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.'"

Comments

How does SDI work?

[partofme]

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?

Re:How does SDI work?

[Sqr(twg)]

The basic idea is: you use satellites detect the nozzle flame of ICBM:s as they launch, then use other satellites to destroy their fuel tanks or payloads with lasers.

The only difference between Civ2 and real life is that in Civ2 it works.

Re:How does SDI work?

[bkmoore]

....How does it work and is it that good in real life?

SDI works like a condom. It blocks incoming nukes. It might provide protection, or it might not. It may prevent unwanted wars or it may not. The only sure way is abstinence. But what's a loose nuke among friends anyway?

Same as conventional weapons

[Dupple]

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)

I have trouble seeing the point

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:I have trouble seeing the point

[Crosshair84]

The purpose of having so many is relatively simple: Modern SOP in regards to nuclear war is "Retaliation after Ride-out". "Launch on Warning" is simply impractical given the short time between the launch of a first strike and the warhead reaching its target. Therefore a country thinking about defense will have to work on the assumption of a large portion of its nuclear weapons being destroyed in the first strike, even after extensive hardening of the launching platforms. Depending on who you ask, the military assumes a worst case scenario where between 90-95% of its strategic nuclear weapons will be destroyed/damaged in a first strike. So if you have 5,000 strategic nukes, ICBM, SLBM, bomber launched cruise missiles, that means that after ride-out you should expect to have only 250 to 500 weapons operationally available with which to immediately retaliate against the aggressor nation.

Then also remember that you don't want to use all your working weapons against the first aggressor nation, there are other nations that may take advantage of the strike to attack you, so you need to hold back some weapons in reserve in case you need to use them against other aggressor nations.

Going from 5,000 to 1,000, assuming 90-95% losses in a first strike, means you now only have between 50 to 100 warheads with which to retaliate with. When you look at it that way,you can understand why having 10,000 nukes is not seen as excessive by many in the military. They don't see us having 10,000 nukes. They see us having 500-1000 nukes after a first strike. less in fact when you consider that many will be offline for maintenance. Figure retaining half for continued deterrence and then you only have a max of 250-500 nukes to immediately retaliate with.

Of course then there is the fact that nuclear disarmament would probably make large scale war MORE likely. With nukes you do not need a large standing army for national defense. (For national OFFENSE, what the US is doing today, you do.) Without them you have to expend vast resources maintaining a conventional military for purely defensive purposes. Seriously, why DIDN'T the Soviet Union just steamroll until they got to Gibraltar? They could have done so with conventional forces largely at any time during the Cold War. Because they knew full well that such an action would result in nuclear retaliation.

Re:I have trouble seeing the point

[realityimpaired]

The number of weapons required to malfunction to cause serious problems: ONE. Even if it's a 0.0000000000000000000000000000000001% probability; the more weapons you have in more places, the more likely something goes wrong.

With you until you said that. Nuclear weapons are not stored in an armed state, and they aren't designed to keep a critical mass in such a configuration that it could turn into an uncontrolled fission. The absolute 100% worst case scenario possible would be that the non-nuclear part of the payload (which is used to mash the nuclear components together and trigger a critical mass detonation) could go off prematurely, but as the weapon is not stored in an armed state, that would not trigger a nuclear detonation (in the un-armed state, the physical position of the nuclear fuel is such that it would be blown away from each other, not towards, in the event that the explosive went off accidentally). It would, essentially, be a dirty bomb whose effective area would be contained to the storage facility in which it went off... dirty bombs are most effective when they're used outside where the local weather can carry the nuclear contaminants. Even that is not very likely, because the type of explosives they're using in modern weapons are extremely difficult to set off accidentally. (check youtube for a video of somebody cooking their lunch with burning c4... that stuff does not accidentally explode).

A *far* more likely scenario than anything you suggest would actually be some nuclear fuel "going missing". The problem with stealing a bomb is that somebody will notice it pretty much immediately. They're big, and difficult to transport. While you could fit one in an 18-wheeler, you'd have a hard time sneaking that truck into a military facility without being noticed. On the other hand, the nuclear fuel is significantly smaller and easier to transport. In theory, somebody could take the nuclear fuel from a weapon while working on it, and sneak it out in a briefcase. I would be extremely surprised if anybody ever managed to successfully do that, because my understanding is that they film people when working on nuclear weapons, and that nobody's ever left alone with a bomb.

You're right, it only takes one, but there are safeguards in place that provide an extremely small chance that any of the situations you suggest could ever happen. I would prefer nuclear disarmament too, but given that it's never going to happen, I'm comfortable with the safeguards in place. The engineers who designed these things are not morons, and designed them to fail safe (or at least, as safe as you can get with several kilograms of nuclear fuel involved).

Re:I have trouble seeing the point

[Crosshair84]

Not to mention that even IF you steal one, good luck arming one. Nukes that are on active standby are heavily guarded and the detonators require pass codes to arm. Talked with someone whose duty was to guard nukes and his orders were, "ONE warning, if you do not get IMMEDIATE compliance, shoot to disable. If you can't shoot to disable, shoot anyway." People working on the weapons accidentally breaking procedure did happen on occasion, where they have to tell everyone to stop everything until the guards can sort everything out. Obviously everyone immediately complies because they know what the guards orders are and know if they get shot it's their own fault. Not unreasonable given what they are working on.

You can't just rip out the pass-coded detonator and wire all the blasting caps on the explosives together, to get the explosive "lens" in an implosion type weapon requires some blasting caps go off before others to take the core super-critical.If that timing is off all you get is a dirty bomb

Weapons that are not on active standby have vital parts removed including, when possible, the nuclear core.

This is done not only for safety, it prevents a saboteur from detonating a warhead. Worrying about a nuke accidentally going off is like me worrying about my car accidentally starting and driving over a little kid while I sit here in my house. Sure my car could accidentally catch fire, the horn could accidentally go off, but for the engine to accidentally start, the transmission accidentally shift into reverse, and the parking brake to accidentally disengage is an event so improbable that it is not worth considering.

They also don't store nukes in downtown New York, even though sometimes I think they should.

Bad strategy

[gmuslera]

Since War Games we know that the only winning move is not to play

Re:Nuclear weapons are blase

[Crosshair84]

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.

Re:Is "tactical nuclear weapon" a bad word now?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

During the Cold War, there was a bitter German joke to the effect of, "Tactical nuclear weapon: any nuclear weapon intended to be detonated over German territory." IOW, it's a euphemism, and "tactical" nukes are, in practice, unlikely to be any less murderous than "strategic" ones.

Re:Sure, but...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:Is "tactical nuclear weapon" a bad word now?

[Mindcontrolled]

Pretty much that. I grew up close to the Czech border in Germany. Wasn't that much of a fun place in the 80s. Our history teacher was military reserve - he used to tell the occasional story about how they nuked our hometown during the last training exercise. Roads were prepared with access shafts to place explosives to destroy the infrastructure, should the Soviets decide to move, lots of fun stuff like that.

Re:Nuclear weapons are blase

[cavreader]

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.

Re:Is "tactical nuclear weapon" a bad word now?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Notice the mention of a 50-kiloton threshold for being "tactical", when bombs in the 15-20 kiloton range had strategic effects in 1945.

A real, non-hipster, way

[Sycraft-fu]

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.