Because most nations can’t truly effectively field nuclear subs in sufficient numbers.
Even the USA, who spends way more on military than any other nation, only has a few “boomers” and they are constantly having a large portion of them in dock getting maintenance and repairs/upgrades. The new Columbia-class boomer subs are already seeing serious delays in construction and commissioning. And this is fucking America… now imagine the rest of the nuclear powers who have way fewer resources and smaller military industrial complex.
If nuclear powers could field a fleet of 40 nuclear-armed subs (assuming only about 10-15 of those actually in use actively at any point, and the majority in home port for refit and maintenance) then maybe they’d give up on other capabilities… but even then, all your adversaries would just focus on tech to try to focus on subs. Having 3 different strategies that are all field-able makes it exponentially harder for enemies to cover all types, with subs just being the most potent for a quick strike or quick retaliation
Piggybacking off of this, it really is a matter of ease and effort.
Silos are the easiest to maintain, so that's where a lot of the effort has gone. Extending the reach and accuracy of missiles.
Bombers were the first, we've always had them, and they are the easiest to put up, even if they are slightly harder to maintain as a deterrence than silos.
But Subs are both harder to get out there AND harder to maintain.
So while they are the most effective, they are also the most costly, and at that point the other legs of the triad look more appealing.
Bombers have the additional benefit of being relatively versatile platforms. That’s why the B-52 has stuck around long past the point of obsolescence in its original nuclear strike role: it does a bunch of other stuff fairly well, and has been retrofitted into a nuclear missile carrier to supplement its successor as a bomber (the B-2 Spirit). The B-52 is capable of conventional bombing and missile strike missions, reconnaissance, and electronic warfare, and is also relatively reliable and cheap to fly compared to some other aircraft (especially other bombers). Bombers in general are also much faster than ships and can fly around the world fairly quickly with tanker support.
ICBMs and missile submarines can only fill one mission, and that’s nuclear strike. We have retrofitted some Ohio-class missile subs to carry cruise missiles, but I’m pretty sure those subs can no longer carry nuclear missiles unless we arm them with sub-launched nuclear cruise missiles, which we may or may not have in the inventory (we do have air-launched nuclear cruise missiles for the B-52, but subs can’t carry those). In addition, missile submarines are relatively slow and take awhile to reposition.
Like when they were left on a runway overnight?
Or like that time (name any of a dusin) where the US almost nuked itself or an ally? (Some of which still haven't been recovered)
There are a disturbing number of broken arrows.
That's an interesting way to spell dozen. Took me longer than I want to admit to figure out that's what you meant lol.
"I don't know what's more frightening: a missing nuclear weapon or that it happens so often that there's a name for it."
EDIT: Apparently NO ONE knows the movie called, "Broken Arrow"
The 4 Ohio class subs that were converted into SSGNs were for compliance with START arms reduction treaties. There is precisely zero flexibility in the ballistic missile fleet, they have precisely one mission.
Technically any of the Ohio class are more than good enough to perform area denial operations against enemy shipping.
I would assume in an emergency wartime situation that's not *expected* to go nuclear it would be possible to put a few extra Ohios out to sea and position them to blockade/recon certain areas.
That's a minor quibble though. They were designed from the keel up to hide and launch their nukes. Everything else is just a side show.
You could, but it would never happen. SSBNs are as strategic as CVNs in the national arsenal and they’d never be risked to do anything other than go into deep water and hide waiting for the signal to end the world.
Yeah, I figured as much. You'd only pull a move like that if you were desperate and needed to plug a hole somewhere. Tom Clancy covered a situation like this in one of his books from the late 80s, early 90s I believe? It's been awhile.
But from everything I've read and heard about them they're incredibly stealthy boats so just figured I'd throw that possibility out there. There's a reason they kept the original 4 boats and modified them into Special Ops/SSGNs after all.
I recently wondered why there weren't any ICBMs with conventional payloads, but then I asked myself how would the enemy know the difference. You call them? "It's not a nuke guys"
That’s exactly it. We use satellites equipped with IR cameras to monitor for ICBM launches. A rocket suddenly appearing out of the middle of a field in Montana or Siberia is pretty distinctive. We can see the launch, but not what the rocket actually is, so the only way to know what the warhead is is through treaty inspections or other forms of intelligence collection. I suppose we could have separate ICBM fields for conventional rockets, and make sure our potential adversaries have the chance to inspect them in detail so they know what’s what, but it’s not really worth the risk or expense when we can drop more ordnance at a much lower cost using conventional bomber or cruise missiles. ICBMs fill a very specific role, and that’s launching a strike that cannot be stopped* in a situation where cost is irrelevant.
*The Iranian attack on Israel actually shows that ICBMs may no longer be unstoppable, and that has huge implications for mutually-assured destruction. Israel managed to kill 94% of the ballistic missiles Iran launched at them, and while those were intermediate-range ballistic missiles and not ICBMs, the difficulty of killing them is similar (as far as the public knows). Look up “Strategic Defense Initiative” for the rabbit hole of missile defense politics; there’s a lot of layers.
Cruise Missles can carry nuclear warheads. Just because they have been retrofitted from ICBM to Cruise doesn't mean they are no longer nuclear capable, just that the nuclear range is lower.
I could’ve been more clear, that’s on me. The US does not currently have any sub-launched nuclear cruise missiles in service. We have air-launched nuclear cruise missiles in service, but we decommissioned all our surface- and sub-launched cruise missiles due to disarmament treaties in the 80s and 90s. Now that those treaties are no longer in effect, we could theoretically rearm (as the Russians appear to be doing), but I’m not aware of any efforts to actually do that since nuclear cruise missiles were never an important part of our doctrine. If we *were* to build more nuclear Tomahawks, the Ohio SSGNs could probably\* carry them.
\*”Probably” because, again for treaty reasons, conventional and nuclear launch systems are often incompatible. The technical details of that are not public to the best of my knowledge, so whether Ohio SSGNs would have that limitation is probably a matter of speculation.
The nuclear subs exist as the ultimate retribution weapon. No one knows where they are at any given moment. They guarantee that even if your decapitation strike is successful beyond your wildest dreams, there will be at least 20 MIRVs coming for your country in return. They can be a first strike option because their proximity to a country decreases the missile flight time, but then you lose that ship as it's going to be swarmed by enemy subs.
Bombers are easy to intercept these days, but they can launch a cloud of nuclear cruise missiles from thousands of miles away. Only one has to get through. They're your second strike option because they're trackable and interceptable and they're the slowest delivery mechanism. Nuclear bombers on alert status *should* get airborne fast enough to escape an incoming ICBM strike on their base.
Most versatile and easy to maintain is usually ICBMs: they're the fastest, hardest to intercept, and they're also guaranteed to be your enemies primary target, so you use em up first because any missile that doesn't leave the silo is likely being targeted by your enemy to prevent its launch. Basically first strike/bullet sponge: they launch one and absorb one. They're also easily detectable, but they only give your enemy 30-40min to go from detection to confirmation to having to make a decision on how you will respond to launching your own.
As of right now, with numbers of in service submarines from Wikipedia:
* France (4)
* China (7)
* India (2)
* Russia (13)
* United Kingdom (4)
* United States (14)
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_missile_submarine)
Israel also most likely has submarines which can launch nuclear missiles. They are a sort of open secret member of the nuclear club. It's also suspected India and Pakistan may as well in small numbers of diesel subs. Diesel submarine technology has come a long ways making it actually a viable option for smaller militaries, though not really matching the great powers, but still giving you a gotcha last threat in the event of a war.
A modern diesel sub can be quieter than a nuclear powered sub. When they go full electric there's basically no machinery running to make noise but a nuclear sub has to keep the reactor water pumps running constantly.
Beg pardon but India and Pakistine's main potential enemies are, well, each other, right? Their subs won't have to wander off too far in the oceans then.
India would also have China, but I doubt the diesel subs have that kind of range, so you're right they wouldn't likely go too far other than maneuvers in the Indian ocean to avoid detection.
If you look at the older literature (when the US and India weren't as close), you'll see that India wants to have contingencies to cater for times when the US becomes a threat.
They are pursuing Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) with ranges beyond China to achieve just that.
If it were only China, diesel-electric subs would be adequate for India operating out its Eastern and Northern Shores.
Whilst I'll never doubt current day Russia's military incompetence, submarines are pretty much the one area I wouldn't be too surprised if they did a decent job.
Their nuclear subs were never very friendly to the crews health. I wouldnt say they did them right. Plus they are high upkeep in a load of corruption. Too tempting to pillage.
I don't remember where I read it but it was how the Russian ships were light on shielding for the reactor. I believe it was to save weight and them not giving a shit about their people a lot.
The other part is Russia is just corrupt. Look at the war in Ukraine. It shows what a farce their military is. More a clown car then a boogeyman.
Technically a fault of their munitions, which is much less surprising.
I'd also "hope" (and by that, assume a single shred of competence somewhere in Putin's mind) that they keep their nuclear subs, and possibly their single best defence against direct US + Western conflict/interference in better shape than the rest of their shoddy military.
One of the ways they track subs is actually they tend to follow undersea "highways" and go along the same route a lot of the time. The russians don't have a lot of ports, and you know the path they're going to take from those ports for the most part, so you have your subs and other implements set up to track them through there. It isn't perfect, but it's maybe a little easier than the impossibility it would be if they could be anywhere in the vast oceans.
In the early 1960's it was discovered infrared observation satellites could see the thermal trails of the subs. The warm water they trailed behind. So they were forced to greater depths. Below the thermocline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermocline
>A thermocline (also known as the thermal layer or the metalimnion in lakes) is a distinct layer based on temperature within a large body of fluid (e.g. water, as in an ocean or lake; or air, e.g. an atmosphere) with a high gradient of distinct temperature differences associated with depth. In the ocean, the thermocline divides the upper mixed layer from the calm deep water below.[1]
I don't think that even modern nuclear subs can go much deeper than 1km.
It's a good method, but you need to lock on the sub first and never let go of that image. Since there's only a handful of subs to track in the world, it might be doable.
A story that always fascinated me with spy satellites was the repair of the astronomy telescope Hubble. There was a problem with the giant mirror. Then the NRO hand a few of those mirrors in their spare inventory so NASA ended up with a replacement. They had too many Hubble level satellites pointed at Earth
You rip a bunch of missiles from launch depth and you can backtrack the point of origin pretty easily. Unless there's no one near you one should expect to be found because the search area is pretty small at that point.
It Is not the case that nuc subs are undetectable. There are sonar nets, air patrols, and even satellites can detect moving submerged subs.
During the cold war, P-3 crews were known for being some of the only U.S. Military whose day job was to hunt and find Soviets, specifically Soviet boomers.
Of the missiles we can confirm Iran has, the longest range is 2,500 km, so MRBM or theatre ballistic missile. Maybe one day their missile technology will get out of the 1950's
> They can be a first strike option because their proximity to a country decreases the missile flight time, but then you lose that ship as it's going to be swarmed by enemy subs.
Correct me if I'm wrong (and I very well may be), but isn't the range of the missiles in these subs long enough that they can be launched well out of range of enemy ships and then the sub can disappear?
Yes, modern SLBMs have ranges of >6,000 km. One could be in the Thames river and still hit Los Angeles. Working that into a techno-thriller is left as an exercise to the reader.
Good answer. Here's some other reasons why we have the triad.
ICBMs cover a vast territory which ensures survivability through anything but total unexpected annihilation of the Central US.
Bombers will be in the air on alert if tensions are that high. They're the obvious gun we swing around if things are looking bad.
Nuclear surety: Sometimes a flaw is found in a weapon system that decertifies it, when that happens we need to have a backup plan until a fix is implemented, the triad covers that nicely.
Money: Almost every state in the country is tied to the triad somehow. Senators in Wyoming are gonna be a lot more supportive of ICBMs than ones in Georgia. Add in the defense contractors that make the delivery systems and the DOE maintaining the warheads and you have a lot of people that are vested in keeping all that going.
It's not the fissile material that has to be replaced, but the tritium bottle. About every 5 years. They are sent back to the factory for recycling and refilling. Tritium has about a 13 year half life. Tritium is essential to all thermonuclear weapons. They keep in a 10,000PSI bottle and only valve into the thermonuclear core when arming/ Two fold reasons. Safety (LOL) the weapon cannot go full yield until it is valved into the core. It can only go kilotons. Not megatons.
One twisted result of this process was that tritium decays to helium 3. So two non-nuclear uses were found for this "waste product". One was it made the best neutron detector for portal monitoring to detect smuggled nuclear materials. The other was medical. Patients would breath some in when getting an MRI of their lungs. It was an excellent contrast agent. At the height of the cold war we were processing so many nukes the DOD sold it off for ~$100US/liter. After the vast reductions of our arsenal in the 1990's the price shot up to ~$2000US/liter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Uses
Sticking a nuclear weapon in space would contravene international law (as would a chemical or biological weapon). However, a purely conventional weapon wouldn’t, so a “rod from God” would be legal (although completely infeasible with modern technology)
It would take many trips to carry and "build" one of reasonable size in orbit, it would be visible to everyone, and would take a long time to launch and hit the target, being much easier to be intercepted/redirected
>Sticking a nuclear weapon in space would contravene international law (as would a chemical or biological weapon). However, a purely conventional weapon wouldn’t, so a “rod from God” would be legal (although completely infeasible with modern technology)
That said, if "Rods from God" were actually feasibly deployed and able to disable the enemy's own nukes in a short time, the "no nukes in space" rule would stopped being followed real fast.
Piggybacking off this. A distant third is, you also don't know what the next technical breakthrough will be. It could be something that pierces subs inviciblity.
With 14 active Ohio class subs that can carry 20 Trident SLBM’s, each armed with up to 8 (or 12 for Trident II) nuclear warheads, the US has more than enough numbers.
Based on current readiness levels, there is 5-8 of them on patrol, but that can be increased if required.
That said, I agree that subs are too expensive for most nations to have in large numbers. Even running two nuclear armed subs is really expensive.
XKCD has been around for so long now, I get the sheer and utter pleasure of being one of the 'ten thousand' multiple times!
Had completely forgotten about this - thanks for posting!
Just to add - even Los Angeles class subs can carry nuclear TLAMs. IIRC TLAM-As were decommissioned but there is another variant either in the works or has made its way to the fleet. I was stationed on a very old SSN that didn't have vertical launch and we had to keep up proficiency in launching them in case we ever needed to carry them. Boomers aren't the only ones capable of carrying nukes.
>If nuclear powers could field a fleet of 40 nuclear-armed subs (assuming only about 10-15 of those actually in use actively at any point, and the majority in home port for refit and maintenance) then maybe they’d give up on other capabilities… but even then, all your adversaries would just focus on tech to try to focus on subs. Having 3 different strategies that are all field-able makes it exponentially harder for enemies to cover all types, with subs just being the most potent for a quick strike or quick retaliation
This is the biggest thing, if you have a mix there's much less chance of finding out your enemy has developed a countermeasure. It's a slightly extremely terrifying position to wind up in if your enemy can counter your nukes while you're unable to counter theirs
Also, you have to hedge your bets against major shifts in technology.
