warhead detonate, deliberately so.
I was responding to Supermancho's comment "nuke right out side the defense range will do enough secondary damage".
Assuming the nuke could detect that it was about to be destroyed, and so detonated, would it still be able to do damage?
Or, if the max altitude for Iron Dome were known, and the nuke set off just above that range, what damage would it do?
The third tier of the missile defense system (destruction during boost, coast, or descent; descent is the third) is meant to avoid Supermancho's scenario.
> Israel has no experience countering nuclear ICBMs.
> What good is the Iron Dome against that?
I agree.
> The defense systems in the linked-to article are meant to intercept and destroy missiles far enough away that even if they explode at that point they do not cause damage to the target.
These still don't work. The article and certain hawks say they will do enough to justify the awful cost that has been debated since the idea was born. The first time I heard a discussion about this was on slashdot in 1999. I think it's wishful thinking paired with Defense spending greed. shrug
After review, I think you were talking about the Arrow (or Hetz) system? These are meant to defend against ballistic missiles, but not ICBM class (Though, the Arrow 3 appears to be similar in capabilities as the SM-3, which is capable of regional (not national) ICBM interception).
> At the time they were doing things like including a transmitter with the missile
Yes. The included a transmitter in the missile so they could conduct separate tests for the radar versus the interceptor. These are expensive tests. We don't want to conduct it, and find it failed because the radar was bad, when everything else went well. So long as the radar continues to give data that matches the transmitter in the target, it's still a good test of the radar, however.
1) counting a "kill" as hitting the rocket, when it should be hitting the warhead. ("If the kill vehicle instead hits the body of the rocket, it will tend to shatter and pass through the rocket body much like a bullet hitting a thin-walled drinking glass or an empty soda can, leaving the warhead undamaged and still falling towards its target")
2) Ineffective/non-realistic decoys ("Following these experiments, the Missile Defense Agency removed all the decoys that it determined could defeat the missile defense from all follow-on experiments")
The article touches on this in an off-hand dismissive line, but anti-missile technology is destabilizing.
If the anti-missile system is effective, then it allows for a first strike without retaliation. I.e., anti-missile systems are offensive weapons. The largest constraint against using nuclear weapons in a first strike is removed for the party with the effective anti-missile system.
Even if it doesn't work well, or at all, you now need your adversary to believe that you spent billions on an ineffective weapons system. If your adversary is not convinced of this, then they have every incentive to react to (possibly false) alarms sooner. Incidents like the following might have ended differently:
> If the anti-missile system is effective, then it allows for a first strike without retaliation.
That's a big if. Current and near-future ABM systems can take out a handful; great if Iran or North Korea decide to take a potshot, but those are opponents the US can essentially take out in a first strike without nukes if they don't mind the massive blowback.
The US has no hope of intercepting all of Russia's or China's nukes anytime soon.
Aside from the fact that releasing more than one thing from a space launch vehicle accurately is actually a fair hard thing to do. Which is why multiple satellite buses are considered dual use technology, and export of them is prohibited. Release of said tech to China back in the 90s is considered to be a large player in why they have MIRV ICBMs.
> If the anti-missile system is effective, then it allows for a first strike without retaliation. I.e., anti-missile systems are offensive weapons.
This is simply false. An effective missile defense system is not necessarily capable of defeating an entire nuclear arsenal of a peer power - easily verified if the number of interceptors is substantially smaller than that power's inventory. The nuclear defense triad extends beyond just ground launched ballistic missiles - bombers, cruise missiles, and submarine launched missiles all offer means to retaliate which a missile defense system alone can not defend against. And finally, the adversary can also develop an antiballistic missile system for exactly the same protection. Of course in the real world such a perfect missile defense system is not possible - realistically there's always going to be too big a risk of some nukes getting through for any rational actor to seriously consider a nuclear exchange. As for the irrational actor, they can not be trusted to avoid mutually assured destruction.
It's like saying a city wall is an offensive weapon because the one city with a wall can attack others without being attacked. Yeah, maybe the very first city to build a wall had a bit of an advantage before everybody else built a wall, but anyone can have a wall without putting anybody in danger.
> If your adversary is not convinced of this, then they have every incentive to react to (possibly false) alarms sooner.
Without a missile defense system, your only hope of surviving nuclear war is taking out your adversary's retaliatory capability - this means a first strike is primarily going to be tasked with doing just that and thus makes launching quickly in response to an incoming strike a necessity. Even if there is a chance it's a false alarm, a limited retaliation might be seen as a more survivable option than waiting to confirm. If on the other hand your opponent has an effective missile defense system, then they have far less incentive to try and suckerpunch you, and thus an unexpected strike can be much more safely labelled a false alarm. Certainly there is no incentive to retaliate faster - what is that going to do but waste missiles? You don't overwhelm a missile defense system with quick retaliation but with massive retaliation. While nowadays some military commanders might entertain the notion of a limited nuclear conflict where a small strike warrants only a proportional retaliation, with missile defenses it's unambiguous that once nuclear war is triggered people will launch everything they've got in an effort to guarantee at least some warheads make it through, and thus reinforces mutually assured destruction.
The wall example doesn't make sense as it is hard to imagine a non exceedingly convoluted MAD scenario where it would be relevant.
Anti ballistic systems are destablizing if you believe you can survive a first strike, your enemy believes you can survive it or your enemy believes you believe it.
It just add many variables to a already deadly calculus.
In truth, effective ABM systems encourage a bolt-from-the-blue strike from the country without ABMs, because they fear the same from their adversary who might be able to ride out a second wave, so theory says hit first. The destabilizing effect is precisely the opposite of what most state.
As others have noted, ABMs usually are easy to count, and the countermeasure is N+1. This is why the UK strategic deterrent is the size that it is: no matter what, Moscow eats a big one.
Why do you think that "ABM is likely to be more effective against a second strike"? Do you think the ABM systems are usually deactivated in times of peace? What about in times of tension? Even if I agree ad argumentum, ABMs would encourage first strikes from out of the blue and discourage strikes in times of tensions.
You are assuming the first strike successfully destroyed some fraction of the target's arsenal (without the opponent launching before being hit). I am not sure that nuclear strategists would make that assumption.
It would, that's the whole point. That's why we develop ever-more-accurate missiles, and why we quasi-openly advertise their CEP.
If you had missiles with lousy accuracy, you'd never consider a counterforce strike. Do as the Chinese did until recently, and target cities and industrial centers. Counterforce targeting is a cheap and effective strategy. OTOH, look at the United States: Trident D-5 is more accurate than the stock MMIII (it's not openly known how MMIII with AIRS from the MX fairs). We can land RVs so accurately that they may as well have conventional warheads. That's destabilizing — but we tend towards the exceedingly rational in our decisions.
Let us imagine you are a nuclear power A. You do not have ABMs. Nuclear power B does, and you believe they are effective (key point). Logic dictates that you will end up the guaranteed loser on an exchange where A fires first with ABMs backstopping their second strike. Now, you might not lose when B fires first, so game theory says you fire first.
The advantage is with the clean-up. First strike takes out some amount of launch vehicles. ABMs have a prayer against x-y warheads, where y is the attrition from the first strike (which is nonzero unless you're dealing with a launch-on-warning opponent, which neither the US nor Russia nor China is).
Few powers are really ready to perform launch-on-warning. The consequences for a false positive are too dire to consider, and we all also have a survivable second strike capability (with the possible exception of China, whose submarines are boiled crap run with an Evinrude outboard). And in my estimation, even China would ride out the first wave.
> In truth, effective ABM systems encourage a bolt-from-the-blue strike from the country without ABMs, because they fear the same from their adversary who might be able to ride out a second wave, so theory says hit first.
If leaders care more about surviving than about killing their enemies, then effective ABM (and defense against other nuclear threats) changes plans more for the country with ABM. If you try a first strike without ABM, you're dead whether your enemy has ABM or not (and if anything, you're slightly more dead if they have ABM). But if you try a first strike with a good enough defense, you might not be dead. And first vs second strike makes a huge difference, because destroying most of the enemy's nukes in a first strike is critical to making your defense possible.
It might seem insane to launch a first strike if the defenses aren't perfectly reliable. (Or like, even if they are, since a first strike is certainly murdering hundreds of millions of people.) But during a crisis, if you think nuclear war is coming and might not be avoidable, then the math changes. In that case you're comparing your odds of surviving an enemy second strike to your odds of averting an enemy first strike. Then the ABM makes a big difference to your willingness to push the button.
For the other nation, it might affect their perception of alarms (eg might make them think a false alarm is a true one, if ABM makes an attack seem more likely), and once that alarm goes off it might incentivize a larger or earlier strike to make sure that their vengeance is effective. But in my non-expert opinion it changes plans for the nation with ABM much more.
