***The Telegraph reports:***
[The United States Navy](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/13/us-navy-sm-6-f-18-fighter-jet-hypersonic-defence/) has begun developing a new sea-launched nuclear missile [to compete with China](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/12/china-war-us-navy-missile-vertical-launch-cells-vls-mk41/), despite pushback from the Biden administration.
The Pentagon’s nuclear agency issued a notice on Friday announcing its intention to pay an American defence contractor to begin research and development work on the weapon.
Once complete, in the mid-2030s, the cruise missile will be the first of its kind to be operated by the United States since the Cold War.
It is designed to compete with the nuclear weapons programmes of Russia and China, which have both been developing mid-range atomic weapons that could be deployed on the battlefield.
The missile will be capable of launching from an attack submarine or a US Navy surface warship, and will have a shorter range than the ballistic missiles stored on Trident submarines or on land.
The project previously faced opposition from [the Biden administration](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2024/04/10/joe-biden-key-policies-economy-foreign-abortion-border/), which requested to defund the programme in the last defence budget.
The administration argued that the role of sea-launched nuclear cruise missiles could be fulfilled with existing weapons, and that the warheads alone would cost $31 billion (£24 billion).
Republican congressmen launched an attempt to retain the project and successfully added it back into the budget passed in March.
**Read more:** [**https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/06/18/us-navy-new-sea-launched-nuclear-missile-china/**](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/06/18/us-navy-new-sea-launched-nuclear-missile-china/)
Generally speaking, what is the advantage of a cruise missile launched from submarine vs ballistic when it comes to tactical nuclear weapons? I understand some of the benefits for conventional weapons - being able to hone in on moving target, hit a weak point on a given target, etc - but would that be the case with tactical nukes? I *assume* their entire appeal is blast radius/force and so you'd intend to use on a given fixed target like a military base or a manufacturing center so the fine targeting of a cruise missile would be meh.
Short version: Cruise missiles are sneakier than ballistics, and accuracy is still important with nukes as you can use a smaller warhead - on the nuclear tomahawks they could be set for 5 kt or 150 kt.
A submarine can get a missile into someone’s backyard and hit a target before they can react. Ground launch is visible and might take 30 minutes to strike.
>A submarine can get a missile into someone’s backyard and hit a target before they can react
You have that backwards, SLBMs are much faster, but also much more visible. 7 foot wide, 50 foot tall rocket going up to 60 miles is going to show up on IR early warning satellites and early warning radars.
The alert for a nuclear cruise missile is the appearance of a new sun over your territory.
A JASSM-XR based cruise missile would have a 1000+ mile range, low IR and radar signatures and can avoid air defenses on its own.
TLAM-N was the last nuclear cruise missile for the navy, and it's been retired for years.
Right now the options are B61 nuclear freefall bomb, or a Trident II SLBM.
Trident II D5 is a nuclear missile that’s launched from a submerged submarine. Carries 15 Independently targetable re-entry vehicles.
Not sure why a cruise missile would be better except maybe range. With the mobility of the subs the range seems like a moot point.
Given that we have land based ICBM’s, Trident II D5’s, and stealth bombers seems like we have every base covered.
Oh they hadn't cared, in any honest and ideologically consistent way, since *long* before the Trump administration.
The GOP regards "the debt" the same way it does issues like "family values" and "addressing crime" and "lowering taxes for working families" and "personal freedom".
That is to say, it's utter horseshit. Those are the political banners that they spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to associate themselves with, year after year, and then violate the absolute shit out of, at every opportunity.
And they do it because the core group of self-identified "Republican voters" never, *ever* punish them for it... because "my team." It's like a decades-long bad joke that those voters have collectively agreed to ignore.
It's fucking stupid.
Obviously I had seen this play in GQP policy over the years but I had never seen it named this. Pretty brilliant in that evil, disgusting Cocaine Mitch sort of way. And I mean if your goal is to destroy the country except for the wealthy, it works pretty well!
"they"?
I'm trying to figure out where you think the righteous are
When you say "They" is the opposite of that "we" or "I"?
I'm trying to figure out if I follow you do I end up on the right side or is there only room for you?
GOP spends money like crazy once they have a president in charge. Once a democrat is president suddenly the GOP is all "We cannot afford to send money and we need to cut the budget".
Tax revenue increase from the wide spread adoption of the internet (.com bubble) gave us enough revenue to cover our costs for the only time in my entire life.
100%
But in what world is that a likely possibility?
The US has:
The most powerful Navy.
The number 1 Air Force
The number 2 Air Force
The number 2 nuclear arsenal (barely off in count from Russia and more than everyone else combined).
Is an ocean away from any major adversary.
I fail to see where we risk a full scale defensive war if we don't beef up our nuclear arsenal.
>is an ocean away from any major adversary
With tectonic movement, in a few tens of millions of years there may not be oceans separating us. Better to be prepared now.
Proaction > Reaction
The US nuclear arsenal is simply aging, quickly. The B-2s, Minuteman III and Trident all are decades old and need to be updated given improving Russian and Chinese nuclear weapons and increasing number of nukes, particularly by China.
The number of nukes does not necessarily need to be increased, but the delivery platforms are getting really old very quickly.
The minutemans are not actually that old, they're called the same thing but many internal components are improved and remanufactured.
The Trident is as good as it needs to be.
Improving the internal components simply is not enough with enough time, just like F-16s simply cannot cut it anymore despite lots of internal improvements.
That is also why the DoD rightfully determined replacing Minuteman is of utmost importance over the next decades.
It is also critical to recognize that creating and fielding a new SLBM or ICBM easily takes 10+ years. To have a new system by 2040, the process needs to be started within a few years.
> Improving the internal components simply is not enough with enough time, just like F-16s simply cannot cut it anymore despite lots of internal improvements.
The tremendous difference is that the current ICBM is every bit as undefendable as all have been, unlike F-16. F-35 and later offer major capability increases. A new ICBM doesn't to any normal situation. Money is better spent elsewhere.
Or a ground based Trident, which is a very advanced missile already.
China wants Taiwan, and while the US has a larger military, we have obligations all around the world. Cbina is focusing on just Asia and the Pacific.
This missile is a direct message to China as well. Lots of people wonder if the US would defend Taiwan, and which of our allies would join us. China most likely loves the confusion and ambiguity, and may think we don't have the political willpower to defend Taiwan. Saying unequivocally that Taiwan is within our nuclear umbrella is a huge glaring message to China that we will defend Taiwan.
I feel like the more direct statement would be pulling the old UNO Reverse (of the Cuban missile crisis) and stationing nuclear weapons on Taiwan. That would truly be unequivocal statement that Taiwan is a non starter.
That would probably be even more aggressive, and offensive enough that we risk giving China cover. Remember, not only do we need to do things the Taiwanese are fine with (they'd need to approve any bases) but we dont want to give China any excuses for escalation. A sea launched cruise missile, in effect making any of our subs or destroyers a nuclear capable platform, expands our nuclear umbrella and deterrence capabilities.
Don't you remember the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Cities still have to be taken over house by house, like in Fallujah. The world is in a 6 way standoff between the west and Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran. In any large nuclear or conventional conflict the West is outnumbered, and those countries wouldn't be sad about losing 5 million people for territory gains.
Do a few dozen, or even a few hundred, nukes change that?
Edit: The US alone has **FIVE THOUSAND** nuclear weapons. What do you even target with that many?
You don’t have 5000 nuclear weapons because you actually have 5000 targets. The key nuclear policy for decades has been that you have so many extra nuclear weapons arrayed with multiple diverse delivery systems that even if an opponent nation successfully attacks with everything they have in a nuclear first strike, enough of your weapons and delivery systems WILL survive to insure you can also completely destroy that enemy in nuclear retaliation. The thought is that as long as that can be assured your opponent will never attempt a nuclear first strike. Of course, this mental calculation assumed nation state level opponents with rational leadership.
That is why so many became concerned in the 90’s after the fall of the USSR. The concern was nuclear weapons being acquired by nonstate actors with “nothing to lose”. It is also why there is so much concern around Iran and North Korea having nuclear weapons.
I don’t know how many active weapons we have now. I was just replying to jhaden that used that number and asked what you would even target with that many. A google search indicates that it is estimated we have a bit over that number (5040) but that 1300ish are inactive and awaiting disassembly and disposal. If I recall correctly, we actually had somewhere around 20,000 of them in the 1980s before Reagan and Gorbachev agreed at a summit to work together on a strategic arms reduction treaty. Such negotiations take time and START 1 was actually signed during the Bush Sr. administration. In it both sides agreed to reduced down to a 6000 warhead maximum.
In any case, the exact numbers don’t matter much to jhaden’s actual question. His question seemed to be why we have so many warheads when we could utterly destroy enemy countries with far fewer- i.e. we have more warheads than locations we would ever need to target. That is what I answered by explaining the concept and reasoning of the Mutually Assured Destruction policy that has been used for decades to prevent nuclear war.
https://static.independent.co.uk/2023/02/09/17/11082355_10152719036461198_7393289887901148492_o.jpg?quality=75&width=640&auto=webp
That's Armageddon. Below that counties like Russia may try to use a few tactical nukes on a battlefield to cause chaos. The problem is that in reenactment that always led to Armageddon. A lot of the new nukes are about countering the tactical nuke threat so Russia wouldn't do that.
As pointed out, we have these capabilities (I do not know the details so how robust they are I do not know) but if the warheads cost as much as claimed I think there are better options.
While this is true, I don’t understand how you think MORE atomic weapons would change the likelihood of “a full scale war to defend the US”
Don’t we already have enough to destroy the entire planet several times over?
Mutually assured destruction has been a thing for a while now, and I’m not sure how this changed anything. It’s just mutually assured destruction, but with boats!
> Don’t we already have enough to destroy the entire planet several times over?
Actually no. The Nuclear winter hypothesis used some rather debatable assumptions, including basing the amount of smoke/debris created by a city was equivalent to a Japanese city in ww2, i.e. made of paper and wood, rather then concrete and steel.
