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United States discloses nuclear warhead numbers; restores nuclear transparency

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Re: United States discloses nuclear warhead numbers; restores nuclear transparency

#111

Post by justin66 »

somenameforme wrote: post #105
transcriptase wrote: post #11

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…

Let's talk about just how destructive nukes are, because I think most people grossly underestimate this. One bomb in Hiroshima killed hundreds of thousands. And that was a tiny little bomb relative to modern standards - 16kt of yield in a mid-sized city of ~350k people. Modern tactical weapons (weapons intended for battlefield use) can have yields exceeding 100kt. Strategic weapons (weapons intended to end other civi…

> So if nuclear war ever breaks out it's not going to be countries using their nukes to target isolated (and nuclear fortified) launch silos and bunkers in the middle of nowhere - they're going to try to destroy the other country (targeting things like population, economic, health, agriculture), so that they can completely eliminate the threat.

There are at least two falsehoods here. Of course missile silos will be targeted if it's possible to do so. If you're the Russians you might need to make an honest assessment of whether your weapons are accurate enough to destroy a hardened silo, but the US believes they can target silos (and has since at least the eighties).

And prioritizing destruction of enemy population over destruction of the enemy's nuclear weapons and other military assets would just be dumb.

Re: United States discloses nuclear warhead numbers; restores nuclear transparency

#112

Post by hollerith »

bamboozled wrote: post #106
hollerith wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>difficult to plausibly claim that all the ancient rusty USSR stuff across the strategic rocket barrier is in any sort of usable shape. There is no more ancient rusty USSR stuff -- at least in the Kremlin's strategic nuclear arsenal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41041532

Without evidence, that comment is an opinion piece. Hopefully we never have to find out.

Could it be that the source of your skepticism is the fact that you have over the last 2 years seen many comments here on HN asserting that Russia's military is probably incapable of maintaining an effective strategic nuclear capability whereas my comment is the first one you've seen that takes the opposite position?

According to one comment I saw here a few weeks ago, Russia's nukes are probably made of wood.

I suggest searching the web for "Russian nuclear weapons modernization", restricting yourself to credible news outlets.

Re: United States discloses nuclear warhead numbers; restores nuclear transparency

#113

Post by nradov »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #98
llamaimperative wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

This doesn't work since you can't really prove that your opponent doesn't know the secret or changing locations - either out of sabotage or technical advancement.

I can't imagine any sort of sabotage that would make SSBNs easier to locate without also being obvious to the crew. As for technical advancements, what are you thinking of there within the current laws of physics? No other country has the economic resources to blanket the ocean with detection platforms. Some researchers have proposed using satellites to detect submarine wakes but that would take a huge constellation and could only even potentially work if the sub was moving fast at a shallow depth.

Re: United States discloses nuclear warhead numbers; restores nuclear transparency

#114

Post by somenameforme »

llamaimperative wrote: post #32
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no form of full scale nuclear war where the production apparatus for anything becomes a factor Where full nuclear war means a full exchange of strategic fire, yes. For tactical nukes or bombardment of a non-retaliating state, less so.

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.

The main difference between tactical and strategic comes down to intended use. Tactical nukes are intended for battlefield use, strategic nukes are intended to end other civilizations. They also come in different delivery methods. For instance there are tactical nuclear landmines, artillery, and so on, whereas most strategic weapons are just going to be missiles and ICBMs in particular.

But I do agree that the labeling is largely pointless because there are nominally "tactical" weapons with payloads exceeding 100kt. For contrast, Hiroshima (which was enough to destroy a mid-sized city and kill hundreds of thousands with a single bomb) was 16kt. So "tactical weapons" can easily destroy cities. Even if strategic weapons can be hundreds of times higher yield, at some point you're just beating a dead horse, or city as it may be.

Re: United States discloses nuclear warhead numbers; restores nuclear transparency

#115

Post by fragmede »

transcriptase wrote: post #11

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…

> googling required to get an answer would put me on lists I don’t really feel like being on.

But asking in the clear under the pseudonym "transcriptase" here isn't going to get you put on the exact same lists? How do you think this list making process works?

Re: United States discloses nuclear warhead numbers; restores nuclear transparency

#116

Post by toast0 »

transcriptase wrote: post #11

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…

> Because if they could start churning out a dozen or a hundred a week within a short period of time, why does the standing arsenal really matter?

There's probably a declared number where this matters, but the current number of warheads is high enough that's there's no need to make more. 3,000 is plenty to retaliate against an opponent with 30,000. More doesn't provide a benefit.