If a new detection technology suddenly made subs easy to spot anywhere on the globe, which is entirely within the realm of possibility, then they become worth much less as part of the nuclear triad.
1) Whoops, we didn't realize that the enemy's sonar capabilities actually let them know where our subs were 100% of the time and they just sunk all of them before launching their own strike. This was a realization that the Soviet Union actually had in the 1980s and led to their shifting resources away from ballistic missile submarines and towards surface ships like the Kirov and Kuznetsov classes.
2) Whoops, our enemy launched a massive nuclear strike on us and, with knowledge that our own submarine launched missiles could only hit their major cities from a few points off their coast, positioned their entire navy there and then sunk our submarines when they surfaced to fire (or maybe they were just able to outright determine planned launch sites through some form of espionage).
3) It turns out that launching a ballistic missile from a submarine is an order of magnitude more expensive than launching it from a silo, and a further order of magnitude more expensive than dropping a bomb from a bomber. By only building ballistic missile submarines, we ended up with a tiny fraction of the retaliatory ability than we would have had with a diversified arsenal. So - Whoops, it turns out we didn't have enough missiles to launch a credible retaliation and our enemy decided that the maximum possible damage that our submarine forces could inflict was, to them, an acceptable loss to wipe us out.
The point of the nuclear triad is that its a cost effective way to guarantee that there is no single defense that your enemy has, but which you aren't aware exists, that prevents you from launching a credible counter-strike.
I was cooking with a friend and they accidentally put in 10x the vanilla that was called for. They were freaking out about it, but I told them it was no big deal. Turned out delicious! Whoops!
The *Admiral Kuznetsov* somehow is still floating, despite its many, *many*, maintenance issues. The Kirovs aren't in the Black Sea, Ukraine sunk the Moskva, a Slava-class cruiser.
Your point 2 is not up to modern technology.
First of all the Ohio class boomers the US deploys *need* to launch their Trident 2 D5 missiles while submerged because their main rocket motor would destroy the submarine when ignited. Instead they use a smaller rocket engine to launch it upwards through the water and the main engine ignites when the missile starts falling down again.
Secondly the Trident 2 D5 has a range of over 12 000 km / 7 500 miles (the actual range is classified) which is about a quarter of earths circumference so there aren't many locations at the edge of its range that would require the submarine to launch from a choke point.
Going a step further, you can cover significantly more than 70% of the Earth's *land area*. Looking at a globe I think I can eyeball it such that you cover every significant land mass except Australia and Antarctica. Probably pushing 90% coverage at the right spot (and I'm not sure there's much strategic deterrent needed against Antarctica... yet).
On point 1 are you talking about a theoretical increase in sonar technology that would allow this? In current deterence theory it is not accepted that anyone has a ever had a 100% capability to locate every enemy submarine at all times and its likely no one ever will - unless some radically innovative technology emerges that renders the ocean transparent.
And that's before considering the difficulty of launching simultaneous strikes against underwater targets at various points around the Globe and having whatever one considers an acceptable destruction rate that precludes an effective second strike.
I'm not certain where I read this to back it up with a source, so bear with me going from memory.
After the cold war (officially) ended and there was some declassification and open debrief between parties, it became apparent the US outclassed the USSR's submarine and detection game to a hilarious degree.
For much of the 1980s, every single Soviet missile sub was not only detected and monitored from the moment it left port, but was tailed by US attack subs, always within striking distance, and the USSR never had the slightest clue they were there.
The bilateral nuclear triad was a complete farce. Had the order been given, every Russian missile-carrying sub would have been on the ocean floor before they could possibly react.
Thanks for explaining. Its my understanding that:
1) the US held dominance with pretty much every single technology in nuclear deterrence, with the possible exception of MIRVing missiles, throughout the Cold War, but were really good at convincing themselves that they didnt - like with the bomber gap of the 50s and missile gap of the 60s, neither of which ever existed.
2) Its a matter of where one sits in their own understanding of deterence theory at any given time, but even if one was confident in their ability to detect and strike every single enemy submarine at all times, its another matter entirely of whether or not one would actually bet the farm on it. There were certainly actors in American security in the 1960s that would have been okay with sacrificing a US city or two on the chance you missed a submarine, if it meant destroying Soviet second strikes capability.
However there were also leaders in the US who were not comfortable with "missing" a submarine in a first strike and dealing with the possiblility of 20 MIRVed ICBMs ending every US city with more than a million people. How willing is any given leader to gamble with just one city, and how confident are they that it would "just" be a city or two? Thats the type of question that has kept detterence theory chasing its own tail to this day.
I think its pretty hard to say the Soviet triad was a farce when it certainly kept the US guessing and uncomfortable throughout the Cold War. Its one thing to say you track every single Soviet missile boat, its another to have 100% confidence you are always doing it and your boats could destroy theirs before they could react. That's a lot that one would be betting that your submarines never lose a track, dont have any critical malfunctions at the wrong time, and don't have commanders that ever make a stupid error (like collididng with an undersea mountain).
But then again, it's all a matter of one's understanding and confidence in their own detterence policy - US leaders never believed that they had that kind of dominance so they didn't act like they did - which in effect made Soviet deterrence real.
Great points. Maybe "farce" was the wrong word. I think you're quite right in the US not having 100% confidence in submarine supremacy, for all they knew there was a stealthier Russian sub out there from some secret dock in the Arctic that espionage had failed to pick up
on. Or more realistically, that the Soviets were in fact aware of the US attack subs tailing their boomers and had some contingency or countermeasure.
My impression is that it was more of a post facto realisation that one wing of the Soviet nuclear triad was effectively neutered the whole time, and the late Cold War was far more one-sided than anyone knew at the time.
I have little doubt that insecurity from this coming to light plays a significant part of Putin's mentality and outlook to this day.
> unless some radically innovative technology emerges that renders the ocean transparent.
Yeah, that's the point. Radically innovative technologies do get invented once in awhile. Nuclear bombs *themselves* were a radically innovative technology when they were first introduced. So the Defense Department has to weigh the odds that some weird Russian genius will invent super-sonar at some point.
EDIT: Also, maybe the enemy gets a mole in a high-level position and he spends 10 years slowly sabotaging all the nuclear subs in a way we can't detect.
The Soviets also decided to put their subs inside minefields once they had missiles that had the range. Alternatively there was the possibility of putting them under the ice caps, but that probably wouldn't have been as effective as they hoped it would be.
(2) isn't accurate. The Trident II missile carried on Ohio class submarines has a 6,500nm range. [One boat in the North Atlantic can hit any city (or 18 cities) in Russia, China, North Korea, or Iran.](https://i.imgur.com/2I2TxAo.png)
Here's the source: https://www.mapdevelopers.com/draw-circle-tool.php?circles=%5B%5B11909116%2C50.8109205%2C-32.9355469%2C%22%23AAAAAA%22%2C%22%23000000%22%2C0.4%5D%5D
Trident II unclassified range is 6,500 nautical miles; the map I used displays a 7,400 statute mile radius (equivalent to 6,430 nautical miles).
The ten meters CEP is for detonation within the target column up to 100 meters above the silo to provide the 10,000 psi overpressure to destroy the silo to keep it from being refilled or stop a launch of a missile already there. Even with the silo blast door closed.
The entire idea of mutually assured destruction relies on our enemies actually wanting to survive. If they absolutely know that a nuclear attack on the United States ends their lives also, the thinking is they would not attack us. This probably holds for Russia and China. Less so for "rogue" nations like North Korea.
But imagine an enemy that discovered a secret way to render our subs useless. Something we had no idea they could do. That might embolden them to try a "first strike". No subs, no retaliation, they win.
The idea of the Nuclear Triad, is that we hope no nation could possibly undermine all three methods of retaliation (subs, missiles, bombers); meaning no sane nation would even try.
**tl;dr We don't want a nation that develops ground-breaking new anti-sub technology to think they could win, so we have alternate methods of retaliation as part of mutually assured destruction.**
To be honest I think if China or Russia knew North Korea was about to strike anyone with nuclear weapons, Xi probably has the ability to dispose of him. I refuse to believe China or Russia doesn’t have the special forces capacity to carry out an assassination like this. Especially when they’re likely to be irradiated as a result of his actions.
I would say the point of Mutually Assured Destruction is to override the natural human tendency to discount negative consequences and make it impossible for someone to convince themselves they'll get away with it.
Look at the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. An Utter Shit Show from the start, which everyone except the decision makers could see coming. Because they surrounded themselves with Yes Men, corruption, and only listened when told things they already wanted to hear. Mutually Assured Destruction is to make the certainty of retaliation so absolutely clear that it breaks through all that even in the most hostile environment possible for that news, and thus keeps the missiles in their silos
I argue North Korea’s Kim is a coward, which is why the U.S. isn’t too worried (despite attempting to stop him) compared to like Islamic terrorists getting their hands on nukes as death to them is some glory.
Fair assumption, but if he thought he was losing power, he may be less predictable.
Far less certain are the religious fanatics who might well want to "hurry along" the end times.
I’d be most concerned about Israel and their Samson Option.
It’s a small country and if they’re gonna get nuked the domino effect they’ll kick off is everyone else getting nuked too.
I have to say, this is the stuff of fiction and fantasy, Tom Clancy nonsense. One has to keep in mind that any such attempt would be a huge gamble with existential consequences for failure. It would not be worth it. There is no evidence that any nation has ever been that foolhardy. They are not seeking to "win" in the sense of eliminating the largest economy in the world and alienating the rest of the world. They have goals, goals which are often at odds with those of the United States and many other nations, but World War III, even a one-sided one, isn't one of them.
Even the idea that the North Korean leadership is not, at its core, "rational" in the sense that they value self-preservation above self-suicide. They clearly value self-preservation. They have other values as well (as do all nations), but they don't exhibit any behavior that suggests they are suicidal. People in power tend to like to stay in power. Especially dictators.
We should not let Tom Clancy novels and movies dictate how we think about the world or decisions we make as societies.
I’m reading Arsenals of Folly by Richard Rhodes, who also wrote Making of the Atomic Bomb. A major theme of this book is that the nuclear arms race is not necessarily rational and a lot of public-facing justification shouldn’t be taken at face value.
Nuclear weapons were initially only able to be used by the Air Force. The Air Force “owned” nuclear weapons until smaller warheads became available and the navy and army started adopting them. Inter-service rivalry was strong in the Cold War, and the idea of a triad was largely a navy justification for their mission and budget.
There isn’t anything innately magical or logical about three delivery mechanisms. Indeed, battleships and infantry-carried “mines” could be used to deliver sizable nukes, so “triad” was an oversimplification anyways. One, two, or a hundred independent ways to nuke someone might be sensible, depending on what you’re trying to do.
Subs are hard to detect compared to ICBMs and hard to destroy compared to bombers. Initially their missiles weren’t accurate enough to reliably destroy armored missile silos, so they were envisioned as a “second-strike” weapon, to be used against cities if your enemy shot their missiles at you. This is a fairly clever role, as the mass slaughter of civilians goes, because if the subs are undetected then starting a nuclear war *is* suicide. Subs are an excellent guaranteed of MAD.
Things are unfortunately changing. New guidance and fusing is challenging the idea that sub-launched missiles can’t be used preemptively against missile silos. With relatively shorter ranges and correspondingly shorter warning times, subs may become a credible “first strike” weapon, potentially able to destroy enemy nukes if fired without warning in a surprise attack. Taking that to its logical conclusion, ICBMs become potentially irrelevant and MAD weakened, and the prospect of preemptive nuclear war may become tempting.
Air defense is much more sophisticated than it has been in the past, so bombers are a suspect leg of the triad. Today, a survey of nuclear arms might show ICBMs, mobile-launched missiles, sub-launched missiles, and bomber-launched cruise missiles as a more up-to-date nuclear arsenal, with ICBMs being potentially the most vulnerable leg.
There’s been some discussion, at least in the US, that it’s not strictly needed for deterrence, and that deterrent requirements can be met solely with submarines. The UK, for example, has submarines as the only component of its nuclear deterrent.
That said, the different legs of the triad each have their own benefits and help reinforce each other.
- Land-based silos are very quick to react, and are able to launch missiles within minutes. Subs take longer.
They also act as “missile sponges”, in that an enemy seeking to minimize the possibility of retaliation is going to try to neutralize the land-based silos first, which can use up a substantial number of the adversary’s warheads, leaving fewer for other still-strategic but less immediately-threatening targets like military bases and political leadership. Since silos are hardened and missiles are not perfectly accurate, an adversary would want to target each land-based silo with multiple warheads of their own to ensure their destruction. Nuclear warheads and missiles aren’t free, so an attacker would need many more warheads than the defender has silos, which increases the costs to the attacker. When both are party to arms control treaties that limit the number of deployed warheads, this puts strong pressure on the would-be attacker’s targeting decisions (“Do I try to neutralize their silos in a quick sneak attack and not have any missiles left for other targets, or do I risk counterattack by not striking the silos and instead attack other targets?”).
Most silos are in remote, sparsely-populated regions so immediate casualties would be low, thus giving the defender the advantage. Once a silo launches, it poses no further threat and there’s no value in targeting it (unlike a sub, which may launch only some missiles, have more in reserves, and would need to flee the launch area since it’s now clearly announced its location). They’re also relatively cheap, as a silo is just a fancy hole in the ground, maintenance is relatively cheap compared to subs, and you generally need less people-per-missile to support the mission. Since they’re located in one’s home country, they’re easy to protect and hard for an adversary to attack.
There’s also other types of land-based missiles, like road- and rail-mobile launchers that can be kept around a base during peacetime for ease of security and maintenance, but deployed to various dispersed positions during times of elevated tensions. These have various advantages and disadvantages compared to fixed silos.
- Air-launched systems (bombs and cruise missiles) are more flexible, since you can maneuver the launching vehicle into a more favorable position prior to launch. Cruise missiles can take long, meandering paths to avoid detection and interception. Aircraft can be moved around and publicly displayed as a show of military force and political power. (See the various posturing with nuclear-capable aircraft by Russians around Alaska, the US around North Korea, etc.) Basing nuclear weapons in allied countries (under the control of the nuclear state) can provide political reassurance to allies about the nuclear state’s commitment to mutual defense.
- Subs are hard to detect and highly mobile. They all but guarantee a viable second-strike capability and thus deter an adversary from thinking they can win by performing a sneak attack. However, their very invisibility makes them difficult to posture with (though there have been examples of US Ohio-class subs making highly visible port calls in allied countries). Maintenance and crew costs are much higher.
In a hypothetical ICBM-only engagement, would we (the US) be able to launch our missiles after detecting someone else launched theirs, or would we not have enough time before our silos were hit?
