On a tangent: it occurred to me recently that we also don't see much use of ICBMs with non-nuclear payloads, despite these being a fairly-obvious "dominant strategy" for warfare — and one that isn't banned by any global treaties.

I'm guessing the problem with these is that, in practice, a country can't use any weapons system that could potentially be used to "safely" deliver a nuclear payload (i.e. to deliver one far-enough away that the attacking country would not, itself, be affected by the fallout) without other countries' anti-nuke defenses activating. After all, you could always say you're shooting ICBMs full of regular explosive payloads, but then slip a nuke in. There is no honor in realpolitik.

So, because of this game-theoretic equilibrium, any use of the stratosphere for ballistic weapons delivery is effectively forbidden — even though nobody's explicitly asking for it to be.

It's interesting to consider how much scarier war could be right now, if we hadn't invented nuclear weapons... random missiles just dropping down from the sky for precision strikes, in countries whose borders have never even been penetrated.

> despite these being a fairly-obvious "dominant strategy" for warfare

I don't think these are quite as viable as you think. ICBMs are expensive. Probably tens of millions of dollars each, for a single-use item. Cruise missiles cost $1-$2 million to deliver the same payload and have a better chance of surprising the enemy.

ICBMs have longer range, but how often do you need to strike targets more than 1000km past the front line? They're inherently strategic weapons.

Even cruise missiles are horribly expensive for conventional munitions payloads. Cruise missiles were developed to deliver nukes.

An unguided 1000kg "dumb" bomb costs $2,000. A "smart bomb" costs $20,000 to $100,000. A cruise missile costs $1mil to $2mil.

In the scope of any protracted real war, sending out lots of cruise missiles is horribly inefficient. Much much cheaper to send out a few planes to drop 100's of tons of dumb or smart bombs. IOW, you can deliver 10x to 100x more boom if you just use planes and bombs. 1000x more if you use long range artillery. But then, the pilots or soldiers are at risk-- and that is a political calculation.

about cruise missiles, wasn't there one of those DARPA contests to see if a guy in the garage could produce a cruise missile? IIRC it got quite scary and was cancelled or something. Being in the drone and high power rocketry hobby i have absolutely no doubt there's enough knowledge and electronics availability for a guy in their garage to come up with something that delivers 50lbs to a precise gps coordinate a few hundred miles away for less than $10k. Once you do that, it's easy to scale up to 500lbs

I'm skeptical you could hit that sort of range for anywhere near $10K. Forget the electronics, you need an engine powerful enough to lift a few hundred pounds for that distance. Unless you want it detected immediately by early warning radar you need it to fly at a low altitude, like a hundred feet or less. Unless you want it to take forever and be susceptible to infantry with small arms it needs to be traveling fast, in the hundreds of miles an hour. That's simply not possible with an electric system with today's technology, and a rocket engine won't provide the endurance or efficiency you need. That leaves a jet engine or pistol engine. Plus, flying at that speed and altitude means you need an effective autopilot system that uses terrain-following radar. You'll also need some nice guidance packages that allow the shooter to set multiple waypoints, so the missile doesn't have to just fly a direct course. And a 50 lb payload of high explosive just isn't that helpful. There aren't a ton of targets where you only need 50lb of explosives to defeat them, that are also going to stay in the same exact GPS position long enough for your missile to travel a few hundred miles. So you'll want a different terminal guidance method, either some sort of radar sensor or infrared.

I don't think you could get an engine capable of getting you hundreds of miles at that speed and altitude, much less the sensors and guidance system.

A lot of the cost in defense contracts is paying for guaranteed domestic supply in the event of a war. If you buy COTS parts and outsource your machining I see $10k as very achievable, the majority of that being metal and explosives. The electronics are nearly trivial, but some of the IR tracking is embargoed and hard to get outside the US.

Find me an engine capable of going a couple hundred miles an hour for less than $10K though

Hydro-formed "Escopette"-style valveless pulsejet? They run as efficiently as a turbojet (w.r.t. specific fuel consumption), and Mach 0.7 is way beyond your "couple hundred miles an hour".

It will be burnt up by the time it runs out of fuel, though.

For a good one it has to be hydro-formed out of seamless pipe, which is likely hot-stretched (like wire drawing, but using an induction heating coil in place of the die, and independently controlling the feed-rate and the pull-rate) in advance to retain consistent wall thickness in the engine despite being cross-section after hydro-forming. Also probably incremental hydro-forming with grain-structure-fixing re-heating between stages.

The hard part is just that most of the work is in making the hydro-forming dies/tools, not then using them to cheaply produce more engines.

Fascinating, haven't heard of this. Some googling suggested there is some active research in this area, and at least some active use by hobbyists and by the military in target drones. Seems like a promising angle for a cheaper cruise missile, at least on the engine front.

They are loud, though, because they use ~100 Hz wave compression for their combustion, instead of continuous-flow as with a non-pulse jet.

A solid rocket engine. It's not hard. Did you mean missiles or drones?

You're going to have serious troubles implementing a cruise missile with a range in the hundreds of miles with a solid rocket engine. While most cruise missiles use a solid booster to launch the missile and get it up to the proper speed and altitude, you need an engine to sustain flight. You also need a propulsion mechanism that allows you to control thrust, which a solid engine wouldn't. To my knowledge there is no cruise missile in existence that uses just a solid rocket engine. In theory you could get into the hundreds of miles with just a booster if you use it to get up to a significant altitude and glide the rest of the way. But that largely defeats the purpose of a cruise missile: traveling at low altitude to avoid enemy radar.

Of course, you can definitely make a BALLISTIC missile with a couple hundred mile range using a solid rocket engine, and probably for fairly cheap (especially if you don't particularly care about accuracy)

> BALLISTIC missile

Also: Scud missiles are comparable, made outside western cost inflation, and still ~$1M each. So I'm guessing you can't get a ballistic missile anywhere near $10k (at least, not one that isn't more likely to kill its owner).

Yeah, I got confused. Those are harder to reduce cost on. I had this conversation previously about javelins, etc.

Well, unscrupulous sellers find a way even around embargoes...

https://disclose.ngo/en/article/war-in-ukraine-how-france-de...

(An order of magnitude larger helicarrier contract was cancelled eventually.)

V1 was 160 miles, 1800lb warhead? You saying a bunch of nerds in 2022 can't beat 1940's tech to bring the price down a bit?

I think they can bring the price down a bit, but not to $10K, even with a smaller size payload. Also I should mention the V1 was barely accurate enough to target a city the size of London. Not that adding modern GPS guidance would necessarily cost that much, of course.

Gliders though.

So you use a solid rocket booster or maybe make it air-launched and have it glide to the target? So that is definitely a thing, an example I can think of is the US small diameter bomb (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-53/B_StormBreaker ) or the JSOW (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-154_Joint_Standoff_Weapon ). Though those aren't in the "hundreds of miles" that OP originally proposed, they are in the 50-75 mile range. Those also technically aren't cruise missiles, and don't have the primary advantage of a cruise missile: the ability to travel at low altitudes to evade enemy radars and air defenses.