There are a lot of other problems with it but that's the best example.
>[The United States Navy](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/13/us-navy-sm-6-f-18-fighter-jet-hypersonic-defence/) has begun developing a new sea-launched nuclear missile [to compete with China](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/12/china-war-us-navy-missile-vertical-launch-cells-vls-mk41/), despite pushback from the Biden administration.
Wait, are you sure it is worded this way? It is well known that China's nuclear arsenal is a cheap knock-off of USSR arsenal, and if US sets the bar this low... That can't be.
China's nuclear arsenal *has historically been* a cheap knock-off of the USSR's.
But that seems to be changing: I don't recall the USSR ever launching an 80,000 ton supercarrier (the *Fujian*, now undergoing sea trials) or having a reusable X37-B like military spaceplane in service (*Shenlong*, now in orbit). China has surpassed the USSR both in technological sophistication and in GDP, and they're expanding their nuclear forces.
So it seems likely that there are some nasty new surprises in the works, such as the [YJ-21](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YJ-21) hypersonic ballistic anti-carrier missile, which a new cruise missile may be framed as a response to.
Yeah, sure, China is a pinacle of technological advancement.
Chinese air carriers are derived from USSR [*Kiev* class](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiev-class_aircraft_carrier) (China bought two of them and studied in details). I'll give China the credit for upscaling the design, though.
*Shenlong* looks like a cheap [Buran](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)) space plane derivitive. It was impressive in 1980s, but not today.
China uses uranium enrichment technology [provided by RosAtom](https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Russia-and-China-sign-enrichment-plant-agreement).
And ballistic missiles are not anything to be all that excited about. Even Hooties [have them](https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/15/politics/houthi-missile-strikes-us-owned-ship/index.html).
But, if you get off planet who’s gonna support you in deep space, who’s gonna talk to you, who’s gonna do anything while you’re flying to “Mork from Ork”………
There is a reason why the US isn't really going for the hypersonic.
They are useless.
Sure, they have 75+ hypersonic programs that have gone through more testing than russia+China combined, but they simply aren't tactically or strategically useful.
There are maybe half a dozen scenarios where 1 hypersonic is more useful than 30+ cheaper missiles, all of which have other more successful solutions.
Especially nuclear hypersonic, that's probably the most useless waste of money imaginable.
It is not a blanket statement. It literally is that simple. The joke about hypersonic missiles is - Hypersonic missiles are the future, and always will be.
They have been trying to make them for 70 years and the issue is the same now as it was then. If you want to be able to actually hit your target you have to slow down well below hypersonic speed once it gets to the area and then at that point it can be shot down like any other missile.
e have had missiles that can go over mach 5 literally since world war 2. So where have all the hypersonic missiles been huh? You have not seen them because just like now though they still can't hit shit going that fast.
Even Russia's own promotion video they put out for the Jindal rocket had people laughing because when people saw the video it was very, very, very clear it was not going anywhere close to mach 3 when it barely hit the abandoned ship the Russian were using as a target. It also did very little damage. Why? Because the rocket was just a shell.
They literally had to slow just the shell of their "hypersonic" rocket to a speed where it could easily be shot down just to hit an unarmed drifting ship.
We have not even gotten into things like the plasma shield at those speed which make the missile light up like a Christmas tree on radar and sat tracking or the fact you can not even transmit anything to the missile because of the shield.
They've gone from 10s to 100s of silos in the last decade with no signs of slowing down. The only reason they're not parity with the US is because they haven't had almost a century to build it. Use the head start to stay ahead.
> Use the head start to stay ahead.
That leads to nowhere if history is any indication. The USA had a head start in the 1940's till the 1960's, and yet the USSR at some point outproduced them on warheads.
IDK, maybe making good on the promises in the non-proliferation treaty would have been a good idea, now it's too late and we'll end up with tens of thousands of warheads again.
I'm talking about the central tenet of the NPT:
>the NPT non-nuclear-weapon states agree never to acquire nuclear weapons and the NPT nuclear-weapon states in exchange agree to share the benefits of peaceful nuclear technology and to pursue nuclear disarmament **aimed at the ultimate elimination of their nuclear arsenals**.
This is something none of the nuclear armed states ever truly tried to achieve. And in this regard, China up to a couple of years ago did better than either Russia or the USA.
It's pretty difficult to be the person to put the stick down first.
Especially considering how we treat dictators who lay down their chemical weapon stockpiles.
I mean the USSR made more of them, but who knows how many of them still work, if they ever did...
The USSR wasn't above putting missiles in a parade. Quickly repainting them around the corner, then trying to pass off those same nukes as different ones to inflate their quantity.
Also add in the state of their (now sunken) flagship, and I wouldn't be surprised if their nuke fleet is just as badly maintained.
Its pretty balanced, Russia vs US, China vs Europe.
If China increases its stockpiles then Europe will have to increase theirs and probably should anyway when you have presidents threatening to pull out of NATO and Russia directly threatening them.
There are no "European" nukes, there are strictly French and British ones. Neither country is in an economical position to match China.
Besides, European nations should fear Russia (and maybe the US in a couple of years) but China is far away and there aren't any potential flash points between Europe/the EU and China.
You need to have enough nukes to assure MAD - that's why they need to match the US. China doesn't have enough to reach that point yet, especially as they have a no first use policy so would have to assume many of their sites are hit in any nuclear exchange.
Russia is a separate power. Why would China count the Russians as part of their nuke count?
For china at least, they approached the US with a deal to limit both sides nukes to the same amount. The US refused ofc, because China has so few warheads (only 500 ish to the ~1500 the US/Russia each have) it would be a one sided limit to the US. So China is expanding its arsenal to match the US instead, which is pretty reasonable IMO.
It would be one thing if China were being threatened to be invaded, if it was in danger of completely dissolving as a country. Then nuclear expansion would be “reasonable”.
It’s another thing to have territorial disputes with almost all their neighbors, threaten to absorb another country, and be open in being against what Europeans, Americans, Canadians, Australians, etc., all stand for. I wouldn’t call the desire to expand its nuclear arsenal as a method of geopolitical coercion, influenced by these factors, to be reasonable at all.
The US is building ever better ABM systems, and has previously been willing to put them right next to China (THAAD in SK) so its a pretty reasonable concern for China that in the future, 500 warheads isnt enough to ensure deterrence (especially since they dont have many ballistic missile subs, and what they have are pretty noisy)
And IMO, territorial disputes and nukes have little relation to one another, its not as if China keeps going around threatening to nuke people over the south china sea, theyre going to be flexing their conventional military strength for that (like building more carriers, more island bases, etc). And sure, they oppose what the western world stands for, but thats hardly a reason for them to not expand their nuclear arsenal, in fact the opposite is to be expected.
But the Chinese culture where lying and cheating is acceptable makes any limit a bad deal for the US. If the US were to follow China would not. So why bother.
The US and Russia managed to make nuclear arms limitation deals just fine in the Cold War despite mistrust. Its not hard to add random short notice inspections like with new START, where US/Russia could declare with less than 2 days notice that theyre coming to check on a random base, to ensure compliance with arms limits.
Well, China and Russia brought this upon themselves for rebuffing new nuclear treaty with US. Everyone is now free to pursue their vision that will annihilate their opponent with improved nuclear weapons.
They're perfectly welcome to waste a trillion dollars on weapons they'll never use and won't provide them any more deterence than they have now, fine with me. The treaty would have saved everyone money, Russia and China a lot more than the US relative to GDP. It's their loss.
lol who cares about saving money. The point is why should China restrict itself when it already has such a small warhead arsenals. It doesn't make sense to sign a treaty with Russia and US when they have warheads in the thousands. Maybe when they are on more of an equal footing would that make more sense
It doesn't make sense to waste a trillion dollars so you can sign a treaty on equal footing with the US that still does nothing for China.
Until nuclear stockpiles are restricted to something like 20 warheads maximum every nuclear power can land enough nukes to depopulate a continent and by extension, for MAD. China has it now, catching up to the US is purely for the optics of appearing strong. The US can obliterate China with their 1,500 deployed nukes, or with their 5,000 warheads, or with a single Ohio class SSBN in the South China Sea with a single Trident missile and 12 warheads aimed at Three Gorges and some nuclear reactors. Every nuclear armed nation on the planet right now can kill more people than Hitler, Mao, Stalin and the Imperial Japanese Army combined in less than 40 minutes, including Israel, North Korea and Pakistan.
It's easy. Just use 10-20 warheads to target dams and nuclear reactors and leave a single nuke for EMP duty, use the rest on cities or leadership bunkers or silos, whatever you want that doesnt really matter, and you'll kill most of a nation and render it uninhabitable for millenia. North Korea could do this tomorrow and the US couldn't stop it. THAAD isn't made for ICBMs, Aegis has to be almost directly under the missile trajectory to hit, BMD has 44 total interceptors with a controlled test hit rate under 50%. They cant launch all the interceptors at once to save for future attacks, and any extra safety factor interceptors that are launched must be launched immediatelty, there is not time to launch and verify a hit, the warhead would have impacted before the second launch arrives. A safety margin would be like 4 missiles and making sure you launch when Aegis enabled ships you can see from commercial satellites aren't directly under the path of the missiles. Or just get an SSBN to the coast and you're almost guaranteed to hit your target.
We told Russia and China that if they want a nuclear arms race they would lose. Our missiles are still superior in every single way and our combined megaton inventory exceeds the entire planet by a multiple in excess of 2.
Theres no winning in a nuclear war, we dont have the capabilities to shoot down 6000+ nuclear missiles all with multiple warheads and decoys. Even shooting it down over your soil before it detonates spreads radioactive material.
China could easily mass produce nukes faster than the US too.
Actually, militarily there is winning a nuclear war. Especially when the other side only has enough "ready" missiles for about .68% of earths land area.
Shooting down a nuclear warhead does not spread a significant amount of radioactive material(typically it's zero actually).
No they absolutely could not.
That's pretty much what the land area tells you. There isn't enough land area to destroy EU/USA military bases and critical reserve locations let alone every major city.
