
The stability implications of the US nukes' burst-height compensating super-fuze - fahd777
https://thebulletin.org/how-us-nuclear-force-modernization-undermining-strategic-stability-burst-height-compensating-super10578
======
rmcpherson
This general problem discussed in this article, a technological change
affecting the perceived nuclear arsenal balance, is a reminder of the
existential peril of nuclear weapons that we have seemingly forgotten since
the fall of the Soviet Union. In some ways this peril has never been greater
than it is today with unpredictable leaders of nuclear powers and ever-
decreasing barriers to entry for nuclear weapons (e.g. North Korea).

As Einstein said in 1955, when the existential threat was both new and real,
“You may reasonably expect a man to walk a tightrope safely for ten minutes;
it would be unreasonable to do so without accident for two hundred years.”

We are complacent at our species’ peril. How many intelligent civilizations in
the universe have ended shortly after the dawning of their nuclear age? That’s
one possible explanation for the Fermi Paradox.

Thus far, humans have been unable to resist use of a technology to gain power
and the abstention from use of nuclear power seems only as strong as the
current world power structure, which will inevitably fail. There are no easy
solutions to this problem but it’s one we must solve to survive. Perhaps we
even need to change ourselves biologically, as a species. To engineer
ourselves off the paleolithic savannah into one fit to survive in the modern
world of nuclear powers and interconnection.

~~~
Retric
Nuclear weapons are not currently a threat to the existence of the human
species. Modern civilization might be at risk, but there are a lot of people
spread across vast stretches of land and not enough nukes to kill them all.

Granted they make it vastly easier to kill everyone in a city or even a small
country, but people have done similar things for the last 10,000+ years.

~~~
portofcall
The truth is that we don’t know what the long term impacts of a total exchange
would be. Theories range from extreme nuclear winter events, to just the fall
of civilization. I sure won’t pretend to know where on that scale the reality
is, and hope never to find out.

Here is some food for thought though, about the potential for our civilization
to fall; it will not rise again. We’ve accessed far too much petrochemical
wealth and burned it, and the same is true of coal, and metal resources. We
get around that by using our existing industry and technology to go deeper,
refine more, and in general access resources which require advanced technology
to exploit.

There is nothing left which can be accessed by primatives, and so no way to
claw back from such a reduced state. It will be many millions of years before
those resources are reconstituted, far more years than the history of our
species so far by orders of magnitude. This is our chance, and if we burn it
away in nuclear fire, we are done. It probably won’t happen overnight, but the
fall of our civilization is the fall of humanity. Let’s try to avoid that.

The same goes for any cause of systematic civilization-wide collapse, we would
be done. The reason we clawed back in the past is that we has only scratched
the surface before, but we’ve fully plundered global resources now. It’s
onward and upward, or lights out.

~~~
allthenews
>Here is some food for thought though, about the potential for our
civilization to fall; it will not rise again. We’ve accessed far too much
petrochemical wealth and burned it, and the same is true of coal, and metal
resources...exploit

This is nonsense, for a number of reasons.

First, you ignore that smaller, shallow deposits of petroleum still exist all
over the world, in more than enough quantity to support a developing
civilization if it were to be reduced to, say, less than 1/10th of its current
size.

Second, existing stores of substances necessary to civilization will not
simply evaporate. Metals, plastics, and other raw materials will be
recoverable and recyclable.

Third, while there may be a couple hundred years or so of dark ages, I think
it is extremely unlikely for any substantial amount of our current scientific
progress to be eradicated. Unless we cover every mile of civilized earth with
bombardment, I imagine it is guaranteed that there will be survivors with
minimal technical knowledge required to operate computers and harvest various
data that will inevitably be left on servers in random locations. All it takes
is a handful of hackers to spread knowledge of operation and recovery. Not to
mention books and magazines will likely still exist.

I think you underestimate the resilience that modern technology can offer over
decades in terms of recovery after a global catastrophe. A laptop, a
generator, and a copy of wikipedia will get you far in preserving enough
scientific and technical knowledge. Civilization at this point is hard to
permanently wipe out.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I fear you _overstate_ the resilience of modern technology.

In the case of, even brief, total civilizational collapse, I doubt you'd be
able to access any server whatsoever. The Internet is not stable, it's
actively maintained and in the state of constant flux. As for accessing
individual computers and small computer networks - just how many of the
survivors will have enough knowledge to arrange for electricity at appropriate
frequency, ensure it doesn't burn out the fragile machines, and then be able
to interface with a (likely password-locked, disk-encrypted) system to extract
some useful data?

And even if they do that, just for how long will it do them any good? Modern
electronics are built with planned and unplanned obsolescence. Their lifetimes
under active use are measured in years, and even inactive they'll age. With no
industry (requiring a complex, global supply chain of millions of people) to
build fresh replacement drives, there will eventually be nowhere to move the
data to.

Our civilization is like a living system, in the sense that it constantly
works to repair itself everywhere. Disturb that, and it will rot and die.

