It's seems to me that on a planet dense with nuclear powers, not needing to maintain a vast arsenal would be an advantage.
Sure, you need four or five big ones so you can start the chain reaction that ends all human civilization, just like your neighbors can, but since everybody else can be relied upon to complete the job once started--so the logic goes--it seems like the best move would be to have far fewer nukes than everybody thinks you do.
Of course the problem with that is that somebody somewhere is going to manage to keep the money for all of the nukes people think you have, thereby squandering the advantage.
>the ambassador informs President Muffley that the Soviet Union created a doomsday machine as a nuclear deterrent; it consists of many buried bombs jacketed with "cobalt–thorium G", which are set to detonate automatically should any nuclear attack strike the country. The resulting nuclear fallout would then engulf the planet for 93 years, rendering the Earth's surface uninhabitable. The device cannot be deactivated, as it is programmed to explode if any such attempt is made.
"We cannot allow there to be a doomsday device gap. The people of the United State must be protected from Soviet aggression by building the most powerful doomsday device ever conceived!"
"But sir, won't the public notice all of that construction and military activity in such a remote area?"
"Hey CIA, stop wasting time taking pictures of Cuba and start releasing stories about how we've captured some space aliens that we're holding at a remote desert base."
The mechanism of using a single doomsday weapon is somewhat unique, but the effect isn't that different from the actually implemented Dead Hand system that ensured that eliminating the Soviet command structure would trigger a rocket that sends out launch commands to all ICBMs. Though that was implemented years after the movie came out.
I recall that the system existed to ensure that cooler heads (in Russia) could have more time to ensure that they were being actually being nuked i.e. it wasn't a false alarm, and that retaliation was guaranteed.
Growing up in the middle of the cold war and with some sense of history it dawned on me that the whole thing was an aberration. Geopolitically the world is usually not like that. I thought eventually the cold war order would fall apart and it did. Think reversion to the mean. Not the mean is perfect as one can see from current events.
Got to say anytime someone whines that we can't afford some public works project like the California High speed rail I think of the much larger amount were spending on nukes. With $1.5T we could crisscross the US with high speed rail. Unlike nukes you personally might actually use it.
Not much about the Cold War tension actually got dismantled, from a nuclear risk perspective. We put the revolver to our collective heads during the Cold War and didn’t put it back down, just merely got used to holding it there.
I might describe the western countries as being cocksure and overly optimistic after the USSR fell apart. Would also describe the amount of nuclear weapons produced during the 1960-70's as insane and serving no rational reason other than pure pork.
I think you overestimate the power of a nuclear weapon, or even dozens of them. It would take hundreds of targeted strikes to disable a nuclear-armed adversary. Having fewer nuclear weapons only means your major cities, military bases, and industrial assets will be leveled while the majority of your adversary's capabilities remain intact.
Nukes are less directly damaging than people think, but the knock on effects are much worse.
If your goal is simply to destroy a country as a functioning power you don’t need to kill every single person. Nuke a handful of major ports and you massively harm the US economy without killing that many people. Add major cities and things get really bad at even a dozen nukes. Sure, we would nuke the fuck out of anyone that launched such an attack but that doesn’t allow us to ignore such attacks.
Sure, I didn't intend to downplay the seriousness of nuclear war. It would be horrific and damaging to an extent never seen before.
My point was just that the logic of having only a few nukes while everyone else has many more doesn't work. China has 145 cities that have more than 1 million people. You wouldn't be a serious threat to their industrial base with only a few nukes, and so the effect of your deterrence would be minimal.
My guess is an 10MT H-bomb could kill ~20 million people by aiming at Suzhou despite the city only having 6.7 million people. Honestly to cripple China with minimal nukes 2-3 Starfish Prime style Nuclear electromagnetic pulses could disable most of their east coast before you target individual cities.
Also, responding in kind to a limited nuclear exchange may be appropriate if you think an adversary still has a large stockpile. There is a lot of uncertainty involved.
I'm not sure any country is fielding 10 megaton monsters anymore. Maybe Russia has a few. The biggest weapon in the USA's inventory is "only" 1.2 megatons and that has to be dropped by an airplane so it's not going to have much chance of landing on Shanghai. Most weapons now are an order of magnitude smaller (hundreds of kilotons), with a high degree of accuracy ("circular error probable") obviating the need for extreme yield.
Nukemap is rather optimistic, you aren’t getting the kind of medical attention to give people who got a 500rem dose a 50/50 shot of survival after a nuclear bombing. It also ignores fallout, secondary fires, etc.