That said, you could probably make a glide bomb for pretty cheap. The two examples I gave above are in the hundreds of thousands, but I bet if you sacrificed some of the accuracy and payload, and you were really optimizing for cost, you could get that into the tens of thousands

There was a man in New Zealand trying to make a very low-cost DIY cruise missile as a hobby project [0]. iirc, he was using a pulsejet engine, but ended up getting shut down by some visits from stern-looking government agents.

0: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jun/04/terrorism.davi...

> wasn't there one of those DARPA contests to see if a guy in the garage could produce a cruise missile? IIRC it got quite scary and was cancelled or something.

This sounds similar to the Nth Country Experiment, conducted by the US in the 1960s. The idea was to see if three freshly minted physics PhDs could design a working nuclear weapon using only publicly available information. In less than 3 years, the three succeeded in creating a credible design for an implosion-style bomb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_Country_Experiment

> ICBMs are expensive. Probably tens of millions of dollars each

For sub-launched ICBMs (like the UK's nuclear deterrent) you also need to factor in the through-life costs of the launcher platform, and the fact that once it starts launching, it has given itself away. We only have four subs, not all of which are on patrol, so it would be barking to compromise these to deliver a conventional payload.

Submarine launched ICBMs probably wouldn't be valuable without nuclear weapons though: they're valuable because they're a guaranteed second-strike capability to a nuclear first strike - you might plausibly get the land and air launchers, but there's no way to be sure you got all the subs and you only have to miss 1 (i.e. no country would survive losing 28 major cities).

Without nuclear weapons, they're kind of pointless - you don't inflict enough damage to warrant the expense. But the first strike is also so much more survivable.

Which country is "we"? The US has 14 Ohio class SSBNs in service until at least 2029

Probably the UK.

https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/news-and-latest-activity/operat...

Yes, the UK (I should have made this more explicit).

The UK's current deterrent force is currently expected to be replaced by the successor Dreadnought class [0] in the 2030s. They are currently projected to cost £31 billion (likely an underestimate) for four subs, each of which can carry 8 missiles max. Again, these are a horribly expensive way to deliver conventional explosives when we have cruise missiles instead.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreadnought-class_submarine

> ICBMs have longer range, but how often do you need to strike targets more than 1000km past the front line?

Don't you need to also consider the vast expense countries (okay, mostly just the United States) spend to essentially extend their "front line" well beyond their own borders?

Well the first year of the Iraq War cost the US $54 billion, according to congress's budget[0]. This doesn't include the total cost of the supporting infrastructure need to be able to deploy troops in Iraq quickly, but we can estimate that using the increase in defence budget from 2002-3, or $94 billion ($132B in 2020)[1].

According to Wikipedia, Minuteman III ICBMs have a 2020 unit cost of $20 million[2], so for the cost of an Iraq invasion, the US could have fired about 6600 missiles. Considering the invasion toppled the Iraqi government, it's pretty unlikely that firing 6600 missiles with conventional payloads would have been anywhere near as effective.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman#Counterforce

The comparison we're making is whether precision attacks, presumably on roughly building-sized targets, would be cheaper to do from long range via ICBMs (with conventional warheads), or via much cheaper but shorter-range missiles. My guess is that neither ICBMs nor shorter-range missiles could have accomplished what the U.S. military accomplished in Iraq. Presumably missiles alone were responsible for a small portion of that $54 billion.

If I can trust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman a Minuteman III (which is the current ICBM design used by the US) will land within 800ft (240m) of its intended target 50% of the time. And outside that circle the other 50%.

In other words, you can't really target a "building-size" target with these (with maybe exceptions like the Pentagon).

For nuclear payloads, a few hundred meters of error is much less of an issue, of course.

In the first Iraq war, "surgical strike" was euphemism for undiscriminate carpet bombing. Was the second Iraq war any different ?

In a world without nukes, we would've been all about precision targeted ICBM munitions. In a war they would've been used to hit government centers, military bases, staging and supply areas, oil refineries and wells etc.

It's an infinite range weapon which arrives in 20 minutes to kill a target your spy satellites see. They would be used all the time.

Conventional Prompt Global Strike is intended to provide the ability to deliver a conventional kinetic attack anywhere in the world within an hour. It has been an active area of weapons research for the US for 20 years. As you speculate, misinterpretation of the launch is a concern. [1]

As opensocket points out, there are many shorter range conventional weapons used across borders. The cruise missiles of gulf war 1 or the drones of the post September 11 world.

[1] https://sgp.fas.org/crs/nuke/R41464.pdf

To tie this in with current events this is exactly what makes the no-fly zone idea in Ukraine so dangerous. All of the things you have to do to establish a no-fly zone and take away the enemy's ability to fire into and effect your no-fly zone look the same as a prelude to an invasion or nuclear first strike. This is made worse by the fact that many of the weapons systems you would be using are dual use. Meaning they were designed to deliver conventional or nuclear weapons. It's a massive gamble that the actions won't be misinterpreted or used to justify moving up the escalation ladder.

There are quite a lot of shorter-range conventional systems. In practice you don't need that inter-continental range for most purposes. For some modern examples you have the Chinese DF-21 and the Russian Iskander system. And a lot of those systems are dual-use: capable of delivering both nuclear and conventional payloads. It's not totally clear what that will mean in a conflict between two nuclear powers. What do you do when early warning radar picks up a ballistic missile coming in when you can't tell if it is nuclear or conventional? Plus this isn't a video game, you won't hear some alarm going off after it detonates indicating it was a nuclear explosion. You'll need to send someone to do a damage assessment, and that takes time.

We have satellites which can detect a double flash (characteristic of a nuclear explosion), the US and probably most other nuclear powers with the exception of perhaps North Korea and Pakistan would know instantly of any nuclear detonation above ground.

Not to mention the net of seismographs across the US. Those would tell us within our own borders if a nuclear detonation has occurred within seconds of impact.

We have seismographs and other measurement & signature intelligence collection means all over the world, and there's an elite unit in the US Air Force dedicated to detecting and localizing nuclear detonations no matter where they occur (as well as event attribution, nuclear forensics, intelligence gathering, etc.).

https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2019/04/21...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Force_Technical_Applicatio...

> It's interesting to consider how much scarier war could be right now, if we hadn't invented nuclear weapons... random missiles just dropping down from the sky for precision strikes, in countries whose borders have never even been penetrated.

Why are cruise missiles any less scary? They are indeed used in precision strikes across country borders, and can kill you just the same. The existence of nuclear weapons still allows some countries to use cruise missiles, as we see happen almost every year.

I'd consider how much more docile the nation's of the world would have become sans nuke.

If the possibility of an untraceable, space borne, hypersonic weapon was on the table we might have had a better deterrent than nuclear weapons. The lack of fallout and total deniability makes it almost certain they would have been deployed and quite concisely ended a few conflicts at the onset.

It is alarmingly frightening, moreso even, because the impact could be extremely precise- leaving infrastructure intact.