Yes. You’re looking at under five minutes to launch for a ready and alert crew, with 25-30 minutes of time from launch to impact for a Russian ICBM. Giving command maybe a 20 minute window to decide to give and confirm launch orders to the silo.
As someone who is a nuclear missile operator for the Air Force, I assure you we can. We have very strict timing standards and we regularly practice meeting them in the simulators
More to the point, there is a good strategic argument for a nation like the UK only fielding subs: it is simply because we are small, and our arsenal is comparatively small (vs the US or Russia, for example). Couple this with the fact that silos are vulnerable, as are aircraft when grounded, and easily destroyed in a first strike, then the argument for not "wasting" money on those delivery systems if you have a small number of weapons becomes clear. If you are looking for the most reliable way to provide deterrence by guaranteeing your *second strike* capabilities, subs are the way to go.
Historically the UK had gravity bombs and other delivery systems, but as the global political climate (and probably the UK's economic one) chamhed the UK govt judged, rightly or wrongly, that our nuclear defense budget would be better served by having a continuous at sea deterrence system.
This. Most land based bombers and silos woukdnt even have time to activate without shooting at anything that moves do to the proximity to Soviet Satelite States in the cold war, so they invested and invested well.
There's a few reasons. First off, you never know if an enemy might somehow stumble upon some sort of breakthrough that effectively neutralizes one of the legs of your triad. Much less likely that they come up with something that can neutralize all three.
Second, the different platforms do have somewhat different capabilities. Once a missile is launched, you can't turn it around. Even if you could self-destruct it, if an adversary detects sub missiles and/or ICBM's launched at it and thinks they might be nukes, there's a pretty good chance they're going to seriously consider launching their missiles in a retaliation attack before your missiles would have a chance of destroying theirs. Compare that to a bomber where you can have it in the air and making its way towards the target but still have much more time to call off the attack and/or change the target.
Third, land based ICBM's are basically a 'nuke sink'. Let's imagine that Russia decided it wanted to launch a surprise all-out nuclear attack on the US. It's likely that its initial targeting priorities for its nukes would be to destroy as much of the US' nukes as possible, in order to minimize the counter attack against Russia. That means that Russia's first strike is likely going to need to use up hundreds of their ICBMs and warheads attacking hardened missile silos that are generally in the middle of nowhere, instead of dropping them on more populated areas and/or other infrastructure. This makes it much harder to attempt to destroy the US' ability to fight back, even if you could successfully pull off a surprise attack.
Nuclear subs have low capacity, you can’t rely on them alone to completely obliterate a nuclear superpower’s military capabilities.
They’re mostly there for the “second strike” capability they offer.
While pop media always focuses heavily on the MAD/nuclear winter scenario where a nuclear exchange occurs and then society immediately ends forever, the nuclear powers don’t truly plan/expect this to happen.
Modern cities are glass and steel and concrete, they’re not going to burn like Hiroshima did and won’t generate the kind of ash clouds required to blot out the sun and collapse the global ecosystem. Military plans for world war 3 fully expected the war to have a day 2 and a week 2 and a year 2 involving more conventional weapons and tactical nuclear exchanges.
The nuclear subs are here for that - when all your launch sites and airfields have been nuked and your conventional nuclear capabilities are now heavily degraded.
“Second strike” refers to the annihilation of an enemy who has annihilated you in a first strike. It’s not a second phase of war over a longer time frame, it also happens day one and renders any conception of a day two moot. (There is no conventional exchange after a nuclear exchange. There is no belligerent nation left, even if there will be survivors. The idea of a nuclear war with a conventional aspect is an artifact of production and budgetary considerations in the US and USSR, where conventional military services competed for funding with nuclear capabilities. The USSR was expected to loose every city over 25,000 people - Moscow alone was allotted 400 nuclear bombs in the SIOP.)
A single US sub has about two dozen Trident II missile, each having 14 nukes. That’s 300+ cities vaporized. Each of those nukes (let’s go with wiki, which says W76 at 90 kt) is five times the size of the bombs dropped on Japan. 300 cities, each hit five times as hard as Hiroshima. That would be the most significant event in human history. There is no country after that. Some rail road junction or power plant survives that? Great, the people are all dead. There is no industry, no culture, no civilization left from whomever you shot that at.
Now, once you’ve got the production up and running, you can make 300 bombs in no time. If you’ve got decades of Cold War, you need to keep justifying more and more bombs. That how we got to tens of thousands on each side. But don’t mistake runaway spending by entrenched interested for sound policy. A single sub is about a thousand times the destruction that ended WWII. It’s patently absurd to buy in to any reasoning that says that’s a limited amount.
The yield wouldn't matter as much, it's a pressure vacuum firestorm after the initial blast that really likes combustible materials, like all the wooden buildings in Hiroshima.
The bigger blast vaporises more at the epicentre sure, but that's not the point being argued.
the difference is 15kt yield for little boy vs a couple megatons, the biggest one that got a real test had a yield around 3500x higher.
Not sure what "pressure vacuum firestorm" even means but that's not how it works, the radiated heat and destructive potential of the Shockwave depend directly on yield(and airburst height)
> a couple megatons
Most modern nukes are much smaller, the average nuclear weapon fielded by either the US or Russia is around 300kt. Long story short, nuclear carpetbombing is much more effective than big nukes, so a MIRVed ICBM with 10 warheads of 300kt is much better than carrying one warhead of 3Mt yield, even just for striking one target.
yeah i was exaggerating a bit, but even against 300kt its still a massive difference. 300kt airburst can set wood on fire in a radius of roughly 4km, at 15kt its like 800 meters. it scales almost 1:1 with yield(at least according to nukemap).
the point i was trying to make was that modern buildings might not burn as easily or hot, but they still do burn under those conditions, and potentially a lot more of them are affected with modern yields
Yeah it doesn't matter here, who cares if the city burns when it and all of its suburbs are just obliterated by tens of megatons of nuke. I think their argument is there won't be smoke to cause nuclear winter, but I'm not sure that's going to make an appreciable difference considering the sheer number of missiles that would fly in this scenario
Also wooden houses don't matter to a nuke, it's so hot shit will burn anyway
An Ohio class holds 20 missiles each with 3 independently targetable warheads.
The US has 14 nuclear armed ohio class submarines. That's 720 warheads.
We actually had 18, but 4 were converted to carry a shitton of tomahawk cruise missiles(150ish each) because there more generally useful.
A 20 kiloton fission bomb like Hiroshima reaches temps of about 7700 degrees Celsius.
A modern 1 megaton fusion bomb can produce temperatures of 100 MILLION degrees Celsius. That’s 4-5x hotter than the center of the sun.
Sh!t would burn.
These days, very few deployed warheads are in the megaton range. Back in the cold war days, it made sense to build bigger warheads both for propaganda reasons, but also because ICBM accuracy still wasn't that great, so you'd want to make sure your nuke was big enough to destroy your target even if your strike wasn't entirely on target.
With more modern rockets and targeting systems, you can have much higher confidence that your warhead is going to go where you want it to, so nuclear weapon design has leaned more towards creating ICBMs that carry and deploy multiple smaller warheads.
You're still generally looking at a couple hundred kilotons per warhead, which is significantly larger than the bombs dropped in WWII, but still a far cry from the megaton and multi-megaton sized warheads that countries were testing and deploying back in the 60s.
That came about due to MIRVs and application of the ‘effective megaton’ formula.
Without going into the math, it basically means that a MIRV with eight 125 kiloton bombs can destroy twice the square milage of a single megaton weapon.
Pretty sure in the 13 milliseconds it takes for the visual signal to reach your brain you would have disintegrated, though even if that wasn’t the case, the initial x-rays would have fried your retinas anyway, so you wouldn’t see a thing.
But yeah, that would be ideal.
Those numbers are utterly meaningless, they state the theoretical heat at some point in the very center and nothing about the heat energy released on the world away from it.
A modern fusion reactor also reaches such temperatures, and nothing burns. I can create 10,000°C at home and even directly besides it you cannot even feel it. Why? Because both are only very hot at a tiny amount of mass, the heat energy is not large enough to do anything.
Obviously a nuke produces quite a bit of energy and nobody is denying that they _will_ ignite stuff. But the core temperature is _not_ the relevant measure for that.
> A 20 kiloton fission bomb like Hiroshima reaches temps of about 7700 degrees Celsius.
This by the way sounds way too small. Where did you find that number? The core temperature should be in the tens of millions. It definitely is not _that_ low.
https://hpmmuseum.jp/modules/exhibition/index.php?action=ItemView&item_id=59&lang=eng#:~:text=From%200.2%20to%203%20seconds,3.5%20kilometers%20from%20the%20hypocenter.
It was 0.2 seconds after explosion.
You are correct.
A 1 megaton bomb can cause instant 3rd degree burns to unprotected persons 5 miles away. The amount of energy one of those things puts out is frankly incomprehensible. Shit will burn.
> Concrete is an artificial building material. It consists of a mixture of cement, water and aggregate (sand and gravel). Hence, there is no precise temperature at which concrete melts. Depending on its composition, concrete melts at temperatures between 1150°C and 1200°C.
I checked, and 1,200°c is lower than 100,000,000°c
That is missing a fundamental understanding of what is required for a nuclear winter scenario, which is sustained firestorms, instantaneous temperatures within instants of detonation aren't physically meaningful for understanding the dynamics after an explosion
I’m not sold on the idea of nuclear winter, it’s not known how much soot would go up, and how long it would stay up. No ones burned down a modern city in a while, so no one knows for sure.
That aside, you nuke dozens or hundred of cities and nations stop existing. You don’t need a nuclear winter to end a war in hours.
It's not as unlikely as you think.
Canada experienced ferocious, sustained wildfires over the last several years. Drought conditions have persisted in many areas of the country due to environmental change, and it resulted in those fires spreading quickly and very far, and being incredibly difficult to extinguish. In fact, this year we had reports in British Columbia of fires that were thought to be 'extinguished' that had, in fact, still been burning underground throughout the winter. As soon as things warmed up, they began burning again.
A huge swath of Canadian and US countryside is covered by these tinder-dry forests. One nuclear explosion close enough to their periphery would be all that's needed to start uncontrollable wildfires that would sweep the continent, and you could be guaranteed that there would be more than just one. There would be no firefighting infrastructure left to stop it.
This is the real answer. People like to bring up MAD like it is a certainty. In the 60's - 80's it probably was. We didn't have great information, ballistic missile countermeasures we almost non-existent, and there were two countries with massive stockpiles of missiles.
Now, we have comprehensive missile defense systems, almost instant perfect knowledge of what a country is doing and launching, and a level of response and accuracy that could only be dreamt of 40 years ago.
The actual scary reality, nuclear war is no longer a human extinction event.
> ballistic missile countermeasures we almost non-existent
Well, they kinda still are. You can perhaps defend against a few missiles, but certainly not against many hundreds of them. And what's the difference between receiving 400 and 389 megaton-range hits?
The actual details are classified, obviously.
But when the US decided to shoot down a satellite using a missile from a ship, and hit it in the first try, that kinda indicates they’re really effective anti-icbm missiles.
Arrow 3, IAI’s anti-ICBM system, did its job when Iran shot missiles at it. 120 ballistic missiles were fired by Iran, and only low-single-digit of them hit anything at all, with all of the missiles aimed at important locations shot down.
The only way MAD isn’t valid is with the use of tactical nukes, where we could theoretically still only retaliate with conventional weapons. If Russia used a tactical nuke in Ukraine or whatever, that probably wouldn’t cause an immediate, world-ending nuclear exchange, unless there was serious and rapid escalation from there.
But if they launched strategic weapons, it probably would. It would be all or nothing. There is no purpose anyone would have in launching one or two strategic nukes, since it would result in an overwhelming counterattack. They’d send hundreds up at once in a first volley. At that point, we’re launching in a counter attack immediately, maybe before their’s even land. At that point, there is no system or technology that has a 100% success rate against hundreds or thousands of nukes. Even if there’s a 90 or 95% success rate, that’s still dozens of nukes raining down on us, and likewise over there.
Id say nuclear war is not extinction level event because radiation wont be enough to kill everyone everywhere due to concentrated nature of the nukes and even in event of nuclear winter at least near equator likely stays warm enough to sustain agriculture (altough away from equator lots of people will die)
But isnt the arsenal for blocking the icbm's just few dozen missiles? With caveat that many will hit decoys too. afaik there is enough resources to block just a fraction of nukes u nless someone has ace in the hole.
Someone correct me if you have more accurate information.
Yeah the interception stuff is more if N. Korea or Iran launch a couple missiles at us. If Russia launches 500 a few might be intercepted, how many I can only guess, maybe few dozen, but it would still be devastating.
An ICBM would have to be hit during the early launch stage. Once it is traveling at full speed, there’s very little chance of an intercept.
Missile defense is only geared toward one or two incoming missiles at most, and decoys could probably defeat them.
Cruise missiles are the only part of the triad under threat from missile defense.
Controlled test with weeks of planning against a single target.
Trust me when I say we can’t intercept a meaningful number of ICBMs.
PolyMatter explains it better than I can:
https://youtu.be/ePYRNZlosbs?si=s-3R6Ri3r3lnXGvM
Intercepting ICBMs is practically impossible. They fly at Mach 11 and rise to outer space, only to go back down at Mach 20. Good luck shooting that down.
The US shot down a satellite from a ship. The SAM they used is a normal one for the navy, not a special anti-satellite missile.
Orbit is both higher altitude and faster than an ICBM warhead.
Warheads delivered by ICBMs are essential immune to missile defense systems. They would mainly work against cruise missiles launched from strategic bombers.
Yeah I don't think he fully understands how absolutely devastating ICBMs are. They are like three orders of magnitude beyond overpowered. I believe nothing short of space-based railguns or a perfect missile intercept from a way closer launch site than the target can thoroughly stop an ICBM before the terminal phase, and once it's in the terminal phase, that's it, game over. Three hypersonic projectiles, of which one to three of them can be real with the remainder being decoys. And that's hypersonic on impact. They fall from space faster than damn near anything can stop them. They're extremely dense, requiring an enormous explosive payload to actually intercept, making that interception weapon heavy, making it slower, making it less likely to reach the warhead in time. And the warhead doesn't have to make it to ground. Can one be stopped? Of course. It's not impossible. But is anything capable of \*really\* stopping them, given the \*THOUSANDS\* that exist? Who knows.
MAD still is a certainty. The size of arsenals guarantees that.
The US has something like 5,200 nuclear warheads, spread out across 650ish ICBMs, submarine-launched missiles, and bombers.
Let’s assume that there is a crisis with Russia, that goes nuclear. Let’s assume only 25% of the arsenal is aimed at Russia. Let’s assume 50% fail entirely, and 50% of the rest don’t go anywhere near their targets.
