Slashdot Mirror
Sidestepping Tactical Nuclear Weapons Limits With Strategic Bombs
Lasrick writes "Benjamin Loehrke describes the rather odd definitions of what is a 'tactical' nuclear weapon and what isn't. 'There is enough ambiguity surrounding the capabilities of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons to render the term "tactical" all but useless for arms control purposes. As the United States and Russia pursue new arms control treaties, they should drop the tactical distinction and limit the total number of all nuclear weapons — strategic, tactical, or other.'"
From my Civilization 2 days I remember how SDI defenses were able to completely destroy any incoming nukes. How does it work and is it that good in real life?
During similar talks over conventional weapons, a certain number of Russian Army Tanks were transferred to the Russian Navy, thus making them exempt from the treaty.
This is the best link I can find. Scroll down to the 'Cold War' section.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Infantry_(Russia)
Watch those corners
From TFA:
In any case, as a bonus for ratifying a single-limit treaty, the United States and Russia would be one step closer to retiring the term "tactical nuclear weapon," allowing this confused Cold War anachronism to drift into irrelevance.
This makes no sense to me. Tactical nuclear weapons would continue to exist, and would continue to be referred to as such. Plus, it's not obvious at all why they are any more anachronistic than strategic weapons, or why this guy seems more comfortable with the idea of weapons meant to be dropped on cities and kill vast numbers of civilians than ones intended to be deployed on a battlefield, with a much higher ratio of combatant to civilian casualties?
Why do we care about limits on this stuff, in terms of numbers? I can totally understand saying "Let's get rid of these things, period, they are too dangerous." However I can also understand why that'll never happen. So then why do we care how many the US or Russia have given that the answer is "more than is needed" in both cases? It isn't like having "only" say 1,000 nuclear weapons in the US instead of 5,000 would really mean anything.
Is all just seems rather silly. If someone has a viable strategy for real global nuclear disarmament, I'm all ears. However this push to try and limit the numbers the US and Russia has seems like feel-good security theater. They'll agree to it because they know it makes no difference to their actual fighting capabilities. They can destroy a couple hundred nukes as a symbolic thing, probably the ones the computer simulations show are failing anyhow, and it changes nothing.
This is just silliness.
Since War Games we know that the only winning move is not to play
We will have neither of those
Mass drivers. Too expensive to get that much mass into orbit and no matter how fast you throw your projectile, it can only penetrate so far underground, as limited by physics.
Tactical lasers: Effectively banned as they are all too easily used, intentionally or unintentionally, as blinding weapons.
Also stupid easy to destroy such systems. Launch a missile straight up in a sub-orbital intercept trajectory. Payload is aluminum spheres that is released into a fan pattern once the missile has cleared the upper atmosphere. Any Nation that has SCUDs or similar could develop such a system. A SCUD-C has a max altitude of about 124 miles at the max range of 340 miles with a 1300lb warhead. Both system you propose would be in low earth orbit, 500 miles tops. If you shot straight up and reduced the payload weight I see no reason why a SCUD-C could not launch a payload of aluminum spheres 500 miles up. Once up there, the satellites own kinetic energy will destroy it when it hits one or more of the spheres, which relative to the satellite are not moving.
Such a system has the benefit of not creating space junk, as the spheres will simply fall back and burn up in the atmosphere. The only serious technical difficulty is targeting. The targeted satellites may have maneuver capability, but if it only has a short window of warning it will take a significant amount of fuel to maneuver out of the way of such a cloud. Running the satellite out of thruster fuel will be just as effective as destroying it.
short term, yes. Long term, no.
rewriting history since 2109
TFA's thesis is that there simply isn't a dividing line between 'tactical' and 'strategic' that makes your sentence meaningful.
Given the mixture of forward bases and in-air refueling that the nuclear powers certainly aren't going to give up(even if their intentions are purely conventional, being able to B-52 bits of the middle east is just too convenient) delivering a 'tactical' warhead(or 10) right down a 'strategic' target's chimney is a matter of little more than swapping some hardpoints, and the upper edge of the dial-a-yield ranges for 'tactical' devices are well into the realm of 'would ruin a population center's day' territory.
There are, certainly, some unambiguously 'strategic' weapons, of the 'bloody huge thermonuclear warhead on an ICBM' school and there are (a dwindling number of) oddball low-yield artillery shells, demolition charges, and other oddities from the heyday of nuclear optimism(for sheer weirdness, I'm fond of the 'Davy Crockett' system. Essentially a 'technical' as much beloved by ragged 3rd world armies; but with nuclear warheads...); but much of the active hardware falls into the awkward middle ground where, in order to be powerful enough to be worth the trouble of being nuclear, it could certainly bestrategic if asked, and purely because of what people expect from contemporary delivery sytems, even for boring chemical explosives, 'strategic' delivery capabilities are widespread.
