A Case For Unilateral US Nuclear Warhead Reductions

Lasrick writes "Interesting read of the geopolitics between the U.S. and Russia when it comes to reducing nuclear warheads. Pavel Podvig is a physicist trained at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology who works on the Russian nuclear arsenal, US-Russian relations, and nonproliferation. His take here is essential to understanding what is happening between Washington and Moscow on nuclear weapons cuts." Reader auric_dude also sent in a link to a few other views on the issue.

Comments

It's a about money.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maintaining a nuclear arsenal is really pricy. They're full of dangerous things. They require LOTS of upkeep. You have to guard them. (They have the power to destroy the world after all) The infrastructure to maintain your active arsenal is massive and costs piles of money, which seems silly for something you hope to never use.

Some say the nuclear arms race was as much as way to drain money out of the USSR until it collapsed as much as anything else. We're done with that, and I'm sure both sides are sick of throwing money in to a pit. You really only need to blow the world up once, if you're going to do it at all.

I also hear that most nuclear material for peacetime power reactors comes from decommissioned nuclear warheads.

Re:It's a about money.

[tlambert]

Maintaining a nuclear arsenal is really pricy. They're full of dangerous things.

Which is why it makes sense to leave them where they are. Decommissioning is even more pricey.

They require LOTS of upkeep. You have to guard them. (They have the power to destroy the world after all) The infrastructure to maintain your active arsenal is massive and costs piles of money, which seems silly for something you hope to never use.

Most of the cost is military. Personally, I think guarding holes in the desert is a much finer jobs program than bombing people in the Middle East. Safer for the people who get the make-work jobs, too.

Some say the nuclear arms race was as much as way to drain money out of the USSR until it collapsed as much as anything else.

Yeah, those people obviously don't work for the Brookings Institute, or the Sante Fe Institute, and so they have no understanding of the games theory basis that led to the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), resulted in the "Cold War", and kept us out of a hot war.

We're done with that, and I'm sure both sides are sick of throwing money in to a pit. You really only need to blow the world up once, if you're going to do it at all.

If we were sick of throwing money into a pit, we wouldn't have approved TARP, TARP2, and we would have had some campaign promises kept, like closing Gitmo, and getting us out of our two major wars, instead of getting us into two new ones as well. That'd save a bunch of money right there.

I also hear that most nuclear material for peacetime power reactors comes from decommissioned nuclear warheads.

You heard incorrectly. RTG's, or Radioisotope Thermionic Generators, operate on Plutonium. These are used in spacecraft and space probes, Mars landers, and so on. The U.S. mostly buys the Plutonium for those from Russia and other former Soviet republics. Commercial power reactors, other than breeders, run off of Uranium, and the Uranium not only isn't weapons grade, it *can't* be, since if it were, the reactors wouldn't operate properly. Breeders can run on Plutonium, but most of them operate from reprocessed fuel, or as a means of reprocessing fuel.

The U.S. only operates two breeder sites, for the purpose of producing medically useful isotopes, and they are generally not run at capacity. They are under the control of the DOE, and there has been serious talk lately about shutting the one in Oak Ridge down. At which point we will be buying those isotopes from Japan and France - assuming Japan restarts their reactor network again, rather than it committing seppuku after Fukushima made them paranoid.

Re:It's a about money.

[Zontar The Mindless]

Which is why it makes sense to leave them where they are. Decommissioning is even more pricey.

There's a little thing called "shelf life". Nukes have one, too.

Re:It's a about money.

[Arker]

"Which is why it makes sense to leave them where they are. Decommissioning is even more pricey"

Not really. A one-time cost to decommission, defrayed by salvage, versus a large recurring expense.

"Most of the cost is military. Personally, I think guarding holes in the desert is a much finer jobs program than bombing people in the Middle East."

Cant say that I disagree on that. But nukes are extremely expensive toys and the maintanence cost is huge, and NOT mostly on personel. Just maintaining the nuclear arsenal accounts for around $18million a year currently and it's rising every year.

