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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

#131

Post by literallycancer »

BMc2020 wrote: post #39
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?

What you are thinking of is (or used to be, called a MIRV, a mulitiple independently-targeted re-entry vehicle). There's still only one atom bomb per warhead, but 6 warheads per mirv. Think of the MIRV like a cylinder on a revolver with 6 warheads per MIRV like the bullets in it. The warhead has the minimum amount of hardware necessary to make it blow up, while the MIRV has the computers and rocket engines on it. So…

The nuclear winter thing is based on the paper where they assume that there's zero days of stockpiled grain isn't it? When in reality we could go for years with just the grain farmers keep to balance out market volatility.

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

#132

Post by HaZeust »

hollerith wrote: post #128
HaZeust wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Who said anything about petroleum storage tanks? The conversation around nuclear winter in relation to nukes is because it's an understood consequence of 100-some Hiroshima-sized warheads being detonated between two major city centers:

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

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

#133

Post by hollerith »

HaZeust wrote: post #132
hollerith wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Who said anything about petroleum storage tanks? The conversation around nuclear winter in relation to nukes is because it's an understood consequence of 100-some Hiroshima-sized warheads being detonated between two major city centers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Climatic_effect...

>Who said anything about petroleum storage tanks?

Repeating myself: before the 700 Kuwaiti oil fires, the most influential scientists warning about nuclear winter, like Carl Sagan, relied heavily on petroleum fires to make their argument.

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

#134

Post by jmpman »

umbra07 wrote: post #126
nradov wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Iran has some ultra tough concrete. I question if even our best bunker busters can penetrate them.

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

#135

Post by jauntywundrkind »

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?

> LGM-118 Peacekeeper

> MIRV ICMB produced and deployed by the United States from 1985 to 2005. The missile could carry up to twelve Mark 21 reentry vehicles (although treaties limited its actual payload to 10), each armed with a 300-kiloton W87 warhead. Initial plans called for building and deploying 100 MX ICBMs, but budgetary concerns limited the final procurement; only 50 entered service. Disarmament treaties signed after the Peacekeeper's development led to its withdrawal from service in 2005.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-118_Peacekeeper

So, that's what we had been doing for a couple decades. The most crazy ass nuclear cluster bomb.

Now we're still trying to replace the LGM-30 Minutemen ICBMs we have had since 1962: Northrop Grumman's LGM-35 Sentinel. And it's taking forever & costing an unbelievable sum ($200B, $210M/missile including ground systems, although they're back to the drawing board to try to get costs down). https://www.defensenews.com/air/2024/07/08/pentagon-keeps-co...

This is after Minuteman was ~$7m/missile, a super-cheap cast-solid-fuel design, with McNamera shutting down efforts on more expensive & fancy Atlas and Titan missiles. Weighing 1/9th the weight of the monstrous Soviet R7. One persistent dude (Hall) convinced everyone we didn't need fancy we needed a survivable competent second strike capable missile swarm. Minuteman is wild. There are some great submissions on it; the communication network submission from three days ago was fabulous & shows very much a Paul Baram of RAND/Arpanet style network resiliency idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41019604

Also of note, Minuteman's original D-17B computer is also quite the thing. There are some great submissions on it. It uses an early hard-disk like thing as working memory. It uses diode-resistor logic (DRL) since diode-transistor-logic (DTL) wasn't reliable enough yet. Incredibly stunningly built guidance computer that was core to a reliable totally cutting edge inertial guidance system.

Anyhow yeah, we built them decommissioned utterly crazy multi-warhead missiles. And are trying and having trouble going back and building a new single warhead ICBM.

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

#136

Post by ls612 »

nradov wrote: post #113
SkyPuncher wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

SSBN stealth could be at risk by mid-century if current technologies continue to advance in surveillance and information processing. That would be enormously destabilizing from a grand strategic perspective but is still very much a future worry not a contemporary problem yet.

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

#137

Post by defrost »

hollerith wrote: post #133
HaZeust wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said anything about petroleum storage tanks? The conversation around nuclear winter in relation to nukes is because it's an understood consequence of 100-some Hiroshima-sized warheads being detonated between two major city centers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Climatic_effect...

>Who said anything about petroleum storage tanks? Repeating myself: before the 700 Kuwaiti oil fires, the most influential scientists warning about nuclear winter, like Carl Sagan, relied heavily on petroleum fires to make their argument.

As a completely serious question, what about the non-influencer scientists, the ones doing actual detailed physical modelling, what were they saying?

As I recall from the time there were three camps on this:

* pro MAD cold war political scientists who stressed that world ending Mutualy Assurred Destruction scenarios were essential to peace keeping,

* antinuclear horrified scientists, Carl Sagan, Betrand Russell, et al who wanted disarmament and peace through understanding and stressed the world ending horror of nuclear weapons and nuclear winter and wrote a lot of papers light on detail.

* actual working geophysicists modelling the world who seemed largely undecided about the actual threat of nuclear winter .. very much in the maybe | maybe not camp.

ADDED: I just read through the wikipedia Nuclear Winter article and seems (by my recollection) to have been culled in the decade since I last read it when (by my recollection) it referenced a great many more papers that fell on the probably not catastrophic side. It now appears to emphasis only papers that agree with the nuclear winter hypothesis.

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

#138

Post by jcranmer »

BMc2020 wrote: post #39
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?

What you are thinking of is (or used to be, called a MIRV, a mulitiple independently-targeted re-entry vehicle). There's still only one atom bomb per warhead, but 6 warheads per mirv. Think of the MIRV like a cylinder on a revolver with 6 warheads per MIRV like the bullets in it. The warhead has the minimum amount of hardware necessary to make it blow up, while the MIRV has the computers and rocket engines on it. So…

> Fun Fact: The russians don't even have to fire their missiles to wipe us all out. They could set them all off in their silos and create a nuclear winter that would accomplish the same thing.

There's a lot about nuclear winter that is controversial, but having nuclear weapons go off in their silos is one thing that almost everybody can agree can't cause a nuclear winter. The basic premise of nuclear winter is a) nuclear explosions on cities cause massive uncontrollable firestorms b) that pump soot into the stratosphere c) which causes massive global cooling. If any one of those links in the chain fails to hold, then nuclear winter just can't occur. A nuclear weapon going off in its silo will be more of a massive earthworks project than a firestorm, especially if the silo isn't located in the heart of a city with lots of juicy combustible material to cook off all at once.

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

#139

Post by sillywalk »

hypeatei wrote: post #43
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.

> 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.

Against North Korea why would the US even use an ICBM? Why not a B-2 flown from Guam or from the continental US?

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

#140

Post by roenxi »

slg wrote: post #117
roenxi wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I would expect some type of escalation beyond the position we have been in for the better part of the last 80 years.

We have escalated beyond the point we have been in for the last 80 years. Russia have lost more troops than in any war since WWII. That is a lot of dead Slavs. Their strategic nuclear defences have already been attacked [0] and NATO currently appears to be organising direct strikes on Russian territory. They've made it quite clear that they want the war to continue until something in Russia breaks. When more warnings are you expecting to see? There are a lot of warnings out there.

We could easily discover that someone tried to launch the nukes already in this conflict. It would be precedented; the situation is more tense than it ever has been before and we've had fortuitous near misses in similar situations. We're already in territory where we are rolling the dice for a catastrophe with low odds.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/world/europe/ukraine-dron...

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