Hard to say what hypothetical countries arsenals actually look like. The B-41 was supposedly 5.2 megatons of TNT per tonne of bomb designed in the late 1950’s. At 5 tons each a non reusable falcon 9 could get ~4 different 25 Mt bombs to LEO and possibly more on a ballistic trajectory. So it’s not like monsters don’t fit on rockets, saturation bombing is just more effective.
And I've thought that meanwhile it would be enough to soften up the target with an EMP, or few of them, by detonating the nukes in the high atmosphere, or slightly above that? AND THEN INVADE! YEEHAAW!
Pretending that counterforce is "disarming" is cute, but the public understanding of nuclear weapons as being countervalue is the more realistic view of what counterforce will actually do. And countervalue does indeed just need a few dozen weapons as city sizes are approximately powerlaws, so there just isn't that many large ones to hit.
Maybe not here in the US - we only have 10 cities with more than 1 million people. But China has 145 cities >1m. We would not be a threat to their industrial base with only a dozen nukes.
Yes, a dozen nukes would cause many billions, perhaps even trillions in damage and horrific loss of life, but China would still have 125 other cities to keep their war machine moving. Deterrence through countervalue threats is great, but once that trigger has been pulled you still have the rest of the war to fight.
Russia's ability to wage war on Ukraine is enabled entirely because they have a nuclear arsenal. The war would have been shut down almost immediately by the US / nato / etc. if they didn't have that threat.
That was is not about any of Russia's legitimate concerns. It is about scratching Russia's imperial itch. Moreover, it pushed Ukraine further into the arms of the West, Finland straight into NATO and Sweden second in line. Just a follow-up of the 2014 invasion.
William Burns, the current Director of the CIA and former ambassador to Russia, would disagree with you.
"In 2008, Burns, then the American ambassador to Moscow, wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” "
Given the subject matter and year, this was almost certainly in the context of Russia's lobbying against giving Ukraine and Georgia NATO MAPs in 2008, a lobbying effort which (perhaps in part due to Burns’ advice in the letter) was successful—NATO acceded to Russia's demands in the hopes that so doing would, as Russia claimed, promote peace and stability in the region.
Russia then immediately invaded Georgia, which may go some way to explaining why some NATO leaders became quite disinclined to grant Russia the same kind of Chamberlainian accommodation thereafter.
There is an article from the Brookings institute that supports your position-
"In 2006, President Victor Yushchenko attached high priority to securing a NATO membership action plan (MAP). By summer, Kyiv looked on course to attain a MAP when alliance foreign ministers met that December. Curiously, Moscow did not come out hard against the idea. The prospective MAP derailed, however, after Yushchenko appointed Victor Yanukovych as prime minister. During a September visit to Brussels, Yanukovych said he did not want a MAP. The proposal died given the divided position of Ukraine’s executive branch.
Yushchenko called for a MAP again in January 2008, this time with the support of Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko and Rada (parliament) Speaker Arseniy Yatseniuk. Moscow came out in full opposition. When Yushchenko visited the Russian capital that February, he had to stand alongside and listen to President Vladimir Putin threaten to target nuclear missiles on Ukraine. Instead of lobbying allies to support a MAP for Kyiv, Washington waited until the April Bucharest summit, where President George W. Bush attempted to persuade his counterparts to grant Ukraine (and Georgia) a MAP. However, a number of allied leaders by then had made up their minds and opposed the idea. Concern about Russian opposition undoubtedly played a role."
There are a lot of moving parts that I find really interesting. The successes and failures of the players that led up to the war, as well as the domestic and global changes brought about in consequence (Is China doing more than "watching the tigers fight"?) affects the world.
I'm not well-versed in this area, but from what I've been reading, it doesn't look as if NATO simply acceded to Russia's demands- From the NYT in November of 2008:
"At a NATO meeting in Bucharest, Romania, in April, the United States failed to persuade NATO to offer the usual application process, known as a membership action plan, to Ukraine and Georgia. Instead, NATO leaders agreed that one day each country would join, without committing to a timetable."
(Edit: I haven't been able to find much to relate the failure to convince to an accession to Russian demands.)
I get what you're saying about being disinclined to accommodate after Russia's adventure in South Ossetia / Georgia in August of that year; the Nov 2008 article focused on the US push for NATO membership:
"The United States has started an unexpected diplomatic initiative in Europe, urging NATO allies to offer Georgia and Ukraine membership in the alliance without going through a lengthy process and fulfilling a long list of requirements, NATO diplomats said."