These are very delicate, precision machines, and each and every one of them is a minimum of 20 years old, many much older than that. As time goes on they require more maintanence, and it becomes more expensive.

I'm no naive hippy and I am ok with paying for deterrence. But it's clear we could cut our stock in half tomorrow with no reduction in deterrence. An arsenal that is capable of destroying the entire planet is in no way inferior to one that would be capable of destroying the planet a dozen times. It just costs less.

What the US administration has been trying to do, however, is get the Russians to make some concessions in return for us reducing our stock. This just wasnt a great approach to take. It probably actually spooked the Russians, who wonder why we are so concerned about their arsenal, hmmm? And they have other reasons to resist. They have indicated they are not interested in bilateral agreements that were reasonable back in the cold war days. It's a multipolar world, there are many nuclear nations, not just two and their respective pack members. The Russians want negotiations that include all the other nuclear powers as well. And the US administration would probably find that very reasonable if it werent for Israel...

At any rate we should cut stock for a number of reasons. It would soothe the Russian fears and might well lead to them reducing their own stock in response, but that's not the reason to do it, that's just some possible gravy.

"If we were sick of throwing money into a pit, we wouldn't have approved TARP, TARP2, and we would have had some campaign promises kept, like closing Gitmo, and getting us out of our two major wars, instead of getting us into two new ones as well. That'd save a bunch of money right there."

True that.

Re:It's a about money.

[BitZtream]

Maintaining a nuclear arsenal is really pricy. They're full of dangerous things.

Which is why it makes sense to leave them where they are. Decommissioning is even more pricey.

And dealing with the decay that you let build up because you were too lazy to maintain them is more costly still. No, 'let them sit' is a stupid fucking idea. Far more cost effective and safe to reprocess them into reactor fuel.

They require LOTS of upkeep. You have to guard them. (They have the power to destroy the world after all) The infrastructure to maintain your active arsenal is massive and costs piles of money, which seems silly for something you hope to never use.

Most of the cost is military. Personally, I think guarding holes in the desert is a much finer jobs program than bombing people in the Middle East. Safer for the people who get the make-work jobs, too.

You should probably try becoming part of this century before telling us about nuclear stockpiles. We don't have nukes sitting in holes in the desert anymore, which is why we don't need as many. We just launch them from subs that no one knows where they are so they can't be taken out.

Some say the nuclear arms race was as much as way to drain money out of the USSR until it collapsed as much as anything else.

Yeah, those people obviously don't work for the Brookings Institute, or the Sante Fe Institute, and so they have no understanding of the games theory basis that led to the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), resulted in the "Cold War", and kept us out of a hot war.

We're done with that, and I'm sure both sides are sick of throwing money in to a pit. You really only need to blow the world up once, if you're going to do it at all.

If we were sick of throwing money into a pit, we wouldn't have approved TARP, TARP2, and we would have had some campaign promises kept, like closing Gitmo, and getting us out of our two major wars, instead of getting us into two new ones as well. That'd save a bunch of money right there.

I would suggest you take a basic economics and a history course, then learn WHY TARP actually happened rather than what your friends told you. You first need to understand that the magical failed banks failed because laws were changed that suddenly ... on PAPER ... made them insolvable. They were never actually doing bad, they just suddenly became illegal to operate.

I also hear that most nuclear material for peacetime power reactors comes from decommissioned nuclear warheads.

You heard incorrectly. RTG's, or Radioisotope Thermionic Generators, operate on Plutonium. These are used in spacecraft and space probes, Mars landers, and so on. The U.S. mostly buys the Plutonium for those from Russia and other former Soviet republics. Commercial power reactors, other than breeders, run off of Uranium, and the Uranium not only isn't weapons grade, it *can't* be, since if it were, the reactors wouldn't operate properly. Breeders can run on Plutonium, but most of them operate from reprocessed fuel, or as a means of reprocessing fuel.

The U.S. only operates two breeder sites, for the purpose of producing medically useful isotopes, and they are generally not run at capacity. They are under the control of the DOE, and there has been serious talk lately about shutting the one in Oak Ridge down. At which point we will be buying those isotopes from Japan and France - assuming Japan restarts their reactor network again, rather than it committing seppuku after Fukushima made them paranoid.

