
Nukes ready to fly - nherment
https://nationalpostcom.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/fo0505_nuclearweaponsw25001.gif
======
jacquesm
That's got to be one of the saddest infographics ever made. I don't like
infographics, they tend to simplify complex things to the point of
uselessness. But this one is in the 'food for thought' category, one of those
things that we think is solidly in the past when actually it is very much in
the present.

Pakistan/India is the most worrisome combination in that graph.

~~~
signa11
> Pakistan/India is the most worrisome combination in that graph.

why, you chose to include 'India' is kind of interesting. may you please
elaborate ?

afaik, India (and China) are, still, following the NFU
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use))
policy.

~~~
jacquesm
Because they've been in a low level war for a long time.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmir_conflict](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmir_conflict)

~~~
muyuu
This war has most likely stayed low level because both countries are aware of
their nuclear capability.

Probably not the happiest of developments but an all-out war is unlikely
between nuclear powers.

~~~
frandroid
Except that India and Pakistan did have a low-intensity war _right after_
their reciprocal nuclear tests in 1998.

Also, India has whooped Pakistan's ass every time they have been at war, both
before and after nuclear weapons, so Pakistan has a much smaller incentive to
trigger an all-out war. India isn't interested in capturing Pakistan and tilt
its own demographic balance.

~~~
muyuu
Nothing of that contradicts the premise of what I said.

Neither India or Pakistan would jeopardise the very existence of the other
nation, because rather than just lie down and die they'd get a farewell
message from the other side.

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darkFunction
It's interesting that the UK uses solely submarine-launched missiles and the
rest of the world isn't represented by nuclear submarines at all. I would
imagine there are a few advantages to submarines, such as stealth, range,
ability to lie dormant or operate far from home for long periods, etc. Why
only the UK? Are plane-delivered warheads 'better' in some tactical capacity?
Or does the delivery essentially not really matter and each country is using
their most economical technology?

Also, it's a really sad infographic. I visited Hiroshima last year and it was
heartbreaking (also a very beautiful city).

~~~
pjc50
The UK _had_ plane-launched warheads in the 50s:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_bomber](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_bomber)

The rationale for the Trident fleet was for "second strike purposes": in the
event of nuclear war, the UK is small enough to be completely obliterated. The
sub fleet provides a single submarine at all times capable of retaliating in
this event.

This leads to the letters:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort)
. In the event of surfacing to the horrible silence of not being able to
contact HQ and the BBC having ceased transmission, open the letters and follow
orders.

~~~
escapologybb
I think the really interesting thing about the "letters of last resort", is
that the captain can decide what he wants to do when he opens the letter in
that horrible event.

I'm looking for the source, but I read an article with a few former captains
and they pretty much unanimously said that they wouldn't launch and would seek
sanctuary in the nearest friendly harbour instead. Because what would be the
point, the UK would essentially be gone, and all they would be doing would be
adding to the misery. Can you imagine what that knowledge would have done if
it had been known in Soviet circles, for instance?

We may as well launch, because the captains won't retaliate. Scary stuff.

Edit: this is an excellent discussion about these letters on Radio 4:
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0210spf](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0210spf)

~~~
orbifold
The Soviet Union was for the majority of the cold war and before on the
receiving end of the aggression. For the most part it reacted to existential
threats, like in the case of the Cuba missile crisis, which was preceded by
the US placing mid-range missiles in Italy and Turkey. In most of the proxy
conflicts each side behaved in approximately equally despicable ways, in most
cases the US backed dictatorships, like Suharto in Indonesia murdered hundreds
of thousands.

There also is no evidence that the Soviet Union ever intended to use nuclear
weapons as an offensive measure, whereas the US toyed with the thought on
multiple occasions (Cuba crisis, Korean war).

~~~
emp_zealoth
Right, because on the soviet side of iron curtain they weren't extensively
training for an attack at all Also, soviets were never heavily investing into
first strike capability, both nuclear and conventional So much sarcasm. Please
don't revision history

~~~
orbifold
They did train for fighting back in case of an "imperial aggression". Their
strategy was to push back any offensive with overwhelming conventional force
(massive amounts of tanks). See for example here:
[http://www.isn.ethz.ch/Digital-
Library/Articles/Detail/?lng=...](http://www.isn.ethz.ch/Digital-
Library/Articles/Detail/?lng=en&id=107840)

Pretty much all their nuclear arsenal was deployed in a way that ensured
excellent retaliation potential (mobile ICBM launchers etc.), their nuclear
subs etc.