> Anti ballistic systems are destiblising if you believe you can survive a first strike, your enemy believes you can survive it or your enemy believes you believe it.
That adds stability, not detracts from it. If I am deathly afraid of you punching me because I have no defense, then the moment I think you're going to punch me, I need to punch first. If I can take a hit, then I can wait to see what you were actually going to do. Further, if you think you can knock me out with one punch, maybe it's worth a shot. If you know I'm going to be able to hit you back, then that's far less incentive to try.
Holding matches in a room full of gasoline to deter others from dropping theirs is a terrible strategy. Foregoing a fire extinguisher in the hopes that it'll make people hold their matches tighter is insanity.
The US doesn't conduct a nuclear first strike, not because it fears getting nuked in return, but because it doesn't want to be seen as the bad guy. The presence or absence of a missile defense system doesn't change this. Also, there's an entire paragraph on why even an effective system won't change this, so long as it's not perfectly effective (which it can't be), because we still end up with one or more nukes landing in the US, and the acceptable number for that is politically 0.
Though I agree with you that the US would not do such a thing, such assertions - even if written into state policy - cannot reassure an adversary. The US is, in fact, the only state which has used nuclear weapons in combat - it was the very first strike.
True, but the change in US attitudes towards being willing to conduct a first strike, and/or being willing to lose a city to a nuke, won't come quickly or secretly.
Nice to tuck primarly argument against ABM in the footnote - it incentivizes others to increase stockpiles to reestablish mutual vunerability, and missile exchangfes / economics favours attacker.
>1. Assuming, of course, that the number of warheads remains constant. This was probably the best argument against missile defense during the Cold War, when it was at least theoretically possible that the Soviets could double their arsenal in response to the threat. It’s a lot less feasible today, given arms control treaties and the shaky state of the Russian economy. It’s plausible that China could pull it off, but they’ve long taken a rather more minimal approach to deterrence than Russia has, which means a reasonable missile defense system probably wouldn’t worry them too much. Also worth noting that yes, it’s possible to overcome a 50% effective system by shooting two warheads at each target, but the number of targets is cut by 50% either way. ⇑
I think they sell short the destabilization argument. In practice these systems aren't going to be able to shoot down a fixed percentage of a strike. In a strike all missiles are going to be coming in more or less simultaneously, and the ABM system will be able to shoot down a fixed number of them. So it's not a case of shooting down 50% of a strike, it's being able to shoot down 12 missiles from a strike. And that number isn't far off from how much GMD is going to be able to do.
And that's the thing about GMD and other BMD systems: they aren't going to be much use against a full nuclear exchange. But what they are great for is the ragged second strike scenario. If the US goes first in a nuclear war and catches Russia/China off guard, it's possible for most of their hundreds of missiles to be taken out in their silos. And they might only be able to answer with a dozen or so missiles in response, which GMD could take care of. And that's the destabilizing aspect of this, it encourages the holder of the ABM system to go first in a nuclear exchange. Because no one cares if 12 out of 400 missiles are shot down, but they do if 12 out of 12 missiles are shot down.
It then encourages the opponent to make more survivable nuclear delivery systems. Which is exactly what we see from Russia and China: hypersonic glide vehicles, fractional orbital bombardment systems (basically sending the ICBM all the way around the planet so it strikes at the US from the south instead of the north and away from where GMD is deployed), crazy stuff like nuclear-powered cruise missiles and the Poseidon bomb. It encourages further development of nuclear weapons, meaning creating an arms race.
In short, I don't think the ABM systems help us very much in the nuclear war scenario (conventional short-ranged and theater ballistic missiles are a different story).
A single Russian nuclear submarine can carry 800 nuclear warheads [edit: Misread a number; 96 is apparently the max. Still, enough.]. The chances of Russia getting down to twelve nukes after a first strike - even if they don't get off a response while they're in flight - is slim.
The nuclear-powered cruise missiles and Poseidon bomb are just Russia's versions of the V weapons in WWII; flashy, but not actually useful, and taking resources from the more staid and boring aspects like "keep your logistics vehicles' tires from exploding".
> A single Russian nuclear submarine can carry 800 nuclear warheads.
A Borei class submarine can carry 16 missiles with up to 6 warheads each, for 96 total. The older Delta class can carry 16 missiles with 4 warheads each for 64 total. The 800 warheads is the total capacity of Russia's entire fleet, not all of which are active at any given time.
>is there really that serious a lack of information in the world's general populace on how nuclear war would likely play out given the capabilities of all the delivery platforms?
Of course there is. There's a serious lack of information in the world's general populace in pretty much everything. Most people have at best a surface level oversimplified understanding of most things and then probably a few things they're reasonably well-informed about, and nobody's an expert in everything.
In the 80s, most teens could rattle off some measure of nuclear stats, in between bouts of jingoistic refrains. We were more technically literate, and still dangerously stupid.
"Just reiterates how important it is to ensure that weapons of mass destruction are kept in the secure custody of competent authorities. Not only in America, Russia and China, but the rest of the world as well." Given the governments mentioned, the first and second sentence would appear to be in contradiction.
>Just reiterates how important it is to ensure that weapons of mass destruction are kept in the secure custody of competent authorities.
Looking at our national leaders (esp. in Russia), your idea of "competent authorities" is obviously completely insane. Competent authorities wouldn't have built these things in the first place, nor would they be waging wars of conquest.
Apologies, I misread; still enough to overwhelm current ABM systems with a single sub, even if you discount the rest, the bomber fleet, and any mobile or hardened ICBMs that survive the first wave.
Russia has little to fear from ABM. North Korea is probably a bit grumpy about it.
There’s a narrative in some Western spaces of “we can probably survive a nuclear war against Russia quite intact”, a narrative which I find batshit insane crazy.
I see this in GP’s comment, he/she talks at length about how a nuclear war might look like without mentioning the subs even once, because if he/she had done so the whole argument would have fallen flat on its face.
Assuming for a moment NATO can perfectly track each and every Russian submarine and take them all out at once, you've still got the Strategic Rocket Forces to contend with, especially their mobile launchers.
There's no feasible way the US can hit Russia with a first strike and not receive a nuclear strike in return. MAD remains in place, even if the US can knock down a few dozen missiles with ABMs.
Yes. it is destabilizing. Trump pulled out of the Open Skies treaty in 2021, Obama opened the Aegis mentioned in the article in Romania in 2016. It's the restart of a nuclear arms race, which will mean a lot of money for military contractors. Apparently it hasn't gone far enough for this person, who wants more of the money I make working be taxed and sent to military contractors so they can heat up a nuclear arms race that had quieted down by the 1990s.
Open Skies was a net loser for the US. The Russians were abusing the system and everyone who "counts" either has recce satellites of their own or access to reporting from friendly nations.
Aegis GMD has zero effectiveness against a missile field filled with SS-19s, or mobile SS-27s, or anything else that poses an existential threat to the United States. Russia knows this. "Destabilizing" would be an order of magnitude increase in the GMD interceptors at Greely and Vandenberg and the proliferation of battle management radars, and we aren't doing that.
And if you weren't paying attention, there's no "restart" of the arms race. While the US was involved in the -stans, Russia was moving forward with a variety of delivery systems. The race never stopped.
It's useful for the MRBMs/IRBMs out of Iran targeting Europe. It's useless for the ICBMs out of Russia targeting the United States. It's not destabilizing in any way, especially since the magazine size of the Aegis sites is easily verifiable via any number of means, and the easiest countermeasure is N+! (which the Russians have in spades).
>The difficulty of shooting down an incoming missile is broadly overstated
I figured it would back this controversial claim by explaining how some clever new tech is able to shoot down Russia's current state of the art - its hypersonic missiles.
Nope. Zero mention of hypersonic missiles. Why? Is this just a military contractor putting its cap out and asking for $$$?
Hypersonic missiles are still in the prototype/research stage, the short/medium-term nuclear threat remains non-hypersonic. Regardless, right now there are zero systems that can hope to stop a hypersonic missile, reaction time limitations alone are a huge hurdle there.
That said, effective missile defense is theoretically possible even given current tech, it's just extremely hard. In that sense it's not different than the various AI initiatives. Lots of wasted money on goose chases, but also lots of advantage for those who get it right, and some legitimately useful innovations along the way.
Research includes live fire tests. Russia has the advantage of an actual warzone with actual air defenses to test in.
That or they're running out of missiles and down to pushing research prototypes into service (which given their use or Iranian drones and other supply woes would not surprise me).