I need to take the time to find more unbiased information on the conflicts of the region over the past 15-20 years. It's complicated, with a lot of issues in play that seem to go back at least a century. My knee-jerk, scratching-the-surface opinion is that while I believe Russia is ruled by oligarchical mobsters headed by Putin, I can understand, if not sympathize with, their reaction as Western powers have established footholds in bordering countries.
Honest question, for I don't know the answer: If NATO had dissolved 30 some-odd years ago, and the US had fallen from a world to regional power (albeit with nuclear weapons), and then the Warsaw pact had established bases in Canada and Mexico, would outcomes be more or less stable?
Probably depends where etc. In the context of Russia in Europe, I guess it would have been less stable. Ever since the 1990s, Russia has been steadily ramping up the aggressive rhetoric against Eastern Europe, even against NATO countries. This wasn't entirely some kind of "you are a threat" kind of thing, but a lot of "you are only temporarily outside the Russian sphere, don't get used to it". Russia also pushed to expand its influence by force in Georgia, Ukraine (twice now), and I'd argue Belarus, where they prop up an unpopular tyrant. So for Europe, NATO has absolutely been a stabilizing force, and it's absence would only make Russian aggression worse.
But moving away from Europe and into the Middle East, I wonder if that's true. NATO and co did various interventions, in hindsight quite disastrous, that not only failed to achieve their goals but also destabilized the region. How would that part of the world look without a strong, united and emboldened Western coalition? Possibly happier and stabler.
But who knows, the fallen Middle Eastern dictators were pretty horrid.
> I can understand, if not sympathize with, their reaction as Western powers have established footholds in bordering countries.
That is a wrong way of thinking about NATO for several reasons:
1. Eastern European countries were not in the USSR or their satellites by their own choice. They were conquered and enslaved by Russians during the WWII. "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin" by Timothy Snyder is an excellent book on how Eastern European nations fared as German and Russian war machines rolled over them. Russians raped, murdered, pillaged - and then for 50 years forced to play a happy family together under USSR's umbrella.
2. After USSR's demise, the initiative of joining NATO came from the countries in Eastern Europe that had restored their independence, to prevent the return of Russian rule. Western countries were extremely reluctant to extend their mutual defence pact to Eastern Europe. Western politicians underestimated Russian threat and dismissed Eastern European fears of another Russian invasion as a historic trauma.
Eventually, NATO membership was used as a carrot to boost reforms (such as civilian oversight over military structures) in Eastern Europe to ensure internal stability and avoid potential internal conflicts overspilling into western countries. The wars in Caucasus and Yugoslavia were a cautionary tale.
3. "Western powers" do not have a single military base in any country neighbouring Russia in Eastern Europe. Acceptance of Eastern Europe into NATO was not followed by any permanent deployment of Western troops or weapons.
The military balance in Eastern Europe has always been and remains heavily in favor of Russia. They have hundreds of thousands of soldiers, countless tanks, artillery systems and missiles, both conventional and nuclear, right on the border with NATO, and even within (Kaliningrad). Facing them is only light infantry, predominanty local and consisting of non-professional conscripts (think: National Guard), with insignificant number of Western soldiers serving as a tripwire for nuclear response.
Russian apologists would make you believe that NATO has buzzing army bases on the border with Russia, with soldiers waiting for a signal to run to their tanks or launch their missiles, but there's not a single such base. None. Zero.
4. The real threat to Russia aren't tanks and guns, but prosperity without Russia. Prior to the initial Russian invasion in 2014, Ukraine was on the verge of signing a favorable deal that would've opened up European markets to Ukraine. Imagine doing the same job, but earning two, three or even four times as much. Russia has nothing comparable to offer, yet they have a delusional belief that they should dominate neighbouring countries. Since Ukraine was slipping away from their influence, they first tried to bog Ukraine down by dragging it into a frozen conflict in 2014. When that didn't work out and only pushed Ukraine closer to the EU and NATO out of sheer necessity, Russians attempted a direct full takeover of Ukraine in 2022.
That failed too, and only accelerated the loss of influence. Ukrainians will not forgive the war as long as the generation of kids that spent their formative years hiding in bomb shelters from Russian missile attacks lives. Other countries, like Kazakhstan, are also increasingly looking towards the EU or China. Russian influence is crumbling fast. They simply have nothing to offer, and lash out violently whenever they can.
Essentially, these are aftershocks of the collapse of Russian colonial empire. Putin's era is characterized by impotent attempts to subjugate neighbours and restore the former empire, but with a military that is a shadow of its former self, and an economy barely half of California's.