> I'd consider how much more docile the nation's of the world would have become sans nuke.

Interesting. I expected that nuklear weapons made us more docile. It's a huge deterrence for big powers to go to war with each other. I think we are seeing this play out in Ukraine right now. If Russia had no nuclear weapons, I'd expect NATO to have intervened much more directly at this point, especially after seeing that Russia seems much weaker than expected.

That is precisely why Putin keeps saber rattling about Russia's nukes. NATO (but mostly the US) would wipe out the Russian forces in Ukraine in a matter of days. Since he's committed so much of Russia's military to the invasion, the west would effectively castrate Russian defenses and likely all manner of hell would break loose in all those oppressed satellite regimes (hello! Chechenia, Georgia, Belarus, etc.)

The normalization of saber-rattling about nukes is one of the most unsettling outcomes of this whole conflict TBH, and hopefully it's going to be addressed in some way down the line. If every non-nuclear power is suddenly vulnerable to conventional attacks by any rouge state with nukes, the ensuing equilibrium is pretty clear and is not good for overall stability.

>If every non-nuclear power is suddenly vulnerable to conventional attacks by any rouge state with nukes

There's nothing sudden about it, this has been the reality for decades now. We here in the US were on the other side of the matter in Iraq and arguably Vietnam. This is an old truth.

Some in the US even argued for using nuclear weapons on Vietnam, out of frustration with the lack of progress with conventional war.

Imagine how that would have gone -- dropping nukes on the Vietnamese in order to "save" them from Communism.

Thankfully saner minds prevailed.

Yup. Henry Kissinger was a big part of that nonsense, along with a whole bunch of equally sinister stuff. The cluster bombings of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Korea were in many ways directly the result of his machinations.

That reminds me . . . I need to watch Dr. Strangelove again.

Nuclear saber rattling has been the norm for a very long time; it's just that after the fall of the Soviet Union there wasn't much need for it. Things have returned to their more traditional state.

Kim Jong Un would like you to hold his soju.

Putin has been doing it since at least 2014 (along with the more conventional though due to nuclear deterrence more ridiculous threat of "visiting Berlin again").

It's just that until last month it was taken as just posturing to remind the West and the Russians that Russia, as a nuclear power, has to be taken seriously.

in the 80s it was not unusual for armed Russian strategic bombers to cross into US airspace above Alaska and then be escorted back out by US interceptors. I agree nuclear saber rattling is unsettling but it can get much worse than what we're seeing now.

/btw, in other discussions i've been too cavalier throwing around the likelihood of nuclear weapon use in Ukraine. I've thought about it much more since those other threads

I don't feel like anything has really changed in regards to nuclear saber rattling, Biden did so last year in regards to US citizens[0] no less.

[0]https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/06/23/in-gun...

Well yes, but that's just Biden missing the point entirely as usual. The military is sworn to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, so if a mass insurgency is ever needed to counter some future totalitarian government, much of the military will be on that same side. What Putin has been saying is a whole lot more serious than that.

I think he more critically missed that using nuclear weapons on yourself is a massive tactical blunder. Just pointing out this isn't anything new.

Nah. There's no point in putting hypersonic cruise missiles in space. Too expensive, and not survivable. Those weapons will be launched from air, ground, and surface platforms. Magazine depths will be so limited that they'll only be used for the highest priority targets. They won't be enough to end any major conflict by themselves.

> Magazine depths will be so limited that they'll only be used for the highest priority targets. They won't be enough to end any major conflict by themselves.

I'm probably being incredibly naive in saying this, but what about "non-wartime" decapitation strikes — where instead of going to war, you just lob some well-timed hypersonic missiles at your enemy's capitol building / parliament / etc. while all key players are inside; presumably not as a way to leave the enemy nation leaderless, but rather to aid an insurgent faction that favors you to take advantage of the chaos to grab power? I.e., why doesn't the CIA bring ICBMs along to their staged coups?

If you do this, the enemy's nuclear-weapons services will look in the playbook under "what to do if someone kills the government", see, "launch everything as a counterattack", and press the button.

A key advantage of a hypersonic weapon is the possibility of first-strikes to disable the enemy's retaliation systems before they have the ability to launch more-traditional retaliatory responses. Only submarines are likely to be mostly-immune to them.

Sure that type of decapitation strike might be attempted on occasion against weaker countries. The US basically tried to take out Saddam Hussein and his inner circle using precision strikes at the beginning of the 2003 Iraq invasion but they mostly missed.

So why are the Chinese doing it?

https://www.heritage.org/asia/commentary/chinas-new-weapon-j...

The Chinese weapon is ground launched, exactly as I stated. Sure you can boost such a weapon up above most of the atmosphere in order to get longer range, but the downside is that higher altitude flight paths make it easier to detect and counter.

AFAIK, there are no publicized counters to partially orbital hypersonic glide weapons in their glide phase due to their maneuverability and speed. Perhaps THAAD - but it may be difficult to ascertain the target when a weapon can glide halfway across the world

Well in theory the RIM-174 (SM-6) has some limited ability to intercept hypersonic glide weapons. Although obviously that's never been tested.

There are counters to hypersonic glide weapons beyond shooting them down. If you can detect it early enough then the target ship can change course and try to evade. The sensors on those missiles have very limited field of view so if it's not receiving a real time target track data link for course correction then it can be possibly be dodged (depending on how many are incoming, weather, and other factors). Even if the target can't evade, a bit of advance warning would at least allow for cueing EW countermeasures.

Nah? You don't put cruise missiles in space. You put mass in space.

I supposed the point would be to hit the highest priority targets and nothing else. Loss of command and logistics has a profound effect on endurance

Putting mass in space as a weapon is just a silly scifi idea disconnected from reality. Even with modern reusable rockets, launch costs are still extremely high, especially if you need enough platforms to hit time sensitive targets. And the platforms wouldn't be survivable. There are cheaper, more effective ways to fulfill the mission.

Not to mention that you get at most as much kinetic energy out as you put in, minus losses to atmospheric drag and what's needed to drop the orbit (you have to burn retrograde to return from orbit).

I don't think you'd necessarily have deniability. We have early warning radars and satellite networks now capable of identifying an ICBM missile launch in the boost phase. Even with only ground-based sensor detecting the missile in the midcourse, it is a ballistic missile, which means the missile follows a predictable trajectory. This can be used to fairly precisely determine what it is aiming at, but also could be used to trace the missile back to a launch site.

Well from space, the point of origin is a bit arbitrary. We could just wait for our satellite to reach enemy territory.

Also, ICBMs in their present form would not likely resemble anything deployed in space

Didn't one of the old presidents propose that with the Star Wars program? Drop some metal rods from space and it's supposed to pewpew targets with minimal fuss?