Strongly suspect that Kinzhal is just a relatively bog-standard air launched ballistic missile running in a depressed trajectory, and much of the talk is just bloviating. There's no US equivalent, because we decided to cancel it (See AGM-48 Skybolt, and later AGM-69 SRAM and AGM-131 SRAM II).
Reading through this thread really exposes how little defense industry knowledge there is on this forum. Like are we really just speculating that the entirety of the US strategic missile defense apparatus forgot about hypersonic missiles?
The US invented hypersonic: the first in-atmosphere, manned hypersonic vehicle (X-15) in the 1960s, as well as the first hypersonic ABM system (Sprint) in the 1970s, which was designed to intercept warheads that were incoming at Mach 24 just seconds before they reached their targets. Sprint was a high-hypersonic countermeasure (Mach 10+) and that was something the US mass-produced 50 years ago.
But to answer your rhetorical question, the answer is that US has indeed published some of its anti-hypersonic countermeasures to the public: https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2022-04-15
What we have recently seen from China is actually just a missile sponge of large silo fields of ICBMs being built so that even if America does strike first, China still has a nuclear deterrent in the form of the missiles not wiped out.
It's hard to take out a lot of targets even if they are relatively soft.
There are a variety of different approaches to counter the ABM and ragged second strike scenario, China is investing in several.
* Just build more nukes. Adding more warheads, especially ground-launched ones, is cheaper than adding more interceptors to the ABM shield, so it's always a losing game. Thankfully, no one seems to be pursuing this route, since that is massively destabilizing.
* Make it harder to take out all of your missiles in a first strike. Your link is an excellent example of this. Building additional silos is even cheaper than building additional missiles, and then you can play a shell game where you don't know which silo houses a missile and which does not so you have to strike at them all. There are other basing options available, like road-mobile launchers, which China and Russia have both invested in, though this is easier with shorter range ballistic missiles. And of course there are ballistic missile submarines, which give most survivable second-strike capability, but are much more expensive to operate.
* Use a delivery system that is harder to intercept, which I mentioned before. China has tested using both hypersonic glide vehicles and fractional orbital bombardment, in fact both at the same time (https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1213655/a-fractional... ).
> Adding more warheads, especially ground-launched ones, is cheaper than adding more interceptors to the ABM shield
Assumes facts not in evidence. An accidental ICBM launch is catastrophic. An accidental ABM launch is merely expensive. This drives anything associated with ICBMs to a much higher cost, just to assure that it will launch when commanded, and won't launch when not commanded. Interceptors are generally smaller (due to the smaller kill vehicle), which also helps with the cost. GBI, last I looked, was about $90M per missile. GBSD is currently looking at about $660M per missile ($264B for 400 missiles). This doesn't actually compare how much a Russian ICBM would cost, but that's irrelevant, in a sense, since they wouldn't be paying the same for an ABM interceptor either.
> hypersonic glide vehicles and fractional orbital bombardment
These both have severe penalties to the actual number of warheads launched on a given missile. Now instead of having 6 missiles, for example, to hit a given set of targets, you might need 18 missiles. Which drives up the cost of ICBM system. Both of them can also be defended against (GBI can't manage against FOB with the current single defense site, but a potential expansion could bring the radars and launchers required to be able to defend against a southern approach). Hypersonics are very fast in the atmosphere, which helps limit their radar visibility, but the same thing makes it impossible to deploy effective decoys, and makes them extremely bright in IR, which is something we already look at from space. I don't think we have anything that can currently do it, but it's definitely on the list of things we're looking at.
Your math is a little off on the prices. Recall that the GBSD will release 10-12 MIRVs, which means the ABM shield has to intercept 10-12 targets, not one, for every ICBM. And standard operating procedure is to fire 4 interceptors at each target to ensure a hit. That means for each GBSD we need 40 interceptors, making it over 5 times more expensive to intercept a GBSD than the GBSD itself. Of course, just comparing missile costs isn't the best, they do not operate on their own. Each interceptor needs a silo, ground crew, intercept radars, etc. ICBMs need silos and ground crews also. The cost to operate an ICBM or ABM shield over its lifetime will dominate the total costs compared to the initial missile price.
GBSD is currently programmed to be a single warhead missile [0]. The fire plan for GBI is "shoot-shoot-look-shoot-shoot". There's no requirement for the second "shoot-shoot" to actually occur, and in case of a mass launch, wouldn't occur because we'd run out of GBIs first.
GBIs and GBSD do both need silos and ground crews, but the state of them is to a different degree. GBI needs a silo to protect it from weather, but it doesn't necessarily need to be a nuclear hardened silo, because if it comes to that, the silo should already be empty. The ICBM silo does need to be hardened against nuclear weapons. Similarly, the ground crew for the entire ABM field can be centralized, because you don't need them to be multiply survivable to launch after the end of the world, but you do need for an ICBM launch control center to be redundant and nuclear hardened. Each interceptor shares radars, however, so you don't need more with more interceptors. It's a fixed cost for the entire system, given the region you're looking at.
This is semi-irrelevant, as our opposition doesn't pay US prices, and their ability to afford more ICBMs is not related to US prices. The only countries which do pay US prices are the US and UK.
Also, this assumes the ABM shield needs perfection. If you're trying merely to save as many lives as possible, then the existence of the ABM system requires the opponent to prioritize which targets they want to hit. The high priority targets will need to have many warheads targeted on them, while the lower priority targets won't have any, because they don't have the budget for that. And the more warheads we can intercept, the more warheads they have to drop on their high priority targets, because they don't know which ones will actually get intercepted. If we can intercept on average 15 warheads (75% effectiveness with "shoot-shoot"), then they have to drop 16 warheads on each high priority target. If we double the number of warheads we can intercept, then they need to double the warheads they drop on their high priority target. This is why the UK strategic deterrent is roughly targeted only on Moscow, according to open-source knowledge, instead of the early 60s version that hit most of Russia.
Thanks for the info on the GBSD, I wasn't aware of that. I'm actually surprised, I thought the general trend was towards MIRVs.
Yeah, I'm willing to concede the math is a lot more complicated than just "ABM is more expensive than nukes" and I could well be wrong on that point. I suppose if we really wanted to get to the bottom of it we would have to compare the ABM against the current Russian/Chinese arsenal, think about the relative costs of road-based/silo-based/sub-based missiles and their risks, compare rubles and dollars using something other than naive conversions to account for relative purchasing power, consider what impact decoy re-entry vehicles have on the equation, and a bunch of other factors.
I think my original argument that ABM is inherently destabilizing stands though.
New START has warhead limits, as well as missile limits, and the US has decided it'd rather allocate the warheads to bombers and SLBMs instead of ICBMs. The ICBM force is in a sense, a strategic decoy: they're hardened to make you have to expend warheads on them, but the relative lack of warheads means that if you allocate more than one to take each out, you're probably not coming out ahead. But you have to honor the threat, so you can't just not hit them. So, they take 450 or more warheads from what you would otherwise want to hit.
The problem with nukes is that one cannot make them small while there no corresponding limits on downsizing of sensors to detect them.
While we are still some way of mosquito-size device to detect presence of a nuclear warhead, the path is there. So ultimately one must assumes that all warhead decoys or empty silos will be detected and real warheads will be tracked. Which unfortunately leaves production of massive number of warheads the only sure path of deterrence.
In PRC's case, it's also just a generic nuclear build up because the hereto alleged ~300 nukes was minimal (really poverty) deterrance posture that became no longer tenable now that war with US is possible. Other parts of triad is being worked on as well.
Apart from geopolitics, what drove PRC nuke buildup was US modernizing warheads for better detonation timing so less missiles needed for hardened targets = same controlled stockpile can strike 2-3x more targets. It wasn't better missile defense, but better missile offense.
I'd argue better missile defense drive adversaries to develop better missiles tech which are dual use and will enhance their conventional capabilities and perhaps create more vunerabilities overall.
> A system which stops 50% of incoming missiles means that only half as many people will die in a nuclear war, obviously a desirable result.
Half as many will die on the first day of nuclear war.
So assume the enemy only obliterated 50 cities when without defense it would have been 100. That's great! But those 50 nuclear explosions are probably still enough to shroud large parts of the country in nuclear fallout. Not to mention the country's infrastructure will still be destroyed, leading to chaos, diseases, famine and all the other consequences of nuclear war. It's not clear to me a defense that could destroy 50% of incoming missiles would make meaningful difference in what happens medium or long term.
