251–260 of 363 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Only one side has had meaningful advances. That's not true, as Ukraine has scored significant non-territorial advances (like forcing most of the occupier's fleet to retreat from Crimea) in the same time frame. Also you're setting an arbitrary time window of 1 year (when if we want to evaluate the conflict meaningfully, we need to look at how things are moving now compared to the start of the conflict. Which is defini…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He was trying to put words in my mouth and got caught.
You were making claims that a particular technology does not work, and the other poster was ribbing you by playing along with that thought in a way that suggests the technology actually does exist and works. They did not put words into your mouth, but they did give specific examples of technology to highlight their point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Nobody asks how many anti nuke missiles. :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pit production is likely the rate limiting factor. We disassembled a bunch of AFAPs so have a lot of weapons grade plutonium around. But Pu is nasty to work with & Rocky Flats--the previous pit production facility--closed down years ago. Pit production moved to Los Alamos but it is at a much reduced capability. Also, Pantex--where nuclear weapons are assembled--isn't exactly the model for speed & efficiency.
Scientifc American deep dive into plutonium pit production in operation at a new facility at Los Alamos: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/behind-the-scenes...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Looks like only about half of them have been deployed. The rest are mostly retired but not yet dismantled, or in inventory ( https://thebulletin.org/premium/2024-05/united-states-nuclea... ) Apart from the absolute number, is the collection of current weapons "more effective" (whatever that would mean -- some sort of fit for purpose) than the ~23K warheads at the end of the cold war? Or is it simply a subset of the d…
~$20 Billion requested for fiscal 2025.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scientifc American deep dive into plutonium pit production in operation at a new facility at Los Alamos: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/behind-the-scenes...
Rocky Flats manufactured triggers. What’s pit production?
https://ananuclear.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/53f947439e...
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…
It works the same as industrial capacity for things like planes or artillery shells. Once you ramp up production you can produce lots very quickly, the US produced 70,000 between 1945 and 1990, averaging 30 per week with a peak rate around 54 per week; but building out the factories to ramp up takes a long time - for the first 10 years the US averaged 6 per week. Most of the US's nuclear production capacity was disma…