~~~
allthenews
GP claimed civilization would be unable to rise again, implying thousands of
years of knowledge would disappear.

Wikipedia is available for download and requires less than 15GB of space[1].
This is an unprecedented density of self documenting data, containing
thousands of years of advancements in science, mathematics, philosophy, arts.

Consider how many people live in or visit dwellings that are tens or hundreds
of miles from large population centers, and how many of these dwellings have
emergency gasoline generators and working computers.

Now, presuming that most of the destruction happens in major cities, and the
rest of the earth generally remains livable, there will still remain millions
of people, and if just a small sampling of competent technically minded people
survive, there will be billions of abandoned, unused, solid state devices, and
millions of generators to power them, ripe for picking. What are the odds that
not a single competent survivor will have backed up a copy of wikipedia to be
able share with other survivors in the decades after catastrophe?

When a single human can hold in his hand all of the science and mathematics
necessary to derive the technologies upon which modern civilization is based,
rebuilding is easily within the realm of possibility. Not to mention,
artifacts of modern technology will remain as examples for engineering and
even use with sufficient technical knowledge.

Further, I encourage all of you to download and keep a copy of wikipedia for
this very, however farfetched, purpose.

[1][https://www.google.com/amp/s/lifehacker.com/how-to-
download-...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/lifehacker.com/how-to-download-all-
of-wikipedia-onto-a-usb-flash-drive-1798453949/amp)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Fair enough. Access to some amounts of computing may be initially available,
but I still believe it would not last more than a few years.

It all boils down to supply chains and the economy, basically. Electronics
capable of working with today's data storage media is incredibly complex, and
manufacturing replacements will require large and insanely expensive fabs.
Those fabs themselves are full of precise tools and exotic materials, every
one of which requiring other specialized fabs, using tools requiring other
fabs... The whole pipeline from dirt to CPU involves many thousands of people
directly, and itself can only exist in an advanced civilization like ours -
where lots of other people do everything from agriculture to catering to
logistics to law and law enforcement. To build a CPU, you first need to build
a civilization like ours. And to build a civilization like ours, you need
cheap energy sources - it literally wouldn't be possible without them.

> _GP claimed civilization would be unable to rise again, implying thousands
> of years of knowledge would disappear._

Our best bet to retain all that knowledge after total civilizational collapse
is to form orders - not unlike medieval monks - whose sole purpose would be to
make exact paper copies of that knowledge. Otherwise, after computers
eventually die, a lot of that knowledge would disappear (because it wouldn't
be used), and what would stay would get increasingly distorted over time.

~~~
AstralStorm
The most problematic would be the high density integrated chips and storage
media. Lower densities on scale of say 80s tech are doable in a basement with
the right know how and most basic electronics can be fixed or replaced easily
enough, (The problem is stated as how to make a good enough plasma doping
chamber to make transistors.) If at a cost to size and efficiency. (Even
advanced voltage regulators...)

That said, a lot of that hardware, especially rugged, would easily last for a
few decades.

We'd have to use cassettes for data storage once again.

~~~
portofcall
I feel like this conversation is taking place in a strange parallel universe
in which people don’t appreciate what 15,000+ nuclear warheads being exchanged
would do. The fires started from them alone would be an extinction event, and
the kinds of incredibly remote areas in which you might find long-term
survivors would not be laden with caches of electronics and populations
capable of using them.

Getting enough food and water that wasn’t dreadfully contaminated alone would
be the preoccupation of generations. By the time anyone had ideas about rising
from barbarism, what we think of as civilization now would be rusted, eroded,
and overgrown.

All of that assumes the most optimistic of assumptions regarding global
wildfires, teratogenic effects, and nuclear winter. We wouldn’t be using
magnetic tapes, we’d be using rocks and sticks and animal hides.

~~~
Retric
The earth's surface is ~200 million square miles. 1 bomb per 13,000 square
miles seems bad, but we had survivors very close to ground zero with even
H-Bombs and these nukes would not be eventually spread over the surface. Many
people would be 5,000+ miles from the closest detention.

Remember we actually detonated a large number of nukes on the surface with
minimal impact on global radiation exposure.

While relatively small by modern standards Yoshitaka Kawamot was less than 1km
from the hiroshima blast and survived. Yes, these nukes may be 100+x as
powerful but destruction is far from 1:1 with yield sizes.