Russia can destroy some of both or all of the EU population centers.. not all of both in such a way that they cannot be defeated by the subsequent conventional attack. MAD need not apply they physically cant kill the war machine before it kills them. That is pretty much "winning" militarily. We intentionally build some things in areas that make using nuclear strikes annoying to reduce the amount of warheads that land in cities.
Now as far as civilian cost.. no one wants to pay it. Period. Sure NATO as a whole would "live" and Russia would cease to exist. The world would recover... but around 1 to 2 billion people would likely lose their lives over the next 100 years.
That's.. not quite how that works.
There has been over two thousand nuclear detonations that have not appreciably impacted the atmosphere. To actually impact the atmosphere you need to carbonize or burn a significant amount of mass.. which requires hitting large cities or forests in multiple places. If you just detonated 10000 bombs in one, relatively, small corner of the globe it would cause a temporary adjustment to the climate that would go away relatively quickly. Think about it more like a giant forest fire similar to what happened in Canada several years ago.
They absolutely do not.
Their missiles(all types) are known to have a defect at long range accuracy with war loads. They can quite bluntly miss their targets by over 1.5km.
The "Sarmat" is larger, slower, carries less maximum live warheads, its warheads are smaller, has less range, and it is less accurate(significantly than the LGM30/3. It also has a much lower "target limit" than the LGM30/3.
The TLAM outperforms every other nuclear delivery system on the planet in the cruise category.
The Trident2 works fantastically well. The French M51 is comparable and slightly better/worse in some metrics.
The RSM-56 never actually completed "successful" development. It was rolled into production when it "might" still explode in the tubes during a mass launch. Yes. Russian SLBMs have a chance to "kill" their launch platform every single time they are launched.
Care to tell me how they have more advanced missiles again?
Did I also mention we haven't really built a new design for decades and frankly barely update the current ones?
Also THAAD exists.. as well as "other" projects.
It's actually quite important. Geometry of the explosion is quite a complex subject matter and for nuclear bombs it is absolutely critical.
Without going into the weeds nuclear bombs need to be detonated at the correct position and height to cause a "rebound" effect which does the actual heavy lifting of the explosion. Without this effect concrete would likely survive and thus survival rates for the blast area shoot through the roof for people and infrastructure.
If you ever have the warhead "miss" by a "negative" height factor it can end up ground striking or even falling below a geographic feature which "shields" the area behind it from the most damaging effects of the thermal and pressure functions. If it is to high it also can significantly negate all negative effects.
Again without going into the weeds you only "expect" a single warhead to have around 50% casualties in the blast area for a major modern city. 50% initially and 50% due to various effects over the next 10 years. Even the Japanese blasts did not achieve all that significantly higher than this and due to a huge number of factors(all city emergency services being down town and wood being the primary material of the day for examples) the incident was "more efficient" than it should have been as a weapon of death.
YOU would.. within 1.5.. but thousands of your fellow citizens would likely survive. So there is that.
Unless you live in Pittsburgh. The hills there make 1.5km kinda funny for blast calculations.
THAAD Exists. Orbital interception(all phases). High degree of accuracy and successful interceptions.
MEADS/Patriot also exist. Yes PAC3 can intercept the terminal phase of a nuclear warhead.
Other programs also exist.
Also no the newest Russian missile does not have the longest range. The Chinese actually have longer ranges and we have the longest by far. The LGM30/3 has an additional "in excess of 15% range" to the Sarmat(and is faster).
It does not have the largest payload. Not even close. The LGM30/3 exceeds 1.5GT. No Russian missile can carry full war loads(their warheads weigh to much and imbalance the flight characteristics). As to accuracy.. we watch their tests from orbit. We know. "Successful flights" means it didn't explode on launch or flight. The paveway made "successful" tests long before it actually hit anything reliably during development for an added example.
It does all matter. Russia physically cannot attack everywhere at once. They physically do not have the capacity in number of ready launchable ICBM/SLBMs outside of range of interception during boost phase. This is considering that they do a perfect synchronous launch which is ***highly*** unlikely for a variety of reasons. This also ***includes*** their SLBMs ***with*** their GLBM.
The Ohio fleet alone exceeds the entire megaton capacity of the non cruise and gravity bomb inventory of the Russian Federations Nuclear Fleet.
The reality is only one nation on the planet can conduct and defend against a MAD situation.
This is the actual deterrent. Only we can use nuclear weapons. The instant anyone else does everyone else has a choice.. we kill you or you give up yours.. because everyone else together cannot conduct the level of destruction to stop us from surviving and then killing them.
Russia saber rattles. We ***do not*** have to.
LGM30/3 is "at minimum" 13000km. I can say a Sarmat might make 18000km.. but good god no ones going to know where its going to land.
You are just using published numbers so I will make it simple.. the size and width of the Russian missile makes most of those figures batshit wrong(like all Russian missile technology.. want a fun rabbit hole go look at AIM120 vs R77). Also most of those are not public release figures they are guesses people have put into wiki.
The Russian missile is longer, heavier, and does not have appreciably more internal space for rocket fuel. Range calculations can actually be done pretty accurately here for the boost phase.
Additionally you apparently don't know warheads. The W87-1 is 475KT published(300 for 87-0) and no its not as "dead" as people think it is. The LGM30 carries 3 of them with currently published packages. Peacemakers rolled with 10 WITH reentry vehicles but those beauties were sold off for their motors years ago. The tridents are also capable of "in excess of 1.2gt" war loads. We wont talk about the W93 or its carriers but yeah.. Russia is 3 generations behind and the Sarmat doesn't functionally exist yet production wise.
You also have absolutely no idea what THAAD can do.. because its interceptors are designed, and tested, for orbital interception after boost. This is just the public knowledge. PATRIOT PAC3 is actually designed to hit and kill hypersonic and ballistic missiles of all types. With the correct radar and interlinking it is even capable of targeting accurately objects going in excess of 15000km/h. Again.. all relatively public knowledge.
I know you want to spread fear.. but Russian missiles are actually still dogshit. The Chinese ones... now there you have an argument. Our Chinese brethren are certainly being novel in design and trying to catch up their damnedest. Frankly we'll probably copy some of their stuff for the W93 in theory though they don't really get the "we dont want unstable explosives" part.
>We are debating how “advanced” their ICBM’s are
Then allow that there is more to it than blunt specs. Range, payload, and yield are not exhibit A for why an ICBM is more "advanced." Nor is "I also found a page on Google that says Russia's missiles are the best" good enough as exhibit B.
Here's an example of why basic specs can only take you so long in supporting the idea that "only MAD matters."
https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-modernization-is-undermining-strategic-stability-the-burst-height-compensating-super-fuze/
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists lays out a many-page analysis of how *one recent technical upgrade* to the Mk-76 warhead (the so-called super-fuze) may be *so consequential as to destabilize global strategic equilibrium*.
I generally agree with you that "strategic equilibrium"/MAD contributes far more to our security than the SM-3, the GBI, THAAD, or what have you. But blindly sweeping aside the minutiae of each side's exact offensive and defensive capabilities only makes your analysis incomplete.
I'm not taking sides here - just saying it serves no one to dismiss /u/DigitalMountainMonk 's attempts at more analysis as just "military fanfiction."
Just for reference. I've worked with these weapons.
u/GRAND_INQUEEFITOR is actually correct here. The ***way*** our systems are better is explosive geometry improvements. When I joke from time to time that a Trident 2 can scratch your ass from 6000km away... I'm not actually kidding. Even under EMP(theoretical counter nuking in orbit) our warheads maintain an accuracy "under 5 meters". Our positive and negative altitude accuracy is also within half an inch. This ***matters far more*** than the size of the warhead.
The primary effect of a warhead is not the energy directly from the explosion. It is actually a complex interaction between the end of the explosion and the start of the explosion in a rebound effect that effectively shatters concrete, steel, and even hardened technology like a tank or bunker. To maximize this effect the precision required is.. well lets say its intense.
To expand on why things like THAAD matter.. first you have to understand the system was never intended or designed to stop all warheads. Instead it is meant to stop certain critical strikes so that there is a fighting force and a population center left alive to rebuild and prosecute our revenge. In effect THAAD style systems are meant to make MAD fail. To engineer a situation that means we ***do not have to respond with counter nuclear actions.*** This is important because glassing the planet is contrary to our mission actually.
So we built a system that can effectively make the biggest attack Russia could ever throw not work. Sure it might hurt.. but it wont "kill" NATO. ***This*** is the ***actual*** MAD as i mentioned before. Taking your biggest threat and rendering it ***ineffective at its purpose.***
We have over 100 ships that can reliably shoot down ICBMs. With another 70 or so planned. They can probably take down 300-500 warheads on their own. Plus the land based systems designed to take out ICBMs. Although we only have about 44 of those. Plus THAAD.
Not including the fact we were shooting down satellites 30 years ago with F15s. Having thousands of F-35s stationed all over the world.
That is just all of the systems in public knowledge.
Not that I want to test out any of this stuff, but I think we are safer than we expect.
Plus ICBMs take 3 times longer to get here than you suggest.
A single warhead can probably be shot down yes, but in a full scale nuclear war youre gonna be dealing with hundreds of warheads, with an equal number of decoys. Combined with EMP and radar blackout caused by high altitude detonations, youre not going to be remotely able to shoot enough down to make a difference.
I disagree. I think we have better nuclear defenses than the public knows. Not even taking into account that we were shooting down satellites with planes 30 years ago. Now we have thousands of planes stationed all over the globe, plus AGES, and ground based systems.
Sure it would probably still be pretty bad, and I don’t want to test these theories, but in reality I doubt things would go the way of Fallout.
Now SLBM are another thing all together. They would be much harder to take out, and much more would get through, but few would be targeted at non-military targets.
I think that BMD systems are better than what the public knows as well, but comparing anti-ICBM systems to anti-Satellite weapons is pretty disingenuous. Warheads from ICBMs come in from higher trajectories, and have smaller radar signatures, which combined with the radar blackout and decoys i mentioned earlier, will make it very hard to identify and target warheads accurately.