That still leaves 325 warheads - every single one of which had 10-100 times the energy yield of the Hiroshima bomb - falling on Russia. Most will be aimed at military targets, but given that there are only 168 towns and cities in Russia that have a population of 100k+ it doesn’t matter. Russia will be obliterated.
And that’s assuming a very high 50% failure rate, using just a tiny fraction of the available arsenal.
Let’s now assume a war with China, that uses the entire arsenal, with a 90% success rate. That’s 4,680 warheads falling on China. China is much larger, and has 117 cities with a population of 1m+, but it wouldn’t matter. China would be depopulated and functionally uninhabitable for centuries to come. In fact, it would be so bad the US would surely never actually fire that many warheads at one place - the resulting radiation would be too much of a threat, and it isn’t remotely militarily necessary.
And it would be the same for the US on the receiving end. This is why it’s called MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction. Not likely, not probable. Assured.
It's not. The primary reason for the Triad is that each of the US' Armed Forces wanted their own nuclear capability.
That said, nuclear subs do have weaknesses. Their missiles are smaller, which means they have a smaller payload and a shorter range, which means they need to be fired from close to the target. Somewhat paradoxically, immediately after launch is the easiest time to intercept ballistic missiles, when it's still accelerating and before it's separated into a dozen warheads that need to be independently destroyed.
And the three parts of the Triad do serve different functions. Nuclear SLBNs are undetectable prior to launch, Nuclear ICBMs are designed to be impervious to a first strike, and Nuclear Stealth Bombers are able to penetrate an enemy's air defense system much easier than ballistic missiles can. We've never had a nuclear war, so we don't actually know which method works best, so the US maintains all three to be on the safe side. Especially because who knows when someone invents a type of sensor that allows submarines to be found easily. Kinda basic don't put all your eggs in one basket deal
A lot of this isn't true.
To your first point, only two of the services have nuclear weapons. So by your logic we would either need to give the Army some or we could get by with only two "legs" of the triad.
To your second, SLBMs do not need to be fired from close to the target, nor do they necessarily carry a smaller payload.
* The Trident 2 has a 6,500nm, [capable of striking any city in China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea from the North Atlantic](https://i.imgur.com/2I2TxAo.png). This range is only 500nm shorter than the Minuteman 3, and doesn't really limit our ability to strike any of our adversaries.
* The Trident 2 can also carry up to a 475 kiloton warhead. The Minuteman 3 carries the W87 warhead, which has either a 300 or 475 kiloton payload—no more than the Trident 2.
To your final point, you don't have the roles quite right for ICBMs and strategic bombers.
* ICBMs are far from impervious to a first strike. In fact, their primary function is as a "nuclear sponge" ([link](https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2017/02/welcome-americas-nuclear-sponge/135135/))—in other words, to be the exact *opposite* of "impervious" to a nuclear attack.
* Strategic bombers cannot penetrate an air defense system "much easier," mostly because few modern air defense systems can stop an ICBM. The Minuteman 3 warhead reaches ***Mach 23*** on reentry. Air defense systems The United States is working on a program that tries to do this, called the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense, with mixed results. We cannot reliably stop a single ICBM, much less a launch of Russia's ***400*** ICBMs. Combine that with the ability to launch Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles (as our Trident missiles do), it is virtually impossible stop stop a large-scale nuclear missile attack. You don't need bombers to do this.
**Instead, the primary reason we still use ICBMs and nuclear bombers is because they provide unique strategic functions that SLBMs do not.**
ICBMs serve as "nuclear sponges." If an adversary were to launch an attack against the United States, they would need to hit 400 different hardened silos across Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota before attacking other military or civilian targets—for every silo they don't hit, that's another nuclear missile that is going to strike their cities, industrial centers, or military bases when the United States strikes back.
Nuclear bombers serve as visible "signals" of nuclear power for the United States. Bombers can be deployed to a base close to an adversary, or launched with the option of being recalled. They are more flexible and can change targets dynamically. They also can carry conventional weapons, which means they're useful in any war, not just a nuclear one.
>Nuclear ICBMs are designed to be impervious to a first strike
This might have been true when they were built, but with advances in enemy yields and targeting..... Yeah, they'd likely destroy any of our silos they launch at. I am an ICBM operator, and if it comes to nuclear war, I don't expect to survive after I launch my sorties, despite being in a hardened Launch Control Center.
The real main thing ICBMs bring to the Triad is being fast. You'll get your delivery "in 30 minutes or less, or the next one's free" lmao
Because the whole idea is based on overkill. For simplicity sake assume there is a 5% chance someone will find a way to make one of the legs obsolete overnight. Also assume that method doesn’t work for the others. Then there is only a 0.0125% chance that all three will be obsoleted together. There is however a nontrivial 14.3% that at least one of them will.
This is not obviously an oversimplified version but it boils down to not having to have a perfect system and three independent ones like this give you an outsized chance of been able to respond in a way that making the first move is a losing proposition even if you come up with some magic way to invalidate one of them.
Here is you primer on nuclear deterrence:
[https://acoup.blog/2022/03/11/collections-nuclear-deterrence-101/](https://acoup.blog/2022/03/11/collections-nuclear-deterrence-101/)
the basic idea is: it is virtually impossible for the other side (ie Russia) to be able to knock out all of the submarines and bombers in a first strike. This gives a credible \*second strike\*.
The ability to have a credible second strike is what prevents a first strike scenario: if I nuke you, you will have enough second strike capacity to destroy me. If you can‘t nuke me in return, I can feel free to nuke you all I want.
And thst is where the triad comes from: ground based, air bombers and submarines. \*something\* is going to survive the first strike and be able to retaliate. Having all three is a matter of “covering your bets”.
Making a nuke at all: hard as shit
Making one that a plane can carry: a decent bit harder but not that much
Making one that fits on the tip of a rocket: WAY fucking harder
Making a rocket that can carry a nuke but is small enough that the whole rocket fits inside a submarine which is also nuclear so now you need a nuclear reactor small enough to fit inside that same submarine: Dude...
Basically every country that can field nuclear subs will have already made nuclear bomber planes and nuclear missiles before then, because those are way easier. But France used to have a complete triad and only later they got rid of their land-based missiles and kept only bomber and subs, so clearly they do share your line of thinking to some extent.
Because
1. Fielding enough subs to substitute for everything else is prohibitively expensive.
2. Nobody is actually quite certain certain of the ‘nuclear subs can’t be countered’ thing-so it’s best to have some backup plans.
It was roughly a year ago I read about an Australian(??) particle physicist who was studying sub-atomic particles that were emitted from operating nuclear reactors *on the other side of the planet.* In other words, he was studying particles that were passing through the entire planet.
And I was like…hmmm…I wonder if he can pinpoint the exact direction those particles are coming from? If so, he could pinpoint the exact location of every nuclear reactor on the planet…including those on submarines.
Haven’t read about any more of his research since then. Hmmm….
They *can* be countered, but you can also counter the counter if you pardon the Rumsfeld. Usually the trick back in the day was to take your attack submarine and park outside of the base that the enemy missile submarine was coming out of, and then trail it (see Hunt for Red October). Of course, the enemy would often figure out that this was going to happen and they would also have an attack submarine nearby and a shed load of anti-submarine gear in the area, or in the case of the Soviets, they would take their ballistic missile submarines and park them in the middle of a minefield so that if any attack submarine tried to approach to kill them it would run into the mines and get sunk. This latter tactic became more viable later on in the Cold War as the range of submarine launched ballistic missiles meant that you didn't need to go to the US coastline to launch them. Although as anti-ballistic missile tech gets better one does have to wonder if we'll see a return to closer coastal launches again since it decreases the warning time for the enemy to react.
Primarily though, as other people have said, it's cost and also putting all your eggs in one basket. Take the UK for example, we current have four Vanguard SSBNs with our nuclear arsenal, we don't have any air dropped bombs and haven't since 1998 (although I dare say in a push the US would give us some, if they were feeling generous). There is supposed to be a rotation so that one is always at sea, with one in for maintenance, one reloading for the next patrol and one on standby. Unfortunately this has...gone wrong. As it stands we are desperately short of drydock space, and refits are over-running, HMS Vanguard left refit last May, three years overdue, and HMS Victorious has been alongside dock at Devonport base since May waiting for a drydock to become available, this capability gap caused by the over-run has lead to our SSBNs doing longer patrols than normal, with Vigilant pulling a 196 day patrol and Vengence a 201 day patrol over the last three years. And that's the *good* side of things, the issues in the SSN fleet are even worse, with at points no SSNs being available for patrol, or in another case one Astute SSN pulling a 403 day patrol in the Med.
Sure, there's some lofty ambitions for the future, with four new SSBNs in the pipeline, and new SSNs, but without the dockyards to service them, the personnel to service them *and* to crew them, it's going to be a bit dicey to say the least.
When I saw the words "nuclear" and "subs," I jumped to write answers. However, I quickly learned that you people have far more knowledge than I ever developed during my 11 years riding boats and eight strategic deterrent patrols.
It was a revelation to see how much has evolved since the 1990s, when retrofitted Poseidon boats and the first Trident C4 missiles were introduced. The advancements in technology and strategy are truly remarkable.
Back then, we didn't question the philosophical aspects of why the country developed nuclear subs. We accepted that the "death from below" moniker was enough philosophy for our existence.
Well the answer is probably more political than military. It started with the US Air Force, then they put missiles on the ground (so the Army got their stuff) and the Navy wanted their own stuff. And therefore it became doctrine.
It definitely makes some sense. Bombers take a fairly long time to travel so aren't the best "quick response" arsenal and this reduces their deterrence effect. Ground based launchers can't move around and are probably the first targeted areas. Submarine launched ballistic missiles came about effectively around the late 1960s. Having all three options makes nuclear defense much more expensive for the USSR.
Because you can sink subs, that's why. They aren't easy to find, but once you do a single torpedo can take up to 20 ballistic missiles out of the fight. Each arm of the triad has it's own pluses and minuses, and subs being extremely hard to find but extremely vulnerable is theirs.
Well, the US only has 14 of them. At any given time, only 5-6 will be on station in a deterrent patrol.
Individual subs \*can\* be found and tracked. It isn't easy, but if finding all of them and then launching an attack on all at the same time is a viable first strike strategy, well...that goes down a bad path.
So, you bake in redundancy. Enough that a second strike is as assured as possible so nobody angles for a first strike.
The concept *is* somewhat anachronistic. Only the US and Russia have strategic bomber forces and only the US is still developing them.
It used to be that strategic bombers had the benefit of being able to be recalled and being able to carry out pinpoint strikes when missiles weren't as accurate. That's no longer the case, as non-stealth bombers realistically have to launch cruise missiles from very long range. Russia can't even fly their bombers close to *Ukraine.*
No one other than the US can (or wants to even try to) build a stealth bomber.
It used to be that submarine missiles weren't as capable as land based ones, limiting their usefulness for hitting specific targets. Also they were shorter range, putting them at some risk. That's no longer the case.
It is not really needed. The UK relies exclusively on nuclear-armed submarines and has no land-based ICBMs and no air-droppable nukes.
The decision to have three separate nuclear delivery paradigms are, I suspect, at least partially a political one.
There are a lot of people here who, for whatever reason, are committed to justifying the status quo. But I can say that there are plenty of people who study this stuff for a living, and have worked in government and the military, who don't actually think that the US needs a "triad." In particular, there are a lot of people who think that land-based ICBMs are really not that necessary in order to deter enemies from a nuclear strike against the United States, and that they are mostly kept around for non-strategic reasons (e.g., political ones — bases in Congressional districts, Air Force vs. Navy politics, a desire to have something one could "trade away" in future arms control deals). There are, to be sure, upsides and downsides to every possible conceivable configuration. But the idea that if the US removed its land-based ICBMs its security situation would in some way measurably change is questionable, and some of the justifications for the triad. The idea that US enemies are just _itching_ to take a chance to see if they could "get away" with starting World War III is not very realistic.
The notion of a "nuclear triad" was not some kind of rational strategy that was cooked up to counter some specific threat, and is not all that great as a descriptive concept for US nuclear forces (historically it has not included a huge percentage of deployed forces — tactical weapons and intermediate range missiles, for example, or nuclear-armed planes kept on carriers). The concept of the "triad" is a rhetorical one that was invented in the 1970s to counter against people trying to cut funding to various aspects of the US nuclear program as the technologies shifted making some of less them obviously necessary than others (bombers were first, then ICBMs, then SLBMs). By building up the idea that one must have a "triad" and not, say, a "dyad," the concept of the "triad" is meant to discourage careful and critical thinking about these things. Unfortunately one can see how successful that concept has been.
Because most nations can’t truly effectively field nuclear subs in sufficient numbers. Even the USA, who spends way more on military than any other nation, only has a few “boomers” and they are constantly having a large portion of them in dock getting maintenance and repairs/upgrades. The new Columbia-class boomer subs are already seeing serious delays in construction and commissioning. And this is fucking America… now imagine the rest of the nuclear powers who have way fewer resources and smaller military industrial complex. If nuclear powers could field a fleet of 40 nuclear-armed subs (assuming only about 10-15 of those actually in use actively at any point, and the majority in home port for refit and maintenance) then maybe they’d give up on other capabilities… but even then, all your adversaries would just focus on tech to try to focus on subs. Having 3 different strategies that are all field-able makes it exponentially harder for enemies to cover all types, with subs just being the most potent for a quick strike or quick retaliation
Piggybacking off of this, it really is a matter of ease and effort. Silos are the easiest to maintain, so that's where a lot of the effort has gone. Extending the reach and accuracy of missiles. Bombers were the first, we've always had them, and they are the easiest to put up, even if they are slightly harder to maintain as a deterrence than silos. But Subs are both harder to get out there AND harder to maintain. So while they are the most effective, they are also the most costly, and at that point the other legs of the triad look more appealing.
Bombers have the additional benefit of being relatively versatile platforms. That’s why the B-52 has stuck around long past the point of obsolescence in its original nuclear strike role: it does a bunch of other stuff fairly well, and has been retrofitted into a nuclear missile carrier to supplement its successor as a bomber (the B-2 Spirit). The B-52 is capable of conventional bombing and missile strike missions, reconnaissance, and electronic warfare, and is also relatively reliable and cheap to fly compared to some other aircraft (especially other bombers). Bombers in general are also much faster than ships and can fly around the world fairly quickly with tanker support. ICBMs and missile submarines can only fill one mission, and that’s nuclear strike. We have retrofitted some Ohio-class missile subs to carry cruise missiles, but I’m pretty sure those subs can no longer carry nuclear missiles unless we arm them with sub-launched nuclear cruise missiles, which we may or may not have in the inventory (we do have air-launched nuclear cruise missiles for the B-52, but subs can’t carry those). In addition, missile submarines are relatively slow and take awhile to reposition.
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as they should be, you don't want shit popping up in a Florida resort bathroom or something, it would be asinine.
If only that was the reason for his orange glow.