This is also another general argument against nuclear war: Fallout cares about borders about as much as covid did. Even if you're the attacker and your defense is so good you don't have to worry about retaliatory strikes, you will with high likelihood contaminate your allies as well.
yeah but wikipedia says nuclear winter would come from burning cities emitting soot ("100 or more city firestorms"). All tests were done in places like Novaya Zemlya which barely has any vegetation, let alone big burning cities.
Wikipedia also says we've been through such an event at the end of Gulf War 1, when Saddam burned the Kuwaiti oil fields. There was absolutely nothing close to the nuclear winter effect.
Sagan later conceded in his book The Demon-Haunted World that his predictions obviously did not turn out to be correct: "it was pitch black at noon and temperatures dropped 4–6° C over the Persian Gulf, but not much smoke reached stratospheric altitudes and Asia was spared."
That quote from the article (50% missiles stopped means 50% fewer dead) is simply false. It simply means that more missiles will be launched towards each destination. The fact that this requires more missiles is inconsequential given the number of premium targets relative to the number of missiles known to be available. There are far fewer premium targets than nukes.
Imagine the effects of just a single well placed nukes in NYC, LA, San Francisco, and Chicago. 4 nukes expended, 5,973 remaining. Now enter in 50% effective shields, thus requiring an average of 2 nukes. Now, it requires twice the nukes so there's only 5,969 remaining. Very comforting.
The trouble with anti-ballistic missiles at any scale is that the footprint that can be protected by a missile base is small. You can defend Washington, DC, Moscow, or an ICBM field, but it is not so practical to populate a large area such as "east coast cities".
The US has a relatively good answer for this in that it has roughly 100 ships with
which can be maneuvered to have a fairly large footprint, but in the case of Ukraine there is a lot of interest in deploying anti-cruise missile defenses but very little in anti-ballistic missile defenses. That's because a cheap system like
Of course there is a footprint very close to the launch point where you can shoot down a missile aimed anywhere. A missile with really high acceleration should be able to do it
No need for missiles or 1000s of warheads or anti-missiles.
4 five megatones bombs, which is pretty standard, smuggled in DIY kits through the mexican border, and assembled and detonated in the 4 centers of power of the US, namely Washington (political center), NY (financial center), LA (media center), and SF (technological hub) and the US go back to its founding fathers era or at best to its civil war.
And if you can't trace where the nukes come from, who will you nuke back ? The whole world ? The MAD doctrine assume you know who is your ennemy...
And it's not the numbers of victims that matters. It's the command centers.
You could elaborate something similar to every other nuclear powers.
MAD doctrine doesn't exist. No state actually assumes that it should be mutual. That's psychotic. The actual doctrine of the US is Assured Destruction: use a WMD against us, and we will assuredly destroy you. This is not necessarily on a time limit. Such a proposed attack would only harden the resolve the attacked power to make sure the "self lit parking lot" exists.
Maybe. But my point is that "MAD" isn't a doctrine. It's a game-theoretic idea of the outcome of a nuclear war, and it assumes pre-conditions that aren't necessarily true, especially with regard to our opponents.
Deploying anti-missile systems in Poland/Romania and potential deployment in South Korea does a lot of good to the world in the sense of balance and mutual trust between nuclear powers. You can spout as much nonsense as you want about protecting allies from Iran and North Korea, but Russia and China will view it as nothing more as an hostile act, which warrants response of their own, fueling further escalation.
A modern ICBM (see: Sarmat) carries multiple independently targetable warheads (or hypersonic gliders), equipped with active missile defense countermeasures and decoys, striking from arbitrary direction (eg flying over south pole on a non-ballistic suborbital trajectory).
> Shiva Star was also used to develop an experimental weapon known as MARAUDER for the SDI effort between 1989 and 1995. The idea appears to have been to create compact toroids of high-density plasma that would be ejected from the device using a massive magnetic pulse.[2] The plasma projectiles would be shot at a speed expected to be 3000 km/s in 1995 and 10,000 km/s (3.3% of the speed of light) by 2000. A shot has the energy of 2,27 kg of TNT exploding. Doughnut-shaped rings of plasma and balls of lightning exploded with devastating thermal and mechanical effects when hitting their target and produced pulse of electromagnetic radiation that could scramble electronics, the energy would shower the interior of the target with high-energy x-rays that would potentially destroy the electronics inside. The tests cost a few million dollars a year.[3] The project became classified, and no information about the fate of the project has been published after 1995.
Just saying, there's a reason most of the modern research on ABM tech is super classified. It's not hard to hit a missile at any speed when you're shooting a plasma cannon at .033C
I do not understand, how can plasma travel at 3.3% the speed of light in the air? Wouldn't it still need to fight the pressure of the air and by that definition the moment a projectile at 3.3% the speed of light bounces against of speck of air that plasma will immediately release most of it's energy dispersing in various directions?
Hypersonic gliders imply no decoys (can't run decoys in atmosphere at those speeds. If you could, they'd weigh as much as the real thing, so they'd just be the real thing). Arbitrary directions require extra range, which reduces your warhead throw weight. So, you're losing warheads to that, which is a win for the defense in a sense again. Also, I'm not sure what these active countermeasures are.
Lastly, we're talking about Russia now, which... /me points at Ukraine, doesn't exactly have the best of reputations for equipment anymore.
Because we aren't worried about ICBMs anymore. We are worried about hypersonic nuclear missiles launched from nuclear sub that are off our coastline. All you need to do is design missiles that will fly low enough and fast enough so that no type of anti-missile system would be feasible. And they basically already have this.
One reason US/Western missile systems are so outrageously expensive is because they're (rural/flyover) job creation programs masquerading as weapons programs.
Your right how can those rural proles not see the superiority of concentrating all of our resources in a single location, or the advantages created by utilizing JIT supply chains. Don't they realize real wealth is created by complicated financial schemes that result in offshoring everything to foreign nations. These foolish flyover staters they probably think wealth is created by doing foolish things like building cars, or manufacturing goods. They don't understand that real value is created by creating a platform that allows people to arbitrage information asymmetry to better deliver metric based behavior analysis of wider demographic trends in order to capitalize on emphemeral market fluctuations?
Even if you don't intend to be the first to attack, you want a shield in case you're attacked.
Even if the shield can't protect 100% or 50% (say just 10%) you want a shield.
You probably don't want to brag very loudly about your shield. Actually, you might want to hide it as much as possible so the attackers don't feel the need to overcome it. On the other hand, if you shield is crappy, you won't talk too much about its crappyness either.
Current situation has very obvious differences with Cold War and these differences are being revealed right now in Ukraine. "Experts" (I guess actual experts shut TFO) were very surprised of how reluctant Russians were to use aire force, how ineffective their tanks were, etc.
"You probably don't want to brag very loudly about your shield. Actually, you might want to hide it as much as possible so the attackers don't feel the need to overcome it."
That's what always struck me about the US being very open about its successes and failures with missile defense. They have absolutely nothing to gain by telling the world any of this, so the only logical conclusion is that their public disclosures are very carefully controlled set pieces to essentially neither confirm nor deny the actual capabilities of the system. I imagine this also applies to the US and its hypersonic weapons program and the very public display of their "failures." Right.
Another item: even if your shield performance is currently underwhelming, you still want to have it, so you can keep upgrading it as technology advances, instead of rushing it when there's a breakthrough.
And when it becomes a success, you still keep your cards close to your vest.
A large part of good vs bad performance is just iterating on bad until you solve the weaknesses. Sure there are sometimes fundamental problems that need a break through that could be years in coming, but often the only thing lacking is effort to fine tune algorithms. (figuring out which is which is left as an exercise for the reader)
One-off tests in ideal conditions work 50% of the time. Sooo if we have enough nuclear weapons to kill everyone on earth 4 times over that means in an ideal case we only all die twice?
Of course they probably won’t all launch at once. Maybe half of nuclear weapons are in hands of the three likely parties.
So maybe half get launched. In the shit show of a full-scale nuclear exchange you can predict less than perfect performance (also I’d guess countermeasures are better than advertised on both sides since countermeasures are 1,000x cheaper than intercept measures). Then again some will fail to launch since global corruption has undermined effectiveness broadly.
The numbers get fuzzy, but it’s looking like everybody still dies. Best case maybe most of the northern hemisphere is unlivable.
A recent study shows that even a limited nuclear exchange will toss up so much ash as to reduce agricultural yields and starve a billion people. Let’s say it’s not a limited exchange and food production is down to 25% of normal.
I suppose the number who starve would be lower if half of the planet were already dead. Then again there hasn’t been a study of what would happen to the global economy and food system if large parts of the world were rendered radioactive wasteland (my gut says it’s not going to survive such a shock). I suspect food shipping wouldn’t continue as normal. So almost everyone dies and the rest fight over the insufficient remaining food.