Shorter range ballistic missiles have been heavily used in multiple conflicts around the world for many years. The US military has been researching the possibility of using conventionally armed long range ballistic missiles to fulfill the prompt global strike mission. Potential target countries have no anti-nuke defenses. But there is a risk that Russia or China could misinterpret a launch as aimed at them.

in WW2, Germany used V2 missiles for indiscriminate bombing of cities (primarily London). I can imagine it would look like that, but worse - and having gone to a few museums that showed Blitzkrieg London, that was bad enough as it is.

blitzkrieg is something else. You're referring to the London Blitz. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blitz was a bombing campaign (airplanes fly over and drop bombs on cities, a very WWII thing to do). V-1 and V-2 sort of came "after" when rocket and guidance tech developed enough that it was practical to target cities using missles from hundreds of miles away (northern france, I think).

Yes you're right, I meant the blitz, and regular bombing did indeed come first. It's been quite a while since I learned about ww2 history!

Agreed about the nastiness of V2 attacks.

However, the existence of nuclear weapons today doesn't seem to have prevented indiscriminate bombing (using whatever weapons: dumb bombs, unguided rockets, cruise missiles) of targets (including cities) in several countries in recent years.

Interesting tangent I hadn’t considered before. However, China is testing some ballistic anti ship missiles. https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2021/11/aircraft-carrie...

To be fair, if these become a reality, they would likely strike targets in the Pacific Ocean and South China Seas, far away from the US, but the potential to spook nuclear nations is still there.

i would imagine delivering a conventional warhead with an ICBM has a very high risk of being mistaken for a nuclear armed ICBM. Also, they're expensive. Putting a JDAM package on an old iron bomb turning it into the most advanced precision guided munition is very cost effective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Direct_Attack_Munition

>game-theoretic equilibrium

Equilibriums change, every major US platform was at one point designed to be nuclear capable, i.e. cruise missiles now liberally launched from planes/bombers/ships that are all nuclear capable. There's no a reason nuclear countries who get attacked by any US platforms should assume any incoming ordinance ISN'T nuclear, down to gravity bombs, except for expectation - knowing US has overwhelming conventional capabilities and would rather use it than nukes.

Same will apply as conventional ICBM matures - we haven't seen much of it because ICBMs have not been sufficiently accurate unless carrying nukes where CEP in meters don't matter. For countries with power projection, it was dramatically cheaper to get closer first and deliver less expensive ordinance. Conventional ICBMs seem effectively forbidden because most actors assume they're too inaccurate for anything but nukes and too expensive for anything but nukes.

But that's changing - there are hints that PRC is pursuing rapid global strike i.e. US prompt global strike, because IMO it's the great equalizer in terms of conventional mutually assured destruction precisely because it isn't banned. A lot of articles being seeded on SCMP about PRC hypersonic developments that spells out meter level CEP ICBMs designed to conventionally attack strategic target of depth, aka Prompt Global Strike.

Ergo (IMO) PRC maintaining no first use nuclear policy while conducting massive nuclear build up to setup credible MAD deterrence. This sets up the game theory of accepting that conventional ICBM attacks on homeland from across the globe is possible and that it's best to wait for confirmation unless one wants to trigger nuclear MAD. Entire reason US / USSR and countries that could moved to Nuke triad or survivable nuke subs was because it bought more time than hair trigger / launch on warning posture.

This makes a lot of sense for PRC who doesn't have the carriers, strategic bombers or basing to hit CONUS (or much outside of 2nd island chain). It makes a lot of sense for any nation with enough resources for a ICBM rocket force but not enough for global force projection (basically everyone). World will be very different place if such capabilities proliferate. Imagine any medium size country with ability to hit stationary targets worldwide - fabs, server farms, power stations, carriers being repaired in a drydock.

Hypersonics are a boogieman imo. You'll get one volley before everyone starts rolling out flak or other anti-warhead defenses, and hypersonics have a gigantic weakness in not being able to maneuver for beans. Once you're going over a mile per sec -> predicting where you'll be to fill it with crap to destroy you isn't that hard.

Who cares if you can blow up one target once? Unless you marshal enough to wipeout enough infrastructure to really cripple your opponent, it won't do you much good anyway; and if you do cripple them, and they're nuclear, congratulations; you just won a nuclear response. You now have bigger problems.

>anti-warhead defenses

ABM unreliable, require multiple interceptors per incoming - exchange favors attackers who can always saturate. Also expensive, interceptors usually cost close or more than what they're designed intercept. And currently for anyone not US, just getting US to divert 100s of billions to homeland ABM defense is a win as it will take resources from other priorities. This is also assuming ABM works against hypersonics, including all the recent talk about flak/cloud defense. It's purely speculative.

> blow up one target once

For capital assets that takes billions and years to replace like carriers, subs, supply ships, long range bombers, awacs, critical infra nodes all you need to do is blow it up once. It doesn't take a huge pool of hypersonics to essentially dismantle major US force projection capabilities.

> you just won a nuclear response

Why? Primary motive is deterrence, but with conventional forces. And if it comes down to actually exchanging conventional hits, it will follow escalation ladder, no need to cripple, or cripple to point of existential threat that warrants moving to nuclear.

I’m not sure there’s much difference between the Russians using air-launched cruise missiles (with ranges of hundreds to potentially thousands of kilometers and almost always capable of carrying a nuclear warhead) launched from their Tu-95 Bear strategic bombers (equivalent to the B-52), which Russia has done several times now in Ukraine.

I think the difference is that air launched missiles could carry nuclear payloads but usually don't, while ICMBs could carry non-nuclear payloads but usually don't. All kinds of countries have been using air launched missiles all the time which at least on average tells us that every time one is fired it won't(shouldn't) have a nuclear payload. ICMBs on the other hand have never been used against anyone, and their stated goal for existence is carrying nuclear payloads - so if you see one coming your way you can assume it's a nuke, even though technically it doesn't have to be.

> So, because of this game-theoretic equilibrium, any use of the stratosphere for ballistic weapons delivery is effectively forbidden — even though nobody's explicitly asking for it to be.

Interesting! SpaceX was hoping to one day use Starship for quick intercontinental flights. I wonder if this unspoken rule would make that prohibitive?

Unlikely, as those flights would be scheduled and the launch site publicized. It wouldn't absolutely preclude a masked nuclear strike, but that would be possible already with space launches.

It'd also be a pretty shitty first strike, since you'd be limited to the count of starships scheduled to launch (and likely only ones headed generally in the direction of your target if you really want to mask it) at about the same time. So, probably just one or two, at best. Meanwhile, you'd need at least dozens (of missiles—more warheads) to have any hope of substantially reducing a major nuke-armed opponent's capability to retaliate.

Not remotely worth the complexity of setting up and executing. Maybe worth it against an opponent with extremely limited launch capacity (North Korea?) but that's a pretty niche application.

Until we have some magical non-polluting rocket fuel, I can't imagine intra-planetary rocket trips ever becoming permissible. Planes are bad enough.

Ignoring production, hydrolox would work, not that spacex are going down that road

Oh interesting! Rocket science is cool.

There could also be effective anti-missile defenses, which are currently politically impossible due to the fact that developing them puts you outside of the effectiveness of deterrence.

take a look at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_Global_Strike

Chemical and biological weapons are very useful in warfare as a way to demonize one combatant. False or doubtful claims of chemical weapons deployments have an effect on the response of the public and international organizations that is entirely out of scale with the damage that could be inflicted.