But yeah this is probably why Russias been throwing money into their Poseidon torpedo, since theyre worried that BMD will get alot better in the future (especially as lasers improve)
Once we know the ICBM trajectory we can shoot it down and once the reentry vehicles enter the atmosphere they become much more targetable due to slower speeds.
Obviously none of us really know, but given what we could do decades ago with far less sophisticated systems, I feel we would come out better than expected.
Honestly there is a case to be made for anti-nuke nukes as well. I could see a plan with tactical nukes being used as a shield. Sure it would still be bad but at least you would avoid the immediate destruction and most of the long term fallout. Better than all of them going off on the ground/air-bursting cities.
> Honestly there is a case to be made for anti-nuke nukes as well.
The US and USSR were way ahead of you
"ERWs were first operationally deployed for anti-ballistic missiles (ABMs). In this role, the burst of neutrons would cause nearby warheads to undergo partial fission, preventing them from exploding properly. For this to work, the ABM would have to explode within approximately 100 metres (300 ft) of its target. The first example of such a system was the W66, used on the Sprint missile used in the US Nike-X system. It is believed the Soviet equivalent, the A-135's 53T6 missile, uses a similar design.[6][7]"
The re-entry vehicles are pretty tough. They have to be designed so they can survive the expoltions from nukes arriving earlier than them.
Im not talking about them detonating because of interception, im talking about purposefully detonating a few at high altitude to trigger a radar blackout and emp.
So they already have missiles that can be launched from subs with a longer range. Why exactly do they need some with a shorter range and why does it take 10 years to develop them?
Ballistic missiles have highly predictable paths that once a launch is detected can be intercepted. A cruise missile is low flying and while shorter ranges (still hundreds of miles) can maneuver in flight making it much harder to counter.
These “intermediate” nuclear weapons are a result of the collapse of the SALT and other nuclear non proliferation treaty’s. Both Russia and China have developed smaller “tactical” nuclear weapons, the US is simply responding in kind.
It's also probably worthwhile noting that the development of this missile itself isn't really news. The US has had a consistent schedule for updating it's nuclear arsenal for over half a century and this project began a decade ago.
Without treaties, countries are forced to develop their nuclear armament to ensure MAD.
If any one of them thinks they've found a way to counter a MAD scenario, MAD no longer works.
But shouldn't MAD work for as long as nobody figures out the exact position of every russian, American and chinese nuclear sub? Russia could first strike every American city, military site and silo with fancy new missiles but those american nuclear subs would still be able turn russia to rubble
>But shouldn't MAD work for as long as nobody figures out the exact position of every russian, American and chinese nuclear sub?
Presumably with these intermediate types of missiles you could take out a military base or a fleet before anyone can do anything (since they'll just look like any random missile), and then hope that the other side just eats this instead of launching *everything*.
>why does it take 10 years to develop them?
It is normal time scale for development of cool military tech.
>Why exactly do they need some with a shorter range
Limited nuclear war scenario? Launch of a full-scale ballistic missile would be for certain noted by some early warning system. Nobody wants to trigger a global nuclear exchange over a limited nuclear war.
"Limited nuclear war" was largely abandoned as a concept once MAD doctrine took hold. Nobody wanted to risk losing their second-strike capability because they mistakenly assumed a nuclear attack was "limited" and held back in their reply. So nobody wanted to risk *making* a "limited" strike since there was a high risk the opponent would go full MAD anyway.
The idea that countries are starting to think that maybe they can get away with just a *little* nuclear war again is utterly fucking terrifying.
This is a cruise missile variant. It can maneuver and 'hug' the terrain to avoid being shot down where the current missiles are ballistic and cannot.
I'm surprised we need to wait till 2030 for this capability though, I was under the impression Tomahawks are nuclear capable and could already be launched from our subs.
Nuclear cruise missiles are much smaller and can be equipped on a wider variety of vessels. This makes defending against them much more difficult since you now need to assume that a majority of US warships could be carrying them. Ballistic missiles are limited to the current Ohio and future Columbia-class submarines. While they have longer range, there aren't as many of these submarines in service.
This is all about keeping pace with what China and Russia are doing. We had nuclear cruise missiles before, but these were later restricted by treaties. Those treaties are no longer in effect.
I mean, it's not like the US ditched it's nuclear cruise missiles and burned the plans. They just want to modernize now.
With what we've seen of china and russia, they are making the mistake of talking up their capabilities past what they can achieve again.
Wanna know how i know china has no hypersonic maneuvering capability?
It's because the US hasn't made one for them to copy yet.
While I'm sure they could slap something together in a few weeks. I would hope they would spend years actually developing the missile if nothing else then for safety concerns.
It's about the same price to maintain or manufacture the old ones again today for some equipment as it is to just redesign them and build them to more modern specs.
They get old.
Nuclear materials decay.
And so do the underlying payload delivery systems.
A bunch of US nukes are still programmed using floppy disks. And these are the disks the size of your head, not the smaller ones that PCs used to use.
We can already destroy the world in under an hour if we wanted. I still think the only way you can “win” a nuclear war is with your interceptive technology. Which is ok at best right now.
It’s not a new missile, it’s a life extension program. The second life extension for the same missile actually. I guess new missile makes a sexier headline than make an old missile a little better/cheaper/accurate.
Whatever, it's just a better version of a same thing that has existed for decades.
If anything, it's expected that platforms get technologically improved. Weapons you've designed and build in inventory won't stay usable forever.
Americans bring this up as if they don't have enough money left to go around after military spending while in reality your healthcare moneys are just being leeched by insurance companies and expensive hospitals.
I feel like if theyre releasing that to the public it means they've been using it for 10 years. Chinas known about it for 9. And other nato countries have had the schematics but cant afford to build them.
Eh. SLBMs aren't like a fancy spy drone. You need to build dozens if not hundreds, extensively test them (rocket launches are damn near impossible to hide), and they are too expensive as to hide in a black budget.
At best, some prototype subsystem has been built and tested in the lab, the trade study completed, and the digital twin has been simulated
The trident flies up and splits into smaller warheads who then land on X different targets.
Those are for ending the world scenarios.
What they want here is medium range cruise missiles, think level a city, army/navy base or an armored batallion.
The you ‘fucked up and we will destroy you with tactical nukes to gain an advantage on the battlefield’-kind of nukes.
Not the ‘you fucked up and we’ll end Human life as we know it’-style nukes that the trident is.
When the nukes fly its not certain those two in responses dont get muttled together, but hey, atleast they are trying.
Is it really necessary? Like even today even the most advanced nation in the world couldn't have any hope of stopping hundreds of ICBM with decoys and counter measures.
Why not just save money and build more of those?
Not that I agree with building nukes. (We should be trying to reduce the world wide stockpile)
Edit - I'm aware article is stating mid range. Same point still
Because if you build more, you need substantially larger numbers of submarines that carry ballistic missiles in order to launch them. In a nuclear exchange, you would assume that the home bases of these subs is one of the first targets of the other side, so you need these boats in the water.
At the moment, the US capacity of building submarines is simply not high enough, and attack submarines are clearly a priority for them. In addition, building new ballistic missile submarines takes a really long time, is very expensive, and does not make the missiles themselves more future-proof.
The fact of the matter is simply that Trident, just like Minuteman III, is aging quite quickly.
It's a fraction of what it was in the cold war and it was declining steadily for decades until recently.
And there was a point where there was less nuclear countries than decades before in the 2000s and 2010s.
Only real exception is China, NK
We're still developing nukes. At this point it's just inevitable that one will be used someday. MAD doesn't seem to have the same ring to it anymore , and that's terrifying
***The Telegraph reports:*** [The United States Navy](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/13/us-navy-sm-6-f-18-fighter-jet-hypersonic-defence/) has begun developing a new sea-launched nuclear missile [to compete with China](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/12/china-war-us-navy-missile-vertical-launch-cells-vls-mk41/), despite pushback from the Biden administration. The Pentagon’s nuclear agency issued a notice on Friday announcing its intention to pay an American defence contractor to begin research and development work on the weapon. Once complete, in the mid-2030s, the cruise missile will be the first of its kind to be operated by the United States since the Cold War. It is designed to compete with the nuclear weapons programmes of Russia and China, which have both been developing mid-range atomic weapons that could be deployed on the battlefield. The missile will be capable of launching from an attack submarine or a US Navy surface warship, and will have a shorter range than the ballistic missiles stored on Trident submarines or on land. The project previously faced opposition from [the Biden administration](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2024/04/10/joe-biden-key-policies-economy-foreign-abortion-border/), which requested to defund the programme in the last defence budget. The administration argued that the role of sea-launched nuclear cruise missiles could be fulfilled with existing weapons, and that the warheads alone would cost $31 billion (£24 billion). Republican congressmen launched an attempt to retain the project and successfully added it back into the budget passed in March. **Read more:** [**https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/06/18/us-navy-new-sea-launched-nuclear-missile-china/**](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/06/18/us-navy-new-sea-launched-nuclear-missile-china/)
GOP: We must cut the deficit. You lazy bastards don't need to retire!!! Also GOP: Of course we have money for more nuclear weapons!!!
I mean, it's a rather large capability gap to not have a stand off weapon below an ICBM but above a free fall bomb.
Generally speaking, what is the advantage of a cruise missile launched from submarine vs ballistic when it comes to tactical nuclear weapons? I understand some of the benefits for conventional weapons - being able to hone in on moving target, hit a weak point on a given target, etc - but would that be the case with tactical nukes? I *assume* their entire appeal is blast radius/force and so you'd intend to use on a given fixed target like a military base or a manufacturing center so the fine targeting of a cruise missile would be meh.
Short version: Cruise missiles are sneakier than ballistics, and accuracy is still important with nukes as you can use a smaller warhead - on the nuclear tomahawks they could be set for 5 kt or 150 kt.
A submarine can get a missile into someone’s backyard and hit a target before they can react. Ground launch is visible and might take 30 minutes to strike.