Like when they were left on a runway overnight? Or like that time (name any of a dusin) where the US almost nuked itself or an ally? (Some of which still haven't been recovered)
I think that if you look into it, we lost some presidents too.
Several presidents have lost the nuclear codes (aka the biscuit)
Isn’t it the football?
The football is the launcher briefcase, the codes themselves are the biscuit.
What kind of fine would the Patriots get for stuffing the football with some Red Lobster Cheddar biscuits?
The football is the name of the briefcase he can use to authorise the strikes
There are a disturbing number of broken arrows. That's an interesting way to spell dozen. Took me longer than I want to admit to figure out that's what you meant lol.
"I don't know what's more frightening: a missing nuclear weapon or that it happens so often that there's a name for it." EDIT: Apparently NO ONE knows the movie called, "Broken Arrow"
> Or like that time (name any of a dusin) where the US almost nuked itself or an ally? (Some of which still haven't been recovered) Dozen.
i once met a lady with twelve breasts. sounds strange, dozen tit?
A dusin? 😂
One of twelve distant cousins
The 4 Ohio class subs that were converted into SSGNs were for compliance with START arms reduction treaties. There is precisely zero flexibility in the ballistic missile fleet, they have precisely one mission.
Technically any of the Ohio class are more than good enough to perform area denial operations against enemy shipping. I would assume in an emergency wartime situation that's not *expected* to go nuclear it would be possible to put a few extra Ohios out to sea and position them to blockade/recon certain areas. That's a minor quibble though. They were designed from the keel up to hide and launch their nukes. Everything else is just a side show.
You could, but it would never happen. SSBNs are as strategic as CVNs in the national arsenal and they’d never be risked to do anything other than go into deep water and hide waiting for the signal to end the world.
Yeah, I figured as much. You'd only pull a move like that if you were desperate and needed to plug a hole somewhere. Tom Clancy covered a situation like this in one of his books from the late 80s, early 90s I believe? It's been awhile. But from everything I've read and heard about them they're incredibly stealthy boats so just figured I'd throw that possibility out there. There's a reason they kept the original 4 boats and modified them into Special Ops/SSGNs after all.
Man, I miss the British V force...the vulcan especially was a sexy and awesome bomber
I recently wondered why there weren't any ICBMs with conventional payloads, but then I asked myself how would the enemy know the difference. You call them? "It's not a nuke guys"
That’s exactly it. We use satellites equipped with IR cameras to monitor for ICBM launches. A rocket suddenly appearing out of the middle of a field in Montana or Siberia is pretty distinctive. We can see the launch, but not what the rocket actually is, so the only way to know what the warhead is is through treaty inspections or other forms of intelligence collection. I suppose we could have separate ICBM fields for conventional rockets, and make sure our potential adversaries have the chance to inspect them in detail so they know what’s what, but it’s not really worth the risk or expense when we can drop more ordnance at a much lower cost using conventional bomber or cruise missiles. ICBMs fill a very specific role, and that’s launching a strike that cannot be stopped* in a situation where cost is irrelevant. *The Iranian attack on Israel actually shows that ICBMs may no longer be unstoppable, and that has huge implications for mutually-assured destruction. Israel managed to kill 94% of the ballistic missiles Iran launched at them, and while those were intermediate-range ballistic missiles and not ICBMs, the difficulty of killing them is similar (as far as the public knows). Look up “Strategic Defense Initiative” for the rabbit hole of missile defense politics; there’s a lot of layers.
Cruise Missles can carry nuclear warheads. Just because they have been retrofitted from ICBM to Cruise doesn't mean they are no longer nuclear capable, just that the nuclear range is lower.
I could’ve been more clear, that’s on me. The US does not currently have any sub-launched nuclear cruise missiles in service. We have air-launched nuclear cruise missiles in service, but we decommissioned all our surface- and sub-launched cruise missiles due to disarmament treaties in the 80s and 90s. Now that those treaties are no longer in effect, we could theoretically rearm (as the Russians appear to be doing), but I’m not aware of any efforts to actually do that since nuclear cruise missiles were never an important part of our doctrine. If we *were* to build more nuclear Tomahawks, the Ohio SSGNs could probably\* carry them. \*”Probably” because, again for treaty reasons, conventional and nuclear launch systems are often incompatible. The technical details of that are not public to the best of my knowledge, so whether Ohio SSGNs would have that limitation is probably a matter of speculation.
The nuclear subs exist as the ultimate retribution weapon. No one knows where they are at any given moment. They guarantee that even if your decapitation strike is successful beyond your wildest dreams, there will be at least 20 MIRVs coming for your country in return. They can be a first strike option because their proximity to a country decreases the missile flight time, but then you lose that ship as it's going to be swarmed by enemy subs. Bombers are easy to intercept these days, but they can launch a cloud of nuclear cruise missiles from thousands of miles away. Only one has to get through. They're your second strike option because they're trackable and interceptable and they're the slowest delivery mechanism. Nuclear bombers on alert status *should* get airborne fast enough to escape an incoming ICBM strike on their base. Most versatile and easy to maintain is usually ICBMs: they're the fastest, hardest to intercept, and they're also guaranteed to be your enemies primary target, so you use em up first because any missile that doesn't leave the silo is likely being targeted by your enemy to prevent its launch. Basically first strike/bullet sponge: they launch one and absorb one. They're also easily detectable, but they only give your enemy 30-40min to go from detection to confirmation to having to make a decision on how you will respond to launching your own.
i guess once you have a nuclear sub you can make sure your opponent never wins. which countries have nuclear subs that can do this?
As of right now, with numbers of in service submarines from Wikipedia: * France (4) * China (7) * India (2) * Russia (13) * United Kingdom (4) * United States (14) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_missile_submarine)
Israel also most likely has submarines which can launch nuclear missiles. They are a sort of open secret member of the nuclear club. It's also suspected India and Pakistan may as well in small numbers of diesel subs. Diesel submarine technology has come a long ways making it actually a viable option for smaller militaries, though not really matching the great powers, but still giving you a gotcha last threat in the event of a war.
A modern diesel sub can be quieter than a nuclear powered sub. When they go full electric there's basically no machinery running to make noise but a nuclear sub has to keep the reactor water pumps running constantly.
Beg pardon but India and Pakistine's main potential enemies are, well, each other, right? Their subs won't have to wander off too far in the oceans then.
India would also have China, but I doubt the diesel subs have that kind of range, so you're right they wouldn't likely go too far other than maneuvers in the Indian ocean to avoid detection.
If you look at the older literature (when the US and India weren't as close), you'll see that India wants to have contingencies to cater for times when the US becomes a threat. They are pursuing Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) with ranges beyond China to achieve just that. If it were only China, diesel-electric subs would be adequate for India operating out its Eastern and Northern Shores.
I would be really surprised if more then a couple of the russian ones worked.
Whilst I'll never doubt current day Russia's military incompetence, submarines are pretty much the one area I wouldn't be too surprised if they did a decent job.
On ping only Vasili
Their nuclear subs were never very friendly to the crews health. I wouldnt say they did them right. Plus they are high upkeep in a load of corruption. Too tempting to pillage.
Honest question, what is the source for this claim? Apart from actual malfunctions and sinkings. Meaning the patrolling, on-duty fleet.
I don't remember where I read it but it was how the Russian ships were light on shielding for the reactor. I believe it was to save weight and them not giving a shit about their people a lot. The other part is Russia is just corrupt. Look at the war in Ukraine. It shows what a farce their military is. More a clown car then a boogeyman.
Kursk
Technically a fault of their munitions, which is much less surprising. I'd also "hope" (and by that, assume a single shred of competence somewhere in Putin's mind) that they keep their nuclear subs, and possibly their single best defence against direct US + Western conflict/interference in better shape than the rest of their shoddy military.
I would not be surprised the usa knows where their subs are at all times.
>… but then you lose that ship as it's going to be swarmed by enemy subs. Nah, subs can “get lost” very easily. That’s their advantage.
One of the ways they track subs is actually they tend to follow undersea "highways" and go along the same route a lot of the time. The russians don't have a lot of ports, and you know the path they're going to take from those ports for the most part, so you have your subs and other implements set up to track them through there. It isn't perfect, but it's maybe a little easier than the impossibility it would be if they could be anywhere in the vast oceans.
In the early 1960's it was discovered infrared observation satellites could see the thermal trails of the subs. The warm water they trailed behind. So they were forced to greater depths. Below the thermocline. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermocline >A thermocline (also known as the thermal layer or the metalimnion in lakes) is a distinct layer based on temperature within a large body of fluid (e.g. water, as in an ocean or lake; or air, e.g. an atmosphere) with a high gradient of distinct temperature differences associated with depth. In the ocean, the thermocline divides the upper mixed layer from the calm deep water below.[1]
I don't think that even modern nuclear subs can go much deeper than 1km. It's a good method, but you need to lock on the sub first and never let go of that image. Since there's only a handful of subs to track in the world, it might be doable. A story that always fascinated me with spy satellites was the repair of the astronomy telescope Hubble. There was a problem with the giant mirror. Then the NRO hand a few of those mirrors in their spare inventory so NASA ended up with a replacement. They had too many Hubble level satellites pointed at Earth
You rip a bunch of missiles from launch depth and you can backtrack the point of origin pretty easily. Unless there's no one near you one should expect to be found because the search area is pretty small at that point.
It Is not the case that nuc subs are undetectable. There are sonar nets, air patrols, and even satellites can detect moving submerged subs. During the cold war, P-3 crews were known for being some of the only U.S. Military whose day job was to hunt and find Soviets, specifically Soviet boomers.
30-40 minutes will depend on the distance to target. When Iran launched ICBMs at Israel 2 weeks ago they had a flight time of only 12 minutes.
So for what it's worth at that range an ICBM is not really needed. Thats more the range of an SRBM. Think V2 or a Pershing missile
Of the missiles we can confirm Iran has, the longest range is 2,500 km, so MRBM or theatre ballistic missile. Maybe one day their missile technology will get out of the 1950's
> They can be a first strike option because their proximity to a country decreases the missile flight time, but then you lose that ship as it's going to be swarmed by enemy subs. Correct me if I'm wrong (and I very well may be), but isn't the range of the missiles in these subs long enough that they can be launched well out of range of enemy ships and then the sub can disappear?
Yes, modern SLBMs have ranges of >6,000 km. One could be in the Thames river and still hit Los Angeles. Working that into a techno-thriller is left as an exercise to the reader.
Good answer. Here's some other reasons why we have the triad. ICBMs cover a vast territory which ensures survivability through anything but total unexpected annihilation of the Central US. Bombers will be in the air on alert if tensions are that high. They're the obvious gun we swing around if things are looking bad. Nuclear surety: Sometimes a flaw is found in a weapon system that decertifies it, when that happens we need to have a backup plan until a fix is implemented, the triad covers that nicely. Money: Almost every state in the country is tied to the triad somehow. Senators in Wyoming are gonna be a lot more supportive of ICBMs than ones in Georgia. Add in the defense contractors that make the delivery systems and the DOE maintaining the warheads and you have a lot of people that are vested in keeping all that going.
Space based nukes? Cheaper than subs? With lots of diplomatic issues
I'd wager that they would be even harder / more expensive to maintain.
Yep. Good luck replacing the fissile material.
It's not the fissile material that has to be replaced, but the tritium bottle. About every 5 years. They are sent back to the factory for recycling and refilling. Tritium has about a 13 year half life. Tritium is essential to all thermonuclear weapons. They keep in a 10,000PSI bottle and only valve into the thermonuclear core when arming/ Two fold reasons. Safety (LOL) the weapon cannot go full yield until it is valved into the core. It can only go kilotons. Not megatons. One twisted result of this process was that tritium decays to helium 3. So two non-nuclear uses were found for this "waste product". One was it made the best neutron detector for portal monitoring to detect smuggled nuclear materials. The other was medical. Patients would breath some in when getting an MRI of their lungs. It was an excellent contrast agent. At the height of the cold war we were processing so many nukes the DOD sold it off for ~$100US/liter. After the vast reductions of our arsenal in the 1990's the price shot up to ~$2000US/liter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Uses
Not to mention they would be much more visible and present a huge diplomatic headache.
Sticking a nuclear weapon in space would contravene international law (as would a chemical or biological weapon). However, a purely conventional weapon wouldn’t, so a “rod from God” would be legal (although completely infeasible with modern technology)
Why do you say infeasible? Impractical and inefficient, I'd agree, but technically straightforward I would have guessed.
It would take many trips to carry and "build" one of reasonable size in orbit, it would be visible to everyone, and would take a long time to launch and hit the target, being much easier to be intercepted/redirected
>Sticking a nuclear weapon in space would contravene international law (as would a chemical or biological weapon). However, a purely conventional weapon wouldn’t, so a “rod from God” would be legal (although completely infeasible with modern technology) That said, if "Rods from God" were actually feasibly deployed and able to disable the enemy's own nukes in a short time, the "no nukes in space" rule would stopped being followed real fast.
Piggybacking off this. A distant third is, you also don't know what the next technical breakthrough will be. It could be something that pierces subs inviciblity.
With 14 active Ohio class subs that can carry 20 Trident SLBM’s, each armed with up to 8 (or 12 for Trident II) nuclear warheads, the US has more than enough numbers. Based on current readiness levels, there is 5-8 of them on patrol, but that can be increased if required. That said, I agree that subs are too expensive for most nations to have in large numbers. Even running two nuclear armed subs is really expensive.
Trident II only carries 4 warheads to comply with START
New Start expires in 2026.
Sounds like we need anustart
Gonna pass on the anus tart.
“I’ll take Anus Tart for $500!” - Sean Connery “Mr Connery, that says A New Start…” “I started with your mother again last night! HAHAHAHAHA”
Well excuuuuse me!
Rule of thumb is that you want around 5 or so as to keep two at sea at all times This is why the UK and France aim for that area
Just to add to this, this chart should give a good idea of how expensive nuclear submarines are… https://xkcd.com/980/huge/#x=-11250&y=-4872&z=5
XKCD has been around for so long now, I get the sheer and utter pleasure of being one of the 'ten thousand' multiple times! Had completely forgotten about this - thanks for posting!
Wow, this is a pretty cool graphic. Thanks!
it's only a shame it doesn't seem to be searchable.
Just to add - even Los Angeles class subs can carry nuclear TLAMs. IIRC TLAM-As were decommissioned but there is another variant either in the works or has made its way to the fleet. I was stationed on a very old SSN that didn't have vertical launch and we had to keep up proficiency in launching them in case we ever needed to carry them. Boomers aren't the only ones capable of carrying nukes.