Whee! I’m coming around to the “die in the first blast” strategy.
> One-off tests in ideal conditions work 50% of the time. Sooo if we have enough nuclear weapons to kill everyone on earth 4 times over that means in an ideal case we only all die twice?
Yeah, I was having the same thought. Half as much overkill? What value does that have?
My strategy in the case of nuclear war is also to die as quickly as possible.
A review of the discussion on this topic shows that we are suffering from the same insanity that peaked at during the Cold War. No lessons learned. And the same shitheads running the circus.
It isn't exactly clear what this means, but when I read it I thought, "we all seem to be suddenly hysterical about nuclear war."
I listened to the most recent episode of the Arms Control Wonk podcast[1] last night. In this episode, Dr. Jeffrey Lewis observed that yes, paid media and social media is hysterical about nuclear war right now, but also, that the underlying emotional anxiety that fuels this sort of coverage/discussion is the natural result of nuclear deterrence.
It's supposed to feel tremendously frightening. He noted that the word itself, "deter," comes from a latin word that also gave us "terror." The tremendous anxiety that we all feel is totally appropriate given the threat. It feels like insanity, yes, but it actually shows that the system of deterrence, as terrible as it is, is still working.
>"A review of the discussion on this topic shows that we are suffering from the same insanity that peaked at during the Cold War. No lessons learned. And the same shitheads running the circus."
Please share the results of your review, and share the lessons you learned. As posted, this comment contains no informational or rhetorical content.
I think the basic problem with the claims that good missile defence would be destabilising is advent of rogue countries that have access to long range ballistic missiles and to nuclear weapons.
I simply can't understand how anybody could defend that it is actually good thing for North Korea to be able to send a rocket to Seoul, Tokyo or Los Angeles.
If you keep defending game theory and mutually assured destruction, the real solution would not be to freeze the technological race but keep that race up, keep everybody unsure about progress of everybody else and keep only the largest powers actually on top of the race and the smaller ones being unable to pose harm.
Because if you freeze capabilities you give smaller nations time to catch up. This creates situation with lots of players with parity (in this case ability to seriously harm everybody else). When the number of real contestants is low, the whole problem becomes a bit less complex and easier to prevent a real disaster.
The proper behaviour (if we go with MAD) right now would be to keep developing missile defense systems. Because this would force others to develop new, more advanced, more costly missile systems. Which would cut off small players like North Korea or Pakistan from posing much threat.
Is the real answer here some form of radical transparency?
I’ve seen some decent arguments that spies prevented the Cold War from becoming hot, because both sides thought they had good info on whether the other side was going to strike.
>I’ve seen some decent arguments that spies prevented the Cold War from becoming hot, because both sides thought they had good info on whether the other side was going to strike.
From Dr. Strangelove:
STRANGELOVE
>Yes, but the... whole point of the
doomsday machine... is lost... if you keep
it a secret! Why didn't you tell the
world, eh?
DESADESKI
>It was to be announced at the Party
Congress on Monday. As you know, the
Premier loves surprises.
> I simply can't understand how anybody could defend that it is actually good thing for North Korea to be able to send a rocket to Seoul, Tokyo or Los Angeles.
It's clearly a good thing for North Korea; look what the US does to countries that don't have nuclear missiles.
Really liked the aesthetics of Aegis Ashore, they simply pulled a part of the ship and placed it on land. It’s something I imagine a software engineer would do
>Really liked the aesthetics of Aegis Ashore, they simply pulled a part of the ship and placed it on land. It’s something I imagine a software engineer would do
It's basically a virtual machine for Aegis.
Similarly, when the US entered WW1, the US Navy took existing naval guns, mounted them on railcars, and sent them to bombard German positions complete with naval crews and an admiral commanding the entire effort <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14-inch/50-caliber_railway_gun>.
Perfect offense is never going to be fundamentally different than what we have today - any countries involved will be irreconcilably reduced to ash. Perfect defense? The reason the world has not had major open war between developed powers since 1945 is not because we've somehow grown enlightened or moved beyond war, it's because of the above. It's the same reason the Cold War isn't called World War 3. Nukes removed any sort of win condition in war. Perfect defense enables the return of win conditions, and the end of peace.
That's the theory. But in practice one could reasonably claim that ever more irrational and unwise individuals seem to be making their way into positions of power. And in this scenario, nuclear war will happen. The only question is one of when. And so here obsession on defense, regardless of its cost, would probably be the optimal route.
Of course, what we really need to do now is encourage Russia and china to work together more closely and form an alliance against a common and dangerous enemy...
> The difficulty of shooting down an incoming missile is broadly overstated. We routinely play sports (baseball, cricket, skeet shooting) where an unaided human has to intercept a ballistic target, and while those humans don’t have a perfect success rate, they also don’t have radar, computers, or multiple chances.
Well the one pitcher we went up against in little league who had been held back a year or two certainly pitched like that. I couldn't hit that shit at all.
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[ 13.6 ms ] story [ 564 ms ] threadThat doesn't make sense. The population isn't evenly distributed, and a target can have multiple missiles directed at it.
New START set the number of warheads to 1,550.
The 500 largest US cities have a population (2016) of 103,020,808. https://www.cdc.gov/places/about/500-cities-2016-2019/pdfs/5... . (Note LA, Long Beach, and Anaheim are different cities, when I should be using metropolitan areas, so my estimate is low-balling things.)
With 6x coverage of the largest cities, and 2x coverage of the smallest, that's a good chance of ~100 million deaths, even with a 50% missile intercept rate.
While a 0% intercept rate will still leave many people alive, in the sparsest parts of the US - not a factor of 2.
> [footnote] but the number of targets is cut by 50% either way
Note how targets are places or cities, not people. Nuking Gann Valley, South Dakota kills far fewer people, and causes far less disruption, than nuking Seattle.
> Obviously, these are one-off tests in ideal conditions
Last I knew, we had no good numbers for realistic conditions. I last looked at this years ago. At the time they were doing things like including a transmitter with the missile, and excluding chaff and other counter-measures.
Clearly if real-world numbers were a 5% then the entire calculation is wrong.
> The last half-century has seen very little in the way of better decoy technology, and massive improvements in discrimination.
Citation needed in how those improvements affect the overall intercept rate, and the cost/benefit of running an expensive defense system vs. building a few more nukes.
> In practice, no leader this side of Stalin is likely to court those kind of losses unless they really need to, no matter how much they stand to gain from it
Really now?
No one like Curtis LeMay - willing to nuke Vietnam if that were needed to end the war - will ever become president?
And ... won't that encourage North Korea to build more bombs? Because the argument seems to be that with 99% effectiveness, the 30 to 40 nuclear weapons they currently have gives a ~33% of having a strike in the US. So the US could nuke North Korea and risk it. Which means North Korea should build more nukes.
Ditto for every other smaller nuclear power.
> whose opposition often seemed to flow more from political opposition to Reagan than from a technical evaluation of the merits of the system
We've spent how many billions of dollars since the 1980s, to build a missile defense system, and we still don't have something that could handle a 1980s-era Soviet attack?
Yeah, I'm going to say the critics were right.
There's no good reason to expect to be able to protect any given area from a missile attack. If the coverage is good enough in a small area, a nuke right out side the defense range will do enough secondary damage to render it irrelevant. To illustrate, if you want to destroy Israel, the practical approach is to fire a nuke at Palestine.
There's a reason the Aegis Combat System isn't the same as the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System.
Pakistan can likely build a 150 kt bomb (says Wikipedia). Go to NUKEMAP and try it out. https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=150&lat=31.7733151&l... .
What good is the Iron Dome against that?
> There's no good reason to expect to be able to protect any given area from a missile attack.
The defense systems in the linked-to article are meant to intercept and destroy missiles far enough away that even if they explode at that point they do not cause damage to the target.
One THADD hit its target at 147 km altitude, says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_High_Altitude_Area_De... .
Try NUKEMAP again, with a 147 km altitude (use "Advanced options", select Airburst settings of "burst height", and enter 147 with "km" in the pulldown menu. You won't even see the 1psi over-pressure damage at that height.)
Assuming the nuke could detect that it was about to be destroyed, and so detonated, would it still be able to do damage?
Or, if the max altitude for Iron Dome were known, and the nuke set off just above that range, what damage would it do?
The third tier of the missile defense system (destruction during boost, coast, or descent; descent is the third) is meant to avoid Supermancho's scenario.
I agree.
> The defense systems in the linked-to article are meant to intercept and destroy missiles far enough away that even if they explode at that point they do not cause damage to the target.