~~~
portofcall
People are not evenly distributed on the surface of the earth, most of which
is ocean. Nukes do. It target randomly, they target population centers and
strategically valuable regions. Most people live where nukes are aimed, which
is why they are aimed there.

15,000 warheads concentrated where humans live, on the fraction of the 27% of
Earth that isn’t water. Be reasonable.

------
larkeith
> boosting the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces
> by a factor of roughly three

The measure by which the authors conclude a tripling in killing power seems to
be intentionally misleading:

> This 86 percent probability is very close to what could be achieved using
> three warheads with conventional fuzes to attack the same target. To put it
> differently: In the case of the 100-kt Trident II warhead, the super fuze
> triples the killing power of the nuclear force it has been applied to.

While obtaining the same probability of destroying any given target requires
one third as many warheads, the more relevant statistic seems to me to be
expected number of warheads required per target, which is decreased by less
than half; Total targets destroyed per missile launched, which seems a more
accurate descriptor of "killing power", is increased by a factor of about 1.7
- still notable, but very much not the tripling claimed.

------
ChuckMcM
I am not a nuclear policy wonk, so I apologize if this question is answered
elsewhere.

Much of the argument presented in this paper from last year is based on how
destabilizing it is because Russia does not have an orbital launch detection
capability. Since it would _double_ the time they had to respond and requires
no action banned or restricted by treaty, why would they not put satellites in
orbit that could detect the IR signature of a missile launch? Why not strap it
on to their constellation of GLONASS satellites? This seems like a much easier
technology to develop and deploy and test (the US is launching rockets every
month, it should see every one of those launches reliably). What am I missing
here?

~~~
cryptonector
First off, it may not be quite that simple. They may need detector tech that
they lack. Secondly, development of these dead-hand weapons systems may be
easier for them or more appealing for whatever reasons (perhaps cultural).

But yes, you'd think it'd be better to double decision times than to deploy
dead-hands.

Also, the U.S. could easily share early warning satellite technology with
Russia. This might be a lot easier if relations weren't already so frosty.

I believe Obama's sanctions against Russia were unwise, and ratcheted up
tensions unnecessarily. Moreover, Congress' subsequent affirmation of those
sanctions and removal of the President's ability to remove them further
ratcheted up tensions. And all of this over a very partisan domestic feud
about supposed Russian interference in the 2016 election, in a country that
regularly interferes in other countries' elections. Is this really worth it
for Democrats? Is it really worth it for all those very many Republicans that
voted for that silly bill (probably so they could head off Democrat claims of
being in cahoots with Russia)?? Almost certainly not. But such is the degree
of bitter, uncivil partisanship in the United States today. President Trump
doesn't even have the ability to negotiate a thaw in relations given the
current statutory situation -- a treaty could be used, sure, but there's no
reason to think that the Senate would welcome it anymore than it was willing
to let the President be able to reduce sanctions by himself (as would have
been the usual case).

My guess is it will take Republicans having a very good 2018, or failing that,
a very good 2020, before tensions can decrease. Alternatively, Democrats would
have to sweep in 2020 and somehow allow themselves to un-blame Russia for
2016, which just doesn't seem likely, not given their rhetoric so far.

~~~
dragonwriter
> And all of this over a very partisan domestic feud about supposed Russian
> interference in the 2016 election

The majority party in the Congress that adopted the sanctions is the same as
the one of the President who allegedly benefitted from the interference. And
national security officials in that same Presidential administration have
described the Russian interference as something that happened in 2016 and can
be expected to continue.

Blaming the sanctions on a domestic “partisan feud” is incorrect.

~~~
cryptonector
My impression is that Republicans voted for that bill because they were afraid
that voting no would be used against them as proof that they were in cahoots
with the Russians. I think that's at least a tenable interpretation.

------
jadedhacker
Noam Chomsky has been talking about this for a while. He gave a talk at
Harvard* that discussed the threat of terminal war and mentioned this in his
talk. Some might claim that 3x stronger hard-kill power is a stronger
deterrent and can allow us to retire the land based ICBMs. It can also ratchet
up tensions, and I'm going to lol all the way to the bank if the military
gives up a huge source of funding. Inter-branch competition has been that way
since the inception of the nuclear program. Capabilities have been replicated
wastefully at various points to keep people happy.

[https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4675156/noam-chomsky-
requiem-...](https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4675156/noam-chomsky-requiem-
american-dream-10-principles-concentration-wealth-power)

EDIT: It was actually at the unitarian church outside of Harvard.

------
CapitalistCartr
We've been adding such improvements for as long as missiles have existed.
Better nosecones, rearrange the interior furniture, new guidance software,
etc. When the Cold War was still on, we made two-three foot shots (0) from
Vandyland (1) per year. Each one was mined for research and used for tweaking.
The two big changes were solid fuel boosters and multiple warheads. Everything
else has been minor in comparison.

0 [https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/amp9936/behind-
the...](https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/amp9936/behind-the-scenes-
at-a-rehearsal-for-armageddon-16355867/)

1
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandenberg_Air_Force_Base](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandenberg_Air_Force_Base)

------
trdtaylor1
This was why I was assuming the Russians brought back the nuclear torpedo. Not
needing the B part of a ICBM greatly decreases fuel and thus size requirement.