Orbital strikes are the way to go. Launch a steel based rod metal projectile insulated using the heat shield materials that came out of old shuttle project. Add the maneuvering control system currently used with drones and thrusters for course changes and there you are. Massive destruction without having to worry about any radioactive fall out. People have criticized the US stoppage on the shuttle but they never mention the US already has a craft capable of reaching orbit, maneuvering, and landing back on earth. So far it has being a total military project but it has been in development for over 10 years using information collected from the shuttle program. The maneuverability to intercept and destroy any other countries military satellites if needed would also be devastating to those countries who rely on them.
Then you probably have little to no idea of what a tactical nuclear weapon actually is. Strategical nuclear weapons is generally considered to be an nuclear weapon with a yield greater than roughly 100kT(a tactical nuclear weapon thus is anything below 100kT).The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 13kT and the on that hit Nagasaki was estimated at 21kT so the only nuclear weapons ever deployed in war falls well within the tactical envelope and many of the MIRV warheads straddle the boundary and the majority of ballistic missiles use MIRV'ed warheads because they are so much harder to intercept effectively.
The distinction between strategical and tactical nukes becomes pretty moot at this point.
And considering that for example the B61 bomb has a variable yield anywhere between 0,3 and 340kT the definition of what is a tactical and what is a strategical nuke ceases to matter completely.
Personally I don't really care much whether it's a single multi-megaton nuke or several 100kT MIRVed nukes that kills, I'll be just as dead either way.
They could bomb the crap out of a city with 10 megatons of dynamite, nobody will give a crap. It'll be the second news item right after the important breaking news on who Snooki is dating.
Did anybody care when Dresden was bombed and tens of thousands of humans died? We don't hear anyone saying we mustn't have a repeat of Dresden. Noo .. it's we mustn't use nuclear weapons.
Mankind has a psychosis over radiation .. I'm telling you .. forget strategic nuke or midget nukes ... the issue is that its nuclear. It's radioactive.
A nuclear weapon stockpile is no longer a deterrence to war. Conventional armies still are. If someone tries to invade the US, conventional weapons can stop it much better and easier than nukes can. The most powerful nuclear weapon ever made has only a 50% kill ratio in a 15 mile radius .. you cannot scale much higher easily because the earth's curvature will prevent the blast from reaching far .. and if you detonate it high in the sky the blast pressure reduces pi-squared with distance-- so 15 miles is a reasonable upper limit ..and that's assuming it's in a city where the debris is a danger. OK, then what about using multiple nukes at the same time? It won't be wise ... due to fallout ..-> the radiation can gather into a cloud system and rain down on an allied location or worse if we are unlucky it may even get caught in a weather pattern that brings it here. When the US tested one of the first thermonuclear weapons in Bikini Atoll, Japanese fishermen on aboard the Daigo Fukuryu Maru died from the fallout that happened hours later .. they were 100 miles from the atoll. They got more radiation than if they were just 15 miles away. There is a map of the US and thyroid contamination due to fallout from the Nevada test sites at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_fallout_exposure.png You can see that Montana, which is a thousand miles from Nevada got most of the radioactive effect --- meanwhile people in Nevada itself and its neighbor California got much less radiation exposure.
If anyone anywhere uses a nuke, even a tiny tiny nuke and in self defense .. it will still GUARANTEE a new nuclear arms race. Rather than having a stockpile of nukes that can be compromised by a terrorist or psychopathic group of individuals -- it's better to have a very strong conventional army and a small well protected nuclear stockpile. Best of all deterrents though .. is diplomacy .. good foreign policy, being reasonable, not interfering except for extremes, and not bearing hatreds.
Launch a steel based rod metal projectile insulated using the heat shield materials that came out of old shuttle project.
Do you even have the most basic understanding of how much that would cost? Here is a white paper with the details
Price Per Pound to orbit (pdf)
http://www.futron.com/upload/wysiwyg/Resources/Whitepapers/Space_Transportation_Costs_Trends_0902.pdf
So you want to launch a one ton rod into orbit? Just the cost of a launching that would be about $8 million, assuming a $4,000 per pound launch cost. Add onto that several million just to build it in the first place. You won't be able to afford to deploy these in enough numbers to make any difference. A LGM-30 Minuteman III ICBM with a 3 warhead MIRV is only about $7 million.
Massive destruction without having to worry about any radioactive fall out.
You haven't done the math on this, have you?
A 2,000 pound rod traveling at Mach 10 has a kenetic energy equal to..........1.2 tons of TNT. Congratulations, you've spent $10+ million to do what two $800,000 cruise missiles can do.
People have criticized the US stoppage on the shuttle
Not me, the shuttle was a total boondoggle. One-time use rockets/capsules have proven to be the more economical method.