These still don't work. The article and certain hawks say they will do enough to justify the awful cost that has been debated since the idea was born. The first time I heard a discussion about this was on slashdot in 1999. I think it's wishful thinking paired with Defense spending greed. shrug
For all intents and purposes, WRT the US, they are the same thing. Aegis baseline 9 and newer can conduct BMD and AAW at the same time.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/arrow.htm says Arrow 2 can "destroy an incoming missile from its launch at an altitude of 10 to 40km".
NUKEMAP says a 150 kt nuke says 10 km gives some damage and 3rd degree burns, but not major destruction, which requires a maximum altitude of 1.5 km.
If I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_(Israeli_missile)#Operat... correctly, my comment remains true - "Israel has no experience countering nuclear ICBMs", which is the type of missile meant in the linked-to essay.
Thank you for pointing me to that new (to me) information!
Yes. The included a transmitter in the missile so they could conduct separate tests for the radar versus the interceptor. These are expensive tests. We don't want to conduct it, and find it failed because the radar was bad, when everything else went well. So long as the radar continues to give data that matches the transmitter in the target, it's still a good test of the radar, however.
At this point it's been too long, and I can no longer find my source material.
I did find https://web.mit.edu/stgs/pdfs/White_Paper_Associated_With_Ma... , pointing out various flaws in the testing procedures, such as:
1) counting a "kill" as hitting the rocket, when it should be hitting the warhead. ("If the kill vehicle instead hits the body of the rocket, it will tend to shatter and pass through the rocket body much like a bullet hitting a thin-walled drinking glass or an empty soda can, leaving the warhead undamaged and still falling towards its target")
2) Ineffective/non-realistic decoys ("Following these experiments, the Missile Defense Agency removed all the decoys that it determined could defeat the missile defense from all follow-on experiments")
If the anti-missile system is effective, then it allows for a first strike without retaliation. I.e., anti-missile systems are offensive weapons. The largest constraint against using nuclear weapons in a first strike is removed for the party with the effective anti-missile system.
Even if it doesn't work well, or at all, you now need your adversary to believe that you spent billions on an ineffective weapons system. If your adversary is not convinced of this, then they have every incentive to react to (possibly false) alarms sooner. Incidents like the following might have ended differently:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2020-0...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/13/us/false-alarm-missile-al...
That's a big if. Current and near-future ABM systems can take out a handful; great if Iran or North Korea decide to take a potshot, but those are opponents the US can essentially take out in a first strike without nukes if they don't mind the massive blowback.
The US has no hope of intercepting all of Russia's or China's nukes anytime soon.
This is simply false. An effective missile defense system is not necessarily capable of defeating an entire nuclear arsenal of a peer power - easily verified if the number of interceptors is substantially smaller than that power's inventory. The nuclear defense triad extends beyond just ground launched ballistic missiles - bombers, cruise missiles, and submarine launched missiles all offer means to retaliate which a missile defense system alone can not defend against. And finally, the adversary can also develop an antiballistic missile system for exactly the same protection. Of course in the real world such a perfect missile defense system is not possible - realistically there's always going to be too big a risk of some nukes getting through for any rational actor to seriously consider a nuclear exchange. As for the irrational actor, they can not be trusted to avoid mutually assured destruction.
It's like saying a city wall is an offensive weapon because the one city with a wall can attack others without being attacked. Yeah, maybe the very first city to build a wall had a bit of an advantage before everybody else built a wall, but anyone can have a wall without putting anybody in danger.
> If your adversary is not convinced of this, then they have every incentive to react to (possibly false) alarms sooner.
Without a missile defense system, your only hope of surviving nuclear war is taking out your adversary's retaliatory capability - this means a first strike is primarily going to be tasked with doing just that and thus makes launching quickly in response to an incoming strike a necessity. Even if there is a chance it's a false alarm, a limited retaliation might be seen as a more survivable option than waiting to confirm. If on the other hand your opponent has an effective missile defense system, then they have far less incentive to try and suckerpunch you, and thus an unexpected strike can be much more safely labelled a false alarm. Certainly there is no incentive to retaliate faster - what is that going to do but waste missiles? You don't overwhelm a missile defense system with quick retaliation but with massive retaliation. While nowadays some military commanders might entertain the notion of a limited nuclear conflict where a small strike warrants only a proportional retaliation, with missile defenses it's unambiguous that once nuclear war is triggered people will launch everything they've got in an effort to guarantee at least some warheads make it through, and thus reinforces mutually assured destruction.
Anti ballistic systems are destablizing if you believe you can survive a first strike, your enemy believes you can survive it or your enemy believes you believe it.
It just add many variables to a already deadly calculus.
As others have noted, ABMs usually are easy to count, and the countermeasure is N+1. This is why the UK strategic deterrent is the size that it is: no matter what, Moscow eats a big one.
If you had missiles with lousy accuracy, you'd never consider a counterforce strike. Do as the Chinese did until recently, and target cities and industrial centers. Counterforce targeting is a cheap and effective strategy. OTOH, look at the United States: Trident D-5 is more accurate than the stock MMIII (it's not openly known how MMIII with AIRS from the MX fairs). We can land RVs so accurately that they may as well have conventional warheads. That's destabilizing — but we tend towards the exceedingly rational in our decisions.
Whoosh missiles fly and everyone loses.
Few powers are really ready to perform launch-on-warning. The consequences for a false positive are too dire to consider, and we all also have a survivable second strike capability (with the possible exception of China, whose submarines are boiled crap run with an Evinrude outboard). And in my estimation, even China would ride out the first wave.
If leaders care more about surviving than about killing their enemies, then effective ABM (and defense against other nuclear threats) changes plans more for the country with ABM. If you try a first strike without ABM, you're dead whether your enemy has ABM or not (and if anything, you're slightly more dead if they have ABM). But if you try a first strike with a good enough defense, you might not be dead. And first vs second strike makes a huge difference, because destroying most of the enemy's nukes in a first strike is critical to making your defense possible.
It might seem insane to launch a first strike if the defenses aren't perfectly reliable. (Or like, even if they are, since a first strike is certainly murdering hundreds of millions of people.) But during a crisis, if you think nuclear war is coming and might not be avoidable, then the math changes. In that case you're comparing your odds of surviving an enemy second strike to your odds of averting an enemy first strike. Then the ABM makes a big difference to your willingness to push the button.
For the other nation, it might affect their perception of alarms (eg might make them think a false alarm is a true one, if ABM makes an attack seem more likely), and once that alarm goes off it might incentivize a larger or earlier strike to make sure that their vengeance is effective. But in my non-expert opinion it changes plans for the nation with ABM much more.
That adds stability, not detracts from it. If I am deathly afraid of you punching me because I have no defense, then the moment I think you're going to punch me, I need to punch first. If I can take a hit, then I can wait to see what you were actually going to do. Further, if you think you can knock me out with one punch, maybe it's worth a shot. If you know I'm going to be able to hit you back, then that's far less incentive to try.
Holding matches in a room full of gasoline to deter others from dropping theirs is a terrible strategy. Foregoing a fire extinguisher in the hopes that it'll make people hold their matches tighter is insanity.
... 'very first strike' sounds a bit too loaded in the context of Hiroshima/Nagasaki and WW2 as a whole.
It may have been a rash action, perhaps a 'first nuclear strike'.
'very first strike' sounds loaded to the extreme when we consider it was one of the last actions in a multi-year contracted conflict.
Any leftover sense of moral and sanity is probably more likely to be relevant.
Tactical use of nukes, as opposed to a strategic first strike, is different of course.
>1. Assuming, of course, that the number of warheads remains constant. This was probably the best argument against missile defense during the Cold War, when it was at least theoretically possible that the Soviets could double their arsenal in response to the threat. It’s a lot less feasible today, given arms control treaties and the shaky state of the Russian economy. It’s plausible that China could pull it off, but they’ve long taken a rather more minimal approach to deterrence than Russia has, which means a reasonable missile defense system probably wouldn’t worry them too much. Also worth noting that yes, it’s possible to overcome a 50% effective system by shooting two warheads at each target, but the number of targets is cut by 50% either way. ⇑
And that's the thing about GMD and other BMD systems: they aren't going to be much use against a full nuclear exchange. But what they are great for is the ragged second strike scenario. If the US goes first in a nuclear war and catches Russia/China off guard, it's possible for most of their hundreds of missiles to be taken out in their silos. And they might only be able to answer with a dozen or so missiles in response, which GMD could take care of. And that's the destabilizing aspect of this, it encourages the holder of the ABM system to go first in a nuclear exchange. Because no one cares if 12 out of 400 missiles are shot down, but they do if 12 out of 12 missiles are shot down.