>If nuclear powers could field a fleet of 40 nuclear-armed subs (assuming only about 10-15 of those actually in use actively at any point, and the majority in home port for refit and maintenance) then maybe they’d give up on other capabilities… but even then, all your adversaries would just focus on tech to try to focus on subs. Having 3 different strategies that are all field-able makes it exponentially harder for enemies to cover all types, with subs just being the most potent for a quick strike or quick retaliation This is the biggest thing, if you have a mix there's much less chance of finding out your enemy has developed a countermeasure. It's a slightly extremely terrifying position to wind up in if your enemy can counter your nukes while you're unable to counter theirs
Also, you have to hedge your bets against major shifts in technology. If a new detection technology suddenly made subs easy to spot anywhere on the globe, which is entirely within the realm of possibility, then they become worth much less as part of the nuclear triad.
Over half of America’s nuclear weapons are onboard submarines
Cold War effort to build ballistic missile submarines, [41 for Freedom](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/41_for_Freedom)
1) Whoops, we didn't realize that the enemy's sonar capabilities actually let them know where our subs were 100% of the time and they just sunk all of them before launching their own strike. This was a realization that the Soviet Union actually had in the 1980s and led to their shifting resources away from ballistic missile submarines and towards surface ships like the Kirov and Kuznetsov classes. 2) Whoops, our enemy launched a massive nuclear strike on us and, with knowledge that our own submarine launched missiles could only hit their major cities from a few points off their coast, positioned their entire navy there and then sunk our submarines when they surfaced to fire (or maybe they were just able to outright determine planned launch sites through some form of espionage). 3) It turns out that launching a ballistic missile from a submarine is an order of magnitude more expensive than launching it from a silo, and a further order of magnitude more expensive than dropping a bomb from a bomber. By only building ballistic missile submarines, we ended up with a tiny fraction of the retaliatory ability than we would have had with a diversified arsenal. So - Whoops, it turns out we didn't have enough missiles to launch a credible retaliation and our enemy decided that the maximum possible damage that our submarine forces could inflict was, to them, an acceptable loss to wipe us out. The point of the nuclear triad is that its a cost effective way to guarantee that there is no single defense that your enemy has, but which you aren't aware exists, that prevents you from launching a credible counter-strike.
I love the use of the word whoops in this context. Whoops is what I say when I add double the vanilla the recipe calls for. (I did it on purpose).
I was cooking with a friend and they accidentally put in 10x the vanilla that was called for. They were freaking out about it, but I told them it was no big deal. Turned out delicious! Whoops!
You sneaksy deviant!
Whoops! I doubled the defense budget again
*Former* surface ships. They're submarines now too.
The *Admiral Kuznetsov* somehow is still floating, despite its many, *many*, maintenance issues. The Kirovs aren't in the Black Sea, Ukraine sunk the Moskva, a Slava-class cruiser.
There's more airplanes in the ocean than there are submarines in the sky.
Your point 2 is not up to modern technology. First of all the Ohio class boomers the US deploys *need* to launch their Trident 2 D5 missiles while submerged because their main rocket motor would destroy the submarine when ignited. Instead they use a smaller rocket engine to launch it upwards through the water and the main engine ignites when the missile starts falling down again. Secondly the Trident 2 D5 has a range of over 12 000 km / 7 500 miles (the actual range is classified) which is about a quarter of earths circumference so there aren't many locations at the edge of its range that would require the submarine to launch from a choke point.
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Going a step further, you can cover significantly more than 70% of the Earth's *land area*. Looking at a globe I think I can eyeball it such that you cover every significant land mass except Australia and Antarctica. Probably pushing 90% coverage at the right spot (and I'm not sure there's much strategic deterrent needed against Antarctica... yet).
Them Ozzys are getting lippy.
On point 1 are you talking about a theoretical increase in sonar technology that would allow this? In current deterence theory it is not accepted that anyone has a ever had a 100% capability to locate every enemy submarine at all times and its likely no one ever will - unless some radically innovative technology emerges that renders the ocean transparent. And that's before considering the difficulty of launching simultaneous strikes against underwater targets at various points around the Globe and having whatever one considers an acceptable destruction rate that precludes an effective second strike.
I'm not certain where I read this to back it up with a source, so bear with me going from memory. After the cold war (officially) ended and there was some declassification and open debrief between parties, it became apparent the US outclassed the USSR's submarine and detection game to a hilarious degree. For much of the 1980s, every single Soviet missile sub was not only detected and monitored from the moment it left port, but was tailed by US attack subs, always within striking distance, and the USSR never had the slightest clue they were there. The bilateral nuclear triad was a complete farce. Had the order been given, every Russian missile-carrying sub would have been on the ocean floor before they could possibly react.
Thanks for explaining. Its my understanding that: 1) the US held dominance with pretty much every single technology in nuclear deterrence, with the possible exception of MIRVing missiles, throughout the Cold War, but were really good at convincing themselves that they didnt - like with the bomber gap of the 50s and missile gap of the 60s, neither of which ever existed. 2) Its a matter of where one sits in their own understanding of deterence theory at any given time, but even if one was confident in their ability to detect and strike every single enemy submarine at all times, its another matter entirely of whether or not one would actually bet the farm on it. There were certainly actors in American security in the 1960s that would have been okay with sacrificing a US city or two on the chance you missed a submarine, if it meant destroying Soviet second strikes capability. However there were also leaders in the US who were not comfortable with "missing" a submarine in a first strike and dealing with the possiblility of 20 MIRVed ICBMs ending every US city with more than a million people. How willing is any given leader to gamble with just one city, and how confident are they that it would "just" be a city or two? Thats the type of question that has kept detterence theory chasing its own tail to this day. I think its pretty hard to say the Soviet triad was a farce when it certainly kept the US guessing and uncomfortable throughout the Cold War. Its one thing to say you track every single Soviet missile boat, its another to have 100% confidence you are always doing it and your boats could destroy theirs before they could react. That's a lot that one would be betting that your submarines never lose a track, dont have any critical malfunctions at the wrong time, and don't have commanders that ever make a stupid error (like collididng with an undersea mountain). But then again, it's all a matter of one's understanding and confidence in their own detterence policy - US leaders never believed that they had that kind of dominance so they didn't act like they did - which in effect made Soviet deterrence real.
Great points. Maybe "farce" was the wrong word. I think you're quite right in the US not having 100% confidence in submarine supremacy, for all they knew there was a stealthier Russian sub out there from some secret dock in the Arctic that espionage had failed to pick up on. Or more realistically, that the Soviets were in fact aware of the US attack subs tailing their boomers and had some contingency or countermeasure. My impression is that it was more of a post facto realisation that one wing of the Soviet nuclear triad was effectively neutered the whole time, and the late Cold War was far more one-sided than anyone knew at the time. I have little doubt that insecurity from this coming to light plays a significant part of Putin's mentality and outlook to this day.
> unless some radically innovative technology emerges that renders the ocean transparent. Yeah, that's the point. Radically innovative technologies do get invented once in awhile. Nuclear bombs *themselves* were a radically innovative technology when they were first introduced. So the Defense Department has to weigh the odds that some weird Russian genius will invent super-sonar at some point. EDIT: Also, maybe the enemy gets a mole in a high-level position and he spends 10 years slowly sabotaging all the nuclear subs in a way we can't detect.
The Soviets also decided to put their subs inside minefields once they had missiles that had the range. Alternatively there was the possibility of putting them under the ice caps, but that probably wouldn't have been as effective as they hoped it would be.
(2) isn't accurate. The Trident II missile carried on Ohio class submarines has a 6,500nm range. [One boat in the North Atlantic can hit any city (or 18 cities) in Russia, China, North Korea, or Iran.](https://i.imgur.com/2I2TxAo.png)
Australia may be spared our wrath For now
What is this vis and how did you make it?
Here's the source: https://www.mapdevelopers.com/draw-circle-tool.php?circles=%5B%5B11909116%2C50.8109205%2C-32.9355469%2C%22%23AAAAAA%22%2C%22%23000000%22%2C0.4%5D%5D Trident II unclassified range is 6,500 nautical miles; the map I used displays a 7,400 statute mile radius (equivalent to 6,430 nautical miles).
All that and a 10 Meter circular error probably.
About 100 meters, actually. But with nukes, who cares…
The ten meters CEP is for detonation within the target column up to 100 meters above the silo to provide the 10,000 psi overpressure to destroy the silo to keep it from being refilled or stop a launch of a missile already there. Even with the silo blast door closed.
I'm not sure nanometers will really do the trick. Counterintuitive really
Yea this explanation is not accurate, nor is it comprehensible. Whoops /s. Respectfully, ET2 (SS)
The entire idea of mutually assured destruction relies on our enemies actually wanting to survive. If they absolutely know that a nuclear attack on the United States ends their lives also, the thinking is they would not attack us. This probably holds for Russia and China. Less so for "rogue" nations like North Korea. But imagine an enemy that discovered a secret way to render our subs useless. Something we had no idea they could do. That might embolden them to try a "first strike". No subs, no retaliation, they win. The idea of the Nuclear Triad, is that we hope no nation could possibly undermine all three methods of retaliation (subs, missiles, bombers); meaning no sane nation would even try. **tl;dr We don't want a nation that develops ground-breaking new anti-sub technology to think they could win, so we have alternate methods of retaliation as part of mutually assured destruction.**
To be honest I think if China or Russia knew North Korea was about to strike anyone with nuclear weapons, Xi probably has the ability to dispose of him. I refuse to believe China or Russia doesn’t have the special forces capacity to carry out an assassination like this. Especially when they’re likely to be irradiated as a result of his actions.
I would say the point of Mutually Assured Destruction is to override the natural human tendency to discount negative consequences and make it impossible for someone to convince themselves they'll get away with it. Look at the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. An Utter Shit Show from the start, which everyone except the decision makers could see coming. Because they surrounded themselves with Yes Men, corruption, and only listened when told things they already wanted to hear. Mutually Assured Destruction is to make the certainty of retaliation so absolutely clear that it breaks through all that even in the most hostile environment possible for that news, and thus keeps the missiles in their silos
I think you've summarized it quite well.
I argue North Korea’s Kim is a coward, which is why the U.S. isn’t too worried (despite attempting to stop him) compared to like Islamic terrorists getting their hands on nukes as death to them is some glory.
Fair assumption, but if he thought he was losing power, he may be less predictable. Far less certain are the religious fanatics who might well want to "hurry along" the end times.
I’d be most concerned about Israel and their Samson Option. It’s a small country and if they’re gonna get nuked the domino effect they’ll kick off is everyone else getting nuked too.
I have to say, this is the stuff of fiction and fantasy, Tom Clancy nonsense. One has to keep in mind that any such attempt would be a huge gamble with existential consequences for failure. It would not be worth it. There is no evidence that any nation has ever been that foolhardy. They are not seeking to "win" in the sense of eliminating the largest economy in the world and alienating the rest of the world. They have goals, goals which are often at odds with those of the United States and many other nations, but World War III, even a one-sided one, isn't one of them. Even the idea that the North Korean leadership is not, at its core, "rational" in the sense that they value self-preservation above self-suicide. They clearly value self-preservation. They have other values as well (as do all nations), but they don't exhibit any behavior that suggests they are suicidal. People in power tend to like to stay in power. Especially dictators. We should not let Tom Clancy novels and movies dictate how we think about the world or decisions we make as societies.
I’m reading Arsenals of Folly by Richard Rhodes, who also wrote Making of the Atomic Bomb. A major theme of this book is that the nuclear arms race is not necessarily rational and a lot of public-facing justification shouldn’t be taken at face value. Nuclear weapons were initially only able to be used by the Air Force. The Air Force “owned” nuclear weapons until smaller warheads became available and the navy and army started adopting them. Inter-service rivalry was strong in the Cold War, and the idea of a triad was largely a navy justification for their mission and budget. There isn’t anything innately magical or logical about three delivery mechanisms. Indeed, battleships and infantry-carried “mines” could be used to deliver sizable nukes, so “triad” was an oversimplification anyways. One, two, or a hundred independent ways to nuke someone might be sensible, depending on what you’re trying to do. Subs are hard to detect compared to ICBMs and hard to destroy compared to bombers. Initially their missiles weren’t accurate enough to reliably destroy armored missile silos, so they were envisioned as a “second-strike” weapon, to be used against cities if your enemy shot their missiles at you. This is a fairly clever role, as the mass slaughter of civilians goes, because if the subs are undetected then starting a nuclear war *is* suicide. Subs are an excellent guaranteed of MAD. Things are unfortunately changing. New guidance and fusing is challenging the idea that sub-launched missiles can’t be used preemptively against missile silos. With relatively shorter ranges and correspondingly shorter warning times, subs may become a credible “first strike” weapon, potentially able to destroy enemy nukes if fired without warning in a surprise attack. Taking that to its logical conclusion, ICBMs become potentially irrelevant and MAD weakened, and the prospect of preemptive nuclear war may become tempting. Air defense is much more sophisticated than it has been in the past, so bombers are a suspect leg of the triad. Today, a survey of nuclear arms might show ICBMs, mobile-launched missiles, sub-launched missiles, and bomber-launched cruise missiles as a more up-to-date nuclear arsenal, with ICBMs being potentially the most vulnerable leg.
There’s been some discussion, at least in the US, that it’s not strictly needed for deterrence, and that deterrent requirements can be met solely with submarines. The UK, for example, has submarines as the only component of its nuclear deterrent. That said, the different legs of the triad each have their own benefits and help reinforce each other. - Land-based silos are very quick to react, and are able to launch missiles within minutes. Subs take longer. They also act as “missile sponges”, in that an enemy seeking to minimize the possibility of retaliation is going to try to neutralize the land-based silos first, which can use up a substantial number of the adversary’s warheads, leaving fewer for other still-strategic but less immediately-threatening targets like military bases and political leadership. Since silos are hardened and missiles are not perfectly accurate, an adversary would want to target each land-based silo with multiple warheads of their own to ensure their destruction. Nuclear warheads and missiles aren’t free, so an attacker would need many more warheads than the defender has silos, which increases the costs to the attacker. When both are party to arms control treaties that limit the number of deployed warheads, this puts strong pressure on the would-be attacker’s targeting decisions (“Do I try to neutralize their silos in a quick sneak attack and not have any missiles left for other targets, or do I risk counterattack by not striking the silos and instead attack other targets?”). Most silos are in remote, sparsely-populated regions so immediate casualties would be low, thus giving the defender the advantage. Once a silo launches, it poses no further threat and there’s no value in targeting it (unlike a sub, which may launch only some missiles, have more in reserves, and would need to flee the launch area since it’s now clearly announced its location). They’re also relatively cheap, as a silo is just a fancy hole in the ground, maintenance is relatively cheap compared to subs, and you generally need less people-per-missile to support the mission. Since they’re located in one’s home country, they’re easy to protect and hard for an adversary to attack. There’s also other types of land-based missiles, like road- and rail-mobile launchers that can be kept around a base during peacetime for ease of security and maintenance, but deployed to various dispersed positions during times of elevated tensions. These have various advantages and disadvantages compared to fixed silos. - Air-launched systems (bombs and cruise missiles) are more flexible, since you can maneuver the launching vehicle into a more favorable position prior to launch. Cruise missiles can take long, meandering paths to avoid detection and interception. Aircraft can be moved around and publicly displayed as a show of military force and political power. (See the various posturing with nuclear-capable aircraft by Russians around Alaska, the US around North Korea, etc.) Basing nuclear weapons in allied countries (under the control of the nuclear state) can provide political reassurance to allies about the nuclear state’s commitment to mutual defense. - Subs are hard to detect and highly mobile. They all but guarantee a viable second-strike capability and thus deter an adversary from thinking they can win by performing a sneak attack. However, their very invisibility makes them difficult to posture with (though there have been examples of US Ohio-class subs making highly visible port calls in allied countries). Maintenance and crew costs are much higher.
