81–90 of 363 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They aren't targeting cities anymore but Russian and Chinese weapon installations. Consider the number of these. And that the ballistic missile defense is concentrated at these locations. It is surely more than 300.
> They aren't targeting cities anymore Citation needed.
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That is assuming nuclear war breaks out with zero warning. There is usually a build up to wars that could involve ramping up production of a nuclear arsenal before any nuclear weapons are actually used.
What type of warning do you expect to see? We currently have a war in Ukraine involving between 2-4 of the major nuclear powers depending on how you want to count them (Russia, US, UK, China). Russia is bleeding heavily and it is hard to tell how close they are to some sort of internal crisis or collapse into groupthink by the military leaders. There have probably been Able Archer style near misses and we could have…
Why did US disclose this number? Is there a treaty compelling them to? Did other nuclear powers disclose them?
https://www.newsweek.com/american-b52-bombers-historic-nato-...
Every time I’ve seen nuclear stockpiles and the reduction thereof discussed, I’ve wondered: Assuming for some reason the United States needed to ramp back up to an absurd number of warheads (ignore the MAD/political practicalities), how quickly could they do so? What’s the lead time or rate limiting factors in production? Because if they could start churning out a dozen or a hundred a week within a short period of ti…
3000 nukes is better than Cold War highs, but it's still massive overkill. Even with a 90% interception rate, 300 nukes would be enough to kill tens of millions of citizens of any country from the blast alone. If an enemy leader isn't deterred by that, 2700 extra nukes aren't going to change their mind.
> it's still massive overkill The bombs are there because “the only way to avoid being the victim of a nuclear first strike (that having the enemy hit you with their nukes) was being able to credibly deliver a second strike.” “Thus the absurd-sounding conclusion to fairly solid chain of logic: to avoid the use of nuclear weapons, you have to build so many nuclear weapons that it is impossible for a nuclear-armed oppo…
What an odd situation, where we can applaud "the transparency" (and I do, honestly) while the US is also simultaneously cheerfully delivering a public reminder that "we have more than enough to absolutely annihilate anyone and everyone... so don't fuck with us."
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> it's still massive overkill The bombs are there because “the only way to avoid being the victim of a nuclear first strike (that having the enemy hit you with their nukes) was being able to credibly deliver a second strike.” “Thus the absurd-sounding conclusion to fairly solid chain of logic: to avoid the use of nuclear weapons, you have to build so many nuclear weapons that it is impossible for a nuclear-armed oppo…
You don't need a huge number of nuclear weapons to achieve this, you need nuclear weapons in secret and ideally changing locations (i.e. submarines)
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I guess mass produced nukes would rather be enriched uranium based, due to the far easier construction. No fiddly implosive lens assembly. No weird multi-phase cristallization that goes critical if you blink. Metal that is merely as dangerous and nasty as lead, magnesium or arsenic, not plutonium. If you really want to go carpet-bombing with nukes, miniturization isn't as important as having a lot, quickly and reliab…
Enriching uranium is more expensive than making plutonium by a long shot. Modern nukes are two point implosion, not really fiddly. And when was the last criticality incident related to phase transition? Can't remember one.
I'm not sure. This used to be the case in WW2, but today enriching uranium is quite inexpensive.
Here's an enrichment calculator [1]. The cost of enriching to 80% (weapons grade uranium) is $80000/kg, so you can enough uranium for a Hiroshima-style bomb for about $5 million.
$5 million for a nuclear bomb is basically nothing.
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It's not clear there's any such thing as "tactical nukes" given that they're strategically useless, and it's actually not even clear there's such a thing as nuclear exchange that isn't full scale war. At least as told by Ellsberg in the Doomsday Machine, there was literally no mechanism for the US to launch a partial nuclear attack.
> no mechanism for the US to launch a partial nuclear attack Yep, the trajectory to North Korea (from US mainland) has to pass over Russia and the Russians have to trust that it's not coming for them. Not that Russia would be okay with us striking NK in the first place, but you get the point.
Can the trajectory of an ICBM be inferred by the height of it’s arc?