~~~
greedo
Actually, a drone of the size of Status-6 will need a huge amount of fuel.
It's easier to travel through the air than through water. Unless the Russians
plan on deploying it from ships right off shore, it'll need very long range.

~~~
thatcherc
Status-6 is supposedly nuclear powered, so its range is effectively unlimited.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status-6_Oceanic_Multipurpose_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status-6_Oceanic_Multipurpose_System)

------
danielvf
Humanity as a whole is probably better off.

A core strategy of US nuclear forces for the past sixty years has been to
increase precision and to reduce warhead size.

The biggest US warhead ever was in service in 1954 - a 15,000 kiloton bomb.
Our biggest current bomb, designed in the 70's, is 1,200 kilotons, less than a
tenth of what we've had before. Our latest ICBM warhead is only 300 - 475
kilotons.

Also with the increased precision, the US has been reducing the number of
warheads - we now have one third? the number of warheads we had in the 1960's.
In fact, Russia has more declared nuclear weapons than the US.

The increase accuracy is likely to save a lot of lives in the case of war.

~~~
MaxfordAndSons
You're missing the forest for the trees. The accuracy to kilotonnage ratio of
the warheads, as well as the absolute warhead count, is irrelevant. The US
nuclear arsenal as a whole is 2-3x more effective, and thus 2-3x deadlier,
because of the super-fuze.

Also, even if the increased accuracy results in less civilian casualties
during the first strike (debatable, as strategic population centers will still
be targeted...with greater accuracy), the super-fuze is still likely
increasing the overall probability of nuclear war. Thus I would hardly say it
makes humanity as a whole better off.

~~~
danielvf
In the eighties, the US had missles with a CEP of 300 feet. The increased
accuracy from the fuzes is irrelevant in terms of attacking cities. It only
matters for attacking nuclear hardened silos.

The US arsenal has been getting less deadly against civilians and the earth,
while becoming more effective against other nuclear forces. Seems like a good
trade.

------
walrus01
One of the interesting things is that both the US and Russia gave up a
significant number of warheads per missile through MIRV number reduction
treaties. Submarine and lane based missiles on both sides that might have
previously held 3 or 4 MIRVs now have a single re entry vehicle. But things
like the status-6 are not covered by these treaties.

------
ohiovr
How many centurys do you expect to have civilization before someone that
doesn't value life as much as you do does the unthinkable?

------
superkuh
This is compensated for by Russia's implementation of fractional orbital
bombardment systems that bypass radar detection.

~~~
adventured
Nobody is actually worried about that supposed compensation. The biggest joke
going, is the notion that any of these technology improvements matter once you
start lobbing hundreds of nuclear weapons at each other.

Bypass radar detection? Funny stuff.

The US has never thought it could stop dozens, much less hundreds, of Russia
missiles. Fractional orbital bombardment system? A waste of money that Russia
doesn't have, as one of the poorest major nations on earth (with a GDP per
capita below Grenada).

Do you know why the US has spent so relatively little pushing nuclear weapons
tech forward the last 40 years? Because it doesn't matter: just about everyone
dies regardless. Russia has no missile shield, and the US has no missile
shield that can stop a large volley of traditional missiles.

------
John_KZ
Very informative article. Sheds more light into the emerging nuclear weapons
race.

------
rdtsc
> In particular, Russia is now in the process of testing a 40-ton nuclear-
> powered underwater unmanned vehicle (UUV) that could robotically deliver,
> across thousands of kilometers, a 100-megaton nuclear warhead against the
> coastal cities and ports of the United States.

Interesting. What kind of damage would that do. Maybe a few of those blowing
up at the same time would cause a tsunami wave? It sounds like something out
of Dr. Strangelove. Water is also good at dampening explosions, I'd think.

Aha, there is XKCD for this already: [https://what-
if.xkcd.com/15](https://what-if.xkcd.com/15) . It turns out the wave created
by one won't be like a tsunami wave as it will break too quickly. So maybe
they'd need to stagger a few devices in a row.