------
TheSpiceIsLife
Despite, or maybe because of, the several thousand nuclear weapons ready to be
deployed at short notice we get this from Steven Pinker in his book 'The
Better Angels of Our Nature':

• Zero is the number of times that nuclear weapons have been used in conflict.
Five great powers possess them, and all of them have waged wars. Yet no
nuclear device has been set off in anger. It’s not just that the great powers
avoided the mutual suicide of an all-out nuclear war. They also avoided using
the smaller, “tactical” nuclear weapons, many of them comparable to
conventional explosives, on the battlefield or in the bombing of enemy
facilities. And the United States refrained from using its nuclear arsenal in
the late 1940s when it held a nuclear monopoly and did not have to worry about
mutually assured destruction. I’ve been quantifying violence throughout this
book using proportions. If one were to calculate the amount of destruction
that nations have actually perpetrated as a proportion of how much they could
perpetrate, given the destructive capacity available to them, the post-war
decades would be many orders of magnitudes more peaceable than any time in
history.

Amazing.

~~~
jacquesm
> Zero is the number of times that nuclear weapons have been used in conflict.

 _Two_ is the number of times that nuclear weapons have been used in conflict.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Pinker is making the distinction that the two cases you refer to weren't used
in conflict, as such. They were used against civilian targets, not on the
battlefield.

~~~
pjc50
This was the second world war, that distinction wasn't really maintained for
air bombing. Use of incendiaries against cities was already widespread, and
the firebombing of Tokyo killed more people than either of the two nuclear
bombings.

~~~
ekianjo
Not just Tokyo. Most large cities of Japan were by large totally destroyed by
fire bombs. That's why in most Japanese cities there's virtually no pre-WW2
builds left anywhere, with Kyoto and Nara being notable exceptions.

~~~
jacquesm
See also: Dresden.

~~~
ekianjo
Of course. And Dresden was especially horrific since there was no military
target at all in that city at the time. It was purely for the pleasure of
killing civilians and wounded people.

------
beagle90
On a positive note: those Nukes are probably what has stood between many state
v state wars which may have taken place over the past 60 years had the assured
destruction not been there.

~~~
ekianjo
That's a difficult assumption to prove, and we have had extremely bloody
conflicts nonetheless (Vietnam for once) during the Cold War even without the
use of nukes.

~~~
chii
I think it's reasonable to assume that a larger land war would've taken place,
had there not been the threat of nuclear war limiting the cold war to a very
localized region. I would prefer proxy wars over all out war, all said.

~~~
ekianjo
> assume that a larger land war would've taken place,

You seem to forget that wars are expensive, very expensive. The US was already
running bankrupt before the end of WW2, nobody in any sane state of mind wants
an all out war unless they can avoid to do so.

~~~
orbifold
The US emerged as the wealthiest nation in Human history fro m WW2 (~50% of
the worlds wealth), so this statement is somewhat surprising.

~~~
wtbob
We emerged as the wealthiest nation because _the rest of the civilised world
had been reduced to rubble_. It's really easy to have the best, most
productive economy in the world when one's manufacturing base is untouched and
one has suffered a relatively small injury to one's workforce.

Germans were starving to death in 1946; Brits were still rationing meat and
food in 1954, and cheese for decades to come.

Wars are not in general good for the economy: they result in the destruction
of capital and of labour.

~~~
orbifold
I was merely replying to the parent comment, globally WWII was a disaster,
economically the US profited massively, not just relative to the rest of the
world and it could probably have carried on fighting the longest. For instance
the war effort lead to the industrialization of a much larger part of the
country than before and immigration of skilled labor towards the west coast.

As you said it did not suffer any damage to its industry and took over from
Britain, France and Japan as the imperial power in the Middle East and Asia.

There have been plenty of conventional land wars in the following years with
US involvement, the difference was that while WWII was fought to establish
large American spheres of influence, the following wars were fought been to
maintain the American empire.

It is pretty hard to quantify, but I'm confident that people in power thought
that the net benefit of maintaining hegemony in South East Asia
(Korean/Vietnam war) and the Middle East (financing Israel, the Iraq wars),
outweighed the cost.

------
arethuza
I seem to remember that the UK downgraded the yield of its Trident warheads to
be in the range 0.3, 5–10 and 100 kt - Wikipedia has this as "speculative" but
I do remember it being reported a while back.

[The wildly different yields apparently coming from unboosted primary, boosted
primary and full "multi-stage" \- presumably the latter being achieved by
removing the secondary].