Relevant if you want real life cases of military impersonation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag

In general, a wikipedia link with no additional comment does little to advance a discussion in any direction.

It might be relevant, but it's an extremely low-value comment. A good chunk of the people reading the comment (and caring about it) will already know it's describing false-flag operations.

A good way to think about good HN comments is "is there a specific point I'm trying to make". Anything that doesn't try to articulate a point is likely to be downvoted.

Thank you.

Just doesn't seem like it's worth it even for terrorists.

Why invest a bunch of time and effort making more and more deadly poisons when we've already got a wide variety of them that are cheap to manufacture, well known in how they work, and don't cost a bunch of research money to uncover?

At the risk of putting myself on a watchlist, They already know that, so They have an eye on certain kinds of labware, different precursors, and such. And They already have antidotes to some of these poisons.

One could optimize for compounds with hard-to-monitor precursors. Compounds that can be transported with low vapor pressure and volatility, so they cannot be easily sniffed out.

Or imagine a lethal compound with a high delay factor. Or something with specifically panic-inducing effects, perhaps hemorrhagic with a side effect of your skin sliding off in great slick sheets. Another interesting high delay factor compound might induce psychosis: have fun tracking where these gibbering maniacs were a week ago.

With a sufficiently dark imagination, "needs" could be identified for all sorts of compounds.

Remember, the goal is to throw a monkey wrench into the gearwork of an opposing civilization, not necessarily to kill. Fear of the unknown is very effective for this.

> At the risk of putting myself on a watchlist, They already know that, so They have an eye on certain kinds of labware, different precursors, and such. And They already have antidotes to some of these poisons.

Errm, maybe They Do.

On the other hand, I used to work in an organic chemistry research lab, and at least within my ex university's context, we could basically order anything we wanted from the standard chemical suppliers without anyone batting an eyelid. Pre-signed but otherwise blank order forms were freely handed out, you just filled in what compounds you wanted and handed it over, two days later it arrived and you collected it from Stores.

I personally ordered a compound for a reaction I was planning and it was only after it arrived - when I read the safety data sheet - that I realised just quite how toxic it was.

I backed carefully away from that particular bottle, and left it in the fridge, still sealed. Then found another - safer - way to do the reaction instead...

Right, and if you had ordered 3 barrels of the stuff, you'd get a visit from the feds.

> 3 barrels of the stuff

Barrels? Based on what the LD50 was / what the data sheet said, the bottle I briefly had in my hands - and yes, they did start shaking - would have done for a good proportion of the residents of a small city had it managed to be spread around in a form that would have been ingested.

Chemistry labs are typically well-stocked with quite a lot of fairly unpleasant things. They're also the places where a lot of genuinely amazing and potentially live-saving work gets done!

You can't just tease us like this! If not the actual chemical... maybe an analogue or something? Chemistry is one of my great fascinations lol.

Not GP but one time we did a cyanation reaction (attaches a -CN group) in the pilot plant involving trimethylsilyl cyanide (TMS-CN). We had what looked honest to god like an 8lb propane tank of the stuff ("cyanide and cyanide accessories" lol), with an air-free delivery siphon, typical for air-free, pyrophoric, and toxic reagents.

Normally we'd do this in the high potency suite but the reaction scale was too big so we did it in the conventional GMP pilot plant. Bunny suits and cyanide meters for all three chemists.

I calculated that dose-wise, it was enough to kill tens of thousands, were it directly delivered, however if it were merely vaporized, it would only kill those in the immediate area, and would hydrolyze quickly. There's a great article linked elsewhere in thread about the ineffectiveness of chemical weapons, I've added it for convenience because it's a great read. Air is big, the distance-cubed law really dilutes any toxic agent beyond dangerous limits quite fast (comparing pound for pound lethality of conventional explosives).

https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...

Maybe azides.

Is that toxic bottle still sealed, in the fridge, after you've left the institution? I've had to deal with a few EHS situations like that.

> Is that toxic bottle still sealed, in the fridge, after you've left the institution?

Quite possibly!

The previous occupant of my bench area (and hence adjoining fridge space) left some barely-labeled custom radioactive compounds(!!) in the fridge me to find shortly after I took over that space, so I know how that feels.

After consulting suitably-trained personnel, the contents of the vials were then disposed of ... by pouring down a standard sink, with lots of running water.

Those were the days :eek:

How did you deal with it? I would expect they don't take returns.

The same thing that happens when someone quits.

The people finding these things have the same skill sets and access to the same handling/disposal facilities as the people leaving these things so it's very much a "oh my former coworker forgot to/didn't have an opportunity to dispose of X before departing, I'll just do it myself in the same manner he would have". Furthermore, these people have lives, they go on vacation and cover each other. The institutional knowledge of how to handles dangerous organic things necessarily exists in the institutions that do so.

No bench chemist should attempt to cleanup this stuff. Go to your university or company EHS, and if you don;'t have that, your city does. The history of chemistry is filled with responsible and intelligent organic chemists who nonetheless died terrible deaths. EHS has strategies to avoid this.

Humor us all and think another few steps ahead. And what's EHS gonna do?

They're gonna CC the guy who's office is right beside yours because (surprise surprise) the departments and teams who's work results in them having weird nasty stuff buried in the back of the walk in fridge are the same people who know how to handle it.

EHS is just a coordinator. They don't have subject matter in everything. So they contact the experts. If your biology department fridge with Space AIDS(TM) in it it's because your department is the experts so you'll be getting the call.

Yes, I know how these things work, as my coworkers were those EHS people. The point is that they had training, and they are working within an official university context (laws, etc).

So why not save everyone the week of back and fourth emails while nothing gets done and ask them directly how they want to deal with it rather than putting tons of people on blast and substantially constraining their options by bringing intra-organization politics into the mix?

Sounds like a great way to get Normalization of Deviance[1]. One senior person says "I know how to dispose of this, so it's OK if I don't go through proper channels." Then the next person, following their lead without understanding the implications, says "Joe Senior over there disposed of something scary they found without wasting time going through EHS, so I'll do the same." Maybe it goes fine for a while, but eventually you'll end up with a situation where you've poisoned the groundwater or released dangerous chemicals into the air, because nobody is following the proper channels any more.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance

Telling your boss or relevant colleague instead of going over everyone's heads from the get go isn't normalization of deviance and we both know it.

I really dislike these sorts of "name drop" comments. They're just equivalent of "F" or "the front fell off" with a high enough brow for HN veneer on top.

You're suggesting that people bypass official procedures and/or laws in order to save time. This is a bad path to start down. The fact that you're posting this as a throwaway indicates that you don't want your HN account associated with these proposals.

Here's a relevant software-related analogy:

I work in a situation where if we receive certain types of data, we have to go through proper procedures (including an official incident response team). It would be very easy for me to say "I've verified that nobody accessed this data, and we can just delete it," instead of going through the proper channels, which are VERY annoying and require a bunch of paperwork, possibly meetings, etc.

