If we consider the situation of just 1-2 warheads are used in a conflict, I think it really hard to gauge the effect on public perception, and I suppose it also depends on the circumstances. If for instance, they were used in an unprovoked terrorist attack, killing 2-4million in a city, the response could be like after 9/11, but x100.
If they were used to stop a military aggressor, killing "only" 10k soldiers in the field, their may lose their mythical status, and this could be the opening of Pandora's box, increasing the probability that they are used in later conflicts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZcZ6eJoxeE
Sorry, thread needed some levity.
It was restarted a couple years ago with commercial involvement. Possibly a Starlink derivative. Putin must be aware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kh-47M2_Kinzhal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avangard_(hypersonic_glide_veh...
Is it really necessary to lead with "Again"? It makes me feel like you think I can't understand, and therefore you're smarter than me, that you are some know-it-all who has to be right, and that it's zero sum so that I must also therefore be wrong for you to be right. Your informative and accurate point can be made without that word.
We can and should learn from each other. You know a lot and I want to learn from you.
I hope that wasn't too antagonistic, I just wanted to explain how your comment made me feel. I had some very mean things to say to you before writing this out. Thank you for posting, I wasn't aware of Starlink's military implications.
One of the traditional decoys of an ICBM are basically launching a bunch of decoy mylar balloons with the warhead in one as well. The last round of interceptors couldn't figure out which of the balloons was the actual warhead. Then the government made the results secret.
Worse now is the hypersonic weapons which won't have constant or "ballistic" trajectory. They may be slower in space, but they have maneuverability -- which will allow them to avoid being targeted by the systems the US has.
Wikipedia's definitions are what I understand about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_defense#Mid-course_pha...
With boost phase you have around 180 seconds to see it and to react to it.
- Park nukes in space -> no launch, you just drop them on your enemy - Tungsten rods -> put a couple of tungsten rods into a launch satellite and have them rain down from space on your enemy
Not sure that this is such a good idea.
Putting nukes or tungsten rods in space wouldn't accomplish much. You can't just "drop" an object from orbit. Instead you need to conduct a burn to de-orbit and head toward the target. So it doesn't save much time compared to hitting the target directly with a missile launched from Earth. Launch satellites themselves would be vulnerable to anti-satellite defenses so they would be shot down early in any major conflict. And nuclear weapons can't be left unattended indefinitely; they require maintenance at least every few years in order to operate reliably.
Missile defense is as it exists today is not a deterrent.
> called the project "fundamentally destabilizing".[192]
As we see today, the situation is not that terribly stable.
And I'm sure there are lots of simulations that show a survivable outcome, even if it turns out to not be true in reality.
Even in the USA, there's been talk of developing small tactical nuclear weapons for use in a limited nuclear war.
https://rollcall.com/2017/02/02/pentagon-panel-urges-trump-t...
But the problem, of course, is once that nuclear snowball starts rolling, it's hard to stop it, and there's no predicting how big it'll get because leaders don't always act as they do in simulations.
Recent figures I read were 20M-40M for worst case scenarios.
Realistically, a coordinated all in launch is ~1000 warheads, with 400 of them megaton scale in R36 MIRVs from West Siberia.
First strike is only possible with computerised launch infrastructure operational. Beheading the command structure is a way to prevent an effective first strike.
Without it, assorted launches get detected early, giving time for counterattack.
The missile defence can much more easily shoot down 20 boosting missiles coming one by one, than 10 missiles coming simultaneously.
Why?
Because it would knock out most of our cars, electronics, payment systems, farm machinery, and everything else that we depend on to keep the supply chains our grocery stores depend on for food distribution.
See https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/millions-americans-co... for verification.
I have no idea where your "worst case scenarios" come from. But they don't exactly seem "worst case" to me!
Nationwide long term total blackout is unlikely for many reasons.
(and it should be further noted that this conclusion was that the US carrying capacity for life would decrease to 30m sustained by like subsistence agriculture. I expect that those deaths of hundreds of millions would be over decades, not quickly, and I really really doubt that we'd be unable to recover more than some of our agricultural capacity in a decade)
See https://chris-said.io/2020/06/18/everything-ive-learned-abou...
Regardless of which side you believe, it is clear that any "worst case scenario" should include the possibility of an EMP attack that actually does take out the power grid.
Things are setup to fail safe which preserves equipment but defaults to turning everything off. Getting significant parts of the grid up again should take days even if your stuck with rolling blackouts for years.
Further, EMP isn’t a magic wand that instantly destroys all electronics, there is a huge range of sensitivity not just based on type of equipment but also if it’s running and the orientation it’s in. Taking out farm equipment that’s off is really difficult. The actual nukes are a much larger threat.
Even people in areas with no nukes, little fallout and not affected by nuclear winter could face mass starvation due to lack of fertilizers, diesel, spare parts for machines, etc.
Even in North America, Europe and North Asia, having the electric grids knocked out, central administrations crippled, much industry and agricultural infrastructure knocked out, followed by nuclear winter might see more people die from cold and starvation than from the nukes themselves.
Anyway, I don't think we really want to test this, even if the total numbers do not fully add up to complete destruction.
To be frank: That number's missing a zero.
It's nice to believe everyone is thinking their orders through but militaries exist to get people to do violence and they are often very good at their intended purpose. They explicitly seek to drive individualism out of people in order to ensure high discipline in uncertain circumstances when that discipline is most necessary.
> Unlike the other submarines in the flotilla, three officers on board B-59 had to agree unanimously to authorize a nuclear launch: Captain Savitsky, the political officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov, and the chief of staff of the flotilla (and executive officer of B-59) Arkhipov.
Arkhipov had authority to veto the order. What's more, the captain was assuming war had begun and had no order from above to attack.