It then encourages the opponent to make more survivable nuclear delivery systems. Which is exactly what we see from Russia and China: hypersonic glide vehicles, fractional orbital bombardment systems (basically sending the ICBM all the way around the planet so it strikes at the US from the south instead of the north and away from where GMD is deployed), crazy stuff like nuclear-powered cruise missiles and the Poseidon bomb. It encourages further development of nuclear weapons, meaning creating an arms race.
In short, I don't think the ABM systems help us very much in the nuclear war scenario (conventional short-ranged and theater ballistic missiles are a different story).
The nuclear-powered cruise missiles and Poseidon bomb are just Russia's versions of the V weapons in WWII; flashy, but not actually useful, and taking resources from the more staid and boring aspects like "keep your logistics vehicles' tires from exploding".
A Borei class submarine can carry 16 missiles with up to 6 warheads each, for 96 total. The older Delta class can carry 16 missiles with 4 warheads each for 64 total. The 800 warheads is the total capacity of Russia's entire fleet, not all of which are active at any given time.
Of course there is. There's a serious lack of information in the world's general populace in pretty much everything. Most people have at best a surface level oversimplified understanding of most things and then probably a few things they're reasonably well-informed about, and nobody's an expert in everything.
"Just reiterates how important it is to ensure that weapons of mass destruction are kept in the secure custody of competent authorities. Not only in America, Russia and China, but the rest of the world as well." Given the governments mentioned, the first and second sentence would appear to be in contradiction.
Looking at our national leaders (esp. in Russia), your idea of "competent authorities" is obviously completely insane. Competent authorities wouldn't have built these things in the first place, nor would they be waging wars of conquest.
Russia has little to fear from ABM. North Korea is probably a bit grumpy about it.
Evidently it's possible, and perhaps happening. Ironic that MAD as an acronym is used.
https://engineeringrecruiting.org/blog/engineering/will-ai-s...
I see this in GP’s comment, he/she talks at length about how a nuclear war might look like without mentioning the subs even once, because if he/she had done so the whole argument would have fallen flat on its face.
There's no feasible way the US can hit Russia with a first strike and not receive a nuclear strike in return. MAD remains in place, even if the US can knock down a few dozen missiles with ABMs.
Aegis GMD has zero effectiveness against a missile field filled with SS-19s, or mobile SS-27s, or anything else that poses an existential threat to the United States. Russia knows this. "Destabilizing" would be an order of magnitude increase in the GMD interceptors at Greely and Vandenberg and the proliferation of battle management radars, and we aren't doing that.
And if you weren't paying attention, there's no "restart" of the arms race. While the US was involved in the -stans, Russia was moving forward with a variety of delivery systems. The race never stopped.
so... why is it there then? just curious. I think the official publicly touted reason at the time was to protect Romania from Iran, is that it?
At the beginning of this year, the CFR's Foreign Policy magazine said it might be destabilizing. Russia invaded the Ukraine a few months later.
So you say the US putting these military systems around eastern Europe was not a destabilizing move, but I think the past months has shown otherwise.
>The difficulty of shooting down an incoming missile is broadly overstated
I figured it would back this controversial claim by explaining how some clever new tech is able to shoot down Russia's current state of the art - its hypersonic missiles.
Nope. Zero mention of hypersonic missiles. Why? Is this just a military contractor putting its cap out and asking for $$$?
That said, effective missile defense is theoretically possible even given current tech, it's just extremely hard. In that sense it's not different than the various AI initiatives. Lots of wasted money on goose chases, but also lots of advantage for those who get it right, and some legitimately useful innovations along the way.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-says-it-has-depl...
That or they're running out of missiles and down to pushing research prototypes into service (which given their use or Iranian drones and other supply woes would not surprise me).
The US invented hypersonic: the first in-atmosphere, manned hypersonic vehicle (X-15) in the 1960s, as well as the first hypersonic ABM system (Sprint) in the 1970s, which was designed to intercept warheads that were incoming at Mach 24 just seconds before they reached their targets. Sprint was a high-hypersonic countermeasure (Mach 10+) and that was something the US mass-produced 50 years ago.
But to answer your rhetorical question, the answer is that US has indeed published some of its anti-hypersonic countermeasures to the public: https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2022-04-15
Nope. I think it was pretty self evident that we were just talking about this guy's opinion piece.
>the answer is that US has indeed published some of its anti-hypersonic countermeasures to the public: https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2022-04-15
Ummm thats more like preliminary research. It would certainly make for a more interesting article although perhaps a less convincing opinion piece.
It's hard to take out a lot of targets even if they are relatively soft.
https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1212970/a-second-sil...
* Just build more nukes. Adding more warheads, especially ground-launched ones, is cheaper than adding more interceptors to the ABM shield, so it's always a losing game. Thankfully, no one seems to be pursuing this route, since that is massively destabilizing.
* Make it harder to take out all of your missiles in a first strike. Your link is an excellent example of this. Building additional silos is even cheaper than building additional missiles, and then you can play a shell game where you don't know which silo houses a missile and which does not so you have to strike at them all. There are other basing options available, like road-mobile launchers, which China and Russia have both invested in, though this is easier with shorter range ballistic missiles. And of course there are ballistic missile submarines, which give most survivable second-strike capability, but are much more expensive to operate.
* Use a delivery system that is harder to intercept, which I mentioned before. China has tested using both hypersonic glide vehicles and fractional orbital bombardment, in fact both at the same time (https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1213655/a-fractional... ).
Assumes facts not in evidence. An accidental ICBM launch is catastrophic. An accidental ABM launch is merely expensive. This drives anything associated with ICBMs to a much higher cost, just to assure that it will launch when commanded, and won't launch when not commanded. Interceptors are generally smaller (due to the smaller kill vehicle), which also helps with the cost. GBI, last I looked, was about $90M per missile. GBSD is currently looking at about $660M per missile ($264B for 400 missiles). This doesn't actually compare how much a Russian ICBM would cost, but that's irrelevant, in a sense, since they wouldn't be paying the same for an ABM interceptor either.
> hypersonic glide vehicles and fractional orbital bombardment
These both have severe penalties to the actual number of warheads launched on a given missile. Now instead of having 6 missiles, for example, to hit a given set of targets, you might need 18 missiles. Which drives up the cost of ICBM system. Both of them can also be defended against (GBI can't manage against FOB with the current single defense site, but a potential expansion could bring the radars and launchers required to be able to defend against a southern approach). Hypersonics are very fast in the atmosphere, which helps limit their radar visibility, but the same thing makes it impossible to deploy effective decoys, and makes them extremely bright in IR, which is something we already look at from space. I don't think we have anything that can currently do it, but it's definitely on the list of things we're looking at.
GBIs and GBSD do both need silos and ground crews, but the state of them is to a different degree. GBI needs a silo to protect it from weather, but it doesn't necessarily need to be a nuclear hardened silo, because if it comes to that, the silo should already be empty. The ICBM silo does need to be hardened against nuclear weapons. Similarly, the ground crew for the entire ABM field can be centralized, because you don't need them to be multiply survivable to launch after the end of the world, but you do need for an ICBM launch control center to be redundant and nuclear hardened. Each interceptor shares radars, however, so you don't need more with more interceptors. It's a fixed cost for the entire system, given the region you're looking at.
This is semi-irrelevant, as our opposition doesn't pay US prices, and their ability to afford more ICBMs is not related to US prices. The only countries which do pay US prices are the US and UK.
Also, this assumes the ABM shield needs perfection. If you're trying merely to save as many lives as possible, then the existence of the ABM system requires the opponent to prioritize which targets they want to hit. The high priority targets will need to have many warheads targeted on them, while the lower priority targets won't have any, because they don't have the budget for that. And the more warheads we can intercept, the more warheads they have to drop on their high priority targets, because they don't know which ones will actually get intercepted. If we can intercept on average 15 warheads (75% effectiveness with "shoot-shoot"), then they have to drop 16 warheads on each high priority target. If we double the number of warheads we can intercept, then they need to double the warheads they drop on their high priority target. This is why the UK strategic deterrent is roughly targeted only on Moscow, according to open-source knowledge, instead of the early 60s version that hit most of Russia.
[0]: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11681 > The Air Force plans to deploy the GBSD (Sentinel) with one warhead per missile
Yeah, I'm willing to concede the math is a lot more complicated than just "ABM is more expensive than nukes" and I could well be wrong on that point. I suppose if we really wanted to get to the bottom of it we would have to compare the ABM against the current Russian/Chinese arsenal, think about the relative costs of road-based/silo-based/sub-based missiles and their risks, compare rubles and dollars using something other than naive conversions to account for relative purchasing power, consider what impact decoy re-entry vehicles have on the equation, and a bunch of other factors.