Or the operate on other things, which even wikipedia lists. blah blah blha I stopped reading here because you're just spewing untrue bullshit.

Re:It's a about money.

[Arker]

"No such arsenal has ever existed that could do that once, much less a dozen times."

There are a little over 5,000 warheads in the US stockpile (as of 2010 wikipedia quoting reuters.) That's enough to hit every small city in the world, and most of them twice. Each is many, many times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The initial blast fatalities alone from a full scale launch would decimate any nation on earth, it would make things like hurricanes look like hangnails.

The rural population outside the cities would survive the initial blasts, but the lingering effects of radiation would decimate that remnant in short order - as well as the populations of any areas that were not initially struck directly. And only a small fraction of those weapons would need to be detonated to invoke a nuclear winter which would make survival problematic even if all the explosions are on the other side of the globe from you.

Life would continue, yes, the cockroaches would inherit the earth. But humanity would be lucky to survive even in stone age form.

Re:It's a about money.

[Arker]

There are according to a quick ask google a total of 2851 Cities with Population of 150,000 + on earth. That appears to be accurate to me if you have a better source feel free to present it. Assuming that is correct, 2149 could be allocated two, which is easily "most" of 2851. 161 of those would be in the US btw.

Of course the definition of city is somewhat arbitrary and this is a ballpark figure but I think it makes the point. There are huge urban areas that are counted as several cities but can still be taken out with one of the larger warheads. There are more spread out areas where you might have to use 2 or 3 smaller warheads. But in essence it's clearly more than enough weaponry to firebomb every densely populated area on earth simultaneously. Actually using a significant fraction of it would cause a disaster that affects not just the targets but comes back and kills us too.

Re:It's a about money.

[t4ng*]

In the early 1980's the BBC made a drama called "Threads" which had occasional narration interrupting the story to explain the science behind the effects of nuclear war. Anyone who thinks nuclear war is winnable, or that we've never had enough nukes to destroy the world should watch it... the entire thing.

There are no lone-wolf heroes or other typical US movie industry bullcrap, just cold, stark, depressing realism. You can watch it for free on YouTube....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MCbTvoNrAg

Re:It's a about money.

[gl4ss]

18 million sounds like peanuts. whats that, 20 patriot missiles?

Re:It's a about money.

[tlambert]

18 million sounds like peanuts. whats that, 20 patriot missiles?

6-9 Patriot missiles. Unit cost on a Patriot is 2-3 million, depending on ordinance load. Or 2 M1 Abrams main battle tanks. Or for the cost of a single F-35C Joint Strike Fighter, you could fund the entire program for over a decade.

According to the GAO, the Pentagon spends more than that per year issuing visitor badges.

Re:It's a about money.

[tlambert]

"committing seppuku after Fukushima made them paranoid"

That is some calloused, thinly veiled racism you felt you had to add there at the end, huh?

It's a cultural, not racial, reference which was actively relevant until 1970, and is still popularized in NHK broadcast dramas of the Shugunate Era in present-day Japan. It carries the appropriate connotation of "killing oneself over a point of honor". If you read the news reports, the U.S. Navy offered assistance in the early hours of the Fukushima incident, and were rebuffed "as a point of honor".

Would you have preferred I referred to the Hindu practice of Sati? That's also a cultural reference, and while it would be a stretch, one could argue that keeping their nuclear program shut down would be the equivalent of a woman throwing herself/being thrown on the funeral pyre of her husband out of grief.

I think a Bushido-style loss of face is a more apt metaphor for a cause of action in this case, however.

"Deployed"

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA consistently refers to a reduction in "deployed" warheads. For those who don't understand the nuance, there are still many more warheads not currently deployed. We call those "stockpiled" arms. A reduction in deployed warheads is pointless unless we talk about a global (no pun intended) reduction in arms. Why, you ask? Because we have stealth bombers and fighters with global reach. Those stockpiled weapons could be locked and loaded on our jets in short order if we wanted. Suddenly, they are now "deployed" warheads.