I don't think even Tiananmen is quite as cut-and-dry as you're making it out.
There were at least half a dozen generals who risked execution to publicly oppose the attack, and many of the commanders instructed their soldiers not to open fire on the crowds. The insubordination went down to the level of the individual soldier, and if more than a tiny minority of soldiers (namely the 27th army) had actually, genuinely been following orders then the casualties would be orders of magnitude higher than they were.
At least that's what I've heard from people who witnessed it.
I understood the point you are responding to differently than you - it is not about doing the (morally) "right" thing, it is about doing the self-preserving thing. I imagine there is always a lot of people willing to do horrible things when they can reasonably expect they will face no personal consequences (your Tiananmen Square massacre example, which would mean personal consequences for not doing it). The expectations are very different for officers hitting the launch button - they have to know that if they do it, it is very likely that they themselves and everybody they love will die or face horrible future in the post-apocalyptic world. I am not saying this means nobody will hit the button, I am just saying it makes doing it a lot harder and (hopefully) less likely.
Isn't violent repression nearly always triggered by protesters' violence (sometimes only by a fraction of them, sometimes by people acting up in order to trigger repression, sometimes through misinterpretation or some fake-flag operation...) ?
Isn't a well-rehearsed then conducted (in order to avoid and isolate provocations) peaceful protest efficient against it? Moreover even if it isn't efficient the net result (w/o any massive manipulation through mass-media) empowers the protesters through bystanders sympathy.
Of course not. In Russia peaceful protesters are routinely beaten for standing with a piece of paper. There wasn't much violence from protester's side for about a decade now because you get 3-7 years in prison for throwing a paper cup at a riot cop, or touching his helmet (not striking — simply touching). You can be peaceful all you like, it won't help you to get out of it unscathed. Just yesterday we got a few fresh examples (ironically from anti-war protests).
It can be more subconscious and insidious. Anger, hate, and violent action is incredibly contagious. Mob mentality hijacks brains, and spreads like wildfire among peers. It's likely part of our DNA and it takes a special awareness to escape its grip.
In short, we didn't stop using chemical weapons because of ethics (if thats the case, we should've given up landmines, which kill far more civilians).
Rather, chemical weapons are expensive to operate and ineffective weapons in modern battlefields.
Here is the relevant snippet from the blog:
"During WWII, everyone seems to have expected the use of chemical weapons, but never actually found a situation where doing so was advantageous. This is often phrased in terms of fears of escalation (this usually comes packaged with the idea of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), but that’s an anachronism – while Bernard Brodie is sniffing around the ideas of what would become MAD as early as ’46, MAD itself only emerges after ’62). Retaliation was certainly a concern, but I think it is hard to argue that the combatants in WWII hadn’t already been pushed to the limits of their escalation capability, in a war where the first terror bombing happened on the first day. German death-squads were in the initial invasion-waves in both Poland, as were Soviet death squads in their invasion of Poland in concert with the Germans and also later in the war. WWII was an existential war, all of the states involved knew it by 1941 (if not earlier), and they all escalated to the peak of their ability from the start; I find it hard to believe that, had they thought it was really a war winner, any of the powers in the war would have refrained from using chemical weapons. The British feared escalation to a degree (but also thought that chemical weapons use would squander valuable support in occupied France), but I struggle to imagine that, with the Nazis at the very gates of Moscow, Stalin was moved either by escalation concerns or the moral compass he so clearly lacked at every other moment of his life."
In that case the judgment was whether the telemetry was reliable enough to justify launching a retaliatory strike, with all the grave consequences that produces.
An unambiguous order to launch a first strike might not elicit the same kind of hesitation.
In any army of the world I would assume that, especially in the case of nuclear forces, orders to launch are not second guessed. After all, the whole concept of MAD depends on a swift counter attack. If those attack orders wouldn't be carried out fast, in the limited time frame available, something would be wrong.
Vlad Posner fairly recently made the point that because of strong anti-America sentiment in Russia, he is worried that this time the guy isn’t going to be as skeptical of the flashing light and is just going to hit the button.
This was discussed at length during the 70s and 80s, and a big reason why the superpowers started to reduce their arsenals, because there is no winner after the first nuke is launched, not even a small scale exchange can be trusted to remain small.
This is a terrifying time indeed
If you detonate all nukes you could destroy every city with population of over 100'000, worldwide. About 4'500 cities in total. You would still have around 1'500 nukes left. You would kill at least 3 billion people.
Keep in mind that this false alarm didn't look like an all out attack, but like only one missile (or a handful, I don't remember the details).
As Samy Farha put it excellently "in order to live you must be willing to die". Because poker is war and life :)
Why has the Ukraine not blown the gas lines?
Other thing is about MAD. At some point this hypothesis needs to be tested. Yes, as a child of the cold war I am well aware of the stories about there being a warhead with my city's name in Cyrillic painted on it, and the same with every city in Russia, in English. We're conditioned to think that as soon as the missiles are launched, countermissiles will also launch, and then we're all doomed, planet is handed over to cockroaches.
I'm not sure it's true. For one, it's actually happened that missiles looked like they were in the air, and a Soviet guy decided it was best not to send missiles back, and we're all still here. I also get the feeling, from introspecting, that a lot of people would not actually press the button if they saw that radar picture. Would you make the world unlivable for little Russian kids? I'm not sure I would, and though I don't know how many people are making these decisions, my guess is it would be really freaking hard.
Which bring me to my next point, and this will cause some consternation. How bad is it if a nuke or two goes off? We care that the whole world isn't turned to dust, but if we get another Hiroshima somewhere, apart from the enormous shock it would cause, it might stand a reasonable chance of ending whatever conflict it happened in, just like the actual two nuclear attacks in Japan. Is that totally crazy, or is MAD literally coded into the machines now? Maybe someone can enlighten me.