Maybe nothing bad happens. But next time this happens, one of my junior colleagues remembers that the 'correct' thing to do was what I did (clean it up myself after verifying nobody accessed the data). Except they screwed up and didn't verify that nobody had accessed the data in question - and now we are in legal hot water over a data privacy breach.

And then people go back through the records, and both the junior engineer and I get fired for bypassing the procedures which we've been trained on, all because I wanted to save some time.

>You're suggesting that people bypass official procedures and/or laws in order to save time. This is a bad path to start down.

You are assuming rules say what they mean and mean what they say (and are even written where you're looking, and if they are that they're up to date). If it's your first week on the job, by all means, do the most literal and conservative thing. If it's not, well you should know what your organization actually expects of you, was is expected to be reported and what isn't.

There's a fine line to walk between notifying other departments when they need to be notified and wasting their time with spurious reports.

When maintenance discovers their used oil tank is a hair away from being a big leaking problems they just fix it because they are the guys responsible for the used oil and keeping it contained is part of their job.

Your bio lab or explosives closet isn't special. If the material is within your department's purview then that's the end of it.

Not every bug in production needs to be declared an incident.

>Maybe nothing bad happens. But next time this happens, one of my junior colleagues remembers that the 'correct' thing to do was what I did (clean it up myself after verifying nobody accessed the data). Except they screwed up and didn't verify that nobody had accessed the data in question - and now we are in legal hot water over a data privacy breach.

You can sling hypothetical around all you want but for every dumb anecdote about informal process breaking down and causing stuff to blow up I can come up with another about formal process leaving gaps and things blowing up because everyone thought they had done their bit. It's ultimately going to come down to formal codified process vs informal process. Both work, both don't. At the end of the day you get out what you put in.

>The fact that you're posting this as a throwaway indicates that you don't want your HN account associated with these proposals.

This account is how old? Maybe I just use throwaways because I like it.

It sounds like you may have had a bad time with EHS in the past. I found that by making friends with everybody involved ahead of time, I suddenly had excellent service.

sadly, after 30 years of training to be a superhacker on ML, my greatest value is actually in dealing with intra-organizational politics.

I work in a regulated software space, and my experience is that treating quality and regulatory folks as adversaries is a great way to have your projects take way longer than they should and cause immense frustration. Understanding the hows and whys of the way things work makes life easier for everyone. I haven't worked with EHS in the past, but I imagine it's much the same - if you're seen as somebody who's trying to cut corners and take shortcuts, yeah, you'll probably have a bad time.

Great EH&S people are amazing.

At the root of researchers' reactions to EH&S are two things:

1) EH&S will frequently be the source of unfunded and unresourced mandates. "You must stop your research until you've properly tidied up all of your electrical cords" is, in the short term, an impediment to forward progress. Researchers frequently under-budget for safety/disposal costs when submitting proposals, leaving nobody with money to foot the bill for expediting the resolution for a safety stoppage.

2) The statistical likelihood of a single accident is greater for a large organization than for a single research group. One group can get away with a lethal practice for a hundred years before the first death. A hundred labs will only get away with a similar practice for a year.

If you find a competent and reasonable EH&S auditor, they are a great resource. They may ding you for some safety violations, but they'll be able to point the way toward safer practices. In the best case, even if they don't have mitigation funds for longstanding problems, their voices carry real weight and can expedite the allocation of scarce resources toward real safety concerns.

This is how you wind up spending many, many $ remediating a building. And getting those weird questions like, "Inventory says we have 500ml of X, anyone know where it is?"

> This is how you wind up spending many, many $ remediating a building

Oh yes, and this isn't a new phenomenon, for instance:

"When Cambridge's physicists moved out of the famous Cavendish laboratories in the mid-1970s, they unintentionally left behind a dangerous legacy: a building thoroughly contaminated with mercury. Concern about rising levels of mercury vapour in the air in recent months led university officials to take urine samples from 43 of the social scientists who now have offices in the old Cavendish. The results, announced last week, show that some people have exposure levels comparable to people who work with mercury in industry."[0]

[0] The mercury the physicists left behind https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12817450-800-the-merc...

You call your university's EHS department and tell them as much about what you know about the contents of the bottle (which may not be what is on the label). They seal off the lab, remove it, and using what they can determine about the contents, destroy it safely.

> I backed carefully away from that particular bottle, and left it in the fridge, still sealed. Then found another - safer - way to do the reaction instead...

I've wondered how manufacturing plants handle this. You back away because you're afraid of touching the stuff - how does a giant factory that produces and ships the stuff handle it?

It clearly can be handled, the question is what's the procedure to handle it correctly and do you trust your procedure? Manufacturer or someone regularly working with this kind of thing does know and trust, if you suddenly realize it wasn't quite what you signed up for backing off is clearly the better choice than trusting your guess at procedure. But risk can be managed a lot.

Although certainly over-confidence can also happen on the other end, e.g. if something that's quite similar to other dangerous things you work with suddenly has an additional trap. And Safety Datasheets are notorious for not necessarily representing actual in-use risks well.

The same way other dangerous stuff is made?

There is plenty of dangerous chemicals made on a huge scale - sulfuric acid, cyanide, explosives, ...

"They" are not proactive, because they know people hiding bad things need time and coordination. So, only taking notice (and notes) and investigating strange patterns is enough.

But also a lot of what the GP says doesn't apply, because on the case of terrorism, "They" is either the police or random people, so "They" definitively do not have antidotes or training on how to handle known poisons.

I've also worked in chemistry research labs and there are certain compounds (in the US) at least that will need approval. Anything on the DEA precursor list will do it. There are certain chemicals that are dual use for chemical weapons and chemotherapy synthesis (things to make melphalan for example). Those required some extra forms to order.

Flourine compound? Organic heavy metal? I'm curious.

>Another interesting high delay factor compound might induce psychosis

This kind of exists already. BZ gas is the well-known delirium-inducing compound with a delay of several hours: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-Quinuclidinyl_benzilate#Effe...)

The effects are probably mostly temporary though.

> Or imagine a lethal compound

You'll get nuked (or similar WMD) for that.

Imagine a somewhat more realistic set of applications for hot new research chemicals.

How about aircraft or shells or covert actors spray some "thing" that shorts out electrical insulators 1000x more often than normal. Or makes the vegetation underneath power lines 1000x more flammable than normal vegetation. Our power is unreliable causing a major economic hit both directly and via higher electrical bills. If "they" want to invade now the civilians won't have power and be more likely to get out of the way long before the front line troops arrive. I mean you could probably put nano-particles of graphite in a spray can right now, then stand upwind of a power station or substation, but I bet extensive research would do better. A lot of high power electrical "Stuff" relies on plain old varnish being inert for a long time ... what happens if it wasn't? Again you shut down a country they gonna nuke you, but what if electrical power transformers and switching power supplies only last one year on average instead of ten? Thats a huge economic and maybe military strategic advantage but would you get nuked back because some nation's TVs burn out in one year instead of the carefully value engineered ten years?