I think my original argument that ABM is inherently destabilizing stands though.
While we are still some way of mosquito-size device to detect presence of a nuclear warhead, the path is there. So ultimately one must assumes that all warhead decoys or empty silos will be detected and real warheads will be tracked. Which unfortunately leaves production of massive number of warheads the only sure path of deterrence.
Apart from geopolitics, what drove PRC nuke buildup was US modernizing warheads for better detonation timing so less missiles needed for hardened targets = same controlled stockpile can strike 2-3x more targets. It wasn't better missile defense, but better missile offense.
I'd argue better missile defense drive adversaries to develop better missiles tech which are dual use and will enhance their conventional capabilities and perhaps create more vunerabilities overall.
Half as many will die on the first day of nuclear war.
So assume the enemy only obliterated 50 cities when without defense it would have been 100. That's great! But those 50 nuclear explosions are probably still enough to shroud large parts of the country in nuclear fallout. Not to mention the country's infrastructure will still be destroyed, leading to chaos, diseases, famine and all the other consequences of nuclear war. It's not clear to me a defense that could destroy 50% of incoming missiles would make meaningful difference in what happens medium or long term.
This is also another general argument against nuclear war: Fallout cares about borders about as much as covid did. Even if you're the attacker and your defense is so good you don't have to worry about retaliatory strikes, you will with high likelihood contaminate your allies as well.
https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nucleartesttally
And that's over 20ish years. 30 a year is a lot but it's not 3000 in 1 day...
Imagine the effects of just a single well placed nukes in NYC, LA, San Francisco, and Chicago. 4 nukes expended, 5,973 remaining. Now enter in 50% effective shields, thus requiring an average of 2 nukes. Now, it requires twice the nukes so there's only 5,969 remaining. Very comforting.
The US has a relatively good answer for this in that it has roughly 100 ships with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegis_Combat_System
which can be maneuvered to have a fairly large footprint, but in the case of Ukraine there is a lot of interest in deploying anti-cruise missile defenses but very little in anti-ballistic missile defenses. That's because a cheap system like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASAMS
has a fairly good footprint against cruise missiles but something expensive like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot
would struggle to protect all of Kiev, never mind the rest of the country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-Based_Midcourse_Defense
Of course there is a footprint very close to the launch point where you can shoot down a missile aimed anywhere. A missile with really high acceleration should be able to do it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_High_Altitude_Area_De...
but it's got to be very close to the launch point which the enemy probably won't let you do.
Boost phase defense is pretty much a non-starter for defense against any country except perhaps North Korea.
4 five megatones bombs, which is pretty standard, smuggled in DIY kits through the mexican border, and assembled and detonated in the 4 centers of power of the US, namely Washington (political center), NY (financial center), LA (media center), and SF (technological hub) and the US go back to its founding fathers era or at best to its civil war.
And if you can't trace where the nukes come from, who will you nuke back ? The whole world ? The MAD doctrine assume you know who is your ennemy...
And it's not the numbers of victims that matters. It's the command centers.
You could elaborate something similar to every other nuclear powers.
Why use a single WMD against the US when the final result (assured destruction) is the same as when you use a lots of WMDs.
Now try to shoot that down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Star
Just saying, there's a reason most of the modern research on ABM tech is super classified. It's not hard to hit a missile at any speed when you're shooting a plasma cannon at .033C
Lastly, we're talking about Russia now, which... /me points at Ukraine, doesn't exactly have the best of reputations for equipment anymore.
Foolish rural hicks.
Even if you don't intend to be the first to attack, you want a shield in case you're attacked.
Even if the shield can't protect 100% or 50% (say just 10%) you want a shield.
You probably don't want to brag very loudly about your shield. Actually, you might want to hide it as much as possible so the attackers don't feel the need to overcome it. On the other hand, if you shield is crappy, you won't talk too much about its crappyness either.
Current situation has very obvious differences with Cold War and these differences are being revealed right now in Ukraine. "Experts" (I guess actual experts shut TFO) were very surprised of how reluctant Russians were to use aire force, how ineffective their tanks were, etc.
That's what always struck me about the US being very open about its successes and failures with missile defense. They have absolutely nothing to gain by telling the world any of this, so the only logical conclusion is that their public disclosures are very carefully controlled set pieces to essentially neither confirm nor deny the actual capabilities of the system. I imagine this also applies to the US and its hypersonic weapons program and the very public display of their "failures." Right.
And when it becomes a success, you still keep your cards close to your vest.
Of course they probably won’t all launch at once. Maybe half of nuclear weapons are in hands of the three likely parties.
So maybe half get launched. In the shit show of a full-scale nuclear exchange you can predict less than perfect performance (also I’d guess countermeasures are better than advertised on both sides since countermeasures are 1,000x cheaper than intercept measures). Then again some will fail to launch since global corruption has undermined effectiveness broadly.
The numbers get fuzzy, but it’s looking like everybody still dies. Best case maybe most of the northern hemisphere is unlivable.
A recent study shows that even a limited nuclear exchange will toss up so much ash as to reduce agricultural yields and starve a billion people. Let’s say it’s not a limited exchange and food production is down to 25% of normal.
I suppose the number who starve would be lower if half of the planet were already dead. Then again there hasn’t been a study of what would happen to the global economy and food system if large parts of the world were rendered radioactive wasteland (my gut says it’s not going to survive such a shock). I suspect food shipping wouldn’t continue as normal. So almost everyone dies and the rest fight over the insufficient remaining food.
Whee! I’m coming around to the “die in the first blast” strategy.
Yeah, I was having the same thought. Half as much overkill? What value does that have?
My strategy in the case of nuclear war is also to die as quickly as possible.
It isn't exactly clear what this means, but when I read it I thought, "we all seem to be suddenly hysterical about nuclear war."
I listened to the most recent episode of the Arms Control Wonk podcast[1] last night. In this episode, Dr. Jeffrey Lewis observed that yes, paid media and social media is hysterical about nuclear war right now, but also, that the underlying emotional anxiety that fuels this sort of coverage/discussion is the natural result of nuclear deterrence.
It's supposed to feel tremendously frightening. He noted that the word itself, "deter," comes from a latin word that also gave us "terror." The tremendous anxiety that we all feel is totally appropriate given the threat. It feels like insanity, yes, but it actually shows that the system of deterrence, as terrible as it is, is still working.
1. https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/
Please share the results of your review, and share the lessons you learned. As posted, this comment contains no informational or rhetorical content.
I simply can't understand how anybody could defend that it is actually good thing for North Korea to be able to send a rocket to Seoul, Tokyo or Los Angeles.
If you keep defending game theory and mutually assured destruction, the real solution would not be to freeze the technological race but keep that race up, keep everybody unsure about progress of everybody else and keep only the largest powers actually on top of the race and the smaller ones being unable to pose harm.
Because if you freeze capabilities you give smaller nations time to catch up. This creates situation with lots of players with parity (in this case ability to seriously harm everybody else). When the number of real contestants is low, the whole problem becomes a bit less complex and easier to prevent a real disaster.
The proper behaviour (if we go with MAD) right now would be to keep developing missile defense systems. Because this would force others to develop new, more advanced, more costly missile systems. Which would cut off small players like North Korea or Pakistan from posing much threat.
I’ve seen some decent arguments that spies prevented the Cold War from becoming hot, because both sides thought they had good info on whether the other side was going to strike.
From Dr. Strangelove:
STRANGELOVE
>Yes, but the... whole point of the doomsday machine... is lost... if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?
DESADESKI
>It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.
It's clearly a good thing for North Korea; look what the US does to countries that don't have nuclear missiles.
It's basically a virtual machine for Aegis.
Similarly, when the US entered WW1, the US Navy took existing naval guns, mounted them on railcars, and sent them to bombard German positions complete with naval crews and an admiral commanding the entire effort <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14-inch/50-caliber_railway_gun>.
Perfect offense is never going to be fundamentally different than what we have today - any countries involved will be irreconcilably reduced to ash. Perfect defense? The reason the world has not had major open war between developed powers since 1945 is not because we've somehow grown enlightened or moved beyond war, it's because of the above. It's the same reason the Cold War isn't called World War 3. Nukes removed any sort of win condition in war. Perfect defense enables the return of win conditions, and the end of peace.
That's the theory. But in practice one could reasonably claim that ever more irrational and unwise individuals seem to be making their way into positions of power. And in this scenario, nuclear war will happen. The only question is one of when. And so here obsession on defense, regardless of its cost, would probably be the optimal route.
Both views seem quite reasonable to me.
This is not a serious argument.