Linked from there is a very thorough paper "Evaluation of Various Theoretical
Models For Underwater Explosion"
[http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/737271.pdf](http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/737271.pdf)

~~~
tgsovlerkhgsel
I think that instead of trying to create a tsunami, it _might_ be slightly
more effective to drive one straight into a port/city, and detonate at the
surface.

New York:
[https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?t=a1c1cd0eeccb2488024ace...](https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?t=a1c1cd0eeccb2488024ace3456c44d36)

San Francisco:
[https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=100000&lat=37.747095...](https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=100000&lat=37.7470957&lng=-122.5095451&airburst=0&hob_ft=0&ff=52&psi=20,5,1&zm=9)

~~~
nerpderp83
Why wouldn't you just use Fedex, DHL or an intermodal shipper?

~~~
rdtsc
You joke but they have an intermodal shipping container missile. You can buy
it if you have some extra cash laying around:

[http://roe.ru/eng/catalog/naval-systems/shipborne-
weapons/kl...](http://roe.ru/eng/catalog/naval-systems/shipborne-
weapons/klab-k/)

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
TLDR: smarter targeting allows the same explosive power to be more effective.

This general principle has been known for a very long time. These are the same
people who put out the totally useless "Doomsday clock" and like the "Doomsday
clock" are just trying to stir up fear.

~~~
vkou
I rightly hope that everyone is scared shitless about the possibility of any
war - let alone nuclear war.

~~~
cryptonector
But not so scared that a larger war results from unwillingness to fight a
smaller war. We saw that movie in the 30s.

~~~
vkou
We've also seen how it has turned out in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam,
Libya. Hundreds of thousands of people dead, for nothing. But as long as it's
other people dying, we're totally fine with that.

~~~
cryptonector
Strawman. None of those involved genocidal maniacs (unless you include
Cambodia, where the U.S. did _not_ intervene) nor plain old tin pot dictators
bent on world domination.

------
cornholio
I can't, for the life of me, understand why the major nuclear powers still
cannot commit to full denuclearization. It's really one meeting away between
Russia and US, they agree to take all nuclear weapons out of service by 2050
then strong arm every country in the world to participate.

What plausible purpose do these weapons serve (except deterrence itself),
fully knowing that using them will almost guarantee massive retaliation?

~~~
vtange
At this point, I imagine it's a "you first" issue. Trust is pretty darn scarce
these days, how can you be sure the other side won't just annihilate you the
moment they know you can't retaliate? That or be sure that not even one nuke
is active or to take a page from guns, "80%" or nearly-active?

Even if we do manage full denuclearization, it'd be pretty darn hard to keep
it that way seeing as how we can't even stop North Korea from joining the
club.

~~~
cornholio
Who said anything about trust? It would certainly proceed in a lockstep
process, with strict accountability and transparency, where the parties agree
on a schedule to gradually dismantle all weapons and production infrastructure
and supply detailed information at various checkpoints. You can't build a
nuclear arsenal overnight.

NK joined an exclusive club and now Kim is rewarded with a visit from Trump.
In this version of the world, possessing nuclear weapons is a source of
legitimacy for any country. In a non-nuclear world, actions to obtain them
will prompt imediate preemptive conventional attacks. Russia, US and EU could
agree to maintain minimal deterrence capability against rouge actors like NK,
but insufficient for global war.

~~~
stordoff
Even if you do establish a procedure, how do you guarantee that the reported
number of weapons prior to dearmament is accurate (and thus matches the number
of dismantled weapons), and that the other side didn't keep a stockpile in an
off-the-books location? That brings us back to trust -- that the other side is
legitimately engaging with the process and that the totality of weapons is
known, rather than merely reducing their numbers (which would be no bad thing,
but significantly different to total disarmament, particularly if only one
side goes through with it)?

~~~
cornholio
> the other side didn't keep a stockpile in an off-the-books location?

This seems an implausible strategy on the long run, to organize such a
conspiracy you would need thousands of people in the know, from political
leaders to technicians. The value of this intelligence would be so colossal
that it's unfathomable nobody would sell it for profit or release it for
conscience reasons. See the Israel story and Mordechai Vanunu.

Then again, if you manage to have a stockpile of nuclear pits (actual warheads
require continuous maintenance, Tritium replenishment etc.) that only 15
people know about, in an non-deployable configuration and hide them so deep
that the ultra-sensitive nuclear detectors mandated by the treaties can't
sense them, is that a major threat? Their existence might simply fade out of
institutional memory.