~~~
dingaling
> I seem to remember that the UK downgraded the yield of its Trident warheads

Only some of them, guessed at roughly half on each boat.

A partial replacement for tactical WE177.

------
omerhj
Martin Hellman (yes, the co-inventor of public key cryptography) has a
fascinating blog about the risks of stumbling into a nuclear war:
[https://nuclearrisk.wordpress.com/](https://nuclearrisk.wordpress.com/)

------
Iv
Oh? I thought the Israeli arsenal was a closely kept secret. What are the
sources on that?

~~~
Intermernet
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordechai_Vanunu](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordechai_Vanunu)

~~~
Iv
Thanks. So this basically means that this data dates from 1986, right?

~~~
Intermernet
Following the source links, it seems they may be using this comment from here
[http://bos.sagepub.com/content/71/1/85.full.pdf+html](http://bos.sagepub.com/content/71/1/85.full.pdf+html):

>"Most recently, in December 2014, the Notebook did an exhaustive review of
Israel's nuclear arsenal and concluded that claims it has 200 to 400 warheads
are probably exaggerated and that the country's stockpile is more likely in
the range of roughly 80 nuclear warheads (Kristensen and Norris, 2014b).
Getting the size and composition right is important because it hints at
Israeli intentions, and can therefore have a significant effect on threat
perceptions in the Middle East and the potential nuclear aspirations of other
countries in the region"

------
codeshaman
North Korea is missing from the infographic.

An interesting aspect: behind all those nukes, are plans of how to deploy them
with maximum destructive power over an enemy, within minutes.

If you live in western city, then it is probably targeted to receive a couple
of nukes.

~~~
ekianjo
It's missing but I wonder how many nukes they actually have. And the way they
use them is rather like terrorists. They threaten their use, and get financial
aid and food in exchange of not doing anything with them. It's like
International-level racket.

------
ifdefdebug
The colors are just like back in the cold war. The blue are the "good" nukes
and the red are the "bad" nukes. That's what it looks like.

------
known
Its complicated.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nye](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nye)

------
known
You don't need nuclear weapons; Just Drop A "Heat bomb" In Antarctic Ice
Sheets. You'll Drown The World.

~~~
zamalek
> You'll Drown The World.

No you wouldn't, it would only increase the sea level by about 65m. You'd
indiscriminately kill a lot of people (including your own) making it a useless
weapon. There would be hefty amounts of survivors (billions), again making it
useless if you were going for all-out genocide.

The ruined climate might do something to kill off the human race, though.

~~~
muyuu
Some landlocked nations would be virtually unaffected but the sea level
itself, though. There's also countries that have most of their main cities in
the interior (Russia being one).

~~~
VLM
Also remember that a "main" or "important" city before the crisis is a mere
refugee source after a worldwide crisis.

Before a crisis, the capital of the worldwide financial system and a major
world trade port is kinda important. After a crisis ends both the financial
system and world trade, its little more than a source of refugees.

If you want to wargame it out, look at the effects on agriculture. The US
would be pretty much unaffected, sure we'd lose Florida and N.O. but we'll
still have wheat and corn in the midwest, uninterrupted. Rice cultivation and
historical hydraulic empires like egypt might have a little more trouble. Of
course it depends how slowly it happens. The total solar energy striking the
poles, even if it magically 100% perfectly went into ice melting, would take a
heck of a long time. Its not going to be like tossing an ice cube into a
campfire, no 65 meter tidal wave of water would result.

The capital effects would be interesting. So... your nuclear plant is 40M ASL
today, and after the melt it'll be 25M below sea level. Well, at least it'll
have plenty of cooling in an accident.

~~~
muyuu
Some cities are important in every category though, just by virtue of
concentrating a lot of the population. For instance the US would be pretty
much in complete disarray for decades if the coastal cities of California and
the East Coast were just wiped. They concentrate a lot of the power in every
single respect, and also the brains.

