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Nuclear Arms Cuts, Supported By 56% of Americans, Would Make the World Safer
Lasrick writes "Kingston Reif of the Nukes of Hazard blog writes about nuclear arms reductions are back in the news, thanks to President Obama's State of the Union address and now also a Gallup poll that shows 56% of Americans support U.S.-Russian reductions. From the Article: 'A recent report by the Center for Public Integrity revealed that senior Obama administration officials believe the United States can reduce its arsenal of deployed strategic warheads to between 1,000 and 1,100 without harming national security. Those numbers would put the total below levels called for by New START...' Congressional Republicans of course are against those cuts; Reif lays out why the cuts would make the U.S. and the world safer."
Do we even need a thousand nuclear warheads?
Need to mind the mineshaft gap!
Says who? And will countries like NK or Iran follow suit or not? And does that result play into the discussions at all?
Opinions do not equate to facts, yet some people like reporting as if they do.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Why are talks between us and Russia while China is rapidly increasing their nuclear stockpile?
My understanding is that you are basically correct.
In-fact, one of the big points about the current anti-missile systems is that they do not have enough capacity to prevent strategic nuclear strikes from Russia or China. The goal is to make sure that they could always nuke us if they needed too. Which is a rather screwed up design feature; but it's understandable that we don't want to undermine their nuclear deterrence.
Because the US and Russia possess two orders of magnitude more nuclear weapons than China possesses. Even after reduction each will individually hold more than four times what China currently holds.
With Russia embracing democracy, more or less, there is less concern about it trying to conquer the world, as seemed to be a prime Soviet ambition. Meanwhile, China's government (not so much its people) is still bellicose, and has been significantly increasing its offensive capabilities in recent years. We can't drop the MAD paradigm just yet, because of China.
Do we even need a thousand nuclear warheads?
If we ever want to travel to Alpha Centauri we do. How about putting those nukes toward the construction of an interstellar pulsed nuclear space drive?
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I think we should send some of what we have now on a one-way trip to North Korea. That would make everyone happy. For the liberals we would have actually reduced the number left. For the conservatives we would have used them as intended and made the U.S. much safer by demonstrating that they can be used and are not just an empty threat.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
where do you get the absurd idea that nuclear weapons could even kill all the population once? Hollywood?
The difficult part about getting defense people to commit to decreasing the stockpile is that we have no idea when, if ever, we will be able to start producing new warheads. That turns it from being a discussion about how many we strategically need, towards a discussion about how certain were are that the stockpile we have will still be functional when we need it, and "can't we keep them all just in case". It would suck to destroy an entire line of warheads because they seem least valuable today, only to find out later that the ones we kept had an aging problem we couldn't detect before which didn't effect the destroyed line.
Actually, you don't even need that. As each ICBM reaches space, it could pop out a few dozen mylar balloon decoys. The balloons will cool rapidly in space,
And because of their tiny mass will almost immediately slow to zero velocity. If your DEW radars cannot differentiate between something moving at a considerable percent of the speed of sound and a balloon floating around with the wind, you need a better DEW line. "Hey, look, Bob, those incoming missles that were targeting Memphis are now going at only 120 knots and are aimed at the North Pole!"
"In space" doesn't mean "hard vacuum." The low mass (so they can carry enough of them) combined with the large surface area (to mimic a large object) will make them decelerate rapidly enough that they won't confuse anyone for very long. Then remember that the real ICBM has been tracked from very close to the surface, so if one missile suddenly turns into 99 missiles slowing down very quickly and 1 that keeps the same trajectory, you can be pretty confident you know which one is real and which is chaff. Then you'll see one missile descending into the atmosphere and 99 that aren't, the jig will be up.
China has no more ambition or motive to attack the US than Russia does. Sure they are a superpower, and therefore dangerous, but if that is enough to keep MAD, then there is no "just yet" about the situation, they will always (for the foreseeable future) be a superpower, so by your logical we must always have MAD.