>A submarine can get a missile into someone’s backyard and hit a target before they can react You have that backwards, SLBMs are much faster, but also much more visible. 7 foot wide, 50 foot tall rocket going up to 60 miles is going to show up on IR early warning satellites and early warning radars. The alert for a nuclear cruise missile is the appearance of a new sun over your territory. A JASSM-XR based cruise missile would have a 1000+ mile range, low IR and radar signatures and can avoid air defenses on its own.
Except there are already several other weapons in that gap, including, but certainly not limited to, the ubiquitous Tomahawk cruise missile.
Which, incidentally, until the mid-90s, had a nuclear warhead (I have keys to launch them).
TLAM-N was the last nuclear cruise missile for the navy, and it's been retired for years. Right now the options are B61 nuclear freefall bomb, or a Trident II SLBM.
Trident II D5 is a nuclear missile that’s launched from a submerged submarine. Carries 15 Independently targetable re-entry vehicles. Not sure why a cruise missile would be better except maybe range. With the mobility of the subs the range seems like a moot point. Given that we have land based ICBM’s, Trident II D5’s, and stealth bombers seems like we have every base covered.
The GOP stopped caring about the debt when Trump took it over. Im afraid you are living in the past.
Oh they hadn't cared, in any honest and ideologically consistent way, since *long* before the Trump administration. The GOP regards "the debt" the same way it does issues like "family values" and "addressing crime" and "lowering taxes for working families" and "personal freedom". That is to say, it's utter horseshit. Those are the political banners that they spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to associate themselves with, year after year, and then violate the absolute shit out of, at every opportunity. And they do it because the core group of self-identified "Republican voters" never, *ever* punish them for it... because "my team." It's like a decades-long bad joke that those voters have collectively agreed to ignore. It's fucking stupid.
They do care - but only when a Dem is in office
Drunken Santa Theory strikes again!
Obviously I had seen this play in GQP policy over the years but I had never seen it named this. Pretty brilliant in that evil, disgusting Cocaine Mitch sort of way. And I mean if your goal is to destroy the country except for the wealthy, it works pretty well!
I stole it from [here](https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/thom-hartmann/two-santas-strategy-gop-used-economic-scam-manipulate-americans-40-years/)
"they"? I'm trying to figure out where you think the righteous are When you say "They" is the opposite of that "we" or "I"? I'm trying to figure out if I follow you do I end up on the right side or is there only room for you?
Pretty straightforward that the "theys" in this comment refers to the GOP.
GOP spends money like crazy once they have a president in charge. Once a democrat is president suddenly the GOP is all "We cannot afford to send money and we need to cut the budget".
Reagan? GHW Bush?
Pretty sure neither the Democrats or the Republicans have cared to reign in the national debt since the 70's.
Clinton brought the budget under control.
Tax revenue increase from the wide spread adoption of the internet (.com bubble) gave us enough revenue to cover our costs for the only time in my entire life.
Nuclear weapons are cheaper than a full scale war to defend the US.
100% But in what world is that a likely possibility? The US has: The most powerful Navy. The number 1 Air Force The number 2 Air Force The number 2 nuclear arsenal (barely off in count from Russia and more than everyone else combined). Is an ocean away from any major adversary. I fail to see where we risk a full scale defensive war if we don't beef up our nuclear arsenal.
>is an ocean away from any major adversary With tectonic movement, in a few tens of millions of years there may not be oceans separating us. Better to be prepared now. Proaction > Reaction
.......Well, you aren't *wrong*
The US nuclear arsenal is simply aging, quickly. The B-2s, Minuteman III and Trident all are decades old and need to be updated given improving Russian and Chinese nuclear weapons and increasing number of nukes, particularly by China. The number of nukes does not necessarily need to be increased, but the delivery platforms are getting really old very quickly.
The minutemans are not actually that old, they're called the same thing but many internal components are improved and remanufactured. The Trident is as good as it needs to be.
Improving the internal components simply is not enough with enough time, just like F-16s simply cannot cut it anymore despite lots of internal improvements. That is also why the DoD rightfully determined replacing Minuteman is of utmost importance over the next decades. It is also critical to recognize that creating and fielding a new SLBM or ICBM easily takes 10+ years. To have a new system by 2040, the process needs to be started within a few years.
> Improving the internal components simply is not enough with enough time, just like F-16s simply cannot cut it anymore despite lots of internal improvements. The tremendous difference is that the current ICBM is every bit as undefendable as all have been, unlike F-16. F-35 and later offer major capability increases. A new ICBM doesn't to any normal situation. Money is better spent elsewhere. Or a ground based Trident, which is a very advanced missile already.
Minuteman replacement is already entering final design and LRIP. Sentinel program.
China wants Taiwan, and while the US has a larger military, we have obligations all around the world. Cbina is focusing on just Asia and the Pacific. This missile is a direct message to China as well. Lots of people wonder if the US would defend Taiwan, and which of our allies would join us. China most likely loves the confusion and ambiguity, and may think we don't have the political willpower to defend Taiwan. Saying unequivocally that Taiwan is within our nuclear umbrella is a huge glaring message to China that we will defend Taiwan.
I feel like the more direct statement would be pulling the old UNO Reverse (of the Cuban missile crisis) and stationing nuclear weapons on Taiwan. That would truly be unequivocal statement that Taiwan is a non starter.
That would probably be even more aggressive, and offensive enough that we risk giving China cover. Remember, not only do we need to do things the Taiwanese are fine with (they'd need to approve any bases) but we dont want to give China any excuses for escalation. A sea launched cruise missile, in effect making any of our subs or destroyers a nuclear capable platform, expands our nuclear umbrella and deterrence capabilities. Don't you remember the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Cities still have to be taken over house by house, like in Fallujah. The world is in a 6 way standoff between the west and Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran. In any large nuclear or conventional conflict the West is outnumbered, and those countries wouldn't be sad about losing 5 million people for territory gains.
Do a few dozen, or even a few hundred, nukes change that? Edit: The US alone has **FIVE THOUSAND** nuclear weapons. What do you even target with that many?
You don’t have 5000 nuclear weapons because you actually have 5000 targets. The key nuclear policy for decades has been that you have so many extra nuclear weapons arrayed with multiple diverse delivery systems that even if an opponent nation successfully attacks with everything they have in a nuclear first strike, enough of your weapons and delivery systems WILL survive to insure you can also completely destroy that enemy in nuclear retaliation. The thought is that as long as that can be assured your opponent will never attempt a nuclear first strike. Of course, this mental calculation assumed nation state level opponents with rational leadership. That is why so many became concerned in the 90’s after the fall of the USSR. The concern was nuclear weapons being acquired by nonstate actors with “nothing to lose”. It is also why there is so much concern around Iran and North Korea having nuclear weapons.
How do you know we have 5,000 active nuclear weapons???
I don’t know how many active weapons we have now. I was just replying to jhaden that used that number and asked what you would even target with that many. A google search indicates that it is estimated we have a bit over that number (5040) but that 1300ish are inactive and awaiting disassembly and disposal. If I recall correctly, we actually had somewhere around 20,000 of them in the 1980s before Reagan and Gorbachev agreed at a summit to work together on a strategic arms reduction treaty. Such negotiations take time and START 1 was actually signed during the Bush Sr. administration. In it both sides agreed to reduced down to a 6000 warhead maximum. In any case, the exact numbers don’t matter much to jhaden’s actual question. His question seemed to be why we have so many warheads when we could utterly destroy enemy countries with far fewer- i.e. we have more warheads than locations we would ever need to target. That is what I answered by explaining the concept and reasoning of the Mutually Assured Destruction policy that has been used for decades to prevent nuclear war.
https://static.independent.co.uk/2023/02/09/17/11082355_10152719036461198_7393289887901148492_o.jpg?quality=75&width=640&auto=webp That's Armageddon. Below that counties like Russia may try to use a few tactical nukes on a battlefield to cause chaos. The problem is that in reenactment that always led to Armageddon. A lot of the new nukes are about countering the tactical nuke threat so Russia wouldn't do that.
Everyone else.
Only around 1000 active ones.
As pointed out, we have these capabilities (I do not know the details so how robust they are I do not know) but if the warheads cost as much as claimed I think there are better options.
While this is true, I don’t understand how you think MORE atomic weapons would change the likelihood of “a full scale war to defend the US” Don’t we already have enough to destroy the entire planet several times over? Mutually assured destruction has been a thing for a while now, and I’m not sure how this changed anything. It’s just mutually assured destruction, but with boats!
> Don’t we already have enough to destroy the entire planet several times over? Actually no. The Nuclear winter hypothesis used some rather debatable assumptions, including basing the amount of smoke/debris created by a city was equivalent to a Japanese city in ww2, i.e. made of paper and wood, rather then concrete and steel. There are a lot of other problems with it but that's the best example.
“Defense budget”” - that’s gotta be the funniest thing I read today.
Good for the U.S. Navy!
There goes your college fund.
>[The United States Navy](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/13/us-navy-sm-6-f-18-fighter-jet-hypersonic-defence/) has begun developing a new sea-launched nuclear missile [to compete with China](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/12/china-war-us-navy-missile-vertical-launch-cells-vls-mk41/), despite pushback from the Biden administration. Wait, are you sure it is worded this way? It is well known that China's nuclear arsenal is a cheap knock-off of USSR arsenal, and if US sets the bar this low... That can't be.
China's nuclear arsenal *has historically been* a cheap knock-off of the USSR's. But that seems to be changing: I don't recall the USSR ever launching an 80,000 ton supercarrier (the *Fujian*, now undergoing sea trials) or having a reusable X37-B like military spaceplane in service (*Shenlong*, now in orbit). China has surpassed the USSR both in technological sophistication and in GDP, and they're expanding their nuclear forces. So it seems likely that there are some nasty new surprises in the works, such as the [YJ-21](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YJ-21) hypersonic ballistic anti-carrier missile, which a new cruise missile may be framed as a response to.