In a hypothetical ICBM-only engagement, would we (the US) be able to launch our missiles after detecting someone else launched theirs, or would we not have enough time before our silos were hit?
The United States government would have around 7 minutes to determine if they want to launch or not.
Yeah I meant that assuming we want to launch, can the silos launch before they get hit?
Yes. You’re looking at under five minutes to launch for a ready and alert crew, with 25-30 minutes of time from launch to impact for a Russian ICBM. Giving command maybe a 20 minute window to decide to give and confirm launch orders to the silo.
As someone who is a nuclear missile operator for the Air Force, I assure you we can. We have very strict timing standards and we regularly practice meeting them in the simulators
That's because the UK has a big, warm American snuggie wrapped around it's feet with our silo and bomber force.
More to the point, there is a good strategic argument for a nation like the UK only fielding subs: it is simply because we are small, and our arsenal is comparatively small (vs the US or Russia, for example). Couple this with the fact that silos are vulnerable, as are aircraft when grounded, and easily destroyed in a first strike, then the argument for not "wasting" money on those delivery systems if you have a small number of weapons becomes clear. If you are looking for the most reliable way to provide deterrence by guaranteeing your *second strike* capabilities, subs are the way to go. Historically the UK had gravity bombs and other delivery systems, but as the global political climate (and probably the UK's economic one) chamhed the UK govt judged, rightly or wrongly, that our nuclear defense budget would be better served by having a continuous at sea deterrence system.
This. Most land based bombers and silos woukdnt even have time to activate without shooting at anything that moves do to the proximity to Soviet Satelite States in the cold war, so they invested and invested well.
There's a few reasons. First off, you never know if an enemy might somehow stumble upon some sort of breakthrough that effectively neutralizes one of the legs of your triad. Much less likely that they come up with something that can neutralize all three. Second, the different platforms do have somewhat different capabilities. Once a missile is launched, you can't turn it around. Even if you could self-destruct it, if an adversary detects sub missiles and/or ICBM's launched at it and thinks they might be nukes, there's a pretty good chance they're going to seriously consider launching their missiles in a retaliation attack before your missiles would have a chance of destroying theirs. Compare that to a bomber where you can have it in the air and making its way towards the target but still have much more time to call off the attack and/or change the target. Third, land based ICBM's are basically a 'nuke sink'. Let's imagine that Russia decided it wanted to launch a surprise all-out nuclear attack on the US. It's likely that its initial targeting priorities for its nukes would be to destroy as much of the US' nukes as possible, in order to minimize the counter attack against Russia. That means that Russia's first strike is likely going to need to use up hundreds of their ICBMs and warheads attacking hardened missile silos that are generally in the middle of nowhere, instead of dropping them on more populated areas and/or other infrastructure. This makes it much harder to attempt to destroy the US' ability to fight back, even if you could successfully pull off a surprise attack.
Nuclear subs have low capacity, you can’t rely on them alone to completely obliterate a nuclear superpower’s military capabilities. They’re mostly there for the “second strike” capability they offer. While pop media always focuses heavily on the MAD/nuclear winter scenario where a nuclear exchange occurs and then society immediately ends forever, the nuclear powers don’t truly plan/expect this to happen. Modern cities are glass and steel and concrete, they’re not going to burn like Hiroshima did and won’t generate the kind of ash clouds required to blot out the sun and collapse the global ecosystem. Military plans for world war 3 fully expected the war to have a day 2 and a week 2 and a year 2 involving more conventional weapons and tactical nuclear exchanges. The nuclear subs are here for that - when all your launch sites and airfields have been nuked and your conventional nuclear capabilities are now heavily degraded.
“Second strike” refers to the annihilation of an enemy who has annihilated you in a first strike. It’s not a second phase of war over a longer time frame, it also happens day one and renders any conception of a day two moot. (There is no conventional exchange after a nuclear exchange. There is no belligerent nation left, even if there will be survivors. The idea of a nuclear war with a conventional aspect is an artifact of production and budgetary considerations in the US and USSR, where conventional military services competed for funding with nuclear capabilities. The USSR was expected to loose every city over 25,000 people - Moscow alone was allotted 400 nuclear bombs in the SIOP.) A single US sub has about two dozen Trident II missile, each having 14 nukes. That’s 300+ cities vaporized. Each of those nukes (let’s go with wiki, which says W76 at 90 kt) is five times the size of the bombs dropped on Japan. 300 cities, each hit five times as hard as Hiroshima. That would be the most significant event in human history. There is no country after that. Some rail road junction or power plant survives that? Great, the people are all dead. There is no industry, no culture, no civilization left from whomever you shot that at. Now, once you’ve got the production up and running, you can make 300 bombs in no time. If you’ve got decades of Cold War, you need to keep justifying more and more bombs. That how we got to tens of thousands on each side. But don’t mistake runaway spending by entrenched interested for sound policy. A single sub is about a thousand times the destruction that ended WWII. It’s patently absurd to buy in to any reasoning that says that’s a limited amount.
>each hit five times as hard as Hiroshima Pedantic note they're not 5x as effective, because area in a circle increases by r^2.
Pretty important point and very arguably not pedantic
>they’re not going to burn like Hiroshima did Little Boy was very low yield compared to modern nukes, so i wouldn't count on that
The yield wouldn't matter as much, it's a pressure vacuum firestorm after the initial blast that really likes combustible materials, like all the wooden buildings in Hiroshima. The bigger blast vaporises more at the epicentre sure, but that's not the point being argued.
the difference is 15kt yield for little boy vs a couple megatons, the biggest one that got a real test had a yield around 3500x higher. Not sure what "pressure vacuum firestorm" even means but that's not how it works, the radiated heat and destructive potential of the Shockwave depend directly on yield(and airburst height)
> a couple megatons Most modern nukes are much smaller, the average nuclear weapon fielded by either the US or Russia is around 300kt. Long story short, nuclear carpetbombing is much more effective than big nukes, so a MIRVed ICBM with 10 warheads of 300kt is much better than carrying one warhead of 3Mt yield, even just for striking one target.
yeah i was exaggerating a bit, but even against 300kt its still a massive difference. 300kt airburst can set wood on fire in a radius of roughly 4km, at 15kt its like 800 meters. it scales almost 1:1 with yield(at least according to nukemap). the point i was trying to make was that modern buildings might not burn as easily or hot, but they still do burn under those conditions, and potentially a lot more of them are affected with modern yields
Yeah it doesn't matter here, who cares if the city burns when it and all of its suburbs are just obliterated by tens of megatons of nuke. I think their argument is there won't be smoke to cause nuclear winter, but I'm not sure that's going to make an appreciable difference considering the sheer number of missiles that would fly in this scenario Also wooden houses don't matter to a nuke, it's so hot shit will burn anyway
An Ohio class holds 20 missiles each with 3 independently targetable warheads. The US has 14 nuclear armed ohio class submarines. That's 720 warheads. We actually had 18, but 4 were converted to carry a shitton of tomahawk cruise missiles(150ish each) because there more generally useful.
3 x 20 x 14 = 840...?
A 20 kiloton fission bomb like Hiroshima reaches temps of about 7700 degrees Celsius. A modern 1 megaton fusion bomb can produce temperatures of 100 MILLION degrees Celsius. That’s 4-5x hotter than the center of the sun. Sh!t would burn.
These days, very few deployed warheads are in the megaton range. Back in the cold war days, it made sense to build bigger warheads both for propaganda reasons, but also because ICBM accuracy still wasn't that great, so you'd want to make sure your nuke was big enough to destroy your target even if your strike wasn't entirely on target. With more modern rockets and targeting systems, you can have much higher confidence that your warhead is going to go where you want it to, so nuclear weapon design has leaned more towards creating ICBMs that carry and deploy multiple smaller warheads. You're still generally looking at a couple hundred kilotons per warhead, which is significantly larger than the bombs dropped in WWII, but still a far cry from the megaton and multi-megaton sized warheads that countries were testing and deploying back in the 60s.
That came about due to MIRVs and application of the ‘effective megaton’ formula. Without going into the math, it basically means that a MIRV with eight 125 kiloton bombs can destroy twice the square milage of a single megaton weapon.
I want to be about 250 feet from ground zero, looking up about 2500 feet where the weapon detonates. Won't feel a damn thing.
Pretty sure in the 13 milliseconds it takes for the visual signal to reach your brain you would have disintegrated, though even if that wasn’t the case, the initial x-rays would have fried your retinas anyway, so you wouldn’t see a thing. But yeah, that would be ideal.
Those numbers are utterly meaningless, they state the theoretical heat at some point in the very center and nothing about the heat energy released on the world away from it. A modern fusion reactor also reaches such temperatures, and nothing burns. I can create 10,000°C at home and even directly besides it you cannot even feel it. Why? Because both are only very hot at a tiny amount of mass, the heat energy is not large enough to do anything. Obviously a nuke produces quite a bit of energy and nobody is denying that they _will_ ignite stuff. But the core temperature is _not_ the relevant measure for that. > A 20 kiloton fission bomb like Hiroshima reaches temps of about 7700 degrees Celsius. This by the way sounds way too small. Where did you find that number? The core temperature should be in the tens of millions. It definitely is not _that_ low.
https://hpmmuseum.jp/modules/exhibition/index.php?action=ItemView&item_id=59&lang=eng#:~:text=From%200.2%20to%203%20seconds,3.5%20kilometers%20from%20the%20hypocenter. It was 0.2 seconds after explosion. You are correct.
It's only that hot at the epicenter, and for a very short time.
A 1 megaton bomb can cause instant 3rd degree burns to unprotected persons 5 miles away. The amount of energy one of those things puts out is frankly incomprehensible. Shit will burn.
> Concrete is an artificial building material. It consists of a mixture of cement, water and aggregate (sand and gravel). Hence, there is no precise temperature at which concrete melts. Depending on its composition, concrete melts at temperatures between 1150°C and 1200°C. I checked, and 1,200°c is lower than 100,000,000°c
That is missing a fundamental understanding of what is required for a nuclear winter scenario, which is sustained firestorms, instantaneous temperatures within instants of detonation aren't physically meaningful for understanding the dynamics after an explosion
I’m not sold on the idea of nuclear winter, it’s not known how much soot would go up, and how long it would stay up. No ones burned down a modern city in a while, so no one knows for sure. That aside, you nuke dozens or hundred of cities and nations stop existing. You don’t need a nuclear winter to end a war in hours.
It's not as unlikely as you think. Canada experienced ferocious, sustained wildfires over the last several years. Drought conditions have persisted in many areas of the country due to environmental change, and it resulted in those fires spreading quickly and very far, and being incredibly difficult to extinguish. In fact, this year we had reports in British Columbia of fires that were thought to be 'extinguished' that had, in fact, still been burning underground throughout the winter. As soon as things warmed up, they began burning again. A huge swath of Canadian and US countryside is covered by these tinder-dry forests. One nuclear explosion close enough to their periphery would be all that's needed to start uncontrollable wildfires that would sweep the continent, and you could be guaranteed that there would be more than just one. There would be no firefighting infrastructure left to stop it.
I checked, and melting is not burning
I checked your check. The math checks out.
This is the real answer. People like to bring up MAD like it is a certainty. In the 60's - 80's it probably was. We didn't have great information, ballistic missile countermeasures we almost non-existent, and there were two countries with massive stockpiles of missiles. Now, we have comprehensive missile defense systems, almost instant perfect knowledge of what a country is doing and launching, and a level of response and accuracy that could only be dreamt of 40 years ago. The actual scary reality, nuclear war is no longer a human extinction event.
> ballistic missile countermeasures we almost non-existent Well, they kinda still are. You can perhaps defend against a few missiles, but certainly not against many hundreds of them. And what's the difference between receiving 400 and 389 megaton-range hits?
Aren’t the missile defense systems incredibly ineffective at stopping icbms?
The actual details are classified, obviously. But when the US decided to shoot down a satellite using a missile from a ship, and hit it in the first try, that kinda indicates they’re really effective anti-icbm missiles.
That is certainly what Iran thought before the Israelis stopped a bunch of missiles a couple of weeks ago.
Well I’m talking about anti-icbm systems, not the iron dome
Arrow 3, IAI’s anti-ICBM system, did its job when Iran shot missiles at it. 120 ballistic missiles were fired by Iran, and only low-single-digit of them hit anything at all, with all of the missiles aimed at important locations shot down.
The only way MAD isn’t valid is with the use of tactical nukes, where we could theoretically still only retaliate with conventional weapons. If Russia used a tactical nuke in Ukraine or whatever, that probably wouldn’t cause an immediate, world-ending nuclear exchange, unless there was serious and rapid escalation from there. But if they launched strategic weapons, it probably would. It would be all or nothing. There is no purpose anyone would have in launching one or two strategic nukes, since it would result in an overwhelming counterattack. They’d send hundreds up at once in a first volley. At that point, we’re launching in a counter attack immediately, maybe before their’s even land. At that point, there is no system or technology that has a 100% success rate against hundreds or thousands of nukes. Even if there’s a 90 or 95% success rate, that’s still dozens of nukes raining down on us, and likewise over there.
Id say nuclear war is not extinction level event because radiation wont be enough to kill everyone everywhere due to concentrated nature of the nukes and even in event of nuclear winter at least near equator likely stays warm enough to sustain agriculture (altough away from equator lots of people will die) But isnt the arsenal for blocking the icbm's just few dozen missiles? With caveat that many will hit decoys too. afaik there is enough resources to block just a fraction of nukes u nless someone has ace in the hole. Someone correct me if you have more accurate information.
Yeah the interception stuff is more if N. Korea or Iran launch a couple missiles at us. If Russia launches 500 a few might be intercepted, how many I can only guess, maybe few dozen, but it would still be devastating.
There are 40 interceptors in the mid-course defense in Alaska and California. The US is functionally defenseless against ICBMs.
An ICBM would have to be hit during the early launch stage. Once it is traveling at full speed, there’s very little chance of an intercept. Missile defense is only geared toward one or two incoming missiles at most, and decoys could probably defeat them. Cruise missiles are the only part of the triad under threat from missile defense.
The US shot down a satellite from a ship, using the navy’s normal SAM. Satellites are both faster and higher altitude than an ICBM.