How about a spray or microbe or whatever that screws up air filters. Who cares, right? Well most troops (and cops) in most countries have gas masks. Zap their masks via whatever new magical method, then drop simple plain old tear gas the next day or until logistics catches up, which will take awhile assuming they even know they're damaged. Normally when hit with CS, they'd mask up and the CS would have no effect on mask wearers other than reduced vision, but now the side that didn't get their masks ruined has a HUGE tactical advantage.

If you make a bioweapon and kill half the population, they gonna be PISSED and you're gonna get nuked. So try something a little more chill. If your vitamin A reserves are gone, your night vision is temporarily essentially gone. Yeah for long term vit A deficiency you'll get long term skin, general growth, and infection risk problems, but if someone sprayed you with some weird compound that made you pee out all your bodies stores of Vit A before tomorrow morning, the only real short term effect would be night blindness, and that would go away in a couple days with a normal-ish diet or by taking a few days of multivitamin pill or a couple supplement vit A pills. So spray the enemy (and/or the civilians) and they can't see in the dark so magical automatic curfew for the civvies and attack the night blind military and absolutely pound them because they're night blind and can't see your guys. If they have NVGs then hit them at dawn/dusk when the NVGs won't work completely correctly but they can't see without them because of night blindness. Its temporary and never hurt no one other than the opfor "owning the night" until the victims figure it out or naturally recover, so at a strategic / diplomatic level would a country nuke another country because they couldn't see at night for a couple days? Naw probably not. And you can imagine the terror attack / psych warfare potential of leaflets explaining, "we turned off your night vision for a couple days, now obey or we shut off cardiac function next time" Either for the government to use against civilians (think Canada vs truckers) or governments to use against each other (China vs Taiwan invasion or similar). Or give them temporary weird fever sweats or turn their pee robins-egg blue or all kinds of fun.

Now the above is all sci fi stuff I made up and AFAIK I'm not violating any secrets act, unless this post magically disappears in a couple hours LOL.

Think of the new non-lethal battlespace like computer virus attacks. Yeah, we could "EMP" Russia to shut off most of their computers and they'd be really pissed off and nuke us right back so thats a non-starter. But release "windoze annoyance virus number 31597902733" and that could have real world effects. Especially if you release 20,30,4000 new zero-days on the same day.

> How about aircraft or shells or covert actors spray some "thing" that shorts out electrical insulators 1000x more often than normal.

Dropping anti-radar chaff strips is a very good lo-tech way of shorting transformers and power lines. I can't find a link, but IIRC the USAF discovered this accidentally when training missions led to power outages in nearby towns.

The US has a dedicated submunition for this mission called the BLU-114/B. It has been highly effective in past uses, though I imagine cleanup after the conclusion of hostilities was a serious pain. There's been research into even smaller conductors that would get inside fan-cooled equipment, though a.) one might imagine potentially negative health impacts on persons exposed to these materials, and b.) it might be difficult to occupy an area previously hit with these types of munitions given the proliferation of fan-cooled equipment in the military.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Graphite_bombs#/...

>Especially if you release 20,30,4000 new zero-days on the same day.

Interesting example of how cyber attacks could blow back. Anything you put in a virus can be taken out and used against you.

Release a highly communicable airborne disease with a low fatality rate, but which noticeable reduces the IQ of a large portion of the infected group.

True, though you have to remember that threat is a social construct and isn't necessarily a rational measure. The 2001 anthrax attacks killed 5 people, injuring 17, and shocked the nation. As a direct result Congress put billions into funding for new vaccines and drugs and bio-terrorism preparedness. If 5 people were killed and 17 wounded in a mass shooting by a terrorist, would we really have reacted as strongly?

If you wanted to install fear into a country, I think being attacked by some custom, previously unknown chemical weapon would scarier than sarin.

from what i understand the delivery of a chemical or biological weapon is the hard part. For most things, you can't just pour it out on the ground to have a huge effect. Somethings you certainly can, weapons grade Anthrax probably just needs a light breeze to devastate a city but something like that is beyond the reach of your average terrorist groups.

Hmmm, and then you have to ask, for whom is it worth it?

Who might invent a bunch of time and effort in those areas?

I guess developments are not published on Nature.

They are amazingly useful in real warfare. Drop nerve gas on a city, walk in a couple days later. WMDs are the only way to really take a country by force, and of all of them, chemical weapons are the most palatable and also the easiest to produce.

Considering this, defense against them is at least mildly important. A proper defense only exists by considering offense, so they're still developing chemical weapons somewhere. The modern hot topic is viruses and other pathogens.

That's not how it works, and they're not very useful at all. The amount of actual product you need is non-trivial and at that point you might as well just use modern conventional munitions.

The reason why it fell out of favour isn't because it's dangerous, it's because it was ineffective outside of TV and film.

That's not how it works? That's all I get? I'd refer you to the site guidelines, barging into a thread and going "NO U" is not a real conversation.

A siege of a city is more impractical than it ever has been. In ancient times a siege was conducted out of necessity; it was the only way to kill everyone inside if a population did not desire subjugation. Complete death of those resisting you was typically the goal, with the slow communication of antiquity leaving any resistance might mean coming back to an army the next time you visit. It was easier to depopulate the region and move your descendants in.

We see echoes of this in modern times. We "took" Kabul at extreme expense, but did not really "take" it as asymmetric enemy forces continued to operate throughout the entire country while the US occupied Afghanistan. Taking many cities across a nation with advanced embedded weaponry is going to be impossible. If it came down to it, such a country would resort to area denial, like Russia did in the Chechnya and Syria, leveling the cities instead of sweeping them.

We don't see people deploying chemical WMDs not because they are too expensive but because of political reasons, and after that, because they don't have them due to disarmament treaties. All it takes is someone deciding they really want to win for all of it to change. You can deny a huge area for weeks with a few chemical warheads. You can make a city inhospitable using less materiel than it'd take to flatten it.

I'd invite you to read the article I linked: https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch... . Generally speaking, if you need to take a city you're better off using high explosives than chemical weapons. It's well researched and cites sources.

And I'd invite you to re-read my comment. He agrees with my main point:

> In static-system vs. static-system warfare. Thus, in Syria – where the Syrian Civil War has been waged as a series of starve-or-surrender urban sieges, a hallmark of static vs. static fighting – you see significant use of chemical weapons, especially as a terror tactic against besieged civilians.

The Russians being in a similar situation because they do not have equipment suitable for a highly mobile army (I don't quite expect them to use them for reasons below, but worth pointing out).

There's a lot wrong with his take. A lot of what he is writing is unsourced conjecture. It's like saying man portable missiles are irrelevant when you can have the CIA topple their government and remove their will to fight.

For one, conventional arms are horribly inefficient at killing in the first place! It's thousands of rounds fired for a confirmed kill, and the stat is equally as bad for artillery. Any marginal improvement is a big deal.

