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More Nukes! More Nukes!
Chant it with me, “MORE NUKES!” Or, so it would seem this is the plan for the president elect who tweeted yesterday that we must strengthen and expand our nuclear capability.
The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 22, 2016
Never one to back down, President-Elect Trump clarified the remarks by telling MSNBC’s Morning Joe team “Let it be an arms race … we will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.” Media speculation is that these statements were in response to Russia’s Putin saying “We need to strengthen the military potential of strategic nuclear forces, especially with missile complexes that can reliably penetrate any existing and prospective missile defense systems.” The 80’s are back, H/T to Mitt Romney.
The left will, as if on cue, go berserk about how Trump is threatening world peace and will incite the next world war, the big big one where nukes fly and babies die. This is hardly the reality. What is really going on here is the next president showing decisively that the wobbly legged foreign policy of the current occupant of the White House is coming to an immediate end. Trump is not starting an arms race; rather, he is acknowledging the arms race already in progress that began when President Obama sold our nuclear deterrent capabilities for the pottage of a signed treaty.
As R. James Woolsey wrote before the New START Treaty was ratified:
The Russians are engaging in a comprehensive modernization of their nuclear forces, which senior Russian military officials say is their top priority. We cannot deal effectively with them or with the growing number of nuclear-weapon states around the world if we are strategically weaker, undefended and clueless about our adversaries’ capabilities.
The arms race is here whether the left likes it or not, and it is actually the direct result of Obama’s policy of “leading from behind” in foreign policy. What Trump’s statements show is an acceptance of this reality, and of the reality that we are on our heels in this race just as we were after Carter had decimated our military. The U.S. nuclear forces are aging and doing so at an accelerated rate when compared to other nuclear capable countries that are modernizing their forces. We must do what is necessary to secure our place at the top of the nuclear pecking order before the race for arms becomes a race for mere survival.
Published in General
Easy to recall too
While I understand and share Fred’s revulsion to nuclear weaponry, there’s this problem; when the number of nuclear states is > 1, it is best that a liberal, consensual state have the most powerful and survivable armed forces, nuclear and conventional, in the world. Period. If that position is ceded to an illiberal, authoritarian (and/or messianic) state, everyone suffers, and immoral acts run rampant.
Also, in war, you frequently don’t have a moral choice available; you have to choose from the least immoral choice available. Great example in this area is Hiroshima & Nagasaki; in order to forestall an invasion of Japan which would have cost well over 100,000 US soldiers (anyone saying less is historically ignorant) and untold hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Japanese civilians, we employed a terrible weapon twice. Not invading Japan wasn’t an option; tens of thousands of Japanese, Chinese and Russian soldiers were being killed every week toward the end of the war, and that wasn’t stopping anytime soon. Speaking of the Russians, we also forestalled a Soviet invasion of Japan and bolstered the credibility that made MAD actually work during the Cold War. Dangerous as the Soviets were, they knew it was not in their interest to fight a nuclear war, so they didn’t start one.
You prevent war by being ready and able (and willing if absolutely necessary) to fight and win it. Upgrade the nuclear arsenal (and make missile defense work). NOW.
Sure more nukes, but first build Star Wars. Oh yea – and the wall too.
Liberal say, “No nukes is good nukes.”
Nuclear weapons used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped save Japan and Japanese civilization from itself. They had too much honor to live unless the emperor did the unthinkable and capitulated. Otherwise he would rightly have been seen as the destroyer of his country, in addition to all those other lives he ruined. As it was, while he had done bad enough, he saw an ‘honorable’ way out and took it. Today Japan is westernized but still very much it’s own culture, humbled by the mistakes of the past but still with a bright future and an important ally of the US.
Especially since we haven’t popped off a nuke since the early 90’s and despite a decree telling us to be prepared to set one off given 5 years notice, we will be unable to do even that.
We need a new nuke test and pronto.
I hope Mr. C can leverage a sweet new deal to do just that.
That has been fixed, I assure you. (Maybe not the 12″ floppy, but the crew force, yes.
The movie Godzilla (1998) was on this afternoon, so lots of good old nuclear weapon test footage in the opening credits. Including shots of the still intact twin towers in the distance.
We don’t. Mount St Helens was larger than our entire current ICBM Force. The Subs and bombers maybe double that, but not by much. 3x MT St. Helens is hardly enough to destroy the planet. Tambora was orders of magnitude larger.
Just helping with the perspective.
Actually not. Particularly after nukes have already been popped off. Obama phones have more priority.
Bombers are a lot more easy to recall than ICMBs. You must have misunderstood me.
…and there’s the rub.
Even with reductions in the nuclear forces of both sides, Mutual Assured Destruction is still the force in play – and there’s a lower limit on the size of that.