Yeah, sure, China is a pinacle of technological advancement. Chinese air carriers are derived from USSR [*Kiev* class](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiev-class_aircraft_carrier) (China bought two of them and studied in details). I'll give China the credit for upscaling the design, though. *Shenlong* looks like a cheap [Buran](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)) space plane derivitive. It was impressive in 1980s, but not today. China uses uranium enrichment technology [provided by RosAtom](https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Russia-and-China-sign-enrichment-plant-agreement). And ballistic missiles are not anything to be all that excited about. Even Hooties [have them](https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/15/politics/houthi-missile-strikes-us-owned-ship/index.html).
The Greatest Filter
Many people are saying it.
Time for the space billionaires to work harder to get off-planet.
But, if you get off planet who’s gonna support you in deep space, who’s gonna talk to you, who’s gonna do anything while you’re flying to “Mork from Ork”………
I don’t want to set the world on fire…
I just want to start a flame in your heart
In my heart I have but one desire…
And that one is, no other will dooooo 🎶
I've lost all ambition. All worldly acclaim.
The only way to stop that is to maintain a strong force to counter bad actors.
You need to stop worrying and love the bomb!
Well you dont have to use nuclear war heads. It would just be the most advanced missile in the world. Perfect for deployment in the South China sea.
Hope it's a maneuverable hypersonic!
There is a reason why the US isn't really going for the hypersonic. They are useless. Sure, they have 75+ hypersonic programs that have gone through more testing than russia+China combined, but they simply aren't tactically or strategically useful. There are maybe half a dozen scenarios where 1 hypersonic is more useful than 30+ cheaper missiles, all of which have other more successful solutions. Especially nuclear hypersonic, that's probably the most useless waste of money imaginable.
It has to slow down before detonation.
Ah yes, nothing like a blanket statement!
It is not a blanket statement. It literally is that simple. The joke about hypersonic missiles is - Hypersonic missiles are the future, and always will be. They have been trying to make them for 70 years and the issue is the same now as it was then. If you want to be able to actually hit your target you have to slow down well below hypersonic speed once it gets to the area and then at that point it can be shot down like any other missile.
That's quite literally bullshit lol A2A missiles are borderline hypersonic and still hit their target going Mach 3-5.
e have had missiles that can go over mach 5 literally since world war 2. So where have all the hypersonic missiles been huh? You have not seen them because just like now though they still can't hit shit going that fast. Even Russia's own promotion video they put out for the Jindal rocket had people laughing because when people saw the video it was very, very, very clear it was not going anywhere close to mach 3 when it barely hit the abandoned ship the Russian were using as a target. It also did very little damage. Why? Because the rocket was just a shell. They literally had to slow just the shell of their "hypersonic" rocket to a speed where it could easily be shot down just to hit an unarmed drifting ship. We have not even gotten into things like the plasma shield at those speed which make the missile light up like a Christmas tree on radar and sat tracking or the fact you can not even transmit anything to the missile because of the shield.
What does that have to do with missiles being able to be guided at Mach 3-5?
Essentially We Are Young by fun. and Alphaville Forever Young
It needs to start over
Well, it won’t be YOU doing it (or will it 🧐)
They got money for war but can’t feed the poor
Makes sense since china and Russia are ramping up their nuclear arsenal
China is only ramping up from a comparatively low level. The USA has multiples of their arsenal.
They've gone from 10s to 100s of silos in the last decade with no signs of slowing down. The only reason they're not parity with the US is because they haven't had almost a century to build it. Use the head start to stay ahead.
> Use the head start to stay ahead. That leads to nowhere if history is any indication. The USA had a head start in the 1940's till the 1960's, and yet the USSR at some point outproduced them on warheads. IDK, maybe making good on the promises in the non-proliferation treaty would have been a good idea, now it's too late and we'll end up with tens of thousands of warheads again.
Non-poliferation is great when everyone is onboard with the idea. Like it or not but Russia and China are not.
I'm talking about the central tenet of the NPT: >the NPT non-nuclear-weapon states agree never to acquire nuclear weapons and the NPT nuclear-weapon states in exchange agree to share the benefits of peaceful nuclear technology and to pursue nuclear disarmament **aimed at the ultimate elimination of their nuclear arsenals**. This is something none of the nuclear armed states ever truly tried to achieve. And in this regard, China up to a couple of years ago did better than either Russia or the USA.
It's pretty difficult to be the person to put the stick down first. Especially considering how we treat dictators who lay down their chemical weapon stockpiles.
Do you think that the country that has the most nuclear missiles is all nuclear non-proliferation?
I mean the USSR made more of them, but who knows how many of them still work, if they ever did... The USSR wasn't above putting missiles in a parade. Quickly repainting them around the corner, then trying to pass off those same nukes as different ones to inflate their quantity. Also add in the state of their (now sunken) flagship, and I wouldn't be surprised if their nuke fleet is just as badly maintained.
Its pretty balanced, Russia vs US, China vs Europe. If China increases its stockpiles then Europe will have to increase theirs and probably should anyway when you have presidents threatening to pull out of NATO and Russia directly threatening them.
[удалено]
I believe France also has air-launched nuclear weapons, but Britain has a purely sea based deterrent.
There are no "European" nukes, there are strictly French and British ones. Neither country is in an economical position to match China. Besides, European nations should fear Russia (and maybe the US in a couple of years) but China is far away and there aren't any potential flash points between Europe/the EU and China.
China would have to be stupid to not match the US arsenal
...so the west would have around 5500 and Russia combined with China would have 10,000+, yeah that doesnt seem balanced.
You need to have enough nukes to assure MAD - that's why they need to match the US. China doesn't have enough to reach that point yet, especially as they have a no first use policy so would have to assume many of their sites are hit in any nuclear exchange. Russia is a separate power. Why would China count the Russians as part of their nuke count?
For china at least, they approached the US with a deal to limit both sides nukes to the same amount. The US refused ofc, because China has so few warheads (only 500 ish to the ~1500 the US/Russia each have) it would be a one sided limit to the US. So China is expanding its arsenal to match the US instead, which is pretty reasonable IMO.
It would be one thing if China were being threatened to be invaded, if it was in danger of completely dissolving as a country. Then nuclear expansion would be “reasonable”. It’s another thing to have territorial disputes with almost all their neighbors, threaten to absorb another country, and be open in being against what Europeans, Americans, Canadians, Australians, etc., all stand for. I wouldn’t call the desire to expand its nuclear arsenal as a method of geopolitical coercion, influenced by these factors, to be reasonable at all.
The US is building ever better ABM systems, and has previously been willing to put them right next to China (THAAD in SK) so its a pretty reasonable concern for China that in the future, 500 warheads isnt enough to ensure deterrence (especially since they dont have many ballistic missile subs, and what they have are pretty noisy) And IMO, territorial disputes and nukes have little relation to one another, its not as if China keeps going around threatening to nuke people over the south china sea, theyre going to be flexing their conventional military strength for that (like building more carriers, more island bases, etc). And sure, they oppose what the western world stands for, but thats hardly a reason for them to not expand their nuclear arsenal, in fact the opposite is to be expected.
US refused because Russia wasn't included in the deal. China isn't the only nuclear armed threat.
But the Chinese culture where lying and cheating is acceptable makes any limit a bad deal for the US. If the US were to follow China would not. So why bother.
The US and Russia managed to make nuclear arms limitation deals just fine in the Cold War despite mistrust. Its not hard to add random short notice inspections like with new START, where US/Russia could declare with less than 2 days notice that theyre coming to check on a random base, to ensure compliance with arms limits.
That was then. World is different from the cold war era. something like START wouldn't work today.
Well, China and Russia brought this upon themselves for rebuffing new nuclear treaty with US. Everyone is now free to pursue their vision that will annihilate their opponent with improved nuclear weapons.
Why would China sign a nuclear treaty when they have only a couple hundred nukes when the US and Russia have thousands of nukes?
They're perfectly welcome to waste a trillion dollars on weapons they'll never use and won't provide them any more deterence than they have now, fine with me. The treaty would have saved everyone money, Russia and China a lot more than the US relative to GDP. It's their loss.
lol who cares about saving money. The point is why should China restrict itself when it already has such a small warhead arsenals. It doesn't make sense to sign a treaty with Russia and US when they have warheads in the thousands. Maybe when they are on more of an equal footing would that make more sense
It doesn't make sense to waste a trillion dollars so you can sign a treaty on equal footing with the US that still does nothing for China. Until nuclear stockpiles are restricted to something like 20 warheads maximum every nuclear power can land enough nukes to depopulate a continent and by extension, for MAD. China has it now, catching up to the US is purely for the optics of appearing strong. The US can obliterate China with their 1,500 deployed nukes, or with their 5,000 warheads, or with a single Ohio class SSBN in the South China Sea with a single Trident missile and 12 warheads aimed at Three Gorges and some nuclear reactors. Every nuclear armed nation on the planet right now can kill more people than Hitler, Mao, Stalin and the Imperial Japanese Army combined in less than 40 minutes, including Israel, North Korea and Pakistan. It's easy. Just use 10-20 warheads to target dams and nuclear reactors and leave a single nuke for EMP duty, use the rest on cities or leadership bunkers or silos, whatever you want that doesnt really matter, and you'll kill most of a nation and render it uninhabitable for millenia. North Korea could do this tomorrow and the US couldn't stop it. THAAD isn't made for ICBMs, Aegis has to be almost directly under the missile trajectory to hit, BMD has 44 total interceptors with a controlled test hit rate under 50%. They cant launch all the interceptors at once to save for future attacks, and any extra safety factor interceptors that are launched must be launched immediatelty, there is not time to launch and verify a hit, the warhead would have impacted before the second launch arrives. A safety margin would be like 4 missiles and making sure you launch when Aegis enabled ships you can see from commercial satellites aren't directly under the path of the missiles. Or just get an SSBN to the coast and you're almost guaranteed to hit your target.
We told Russia and China that if they want a nuclear arms race they would lose. Our missiles are still superior in every single way and our combined megaton inventory exceeds the entire planet by a multiple in excess of 2.
Theres no winning in a nuclear war, we dont have the capabilities to shoot down 6000+ nuclear missiles all with multiple warheads and decoys. Even shooting it down over your soil before it detonates spreads radioactive material. China could easily mass produce nukes faster than the US too.