It's not security that they are looking for. They want domination.
Don’t be ridiculous, you can disagree with the war and still understand nations have competing interests and Ukraine being in NATO comes at the expense of Russian interest.
I can understand interest, sure. But this wasn't it.
First of all, it's not really clear to me how this is against Russia's deep interest. This gets bandied around a lot, but frankly Russia is already so close to NATO borders elsewhere (Norway, Baltics, Poland if you count Kaliningrad, and of course the Bering straight), and it barely matters with ICBMs around. A conventional war between Russia and NATO, where proximity matters, is totally implausible. I get that Russia would rather have an ally next door than a NATO country, but that it's a threat justifying neutralization is BS to me.
Second, Russian losses in this war are enormous. I can't see how Russia thought this war would make it a safer place. They are delving deep into the reserves for a full scale war (like, with NATO), which now they won't have.
Finally, this is off the back of a lot of esoteric Kremlin propaganda about how Ukraine has only ever been a part of "Greater Russia".
That's exactly what the parent was acknowledging. Using the abstract term "Russian interest" is just a way of sidestepping that these interests include imperial conquest.
I wonder how USA would react to Mexico joining a China military alliance and hosting Chinese troops and weapons? Or maybe Cuba hosting USSR weapons and troops?
"Ultimately, Khrushchev received an assurance that the U.S. would not invade Cuba and, in a deal that remained secret for a quarter century, the U.S. also promised to remove its missiles from Turkey."
The cuba part. The Mexico thing, wow I'm going to have to look that one up, I am ignorant on that. I don't see what it has to do with Ukraine wanting to join NATO , I didnt say I want them to join NATO, just it's a fact they've talked about this.
Well, Mexico was a thought experiment. Cuba hosting nukes for USSR happened as retaliation for USA pressing in to USSR via Turkey, and few are taught that history.
It is reasonable for people and countries to want a buffer zone of security. The western neocons have pressed into Russia for three decades, thus creating problems. USA neocons have been making sport of pressing into Taiwan to aggravate China. Taiwan is non-negotiable for China, so the west would be safer by not putting military bases on an enemy's front door.
Ukraine borders Russia, so of course Russia wants a buffer from aggressors. People in Donbas were Russian and speak Russian, and Ukraine should honor the Minsk agreement and let them vote on their future.
> It is reasonable for people and countries to want a buffer zone of security.
Not at the expense of others. I fail to see why I should give up my freedoms, my language, culture and material possessions, and become a slave for Russians like my parents were in the USSR. How do you justify it? Are Russians a master race?
So what? there are many things that you intentionally omit in presenting your point, right?
Ukraine gave up it nukes (Budapest accord) in exchange for promise that US, Russia will protect Ukraine in case of war (Albeit that was botched) , among other things.
Ukraine agreed in 2014 to Minsk agreement to allow Donbas to vote on self-sovereignty. Angela Merkel recently said that agreement was just scamming Russia to allow time for west to arm Ukraine. Now even Ukraine cancelled their elections, so their comedian actor stays in power wearing green shirt costumes.
Ask Ukraine if they are better off without their nukes now.
I have read somewhere that after the fall of the soviet union, some historians got access to some invasion plans for western europe. Apparently those plans excluded France and the UK.
However, that was for a single exercise/simulation and the Warsaw Pact militaries probably had loads of other plans. My understanding is that militaries plan all manner of scenarios, some of which turn out to be less than great ideas e.g.:
Makes you wonder what the efficacy of a dirty bomb which makes the surface of the earth uninhabitable with cobalt isotopes would be to nuclear deterrence.
Surprisingly low. Dirty bombs are much more bang than they are sting. Definitely would leave people with cancer, but exceptionally short range and most would be the manufacturers. It's difficult to get enough radioactive material and distribute is in a large enough area with a conventional weapon (talking terrorist size not MOAB). There is a reason why despite a lot of missing USSR nuclear material no dirty bomb has ever been set off. Great tool of fear, but not as effective at harm. Not saying it is safe, but rather not as deadly as you might presume. It's also just significantly harder to manufacture, very high risk, expensive, and makes it far easier for you to get caught before detonating the device. That also contributes to their lack of use.
> it seems like the best move would be to have far fewer nukes than everybody thinks you do.
I don't believe that this is possible if even one nation has a moderately competent intelligence agency. They may not have all the details, but if they have any economic data at all, their analysts can likely napkin-math to within 10% of the actual number. Any actual espionage would just further refine it.