The truth remains, until nuclear weapons stockpiles are reduced below MAD levels, reduction in arms is just for show. We'll always have enough in storage to kill each other a few times over, but that's not really what matters. What matters is that we are constantly trying to establish a dialog with people who don't like us rather than take a beligerant stance. That, more than anything else will result in reduced nuclear tensions.

Re:"Deployed"

[murdocj]

I have a hunch that the stockpiled nukes are not sitting in crates next to the $100 hammers.

Re:"Deployed"

[Anonymous Coward]

"constantly trying to establish a dialog with people who don't like us"

Who is it that you think does not like you? I work with the Russians every day and know for sure that they have no animosity towards Americans although they do get seriously annoyed with the fact that most Americans seem to believe that they won WWII which is contrary to history. Most of it is more like sympathy as they see that America now has a level of propaganda that they had 30 years ago and that American people actually believe what they are told but this is not the same as dislike. Governments and people are different and Russians understand this far more than most and they see the American government as dangerous and evil but that does not mean that they see the American people as any different to people of their parents generation.

Russia did not "collapse" 20 years ago. They had 4 times the military that the US had and the cost was stupid so they cut it by 75%. They still do not see the US as a threat. One reason I work with Russians is because they have more money and can pay me. Our economy collapsed more than theirs did but our propaganda told the story differently.

Re:"Deployed"

[mianne]

The problem with your assessment is that you, yourself, referred to "MAD levels". So within the Cold War "USA vs USSR" context, those stockpiled warheads are utterly useless. Say Russia launched all their nukes toward the US,; the US would retaliate by launching all its deployed nukes toward Russia. So within about 30 minutes or so, most of the world's urban populations will be wiped out in a radioactive firestorm. Okay, so then the CIA spooks within Russia report that most of the Kremlin is now speeding off toward some previously unknown remote underground bunker in the Urals.

How much time do you think it will take to pull some of those extra warheads out of mothballs, arm them, load them onto a supersonic jet, fly them within range, and finally launch them at the suspected target? The warheads wouldn't even be close to getting out into the sunlight before the mushroom clouds appeared at the military base where they were stored.

Now in the post Cold War era, it's theoretically possible that the US, Israel, or other actors could launch a few tactical nukes against reactors in Iran, Pakistan, and/or North Korea, and then theoretically deploy enough stored warheads to replenish the supply to the level before the strikes. But you'll have to factor in the blowback these strikes would have on the global stage--particularly in China and Russia. and a full scale nuclear war might ensue shortly thereafter. If not, at least a huge build up on all sides would promptly commence and tensions would rise the world over to levels not seen since the Cuban missile crisis.

Re:wrong

[Intrepid imaginaut]

How many have been tested in the last handful of decades? A lot more than sixteen. Give everyone nukes I say, make it so that interference in the affairs of other nations will always come at too high a price. Then people can sort things out for themselves, and reap the rewards or suffer the consequences as they deserve. The age of gunboat diplomacy is at an end.

Re:wrong

[ShanghaiBill]

I think like 16 or something would destroy the entire world's weather for decades so yeah, completely pointless.

No way. Just how big do you think these warheads are? In total megatons, America's nuclear arsenal peaked in the 1960s, and has been declining for half a century as accuracy as dramatically improved. You don't need a lot of yield if you can put it through a particular window in the Kremlin. Most ICBMs and SLBMs have warheads of only a few hundred kilotons. Cruise missile warheads are around 10-20KT. That is a Nagasaki, not a Castle Bravo.

Re:wrong

[Immerman]

How do you figure? Energy-wise a single hurricane can easily dissipate hundreds of thousands of times as much energy as our largest nukes. If every nuke on the planet were detonated the combined dust clouds might cause a year or two without a summer, but a single large volcano eruption is going to be many times worse than a handful of nukes, and even then the consequences are typically very localized (from a global perspective). The real damage from nukes (aside from the radioactive craters) is fallout - and that doesn't really effect weather at all. Even that would have to be pretty extreme to do more than cause greatly increased rates of cancer and birth defects.