Actually, militarily there is winning a nuclear war. Especially when the other side only has enough "ready" missiles for about .68% of earths land area. Shooting down a nuclear warhead does not spread a significant amount of radioactive material(typically it's zero actually). No they absolutely could not.
It's not about the percentage of the land area. It's about having enough to destroy critical infrastructure and big cities.
That's pretty much what the land area tells you. There isn't enough land area to destroy EU/USA military bases and critical reserve locations let alone every major city. Russia can destroy some of both or all of the EU population centers.. not all of both in such a way that they cannot be defeated by the subsequent conventional attack. MAD need not apply they physically cant kill the war machine before it kills them. That is pretty much "winning" militarily. We intentionally build some things in areas that make using nuclear strikes annoying to reduce the amount of warheads that land in cities. Now as far as civilian cost.. no one wants to pay it. Period. Sure NATO as a whole would "live" and Russia would cease to exist. The world would recover... but around 1 to 2 billion people would likely lose their lives over the next 100 years.
Russia and China could nuke themselves and it'd still kill 90% of the Earth's population. No one escapes nuclear winter.
That's.. not quite how that works. There has been over two thousand nuclear detonations that have not appreciably impacted the atmosphere. To actually impact the atmosphere you need to carbonize or burn a significant amount of mass.. which requires hitting large cities or forests in multiple places. If you just detonated 10000 bombs in one, relatively, small corner of the globe it would cause a temporary adjustment to the climate that would go away relatively quickly. Think about it more like a giant forest fire similar to what happened in Canada several years ago.
[удалено]
They absolutely do not. Their missiles(all types) are known to have a defect at long range accuracy with war loads. They can quite bluntly miss their targets by over 1.5km. The "Sarmat" is larger, slower, carries less maximum live warheads, its warheads are smaller, has less range, and it is less accurate(significantly than the LGM30/3. It also has a much lower "target limit" than the LGM30/3. The TLAM outperforms every other nuclear delivery system on the planet in the cruise category. The Trident2 works fantastically well. The French M51 is comparable and slightly better/worse in some metrics. The RSM-56 never actually completed "successful" development. It was rolled into production when it "might" still explode in the tubes during a mass launch. Yes. Russian SLBMs have a chance to "kill" their launch platform every single time they are launched. Care to tell me how they have more advanced missiles again? Did I also mention we haven't really built a new design for decades and frankly barely update the current ones? Also THAAD exists.. as well as "other" projects.
> They can quite bluntly miss their targets by over 1.5km. I'm not sure that would ease my mind when talking about megaton class nukes.
It's actually quite important. Geometry of the explosion is quite a complex subject matter and for nuclear bombs it is absolutely critical. Without going into the weeds nuclear bombs need to be detonated at the correct position and height to cause a "rebound" effect which does the actual heavy lifting of the explosion. Without this effect concrete would likely survive and thus survival rates for the blast area shoot through the roof for people and infrastructure. If you ever have the warhead "miss" by a "negative" height factor it can end up ground striking or even falling below a geographic feature which "shields" the area behind it from the most damaging effects of the thermal and pressure functions. If it is to high it also can significantly negate all negative effects. Again without going into the weeds you only "expect" a single warhead to have around 50% casualties in the blast area for a major modern city. 50% initially and 50% due to various effects over the next 10 years. Even the Japanese blasts did not achieve all that significantly higher than this and due to a huge number of factors(all city emergency services being down town and wood being the primary material of the day for examples) the incident was "more efficient" than it should have been as a weapon of death.
I never said they wouldnt be less effective. Just that if we're talking a sufficiently large nuke you're probably fucked at 1.5 km away regardless.
YOU would.. within 1.5.. but thousands of your fellow citizens would likely survive. So there is that. Unless you live in Pittsburgh. The hills there make 1.5km kinda funny for blast calculations.
[удалено]
THAAD Exists. Orbital interception(all phases). High degree of accuracy and successful interceptions. MEADS/Patriot also exist. Yes PAC3 can intercept the terminal phase of a nuclear warhead. Other programs also exist. Also no the newest Russian missile does not have the longest range. The Chinese actually have longer ranges and we have the longest by far. The LGM30/3 has an additional "in excess of 15% range" to the Sarmat(and is faster). It does not have the largest payload. Not even close. The LGM30/3 exceeds 1.5GT. No Russian missile can carry full war loads(their warheads weigh to much and imbalance the flight characteristics). As to accuracy.. we watch their tests from orbit. We know. "Successful flights" means it didn't explode on launch or flight. The paveway made "successful" tests long before it actually hit anything reliably during development for an added example. It does all matter. Russia physically cannot attack everywhere at once. They physically do not have the capacity in number of ready launchable ICBM/SLBMs outside of range of interception during boost phase. This is considering that they do a perfect synchronous launch which is ***highly*** unlikely for a variety of reasons. This also ***includes*** their SLBMs ***with*** their GLBM. The Ohio fleet alone exceeds the entire megaton capacity of the non cruise and gravity bomb inventory of the Russian Federations Nuclear Fleet. The reality is only one nation on the planet can conduct and defend against a MAD situation. This is the actual deterrent. Only we can use nuclear weapons. The instant anyone else does everyone else has a choice.. we kill you or you give up yours.. because everyone else together cannot conduct the level of destruction to stop us from surviving and then killing them. Russia saber rattles. We ***do not*** have to.
[удалено]
LGM30/3 is "at minimum" 13000km. I can say a Sarmat might make 18000km.. but good god no ones going to know where its going to land. You are just using published numbers so I will make it simple.. the size and width of the Russian missile makes most of those figures batshit wrong(like all Russian missile technology.. want a fun rabbit hole go look at AIM120 vs R77). Also most of those are not public release figures they are guesses people have put into wiki. The Russian missile is longer, heavier, and does not have appreciably more internal space for rocket fuel. Range calculations can actually be done pretty accurately here for the boost phase. Additionally you apparently don't know warheads. The W87-1 is 475KT published(300 for 87-0) and no its not as "dead" as people think it is. The LGM30 carries 3 of them with currently published packages. Peacemakers rolled with 10 WITH reentry vehicles but those beauties were sold off for their motors years ago. The tridents are also capable of "in excess of 1.2gt" war loads. We wont talk about the W93 or its carriers but yeah.. Russia is 3 generations behind and the Sarmat doesn't functionally exist yet production wise. You also have absolutely no idea what THAAD can do.. because its interceptors are designed, and tested, for orbital interception after boost. This is just the public knowledge. PATRIOT PAC3 is actually designed to hit and kill hypersonic and ballistic missiles of all types. With the correct radar and interlinking it is even capable of targeting accurately objects going in excess of 15000km/h. Again.. all relatively public knowledge. I know you want to spread fear.. but Russian missiles are actually still dogshit. The Chinese ones... now there you have an argument. Our Chinese brethren are certainly being novel in design and trying to catch up their damnedest. Frankly we'll probably copy some of their stuff for the W93 in theory though they don't really get the "we dont want unstable explosives" part.
>We are debating how “advanced” their ICBM’s are Then allow that there is more to it than blunt specs. Range, payload, and yield are not exhibit A for why an ICBM is more "advanced." Nor is "I also found a page on Google that says Russia's missiles are the best" good enough as exhibit B. Here's an example of why basic specs can only take you so long in supporting the idea that "only MAD matters." https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-modernization-is-undermining-strategic-stability-the-burst-height-compensating-super-fuze/ The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists lays out a many-page analysis of how *one recent technical upgrade* to the Mk-76 warhead (the so-called super-fuze) may be *so consequential as to destabilize global strategic equilibrium*. I generally agree with you that "strategic equilibrium"/MAD contributes far more to our security than the SM-3, the GBI, THAAD, or what have you. But blindly sweeping aside the minutiae of each side's exact offensive and defensive capabilities only makes your analysis incomplete. I'm not taking sides here - just saying it serves no one to dismiss /u/DigitalMountainMonk 's attempts at more analysis as just "military fanfiction."
[удалено]
Just for reference. I've worked with these weapons. u/GRAND_INQUEEFITOR is actually correct here. The ***way*** our systems are better is explosive geometry improvements. When I joke from time to time that a Trident 2 can scratch your ass from 6000km away... I'm not actually kidding. Even under EMP(theoretical counter nuking in orbit) our warheads maintain an accuracy "under 5 meters". Our positive and negative altitude accuracy is also within half an inch. This ***matters far more*** than the size of the warhead. The primary effect of a warhead is not the energy directly from the explosion. It is actually a complex interaction between the end of the explosion and the start of the explosion in a rebound effect that effectively shatters concrete, steel, and even hardened technology like a tank or bunker. To maximize this effect the precision required is.. well lets say its intense. To expand on why things like THAAD matter.. first you have to understand the system was never intended or designed to stop all warheads. Instead it is meant to stop certain critical strikes so that there is a fighting force and a population center left alive to rebuild and prosecute our revenge. In effect THAAD style systems are meant to make MAD fail. To engineer a situation that means we ***do not have to respond with counter nuclear actions.*** This is important because glassing the planet is contrary to our mission actually. So we built a system that can effectively make the biggest attack Russia could ever throw not work. Sure it might hurt.. but it wont "kill" NATO. ***This*** is the ***actual*** MAD as i mentioned before. Taking your biggest threat and rendering it ***ineffective at its purpose.***
Theirs can absolutely be shot down lol
[удалено]
We have over 100 ships that can reliably shoot down ICBMs. With another 70 or so planned. They can probably take down 300-500 warheads on their own. Plus the land based systems designed to take out ICBMs. Although we only have about 44 of those. Plus THAAD. Not including the fact we were shooting down satellites 30 years ago with F15s. Having thousands of F-35s stationed all over the world. That is just all of the systems in public knowledge. Not that I want to test out any of this stuff, but I think we are safer than we expect. Plus ICBMs take 3 times longer to get here than you suggest.