The maneuverability to intercept and destroy any other countries military satellites if needed would also be devastating to those countries who rely on them.
The country that most describes is the US. No other country is as heavily reliant on satellites. Note that China supposedly has an operational anti-satellite laser, which I find to be completely believable as the tech has been feasible for quite some time.
I have pointed out elsewhere that any country that has rocket tech of SCUD-C level or better could build a "shotgun" type anti-satellite weapon for LEO satellites, the main difficulty being targeting.
This guy thinks he's discovered some magic thought experiment that let you think everything away. No, not really. The problem is that there are hostile, sometimes crazy, nations that have nuclear weapons. There are other nations that are kinda bullies (like China) that have nuclear weapons too. So if the US, England, France, and let's say Russia too get rid of all their nuclear weapons, then all that happens is those nations have leverage to push them around.
Right now, China's nuclear arsenal is defensive only and that's all it can be. They tried to use it offensively, they'd risk total nuclear annihilation. However if nuclear weapons went away from the other nations, it would be feasible. China decides to invade Russia and don't say "that would never happen" realize a small border conflict, with fatalities, happened in 1969, and a larger one happened in 1929. So they decide to invade to take land, which they quite want and need. Russia responds with conventional weapons and is doing well in the fight but China threatens them off: Leave us alone or we'll nuke a few cities. What is Russia to do?
Or worse yet, you take North Korea. Again, right now there's an understanding that if they nuked SK or Japan, it would mean nuclear annihilation for them and crazy though their leaders may be, they don't want to die or become rules of the glass parking lot. However with the US nuclear threat gone? Maybe they decide to go for it, nuke the major military installations in SK and Japan, and invade. What do they care? The life of their citizens doesn't matter to them and they aren't getting nuked back.
That's why I say there's no viable strategy. Doesn't matter what you could talk the US and Russia in to, they aren't the only ones who have nuclear weapons and there are likely to be more nations in the future, not less. If you think you can "irony" North Korea or China or Israel or Pakistan in to giving up their weapons, good luck with that, however until that happens, don't bother trying with the US or Russia.
Tactical nukes make nuclear war practical.
That's what the nuclear-capable nations' militaries hoped for, but it didn't turn out that way. As already stated in a number of posts above (and argued in TFA), the distinction between tactical and strategic nukes is very difficult to make. Nuclear weapons are simply too powerful (and too dirty, regardless of the size) to be useful in a tactical setting.
One party which seems to have recently realized this is, wonder of wonders, North Korea. There are strong indications that their designed yield was about 4 kT. A piddly tac nuke, right? Well, as mentioned in the discussion after the referenced article, imagine those 4 kT going off in the heart of Seoul or Tokyo...
"The problem is that there are hostile, sometimes crazy, nations that have nuclear weapons"
Like the USA? :-) If not today, maybe after the next election? What about a country that has institutionalized torture, that has about a quarter of its population food insecure, that is becoming completely dependent on other countries for consumer goods, and that is blowing up people around the world with killer robots, is sane?
You may be unable to see the forest of my point for the trees of your strategic reply, perhaps because you are caught up in short-term thinking about the rationality of military planning (each point making sense by itself) while missing the overall increasing systematic risk? That is the kind of thinking that lead to the recent global economic crisis --- every local economic decision making sense locally, but then the whole house of cards collapsing as the system collectively passes some phase change boundary (like heated water starting to turn into steam). Like pollution, increasing systemic risk is an externality often unaccounted for in local decision making (whether economically or militarily).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is based on rationality at all levels of the system (except that the whole approach is crazy for reasons I mention below). You just said there are crazy people out there. So MAD will not work. It can not keep working indefinitely for exactly the reasons you mention ("hostile, sometimes crazy"). Seriously, why should a crazy leader of either North Korea or the USA not just start nuking other countries because they think they are on some mission from god or something and everyone else is to terrified to stop them? Example:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa
"George Bush has claimed he was on a mission from God when he launched the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, according to a senior Palestinian politician in an interview to be broadcast by the BBC later this month."
Another source from before Bush's election:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html
"''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.'' Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.'' "
You're also ignoring the bigger issue is that WMDs is no longer purely a national problem. Like has happened so many times before, the technologies like nuclear weapons, designer plagues, nanotech, cyberwarfare, or killer robots, that once were only in the control of big countries are going to eventually filter down to the average small country or even small group or individual. Our entire military doctrine is out-of-sync with emerging 21st century realities.
Or, as George Orwell said:
http://blog.gaiam.com/quotes/authors/george-orwell
"We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, is possible to carry this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."
An essay I wrote on that general issue:
"Problems of the MAD doctrine, their consequences, and positive alternatives"
http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/browse_thread/thread/6b18338b6b947931
"The policy of "Mutually Assured Destruction" (MAD) wi
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.