Re:No problem here.

[Immerman]

Then we best start producing a whole lot more quick, because we don't have nearly enough as is unless we can gather everyone together into great big living bulls-eyes. We could probably wipe out all the major military, industrial, and urban areas on the planet (assuming all missiles flew true, and all defense systems were complete failures), and maybe have enough left over to do some damage to farmland as well, but everything else would be basically fine. The survivors of the initial holocaust might suffer a year or two of "nuclear winter" (which would likely mean a lot more deaths) and a century or so of high rates of cancer and birth defects, but nothing terribly debilitating.

Comment from a well known pacifist

[ebno-10db]

"If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce."

-- Winston S. Churchill

Re:No problem here.

[murdocj]

Well, lets see... this talked about 1500 "strategic" nukes. Say Russia dropped 1,000 on the USA, or on average 20 per state. I'm guessing that's most major cities, most industrial complexes, most centralized food processing, rail and air transportation, highway hubs, etc. Yeah, a lot of people would survive the initial attack, but unless you can live off of what's right around you, you won't survive the aftermath, even if you don't have radiation sickness.

The other way to think of it is that recovering from catastrophes like hurricanes, earthquakes, etc is really tough, even when the rest of the country pitches in to help. What happens when there is no "rest of the country"?

Uncharacteristically Stupid

[Terry95]

It never ceases to amaze and depress me that otherwise seemingly intelligent people are mortified by the big bag nuclear boogie man. There is nothing magical about these weapons. Just like every weapon since the wooden club they have strengths and weaknesses. For some objectives they are ideal, for others completely ineffective.

Every one ever built detonated all at once is not remotely capable of destroying the planet or wiping out all human life. Just NO OK? You're 10 orders of magnitude short of that threshold -- in reality it is probably completely unobtainable with these weapons PERIOD. You can certainly destroy a city. You can disrupt a country and international commerce for years to come. But destroy all life? Crack the planet open? Please, you make yourself sound like a uneducated savage worshiping the man with the fire stick.

What they ARE capable of and why the media and politicians are universally TERRIFIED of them is because they are uniquely capable of upsetting the historic definition of war. That is: "War is old men talking and young men dying".

War is a lot less fun when it is something other than sending politically impotent people's children to die in some God forsaken hell hole on the other side of the world. This is the only explanation I can find for the the Nuclear Hysteria. An ICBM can bring the war to Harry Reid, John Boehner and Rupert Murdoch's back yards. But the war it brings isn't really any different than the war bomb laden B-52s have been bringing to targets for decades. Note that I'm not judging those conflicts, just observing to the dead people it doesn't matter very damn much what killed them.

I'm just pointing out that our allegedly "humane" wars about which we lie to ourselves that only the bad guys are killed are all a politically correct illusion. Nuclear weapons make that illusion fairly impossible to maintain. A society has to do some actual soul searching (assuming they can even find its soul under the recordings of reality TV) and decide emphatically YES This Cause is worth risking our lives for, and it is worth killing so many women and children that we can no longer pretend it didn't happen.

In the end nuclear weapons are probably the most humane military instrument ever devised. Depending on exactly how evolved your sense of "humanity" is of course.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon

Re:Uncharacteristically Stupid

[clarkkent09]

Ayatollah Khomeini: "We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let Iran burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world"

There is a difference between rational countries having the bomb and countries run by Islamic fanatics having the bomb.

Re:Uncharacteristically Stupid

[Lasse.Vartiainen]

The above quote appears to be fabricated, see for example : http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2007/11/is_iran_suicidal_or_deterrable If you want real quotes for threatening, or wanting to, nuke targets, you probably find more from U.S military leaders.

Re:wrong

[ebno-10db]

If every nuke on the planet were detonated the combined dust clouds might cause a year or two without a summer

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Recent_modeling

A nuclear war between the United States and Russia today could produce nuclear winter, with temperatures plunging below freezing in the summer in major agricultural regions, threatening the food supply for most of the planet. The climatic effects of the smoke from burning cities and industrial areas would last for several years, much longer than previously thought. New climate model simulations, which are said to have the capability of including the entire atmosphere and oceans, show that the smoke would be lofted by solar heating to the upper stratosphere, where it would remain for years.