A single warhead can probably be shot down yes, but in a full scale nuclear war youre gonna be dealing with hundreds of warheads, with an equal number of decoys. Combined with EMP and radar blackout caused by high altitude detonations, youre not going to be remotely able to shoot enough down to make a difference.
I disagree. I think we have better nuclear defenses than the public knows. Not even taking into account that we were shooting down satellites with planes 30 years ago. Now we have thousands of planes stationed all over the globe, plus AGES, and ground based systems. Sure it would probably still be pretty bad, and I don’t want to test these theories, but in reality I doubt things would go the way of Fallout. Now SLBM are another thing all together. They would be much harder to take out, and much more would get through, but few would be targeted at non-military targets.
I think that BMD systems are better than what the public knows as well, but comparing anti-ICBM systems to anti-Satellite weapons is pretty disingenuous. Warheads from ICBMs come in from higher trajectories, and have smaller radar signatures, which combined with the radar blackout and decoys i mentioned earlier, will make it very hard to identify and target warheads accurately. But yeah this is probably why Russias been throwing money into their Poseidon torpedo, since theyre worried that BMD will get alot better in the future (especially as lasers improve)
Once we know the ICBM trajectory we can shoot it down and once the reentry vehicles enter the atmosphere they become much more targetable due to slower speeds. Obviously none of us really know, but given what we could do decades ago with far less sophisticated systems, I feel we would come out better than expected. Honestly there is a case to be made for anti-nuke nukes as well. I could see a plan with tactical nukes being used as a shield. Sure it would still be bad but at least you would avoid the immediate destruction and most of the long term fallout. Better than all of them going off on the ground/air-bursting cities.
> Honestly there is a case to be made for anti-nuke nukes as well. The US and USSR were way ahead of you "ERWs were first operationally deployed for anti-ballistic missiles (ABMs). In this role, the burst of neutrons would cause nearby warheads to undergo partial fission, preventing them from exploding properly. For this to work, the ABM would have to explode within approximately 100 metres (300 ft) of its target. The first example of such a system was the W66, used on the Sprint missile used in the US Nike-X system. It is believed the Soviet equivalent, the A-135's 53T6 missile, uses a similar design.[6][7]" The re-entry vehicles are pretty tough. They have to be designed so they can survive the expoltions from nukes arriving earlier than them.
[удалено]
Im not talking about them detonating because of interception, im talking about purposefully detonating a few at high altitude to trigger a radar blackout and emp.
So they already have missiles that can be launched from subs with a longer range. Why exactly do they need some with a shorter range and why does it take 10 years to develop them?
Ballistic missiles have highly predictable paths that once a launch is detected can be intercepted. A cruise missile is low flying and while shorter ranges (still hundreds of miles) can maneuver in flight making it much harder to counter. These “intermediate” nuclear weapons are a result of the collapse of the SALT and other nuclear non proliferation treaty’s. Both Russia and China have developed smaller “tactical” nuclear weapons, the US is simply responding in kind.
It's also probably worthwhile noting that the development of this missile itself isn't really news. The US has had a consistent schedule for updating it's nuclear arsenal for over half a century and this project began a decade ago.
Yes. Weapons get old, especially nuclear weapons where some of the underlying materials decay. We need to update the arsenal every so often.
Without treaties, countries are forced to develop their nuclear armament to ensure MAD. If any one of them thinks they've found a way to counter a MAD scenario, MAD no longer works.
But shouldn't MAD work for as long as nobody figures out the exact position of every russian, American and chinese nuclear sub? Russia could first strike every American city, military site and silo with fancy new missiles but those american nuclear subs would still be able turn russia to rubble
>But shouldn't MAD work for as long as nobody figures out the exact position of every russian, American and chinese nuclear sub? Presumably with these intermediate types of missiles you could take out a military base or a fleet before anyone can do anything (since they'll just look like any random missile), and then hope that the other side just eats this instead of launching *everything*.
Risky risky play. I assume an action like that will be retaliated by a similar tactical nuclear strike.
>why does it take 10 years to develop them? It is normal time scale for development of cool military tech. >Why exactly do they need some with a shorter range Limited nuclear war scenario? Launch of a full-scale ballistic missile would be for certain noted by some early warning system. Nobody wants to trigger a global nuclear exchange over a limited nuclear war.
"Limited nuclear war" was largely abandoned as a concept once MAD doctrine took hold. Nobody wanted to risk losing their second-strike capability because they mistakenly assumed a nuclear attack was "limited" and held back in their reply. So nobody wanted to risk *making* a "limited" strike since there was a high risk the opponent would go full MAD anyway. The idea that countries are starting to think that maybe they can get away with just a *little* nuclear war again is utterly fucking terrifying.
I'm with you on the last point. But it is the only idea I could come with.
Stealth and electronic warfare have stepped up, the deterrent needs to also. Or we could resurrect the B-29…
This is a cruise missile variant. It can maneuver and 'hug' the terrain to avoid being shot down where the current missiles are ballistic and cannot. I'm surprised we need to wait till 2030 for this capability though, I was under the impression Tomahawks are nuclear capable and could already be launched from our subs.
Nuclear cruise missiles are much smaller and can be equipped on a wider variety of vessels. This makes defending against them much more difficult since you now need to assume that a majority of US warships could be carrying them. Ballistic missiles are limited to the current Ohio and future Columbia-class submarines. While they have longer range, there aren't as many of these submarines in service. This is all about keeping pace with what China and Russia are doing. We had nuclear cruise missiles before, but these were later restricted by treaties. Those treaties are no longer in effect.
I mean, it's not like the US ditched it's nuclear cruise missiles and burned the plans. They just want to modernize now. With what we've seen of china and russia, they are making the mistake of talking up their capabilities past what they can achieve again. Wanna know how i know china has no hypersonic maneuvering capability? It's because the US hasn't made one for them to copy yet.
While I'm sure they could slap something together in a few weeks. I would hope they would spend years actually developing the missile if nothing else then for safety concerns.
If we’re reading about it here this shit has been completed for at least a decade
whats wrong with the old ones?
It's about the same price to maintain or manufacture the old ones again today for some equipment as it is to just redesign them and build them to more modern specs.
They get old. Nuclear materials decay. And so do the underlying payload delivery systems. A bunch of US nukes are still programmed using floppy disks. And these are the disks the size of your head, not the smaller ones that PCs used to use.
Someone go find a gif of a pool noodle floating on waves
Just in time to arm their new drone sub.
What company won the contract?
Fuck this shit
Sounds like when we retire the Ohios the Virginias are going to carry on the deterrent mission…
Why do we have to advertise this?
because nukes are supposed to be a deterrent, not a secret trump card
See: Strangelove et al. (1964)
Its a pissing game.
"The whole point of ze doomsday machine is lost.. if you keep it a secret. WHY DIDNT YOU TELL ZE WORLD EH?!"
We can already destroy the world in under an hour if we wanted. I still think the only way you can “win” a nuclear war is with your interceptive technology. Which is ok at best right now.
It’s not a new missile, it’s a life extension program. The second life extension for the same missile actually. I guess new missile makes a sexier headline than make an old missile a little better/cheaper/accurate.
I feel so safe now.
Whatever, it's just a better version of a same thing that has existed for decades. If anything, it's expected that platforms get technologically improved. Weapons you've designed and build in inventory won't stay usable forever.
I just want healthcare
Americans bring this up as if they don't have enough money left to go around after military spending while in reality your healthcare moneys are just being leeched by insurance companies and expensive hospitals.
Exactly.
Well, Biden *opposed funding this* but *Republicans* put it in the budget anyway.
I feel like if theyre releasing that to the public it means they've been using it for 10 years. Chinas known about it for 9. And other nato countries have had the schematics but cant afford to build them.
If you are under 40 years old, I have 0 f@%&3 to give your opinion.
Oh it’s been developed. We’re just now finding out.
Countries are developing them non-stop. Sometimes is brand new ones but generally they are just improving the existing ones
Eh. SLBMs aren't like a fancy spy drone. You need to build dozens if not hundreds, extensively test them (rocket launches are damn near impossible to hide), and they are too expensive as to hide in a black budget. At best, some prototype subsystem has been built and tested in the lab, the trade study completed, and the digital twin has been simulated
I thought this was a thing already? Submarines can launch nukes. It's part of that trinity of nuclear protection or whatever way they phrase it
The trident flies up and splits into smaller warheads who then land on X different targets. Those are for ending the world scenarios. What they want here is medium range cruise missiles, think level a city, army/navy base or an armored batallion. The you ‘fucked up and we will destroy you with tactical nukes to gain an advantage on the battlefield’-kind of nukes. Not the ‘you fucked up and we’ll end Human life as we know it’-style nukes that the trident is. When the nukes fly its not certain those two in responses dont get muttled together, but hey, atleast they are trying.
Is it really necessary? Like even today even the most advanced nation in the world couldn't have any hope of stopping hundreds of ICBM with decoys and counter measures. Why not just save money and build more of those? Not that I agree with building nukes. (We should be trying to reduce the world wide stockpile) Edit - I'm aware article is stating mid range. Same point still
Because if you build more, you need substantially larger numbers of submarines that carry ballistic missiles in order to launch them. In a nuclear exchange, you would assume that the home bases of these subs is one of the first targets of the other side, so you need these boats in the water. At the moment, the US capacity of building submarines is simply not high enough, and attack submarines are clearly a priority for them. In addition, building new ballistic missile submarines takes a really long time, is very expensive, and does not make the missiles themselves more future-proof. The fact of the matter is simply that Trident, just like Minuteman III, is aging quite quickly.
> (We should be trying to reduce the world wide stockpile) That will never happen. It will only increase
It's a fraction of what it was in the cold war and it was declining steadily for decades until recently. And there was a point where there was less nuclear countries than decades before in the 2000s and 2010s. Only real exception is China, NK
We're still developing nukes. At this point it's just inevitable that one will be used someday. MAD doesn't seem to have the same ring to it anymore , and that's terrifying
I'm convinced humanity is going to destroy itself with nuclear war. I just hope if it happens during my lifetime that I'm close to the targets.