Nuclear disarmament, as practiced by the US and Russia is a negotiation to reduce the number of warheads in a coordinated fashion so that it's possible to convince warmongers on both sides that it's reasonable. The benefits are primary a reduction in cost to maintain and secure the warheads and a significant reduction in the risk of accidents related to the warheads. Mutual destruction is still assured --- you'd need a lot fewer warheads for that and involvement of other nuclear states; but then your question of production capacity would be more interesting.

Re: United States discloses nuclear warhead numbers; restores nuclear transparency

#117

Post by slg »

roenxi wrote: post #72
slg wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe we aren't at 0 warning at the moment, but if there is a spectrum from 0 warning to imminent, we are close enough to 0 that the distinction doesn't really matter. The US, UK, and China are not actively fighting in Ukraine and even if they were, this wouldn't be the first time these countries have directly fought each other in a proxy war in the nuclear age. So unless you think the Russian military personnel that would actually carry out a full scale attack on the West would prefer destroying civilization to losing in Ukraine, I would expect some type of escalation beyond the position we have been in for the better part of the last 80 years.

Re: United States discloses nuclear warhead numbers; restores nuclear transparency

#118

Post by somenameforme »

justin66 wrote: post #111
somenameforme wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's talk about just how destructive nukes are, because I think most people grossly underestimate this. One bomb in Hiroshima killed hundreds of thousands. And that was a tiny little bomb relative to modern standards - 16kt of yield in a mid-sized city of ~350k people. Modern tactical weapons (weapons intended for battlefield use) can have yields exceeding 100kt. Strategic weapons (weapons intended to end other civi…

> So if nuclear war ever breaks out it's not going to be countries using their nukes to target isolated (and nuclear fortified) launch silos and bunkers in the middle of nowhere - they're going to try to destroy the other country (targeting things like population, economic, health, agriculture), so that they can completely eliminate the threat. There are at least two falsehoods here. Of course missile silos will be t…

It's not just about accuracy. Targeting silos comes with multiple problems. The first is that they are deep underground and fortified to withstand nuclear blasts. The second is that even if you believe you can disable a silo, there's a very good chance that by the time your nuke gets there - what was in the silo has already been launched. There are also other practical issues - you don't know where every silo is, there are likely dummy silos meaning you end up completely wasting a high yield weapon, and so on.

US Cold War targets have been declassified. [1] That was from an era with less effective detection, and also where launching would generally involve planes, so airfields were targeted, but again you can see the extreme focus on agriculture, industry, medical, economic, and many targets simply labeled "population." The USSR's target list would have looked, more or less, identical. Modern target lists likely aren't even bothering with silos and just going for complete destruction of the enemy civilization.

Nuclear war, has as a prerequisite, the end of any sort of norms. It's not about destroying the opponent's military, but about literally destroying the opponent's country. Military can be rebuilt and redeployed - by targeting population, industry, economic, medical, population, and so on you completely eliminate the enemy's ability to ever be a threat again.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/23/us/politics/1950s-us-nucl...

[1] - https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb538-Cold-War-Nuclear... (a much more informative, but less approachable article/datacache)

Re: United States discloses nuclear warhead numbers; restores nuclear transparency

#119

Post by hollerith »

HaZeust wrote: post #99
justin66 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because if they could start churning out a dozen or a hundred a week within a short period of time, why does the standing arsenal really matter? Possessing an overwhelming amount of retaliatory force and the combined ability and willingness to deliver it immediately in the face of an enemy's first strike serves a useful purpose for deterrence. "Mutually assured destruction" means that both sides are prevented from…

I'd also like to add to this; that the ability to consecutively create additional warheads is not of any particular inherent value, especially when our reserve count is more than enough to wipe out any and all civilization - regardless of target diversity. It's not like missiles or ammo, where the more we produce in times of conflict, the more of an upper-hand we have. We've already reached the ceiling for the finite…

What do you imagine happens when thousands of nukes explode? The Earth splits into pieces?

Re: United States discloses nuclear warhead numbers; restores nuclear transparency

#120

Post by [deleted] »

hollerith wrote: post #112
bamboozled wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without evidence, that comment is an opinion piece. Hopefully we never have to find out.

Could it be that the source of your skepticism is the fact that you have over the last 2 years seen many comments here on HN asserting that Russia's military is probably incapable of maintaining an effective strategic nuclear capability whereas my comment is the first one you've seen that takes the opposite position? According to one comment I saw here a few weeks ago, Russia's nukes are probably made of wood. I sugg…

[deleted]
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