Edit: It's back? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbB0srzLuuo
Thank you.
I think what happened is that the author removed the nine revisions and uploaded this latest one on the 17th. It was interesting to see their progression though.
Going to youtube-dl it just in case.
Look at the one time nukes were used in war (so far) for an example. The US didn't need nukes to destroy those cities. Hiroshima and Nagasaki probably weren't even the deadliest bombing raids of the war: that honor goes to the attack on Tokyo on March 9-10 1945.
The difference is that it took 339 B-29s to devastate Tokyo, but only one B-29 to devastate Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
If you have a few hundred bombers armed with conventional weapons, they can destroy a large target. Arm them with nuclear weapons and they can destroy hundreds of large targets.
Battlefield nukes are similar. An attacking enemy tank division can be stopped by a division of your own... or a single nuclear artillery shell.
This was really important during the cold war because the USSR had massive superiority in conventional arms. NATO troops were significantly outnumbered, and they weren't willing to spend what it would take to reach parity. Nukes were a cheap way to defend. Instead of stopping invading Soviet troops with lots of your own troops, stop them by blowing them up.
Then it just escalates. If the other guy can nuke your troops, you need to be able to nuke his or else you'll lose the war. You want to stop the other guy's nukes, so you nukes nukes that can destroy their air bases and missiles, not just tactical nukes. If the war continues then supplying your troops becomes important, and you need to destroy their factories and transportation infrastructure too.
The MOAB weighs 21k pounds and is equivalent to 11 tons of TNT.
The W54 battlefield nuke weighs 51 pounds and is equivalent to 10-20 tons of TNT
Time to start searching your browser history I guess :p
It's pretty straight-forward and has been for decades: conventional forces go first; if you begin losing badly, then you pull the nuclear card to prevent any meaningful territorial losses; the war ends in some variation of a stalemate.
Whether they can make it work that way in practice, hopefully we'll never find out. The biggest challenge to the practice of it, is dealing with even small existing territorial losses when the nuclear card comes out. Countries like Pakistan and North Korea may also not function that way, hard to guess about their operations under pressure just due to the nature of their brittle regimes, but most of their leadership also likely wants to live.
"It's pretty straight-forward and has been for decades: conventional forces go first; if you begin losing badly, then you pull the nuclear card to prevent any meaningful territorial losses; the war ends in some variation of a stalemate."
Exactly where have nuclear weapons used "for decades" in this way?
They are "used" passively. Any country that has the ability to create a nuclear explosion is constantly using them as diplomatic leverage. Even if you don't detonate them, even if you don't talk about them directly, the capability alone shapes reality.
Parent was
"One of the big worries I have is that a losing super power would turn to nukes once conventional weapons stores are exhausted."
https://wayback.archive.org/web/20170608025320/https://www.y...
I try to plug it whenever I can. It's an amazing piece of art, and it's one of the best ghost stories ever told.
Wow. It's gone.
And I didn't wget the video when I had the chance.
I can't believe it's gone. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14508078 All of them. There were like nine versions of the video, published by an anonymous author over the course of a year and a half. People were suspecting it was more than just a talented amateur. We'll never know.
That's so strange! Ben Marking, who are you?
EDIT: It's up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D3vCiYbXFE Thanks to dcgoss and junkculture for looking. Apparently they removed all the old revisions, so we're left with this one.