The idea is that, if the other side throws a massive first strike at you, you respond with enough force to take them out, too. Unfortunately, the US is (according to some of the old Cold War guys) reaching the lower limit on what makes up a deterrent force – and might have reached that already. All it takes is one optimistic Russian general with Putin’s trust, and someone might push the button because they think they could come out ahead, and only lose a few cities while removing the US from the picture.
Think what would happen if the Russians managed to completely shut down our command and control for an hour, or if they have a sneaky way to take out our patrolling subs.
At that point, everyone loses.
He says he’s got one more in him and his colleague and other gray-beard at work agrees. The problem is, they have no one to mentor. Haven’t had anyone for decades. Sure, there are still kids going into engineering, but no one thought there was a future in (nuclear) weapons testing after the test ban. All this airy fairy bliss-ninny idiocy (sorry Fred) about doing away with nukes cut the knowledge/experience tree down to a stump. It’s going to be quite the challenge to regrow from that.
… and I have to give him up for three months at a time…
Agreed. SDI first. It unhinged the entire offensive calculations of the Russkies. An even greater deterrent against rogue states.
Only in the sense that ICBMs have no chance of being recalled.
Bombers will automatically recall themselves under certain circumstances. Under others, the communication is not guaranteed. Not because it is technically infeasible, but because spending on Obama Phones carried higher priority.
I know. We were supposed to keep the ability to pop one off within 5 years, according to public law, thing is, nobody figured out what that would take and there was no money to do it if they did.
ICBMs are the cheapest weapon system ever fielded. The entirety of the Air Force portion (ICBMS, Bombers) of our nuclear deterrent costs less to operate than what the Post Office lost in 2008.
Incoming missiles re-enter at 20+ Mach. Humans don’t have the reflexes to hit them at all, anywhere in their trajectory, except for a 10 second window as they are lifting off.
Nope, not unless you want to make Nuclear war more likely. This is a case where interservice rivalry worked in everyone’s favor – you might not want to hold it up as a bad example of such.
BTW -@fredcole I’ll bet you cannot accurately describe the current Triad. (no peeking, Fred)
Here is a better conversation regarding that mess.
But Fred can’t look at it until he tells me what it is off the top of his head (but please, take another swipe at the Pres-elect if you like).
So, around the office we have what is affectionately known as Instugator’s Dictum.
It goes like this;
The New START treaty has an upper limit on deployed strategic forces of 1550. Russia has already been violating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
Gee if an arms race can be started via a tweet, then the world is a much more volatile place than I expected.
We should totally have more Nukes then to keep it from getting completely out of hand.
Let’s see, we have two experts in this thread, one who worked on Boomers, and one who works on this stuff with the Air Force.
@fredcole what are your credentials to show your expertise in discussing this area?
Technically, I believe the term is BOOMers. ;-)
This field is very involved, as you might imagine, and Mr. C’s work was more on the receiving end than the delivery — nuclear effects testing and hardening. Later his work was in missile defense on those spectacular interceptor tests, equipping the targets so that we could learn how efficacious the interceptors are. Good stuff. He knows his physics and he loves those countdowns. Only actual rocket scientists get to witness more “events” (always loved that euphemism). EVENTS!!!
A slightly pedantic correction: missiles go up, payloads come down. So not only is the “target” for interceptors going over 18,000 MPH, it’s pretty darn small. Traveling only a few hundred miles at that speed, well the math says you haven’t much time.
I usually describe the ballistic flight path to people as being like an underhanded lob. The accuracy we have with that over several thousand miles is rather spectacular.
Hitting a bullet with a bullet.
This is an appeal to authority, which is not a strong form of argument.
You’ll find no one more against the proliferation and use of nukes than those who would actually be involved in their use because we know what it entails. But, because we know the outcome should anyone else use them, you’ll also find no stronger advocates for our own possession and deployment of the weapons. The outcome would be so inhumanly terrible that enough nukes to make their use irrational is the only acceptable quantity other than absolute zero. Since zero is not part of reality the other quantity is the only actual path. This mindset held throughout and after the Cold War. Now that we have less rational actors like North Korea and Iran in the game the understanding becomes more complex. Obama’s whistling past the graveyard on the matter was the worst policy other than unilateral disarmament. At least Trump (and you all know how I feel about him) is willing to address the situation.
That is utter B.S. We have a rough idea of the total yield because we know were every single nuke and nuke reactor is located in the world at any given moment. Plus we know how much radiation those locations give of so we can basically estimates the yields. The missile capacity itself, I am sure its top secret but we have a decent idea of what they can due.
No President has done more to damage Non-Proliferation than P. Obama.
Libya – removing a dictator who actually gave up his WMD program
Ukraine – next time a country is contemplating giving up nukes, they won’t accept Western reassurances to protect their territorial integrity.
Iran – The USA affirms the right of Iran to enrich Uranium.
Just to name a few…
Huh? Ever heard of the “underground great wall”? We have no idea what the Chinese have.
Even if we knew the location of every Ruskie nuke (which we do not) it is a pure matter of trust as to what the yield of each is.