He does not convincingly separate their lack of legitimate use from moral concerns. Developed nuclear states don't use them for a lot of reasons, but a huge issue is that chemical weapons are on the escalation ladder. In the US's case it's also that we don't want to kill indiscriminately. He so much as states this at one point:

> In essence, the two big powers of the Cold War (and, as a side note, also the lesser components of the Warsaw Pact and NATO) spent the whole Cold War looking for an effective way to use chemical weapons against each other, and seem to have – by the end – concluded on the balance that there wasn’t one. Either conventional weapons get the job done, or you escalate to nuclear systems.

> But if chemical weapons can still be effective against static system armies, why don’t modern system armies (generally) use chemical weapons against them? Because they don’t need to. Experience has tended to show that static system armies are already so vulnerable to the conventional capability of top-flight modern system armies that chemical munitions offer no benefits beyond what precision-guided munitions (PGMs), rapid maneuver (something the Iraqi army showed a profound inability to cope with in both 1991 and 2003), and the tactics (down to the small unit) of the modern system do.

I take no exception to this, but basically no large army has encountered a case where they need quickly deployed area denial that is different from landmines. A massive retreat into the interior of a country may be such a case, but you run into issues where a decapitation against that state is probably going to be more effective.

For what it's worth, this is why Russia's concern of NATO countries walking up into it is nonsensical. It's just, perhaps, they never realized how nonsensical it was, as their defense planners do not have experience with a highly dynamic army. (But oddly they seem to have some idea of what might happen, as this is what likely led to their development of nuclear/neutron mortars and artillery. But any situation where those would come out is going to be ICBM time anyway.)

> That's not how it works? That's all I get? I'd refer you to the site guidelines, barging into a thread and going "NO U" is not a real conversation.

There's no point in detailing beyond that. Respectfully, it's like someone suggesting quicksand is a good way to stop tanks because they watched it in a cartoon. I'll add some commentary in good faith but I'm not going to comment beyond this.

The fact of the matter is that the amount of chemical product you need to try to slow down the enemy is so insanely large that it just doesn't make sense to use -- it doesn't make sense to produce, it doesn't make sense to prepare, it doesn't make sense to bother firing.

I invite you to pick your chemical weapons agent of choice (sarin, chlorine, whatever is the one), pick a spacial size you want to attack an enemy in and then do some back of the napkin estimations at how much of that chemical weapon product you would actually need in order to disperse enough in that area to achieve your objective. I don't want you to account for failed launches, or wind, temperature and so on, let's assume that every munition fired will go to the exact spot it needs to be and disperse perfectly.

You'll very quickly realise that chemical payloads are wholly useless. We're talking about in the magnitudes of hundreds or even thousands of rockets to clear out a small area.

Perhaps it made sense in trench warfare 100 years ago, but it doesn't make sense to use against a guerrilla (or even conventional) force in any modern time.

> We don't see people deploying chemical WMDs not because they are too expensive but because of political reasons, and after that, because they don't have them due to disarmament treaties. All it takes is someone deciding they really want to win for all of it to change. You can deny a huge area for weeks with a few chemical warheads. You can make a city inhospitable using less materiel than it'd take to flatten it.

None of this is true. Sorry, but it's just not. And hopefully following the exercise above you'll come to see it that way as well.

They go against the Geneva Protocol, and it's not even allowed to stockpile them so not even useful if you are a terrorist with a death wish because then there are simpler ways to end your problems.

Russia used them extensively in Syria quite recently, so the concerns are valid.

Given that the Syrian war is still ongoing, that seems to debunk the idea that it's as easy as "Drop nerve gas on a city, walk in a couple days later."

What?! This is not true! I've never heard anyone claiming russia did it. The mainstream consensus is that the syrian government did it, while a minority thinks it was either old stock getting released by accident or the rebels doing it.

Do you have a source? Because even with all the controversy surrounding international investigation and the theories that have spawned around that, russia wasn't even a possible suspect.

The allegations by OPCW are politicised[0] and based on theoretical chemistry, i.e hexamine as an acid scavenger.

That is to say: neither the Syrian government nor Russia have used chemical weapons in Syria. They haven't used them because they are -- for all intents and purposes -- useless. If you want to take down a group of people in flip flops and have access to a thermobaric[1] MLRS[2] you're not going to break international law so you can give one or two of them a scratchy throat with chlorine payloads (if you're lucky).

[0] https://wikileaks.org/opcw-douma/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermobaric_weapon

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOS-1

> They haven't used them because they are -- for all intents and purposes -- useless.

To your point, some numbers from wikipedia:

The LD50 of sarin is 39 micrograms per kilogram, so 0.0039 grams to kill a 100kg man half the time in theory.

Now consider the worst of the gas attacks in Syria was in Ghouta. Fatality estimates vary considerably, but the highest estimate claims 1729 fatalities. The attack is claimed to have been performed using at least 8 rockets, likely more, each with at least 50 liters of liquid sarin. That's a lower bound of 400 liters of liquid sarin, for an upper bound of 1729 kills. Liquid sarin's density is roughly the same as water, so that works out to more than 230 grams of sarin per person killed. And if you use the lower fatality estimates or the higher rocket count estimates, the numbers are even worse.

Conclusion? The delivery/dispersion of poison gas is incredibly inefficient. In practice you need tens of thousand times more nerve gas than the LD50 figures would have you naively believe.

The assertions in the Wikileaks docs are contested, and focus on a single incident when the war has had multiple.

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2020/01/15/the-opcw-dou...

For example, that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghouta_chemical_attack happened is not disputed by Russia; they dispute who did it.

Bellingcat has been pretty reliable but their investigations around the chemical attacks were very... flawed. It happened for sure, but their analysis of how the events unfolded on the ground was so lacking (not their fault, OSINT can only get you so far in a chemical attack) that imo they probably should've just not published their initial articles. Doesn't mean they can't be right on the OPCW controversy, but it's still something to keep in mind

But in any case, while yes there is a dispute around who did it... Russia was never claimed to be the responsible by anyone. The two options are either the syrian government or the rebels, and that's true for all the chemical attacks.

So the GP was completely wrong, Russia did not use chemical warfare in syria!

Bellingcat quite literally created the propaganda -- they teamed up with Dan Kazesta to invent the hexamine nonsense, pushed it among the neocon circles (all of the ex-Just Journalism people, Atlantic Council, Foreign Policy, Henry Jackson Society affiliates, and so on) and then wrote their own narrative.

Their biggest target throughout their efforts? Ted Postol, professor emeritus of science at MIT, who they claimed was a Russian disinformation agent for finding the theoretical chemistry ridiculous and not practical.

> Fortunately we don't see any real work

Not really, having new developments all classified is not helpful to anyone.

The real fun starts when somebody starts using techniques like this that overcome the weaknesses of known chemical weapons and provide specific advantages. It's also kind of hard to monitor computational chemical research.

It's my understanding that the Soviet army doctrine in the '70s and '80s included the use of chemical weapons. That hypothetical threat put a hell of a lot of friction on NATO in terms of training, supplies, and preparedness.

that we don't see it doesn't mean it is not happening.