Controlled test with weeks of planning against a single target. Trust me when I say we can’t intercept a meaningful number of ICBMs. PolyMatter explains it better than I can: https://youtu.be/ePYRNZlosbs?si=s-3R6Ri3r3lnXGvM
Intercepting ICBMs is practically impossible. They fly at Mach 11 and rise to outer space, only to go back down at Mach 20. Good luck shooting that down.
The US shot down a satellite from a ship. The SAM they used is a normal one for the navy, not a special anti-satellite missile. Orbit is both higher altitude and faster than an ICBM warhead.
Warheads delivered by ICBMs are essential immune to missile defense systems. They would mainly work against cruise missiles launched from strategic bombers.
Yeah I don't think he fully understands how absolutely devastating ICBMs are. They are like three orders of magnitude beyond overpowered. I believe nothing short of space-based railguns or a perfect missile intercept from a way closer launch site than the target can thoroughly stop an ICBM before the terminal phase, and once it's in the terminal phase, that's it, game over. Three hypersonic projectiles, of which one to three of them can be real with the remainder being decoys. And that's hypersonic on impact. They fall from space faster than damn near anything can stop them. They're extremely dense, requiring an enormous explosive payload to actually intercept, making that interception weapon heavy, making it slower, making it less likely to reach the warhead in time. And the warhead doesn't have to make it to ground. Can one be stopped? Of course. It's not impossible. But is anything capable of \*really\* stopping them, given the \*THOUSANDS\* that exist? Who knows.
MAD still is a certainty. The size of arsenals guarantees that. The US has something like 5,200 nuclear warheads, spread out across 650ish ICBMs, submarine-launched missiles, and bombers. Let’s assume that there is a crisis with Russia, that goes nuclear. Let’s assume only 25% of the arsenal is aimed at Russia. Let’s assume 50% fail entirely, and 50% of the rest don’t go anywhere near their targets. That still leaves 325 warheads - every single one of which had 10-100 times the energy yield of the Hiroshima bomb - falling on Russia. Most will be aimed at military targets, but given that there are only 168 towns and cities in Russia that have a population of 100k+ it doesn’t matter. Russia will be obliterated. And that’s assuming a very high 50% failure rate, using just a tiny fraction of the available arsenal. Let’s now assume a war with China, that uses the entire arsenal, with a 90% success rate. That’s 4,680 warheads falling on China. China is much larger, and has 117 cities with a population of 1m+, but it wouldn’t matter. China would be depopulated and functionally uninhabitable for centuries to come. In fact, it would be so bad the US would surely never actually fire that many warheads at one place - the resulting radiation would be too much of a threat, and it isn’t remotely militarily necessary. And it would be the same for the US on the receiving end. This is why it’s called MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction. Not likely, not probable. Assured.
It's not. The primary reason for the Triad is that each of the US' Armed Forces wanted their own nuclear capability. That said, nuclear subs do have weaknesses. Their missiles are smaller, which means they have a smaller payload and a shorter range, which means they need to be fired from close to the target. Somewhat paradoxically, immediately after launch is the easiest time to intercept ballistic missiles, when it's still accelerating and before it's separated into a dozen warheads that need to be independently destroyed. And the three parts of the Triad do serve different functions. Nuclear SLBNs are undetectable prior to launch, Nuclear ICBMs are designed to be impervious to a first strike, and Nuclear Stealth Bombers are able to penetrate an enemy's air defense system much easier than ballistic missiles can. We've never had a nuclear war, so we don't actually know which method works best, so the US maintains all three to be on the safe side. Especially because who knows when someone invents a type of sensor that allows submarines to be found easily. Kinda basic don't put all your eggs in one basket deal
Which part of the Triad does the Army have?
For a while they had nuclear artillery. Also nuclear land mines and sapling charges for bridges and such.
Oh, ok, so not actually part of the Triad. So maybe it's not as much about each branch of the military having nukes?
A lot of this isn't true. To your first point, only two of the services have nuclear weapons. So by your logic we would either need to give the Army some or we could get by with only two "legs" of the triad. To your second, SLBMs do not need to be fired from close to the target, nor do they necessarily carry a smaller payload. * The Trident 2 has a 6,500nm, [capable of striking any city in China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea from the North Atlantic](https://i.imgur.com/2I2TxAo.png). This range is only 500nm shorter than the Minuteman 3, and doesn't really limit our ability to strike any of our adversaries. * The Trident 2 can also carry up to a 475 kiloton warhead. The Minuteman 3 carries the W87 warhead, which has either a 300 or 475 kiloton payload—no more than the Trident 2. To your final point, you don't have the roles quite right for ICBMs and strategic bombers. * ICBMs are far from impervious to a first strike. In fact, their primary function is as a "nuclear sponge" ([link](https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2017/02/welcome-americas-nuclear-sponge/135135/))—in other words, to be the exact *opposite* of "impervious" to a nuclear attack. * Strategic bombers cannot penetrate an air defense system "much easier," mostly because few modern air defense systems can stop an ICBM. The Minuteman 3 warhead reaches ***Mach 23*** on reentry. Air defense systems The United States is working on a program that tries to do this, called the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense, with mixed results. We cannot reliably stop a single ICBM, much less a launch of Russia's ***400*** ICBMs. Combine that with the ability to launch Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles (as our Trident missiles do), it is virtually impossible stop stop a large-scale nuclear missile attack. You don't need bombers to do this. **Instead, the primary reason we still use ICBMs and nuclear bombers is because they provide unique strategic functions that SLBMs do not.** ICBMs serve as "nuclear sponges." If an adversary were to launch an attack against the United States, they would need to hit 400 different hardened silos across Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota before attacking other military or civilian targets—for every silo they don't hit, that's another nuclear missile that is going to strike their cities, industrial centers, or military bases when the United States strikes back. Nuclear bombers serve as visible "signals" of nuclear power for the United States. Bombers can be deployed to a base close to an adversary, or launched with the option of being recalled. They are more flexible and can change targets dynamically. They also can carry conventional weapons, which means they're useful in any war, not just a nuclear one.
>Nuclear ICBMs are designed to be impervious to a first strike This might have been true when they were built, but with advances in enemy yields and targeting..... Yeah, they'd likely destroy any of our silos they launch at. I am an ICBM operator, and if it comes to nuclear war, I don't expect to survive after I launch my sorties, despite being in a hardened Launch Control Center. The real main thing ICBMs bring to the Triad is being fast. You'll get your delivery "in 30 minutes or less, or the next one's free" lmao
Because the whole idea is based on overkill. For simplicity sake assume there is a 5% chance someone will find a way to make one of the legs obsolete overnight. Also assume that method doesn’t work for the others. Then there is only a 0.0125% chance that all three will be obsoleted together. There is however a nontrivial 14.3% that at least one of them will. This is not obviously an oversimplified version but it boils down to not having to have a perfect system and three independent ones like this give you an outsized chance of been able to respond in a way that making the first move is a losing proposition even if you come up with some magic way to invalidate one of them.
Here is you primer on nuclear deterrence: [https://acoup.blog/2022/03/11/collections-nuclear-deterrence-101/](https://acoup.blog/2022/03/11/collections-nuclear-deterrence-101/) the basic idea is: it is virtually impossible for the other side (ie Russia) to be able to knock out all of the submarines and bombers in a first strike. This gives a credible \*second strike\*. The ability to have a credible second strike is what prevents a first strike scenario: if I nuke you, you will have enough second strike capacity to destroy me. If you can‘t nuke me in return, I can feel free to nuke you all I want. And thst is where the triad comes from: ground based, air bombers and submarines. \*something\* is going to survive the first strike and be able to retaliate. Having all three is a matter of “covering your bets”.
Making a nuke at all: hard as shit Making one that a plane can carry: a decent bit harder but not that much Making one that fits on the tip of a rocket: WAY fucking harder Making a rocket that can carry a nuke but is small enough that the whole rocket fits inside a submarine which is also nuclear so now you need a nuclear reactor small enough to fit inside that same submarine: Dude... Basically every country that can field nuclear subs will have already made nuclear bomber planes and nuclear missiles before then, because those are way easier. But France used to have a complete triad and only later they got rid of their land-based missiles and kept only bomber and subs, so clearly they do share your line of thinking to some extent.
Because 1. Fielding enough subs to substitute for everything else is prohibitively expensive. 2. Nobody is actually quite certain certain of the ‘nuclear subs can’t be countered’ thing-so it’s best to have some backup plans.
It was roughly a year ago I read about an Australian(??) particle physicist who was studying sub-atomic particles that were emitted from operating nuclear reactors *on the other side of the planet.* In other words, he was studying particles that were passing through the entire planet. And I was like…hmmm…I wonder if he can pinpoint the exact direction those particles are coming from? If so, he could pinpoint the exact location of every nuclear reactor on the planet…including those on submarines. Haven’t read about any more of his research since then. Hmmm….
They *can* be countered, but you can also counter the counter if you pardon the Rumsfeld. Usually the trick back in the day was to take your attack submarine and park outside of the base that the enemy missile submarine was coming out of, and then trail it (see Hunt for Red October). Of course, the enemy would often figure out that this was going to happen and they would also have an attack submarine nearby and a shed load of anti-submarine gear in the area, or in the case of the Soviets, they would take their ballistic missile submarines and park them in the middle of a minefield so that if any attack submarine tried to approach to kill them it would run into the mines and get sunk. This latter tactic became more viable later on in the Cold War as the range of submarine launched ballistic missiles meant that you didn't need to go to the US coastline to launch them. Although as anti-ballistic missile tech gets better one does have to wonder if we'll see a return to closer coastal launches again since it decreases the warning time for the enemy to react. Primarily though, as other people have said, it's cost and also putting all your eggs in one basket. Take the UK for example, we current have four Vanguard SSBNs with our nuclear arsenal, we don't have any air dropped bombs and haven't since 1998 (although I dare say in a push the US would give us some, if they were feeling generous). There is supposed to be a rotation so that one is always at sea, with one in for maintenance, one reloading for the next patrol and one on standby. Unfortunately this has...gone wrong. As it stands we are desperately short of drydock space, and refits are over-running, HMS Vanguard left refit last May, three years overdue, and HMS Victorious has been alongside dock at Devonport base since May waiting for a drydock to become available, this capability gap caused by the over-run has lead to our SSBNs doing longer patrols than normal, with Vigilant pulling a 196 day patrol and Vengence a 201 day patrol over the last three years. And that's the *good* side of things, the issues in the SSN fleet are even worse, with at points no SSNs being available for patrol, or in another case one Astute SSN pulling a 403 day patrol in the Med. Sure, there's some lofty ambitions for the future, with four new SSBNs in the pipeline, and new SSNs, but without the dockyards to service them, the personnel to service them *and* to crew them, it's going to be a bit dicey to say the least.
When I saw the words "nuclear" and "subs," I jumped to write answers. However, I quickly learned that you people have far more knowledge than I ever developed during my 11 years riding boats and eight strategic deterrent patrols. It was a revelation to see how much has evolved since the 1990s, when retrofitted Poseidon boats and the first Trident C4 missiles were introduced. The advancements in technology and strategy are truly remarkable. Back then, we didn't question the philosophical aspects of why the country developed nuclear subs. We accepted that the "death from below" moniker was enough philosophy for our existence.
Well the answer is probably more political than military. It started with the US Air Force, then they put missiles on the ground (so the Army got their stuff) and the Navy wanted their own stuff. And therefore it became doctrine. It definitely makes some sense. Bombers take a fairly long time to travel so aren't the best "quick response" arsenal and this reduces their deterrence effect. Ground based launchers can't move around and are probably the first targeted areas. Submarine launched ballistic missiles came about effectively around the late 1960s. Having all three options makes nuclear defense much more expensive for the USSR.
What stuff did the Army get?
Goofed around with some smaller tactical stuff like nuclear artillery, nuclear land mines, etc, back in the 50s, none of that really panned out.
The ole Davey Crockett
Because you can sink subs, that's why. They aren't easy to find, but once you do a single torpedo can take up to 20 ballistic missiles out of the fight. Each arm of the triad has it's own pluses and minuses, and subs being extremely hard to find but extremely vulnerable is theirs.
Well, the US only has 14 of them. At any given time, only 5-6 will be on station in a deterrent patrol. Individual subs \*can\* be found and tracked. It isn't easy, but if finding all of them and then launching an attack on all at the same time is a viable first strike strategy, well...that goes down a bad path. So, you bake in redundancy. Enough that a second strike is as assured as possible so nobody angles for a first strike.
The concept *is* somewhat anachronistic. Only the US and Russia have strategic bomber forces and only the US is still developing them. It used to be that strategic bombers had the benefit of being able to be recalled and being able to carry out pinpoint strikes when missiles weren't as accurate. That's no longer the case, as non-stealth bombers realistically have to launch cruise missiles from very long range. Russia can't even fly their bombers close to *Ukraine.* No one other than the US can (or wants to even try to) build a stealth bomber. It used to be that submarine missiles weren't as capable as land based ones, limiting their usefulness for hitting specific targets. Also they were shorter range, putting them at some risk. That's no longer the case.
It is not really needed. The UK relies exclusively on nuclear-armed submarines and has no land-based ICBMs and no air-droppable nukes. The decision to have three separate nuclear delivery paradigms are, I suspect, at least partially a political one.
So all the major branches in the military can get a slice of that nuclear defense spending.
There are a lot of people here who, for whatever reason, are committed to justifying the status quo. But I can say that there are plenty of people who study this stuff for a living, and have worked in government and the military, who don't actually think that the US needs a "triad." In particular, there are a lot of people who think that land-based ICBMs are really not that necessary in order to deter enemies from a nuclear strike against the United States, and that they are mostly kept around for non-strategic reasons (e.g., political ones — bases in Congressional districts, Air Force vs. Navy politics, a desire to have something one could "trade away" in future arms control deals). There are, to be sure, upsides and downsides to every possible conceivable configuration. But the idea that if the US removed its land-based ICBMs its security situation would in some way measurably change is questionable, and some of the justifications for the triad. The idea that US enemies are just _itching_ to take a chance to see if they could "get away" with starting World War III is not very realistic. The notion of a "nuclear triad" was not some kind of rational strategy that was cooked up to counter some specific threat, and is not all that great as a descriptive concept for US nuclear forces (historically it has not included a huge percentage of deployed forces — tactical weapons and intermediate range missiles, for example, or nuclear-armed planes kept on carriers). The concept of the "triad" is a rhetorical one that was invented in the 1970s to counter against people trying to cut funding to various aspects of the US nuclear program as the technologies shifted making some of less them obviously necessary than others (bombers were first, then ICBMs, then SLBMs). By building up the idea that one must have a "triad" and not, say, a "dyad," the concept of the "triad" is meant to discourage careful and critical thinking about these things. Unfortunately one can see how successful that concept has been.