------
daledavies
Why would a country need several hundred (or even thousand) nukes, surely a
handful would be enough?

~~~
VLM
The numbers seem mostly made up. 288 trident II... well OK at 24 per Ohio SSBN
thats implying 12 subs are ready to launch 100% of their missiles at all
times.

However there are only 14 Ohio SSBNs. And the rotation is 2.5 months on patrol
(figure maybe 2 months effective?) and 1 month in port. I imagine a giant
crane lowering supplies into the sub might block launched missiles... I don't
think they have the compressed air online to launch while in port, although
maybe... So more realistically, assuming no long term refits the navy has
maybe 7 or so in position ready to launch. So WRT the infographic, maybe 168
ready to launch.

However. Everything from here on is classified so I'm speculating. There are
tactical conditions where trying to launch will merely get yourself sunk
before launching. So you've got a ASW destroyer and helos overhead pounding
the sea with active sonar because we're having a nuclear war here. Speaking of
nuclear war, during a nuclear war being on board a deployed SSBN is probably
somewhat hazardous duty, so "we" probably don't have 14 floating SSBNs for
very long. Also peculiar range issues and launch geometry issues, if
theoretically we're at war with China, a launch trajectory passing directly
over Moscow is going to totally freak out the Russians at the worst imaginable
time. Also from a strategic standpoint using up your entire force in one
attack is really dumb. Also there are weather related issues, if you're in
high seas you might have launch issues. Sure you can pop a missile out the
tube but if it starts its launch in the air sideways thats a mission failure.
So I think in actual warfare maybe only 2 subs get to launch, at best.
Suddenly we're down to 48 missiles in the air from the 288 infographic. Best
case. Good argument for one. Or 24 missiles.

Again more classified BS. The best NASA and the russians can do under ideal
conditions is launch maybe half of the time on time without a failure. Of
course they put a lot of money into being reliable, but... I feel 50%
successful launches might be semi-realistic? I mean, every attack sub and ASW
helicopter is going to be all over you the instant the first missile launches,
the odds of surviving until the 24th missile launches seem low, which is why
we don't deploy subs will 500 tubes because tubes 200-500 will never survive
to fire... If some 50 cent integrated circuit fails or some valve, its non
trivial to fix the missile while underway and you might not have the spare
parts. I stand by about 50% estimate.

The MIRV thing means at re-entry you can attack nearby targets, so the
equivalent of Saint Paul and Minneapolis are both in big trouble, but for
trajectory and aerospace reasons its hard to hit Seattle and DC at the same
time. So you can pack multiple warheads on a missile, but you really only get
maybe 30 targets outta 24 missiles. Why do you think we spread our missile
launch fields all over the upper midwest instead of putting them all in one
county in Texas?

Finally we know from semi-public test results that not every test goes
perfectly, so I have a gut feeling that in a real nuclear war no holds barred,
high radiation environment, 25 or so hits is reasonable. Hopefully thats
enough to discourage any belligerent from starting a war they'd lose.

You can see the motivation to not decrease stocks by 10x or 100x because that
takes the odds of 25 hits down to 2.5 hits or 0.25 hits. Decrease the number
of nukes by 100x and we'll kill dozens of millions within one generation in
WW3, guaranteed, not much changes in human nature. Compared to dozens of
millions of human lives, building a couple hundred ICBMs is really cheap
insurance!

~~~
lmm
I think you're underestimating how big the ocean is. Most of the time a
strategic missile submarine is not followed; attack submarines or helicopters
may be heading there after you've launched but at that point it's too late.

In a first strike scenario overwhelming force is absolutely the way to go.
You're trying to completely eliminate the ability to retaliate. It's not a
scenario where "holding back a reserve" makes sense.

ICBMs are routine, proven technology; the fair comparison is with commercial
satellite launches, not with interplanetary probes. And those have a success
rate a whole lot higher than 50%.

------
meric
How many times can each countries' nuclear weapons cover the land area of the
Earth?

~~~
chii
enough times to not need to count.

~~~
gd1
Wrong. Zero. Do the math, they're not even close.

------
bhdz
It seems a lot of world leader's words are backed by nuclear weapons...

