United States discloses nuclear warhead numbers; restores nuclear transparency • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by maxglute » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 4:07 AM UTC

crmd wrote: post #52

hypeatei wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You can fire an SLBM from the Pacific or the Sea of Japan without traversing Russia or China.

NK's geographic position is interesting. Unless US boat is launching east from PRC's Yellow / Bohai sea / PLAN bastion, there isn't a trajectory to NK that doesn't look like it's heading towards PRC mainland. And even then, unless timed during summer months, prevailing winds is going to push fallout / radiation towards BJ. During winter downwind will drift to SKR / JP / east coast PRC. I don't know what proportional counter retaliation is, maybe a few nukes off CONUS west coast urban centres, but PRC isn't going to sit there and eat incidental radiation over major population centres even if target is NK.

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

#122

Post by justin66 » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 4:13 AM UTC

somenameforme wrote: post #118

justin66 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, the…

> It's not about accuracy.

In the case of US silos, it sure is. Nobody believes the doors on those silos would survive a direct hit (edit: meaning, a hit with a US warhead's sort of CEP accuracy), but if the warhead lands a mile away...

> The first is that they are deep underground and fortified to withstand nuclear blasts.

If you have any references indicating that Russian ICBM silos have been deemed by the US to be indestructible, I would like to read about that. It is possible to build a bunker deep underground that is difficult to destroy with a single warhead, yes, but what we're talking about is actual silos where ICBMs are deployed.

> but again you can see the extreme focus on agriculture, industry, medical, economic, and many targets simply labeled "population."

I see that being referenced as one potential target (category number 275, out of how many I'm not sure) of many. Not the subject of "extreme focus" as you've said here, nor a target that would be prioritized over the enemy's military assets, as you suggest in a parent comment.

(the real war crime is the design of that website)

> Modern target lists likely aren't even bothering with silos and just going for complete destruction of the enemy civilization.

I guess this is the gist of my disagreement with your comments. I have no idea why you would believe this. I'm not suggesting the people who do this kind of planning are humanitarians, nor am I suggesting I expect many people to survive a big nuclear exchange. My disagreement is: the idea silos would not be targeted by a party launching a first strike, in favor of hitting soft targets, is silly.

edit: there's enough wrong here that I could go a little crazy with responses. here's just a little more.

> There are also other practical issues - you don't know where every silo is,

If you're the US government, you view it as your job to know where all the silos, and to the fullest extent possible all the warheads, are. (and if you're the adversary, you're interested in using your silos as a tool for deterrence and negotiation, which wouldn't work if they all existed in secret)

> there are likely dummy silos meaning you end up completely wasting a high yield weapon, and so on.

Russia's strategy has included road-mobile ICBMs that are deliberately difficult to track, but if they've ever built fake silos, I've never heard about it. During the cold war that would have been problematic - the treaties involved inspecting silos. Post-cold war... I don't know, what's the point? In any case, do you have any evidence that this is something they've done?

I guess a cynical person could wonder about how well maintained those Russian ICBMs are today, and whether they're all really "fake silos." ahem You read pretty negative things, but I've never seen anything that seemed better than rank speculation.

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

#123

Post by sillywalk » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 4:16 AM UTC

silverquiet wrote: post #41

openasocket wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liquid propellants are generally less stable than solid fuel. I had read in multiple places (from reputable sources) that you generally couldn’t keep liquid missiles permanently fueled like that. The propellants are extremely corrosive and dangerous. But you are right that the Titan II is liquid fueled and was kept permanently fueled in the silo. I’m not entirely sure how to resolve those two facts. The Wikipedia pag…

There was an incident where a technician dropped a large socket down a silo that impacted the side of a Titan missile and set off a chain of events that ended in an explosion that nearly detonated a nuclear bomb on US soil.

The Damascus Incident[0]. There's a book called Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser that details the incident, and a PBS based on the book about it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_ex...

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

#124

Post by ein0p » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 4:17 AM UTC

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…

You don’t have to imagine, here’s a web site that lets you model the impact: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/. I positioned the “moderate” 1MT single warhead strikes at all nearby army and naval bases and concluded that I won’t be incinerated right away, but will die of radiation sickness and starvation instead.

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

#125

Post by HaZeust » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 4:18 AM UTC

hollerith wrote: post #119

HaZeust wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Nuclear winter??? Strange question.

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

#126

Post by umbra07 » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 4:19 AM UTC

nradov wrote: post #107

llamaimperative wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are a limited set of scenarios where a major nuclear state might use a tactical weapon against a lower-tier state. For example, if the USA got into a conflict with Iran and we had actionable intelligence that they were assembling a nuclear weapon in an underground bunker then we might take it out with a small number of tactical nuclear ground strikes. I'm not recommending this but you can game out scenarios whe…

but why use a nuke? we have all sorts of non-nuclear weaponry. we have bunker busters that can penetrate hundreds of feet.

even if iran can't retaliate with nukes, the geopolitical cost would be insane.

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

#127

Post by refurb » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 4:20 AM UTC

corry wrote: post #56

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."

> so don't fuck with us.

That's the entire point of nuclear weapons, isnit?

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

#128

Post by hollerith » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 4:22 AM UTC

HaZeust wrote: post #125

hollerith wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nuclear winter??? Strange question.

It's not a strange question: many falsehoods get repeated over and over on the internet and here on HN.

The conversation around nuclear winter focused on burning petroleum storage tanks because (in contrast to burning houses and burning trees) those kinds of fires produce the darkest smoke with a particle size small enough to get high in the atmosphere and to stay in the atmosphere for a long time. "100 oil refinery fires would be sufficient to bring about a small scale, but still globally deleterious nuclear winter," said one prominent paper.

Then Saddam lit 700 oil wells on fire (and deployed land mines to slow down firefighters with the result that it took 7 months to put the fires out), and although there was some slight cooling effect, you really had to go looking for it with precision instruments to detect it at all:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in...

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

#129

Post by sillywalk » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 4:26 AM UTC

Scaevolus wrote: post #36

johnohara wrote: post #25

Is it possible that over the years the number of nuclear devices per warhead has increased? 1, 4, 8, etc. per warhead, thereby increasing your capability while claiming a reduction?

The US recently improved trigger accuracy, detonating warheads at precise distances to maximize kills on hardened targets, which had the effect of increasing the number of effective warheads.

I remember reading about this a few years ago... the MC4700 "super-fuze"

It looks like it was deployed back in 2009 on the warheads on Trident SLBMs. From [0]:

"Before the invention of this new fuzing mechanism, even the most accurate ballistic missile warheads might not detonate close enough to targets hardened against nuclear attack to destroy them. But the new super-fuze is designed to destroy fixed targets by detonating above and around a target in a much more effective way. Warheads that would otherwise overfly a target and land too far away will now, because of the new fuzing system, detonate above the target.

The result of this fuzing scheme is a significant increase in the probability that a warhead will explode close enough to destroy the target even though the accuracy of the missile-warhead system has itself not improved.

As a consequence, the US submarine force today is much more capable than it was previously against hardened targets such as Russian ICBM silos. A decade ago, only about 20 percent of US submarine warheads had hard-target kill capability; today they all do."

[0] https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni...

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

#130

Post by transcriptase » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 4:27 AM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #115

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?

I would assume that asking a question in the comments section of a relevant article, and making clear why I’m doing so is slightly less flag worthy than randomly googling questions about logistics and production.