Hell, that's why there's fluoride in the drinking water... just so some Soviet spy couldn't figure out how many we had from fluoride numbers alone.
Figured it out on my own a few years back. Only answer that makes sense. It's used for very few things, and the output of those is published annually. If we're using more fluoride than that, the difference tells you annual (uranium, of course) bomb production.
From there, the propaganda took off, any counter-narrative is conspiracy theory, and we now believe our own lies.
Hell, the funny thing is I think almost all our current arsenal is plutonium... how long could uranium have even mattered? Not past the 1960s.
It was actually. Lawsuits were filed against the DuPont factory. The link is a bit of a “doomer/conspiracy” site I think but the information is accurate.
> everybody else can be relied upon to complete the job once started--so the logic goes
How does that logic goes? Is it some simplistic tale we tell children or an actual strategic calculation?
> so you can start the chain reaction that ends all human civilization
You know that the goal is not to end all human civilization?
> it seems like the best move would be to have far fewer nukes than everybody thinks you do.
It sounds like you haven't heard of the nuclear sponge and the shell game. Let's say you want to hit your adversary. And because you are not suicidal you want to do it in such a way that they can't hit you back in retaliation. "Simple!" You just aim a warhead at each of their rockets. Now how many warheads do you need to do that? About the same number as many rockets they have. One for each. Or maybe 2 if you are accounting for malfunctions. Or maybe 4 if you want to saturate their defenses.
And because you can put multiple warheads on a single rocket this favours the attacker. Because the defender needs even more rockets to "soak up" the warheads of the attacker. And the defender needs even more than that so they can ensure a retaliation, which in turn stops the attacker from even trying in the first place.
So that is why you need many missiles. This concept is the nuclear sponge.
And of course this is super weapons race-y. Because if you need more missiles than your enemy, and your enemy need more missiles than you... there is a problem with that.
So what you can do is that you build more missile launchers than you have missiles for. And you play a shell game. You have X launchers but only 40% of them are ever armed with a missile at any single time. And to prevent your enemy figuring out which ones are filled you play complicated distractions. For example you make sure the empty launchers are guarded just as much as the full ones. And you periodically go with a big truck to swap missiles around. Or maybe to swap nothing with nothing? Or to bring missiles to maintenance? Nobody knows, and nobody is supposed to know. If you do it well enough your enemy won't be confident in their knowledge on which launchers are filled so they have to hit all of them if they want to be the one who first throws a punch.
I'm not sure you really need to fire nuclear missiles at other nuclear missiles as air defense. You just need something to shoot theirs down before they reach somewhere sensitive and detonate. Be it a non-nuclear missile, laser, Superman, whatever.
But the theory is somewhat sound -- you need more nuclear weapons than they can defend against. Which is a question less of quantity and more whether you can delivery payloads in faster, quieter, and therefore less interceptible ways.
Quantity is a brute-force override when you don't know how good their defenses are. Or you want enough to hit everyone in the world regardless of their defenses because you're nuts. Or you'll make someone a lot of money by ordering more, rather than better, nukes.
Honestly, the US buying more nukes is more an indicator that any previous technology gap is closing. The US is less confident in its own defensive capability relative to opponents' offensive capacity. So it feels it needs to up its offensive capacity to prevent its defenses from being tested. However, since the US is not confident of the QUALITY of its nuclear weapons program, it must make up for that with quantity.
To clarify, not just the two fighting parties too. No country works alone. Everyone has skin in the game, so there's large incentives to encourage your allies to back off or even sabotage or turn on them should you believe they are going to risk it. Everyone and everyone is playing the game, not just the superpowers.
> Incredible as it sounds, the end goal is to end all human civilization.
No. The end goal is to live. If the end goal would be to end civilisation you would just shoot, and shoot now. Easy. All the complications is because you want to live.
'Dying is easy, young man. Living is harder' to quote from Hamilton the musical. :)
> Let's say you want to hit your adversary. And because you are not suicidal ...
Uh, you have to declare at the start if the actor thinks starting a nuclear war is rational or not, none of this "Assume they thinks its a good idea, but also think that it's a bad idea".
Sure, you need four or five big ones so you can start the chain reaction that ends all human civilization, just like your neighbors can, but since everybody else can be relied upon to complete the job once started--so the logic goes--it seems like the best move would be to have far fewer nukes than everybody thinks you do.
Of course the problem with that is that somebody somewhere is going to manage to keep the money for all of the nukes people think you have, thereby squandering the advantage.