Right, at their current rate of expenditure their military should catch up with our current levels in only what, about 50-100 years. And I'm sure that has nothing to do with their being surrounded by a number of hostile and/or unstable countries within easy striking distance. Or as a deterrent against the one currently unopposed superpower that's apparently feeling it's oats and picking fights anywhere there's money to be made.
Frankly, I suspect the day China presents a credible military threat to the US will be the day our government has already crumbled from within.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Who gives a shit what 56% of the general populace think? They aren't qualified to have a meaningful opinion.
Did I miss the high school class on thermonuclear tactics? Pretty sure I would have gone to that.
You might want to recheck that. The average nuclear warhead in the US arsenal is approximated to be 33,500 kilotons (slightly larger than the well known B41). For comparison, the nukes used in/on Japan were 15 and 21 kilotons. 33,500 kilotons is large enough to destroy/kill everything in a 55-60 mile diameter. It would take about 1000 of these to DIRECTLY kill everything in the United States. Factor in the indirect damage (nuclear poisoning, fallout, etc etc), and you could kill everyone in the United States with far far fewer. India (for example only), has 1/3rd the area of the United States. It would take probably 100 33.5 megaton nuclear bombs to kill everyone in an area equal to the size of India, and it would likely kill a couple hundred million of people not in that area.
That's completely false, most modern missile-based nukes are in the hundreds of kilotons, like 100-500 kt. 33.5 megatons is larger than the largest bomb we've ever had in service, the B53 at 9 megatons.
Which means you get wiped out while your missles are in space waiting for the re-entry time ...
At an altitude of 100km, you reach the Karman Line, which is generally considered the threshold of space. The air density at that altitude is 1/(2.2 million) the surface density. At ICBM trajectory has an apogee of 1,200 km. Since the density decreases exponentially, it will be far, far less at that altitude. So I don't think either the balloons or the warhead would slow down enough to matter.
First off, China is a RICH nation. Make no mistake. They have trillion+ of dollars that they are sitting on. They are NOT a poor nation.
In addition, they are NOT a democratic gov. or even a capitalist economy. The fact is, that the economy is split into 2 with those companies that export being capitalists, while those that are tied to the gov, esp. the PLA, being a pure command situation.
With China's earthquake loads was discovered about them. That 3000 miles of underground railway was a shocker. And the fact that they had an underground hidden nuke operation by the reservoir was also a shock. That alone should be a sign that it is very possible for China to have a reactor down there, being cooled by the reservoir and would NEVER be seen by space.
Now, as to MAD, let me explain how this works. Basically, both sides have to have systems that are either 100% first strike, with limited retailiation, OR nearly 100% defense, with limited first strike. Most importantly, neither side can have a true missile defense system. Now, W killed that and the neo-cons are pushing for us to put up a BMD system. However, it should be obvious to all, that we have gone nowhere with it. As such, we are still playing by the MAD logic that America and USSR had. Now, along comes China who does not tell what they have. However, we are finding out all the time that they are far more advanced than they let on to. In particular, they DO appear to have loads more BMD than is acknowledged. For starters, they took out a sat that was quite high (500 miles+). But it continues to get better. For starters, they have multiple ground based lasers designed to shoot into space. They have already taken out multiples of our sats. In addition, their space station is a military base. It is NOT a civilian program. They have stated that no civilians or non-chinese will be on-board. All in all, it is obvious that China is working against MAD, and is looking for a number of leg ups. That implies first strike and their entertaining the idea of winning a nuke war. And I am not wild about ANY military officer thinking that. EVER. That is why the worst thing that could happen is to cut down warheads.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
We've surrounded Iran with dozens of military bases, crashed their economy and currency with sanctions, illegally threatened them with military force, and committed multiple acts of war on a country over the....nuclear weapons program both the CIA and Israelis admit they don't have.
So when does Iran get to threaten the United States for being in "material breach" of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which requires disarmament for countries already in possession of nuclear weapons?
This is dead on correct. Balloons on trajectory traveling just around mach 25 won't hit atmo with sufficient density to slow them down until about 5 minutes before the real warheads impact. There is no way to effectively respond in that time window. This is a completely effective strategy.