Sounds like we better get cracking on those mine shafts.

So I put down my sword...

[RogueWarrior65]

and you put down your rock and we try to kill each other like civilized people?
It's not my fault being the biggest and strongest. I don't even exercise.

Re:wrong

[Hartree]

No. Not maybe, but no.

Either Mt. Pinatubo or Mt. St. Helens were far larger than that in terms of energy and vastly more effective at coupling the debris into the upper atmosphere. Add to that the large amounts of sulfur compounds they emitted.

So, where was the massive weather disruption or global cooling (or warming for that matter)?

It didn't happen. It hasn't happened then or even with Krakatoa or other massive eruptions of less than Yellowstone or Mt. Toba scale.

16 nukes are an eyeblink compared to the sort of energy flows that Mom Nature has going on all the time. The big thing about nuclear weapons is they emit the energy very very fast and in ways that couple well to destroying buildings, and living things nearby.

As a comparison, (yes, I did the calculation):

The detonation of all the worlds nuclear weapons at the point in time when the arsenals were the greatest (and vastly overestimating by assuming they were on average 1 megaton rather than 100 kiloton range or less) in the ocean, assuming all the energy stays in the water, would raise the temperature of the worlds oceans less than one hundredth of a degree C.

That was in repsonse to someone who assured me that he had it on good authority that it would boil the oceans dry. Unfortunately for him, I paid attention in all those physics classes I took.

Obvious troll is obvious:

[Hartree]

What planet are you on?

Someone posted a wildly inaccurate claim just as wrong as saying hurricane Katrina would destroy the whole earth.

And where in hell did you get the idea that anyone is saying that nuclear war is anything but devastating?

Do you mean that saying that Katrina wouldn't destroy the whole earth means advocating for repeated hits by it since it's just "misinformation"?

In the words of Monty Python: "That's a very silly line. Sit down."

Re:wrong

[tmosley]

This guy knows human nature.

Nuclear non-proliferation is implicit endorsement of war and all the horrors that accompany it. Nuclear weapons have saved more lives than any other technology invented by man since they have been created. World Wars would still be happening every 1-2 decades were it not for them.

Re:My Argument

[clarkkent09]

Russians will never give up nukes. It's their only defense against China.

Article is not very good

[phantomfive]

It's cliche to say the article is not very good, but in this case it truly is missing a serious point:

No plan to get rid of nuclear weapons can be complete without taking China (and others) into consideration. We are at the point that it's not just a standoff between Russia and the US, who both have been reducing their nuclear weapons. Other countries have been actively increasing them, and unless they join in the movement, Russia and the US leave themselves completely vulnerable if they don't maintain at least some nuclear weapons.

I'm in favor of getting rid of nukes, but you can't assume it's just a game between Russia and the US, as this article does.

Re:wrong

[dryeo]

In 1816 summer never showed up, at least partially caused by the eruption of Mount Tamboura, perhaps amplified by a solar minimum and it being the tail end of the little ice age. Frost and snow at the beginning of June in New England and New York, ice on the rivers in Pennsylvania and swings in temperatures from the 90's to below freezing. Farming was devastated with prices rising extremely, oats went from 12 cents to 92 cents a bushel ($1.51 to $12.45 in to-days money). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_Summer
A bunch of nukes along with the associated fire storms could well do similar, a couple of years with very low agriculture output would be very hard on many of the worlds peoples.

Re:No problem here.

[rasmusbr]

And to make things worse the planet would be about one order of magnitude above its carrying capacity if it were not for a steady supply of artificial fertilizer, made from natural gas or other fossil fuels. Even if you can live off the land around you now you may be unable to do so after a major nuclear exchange when fertilizer becomes unavailable and agricultural yields drop.

What about hunting then? Well, we are about two orders of magnitude above the Earth's carrying capacity for us as hunter-gatherers. The what little edible wildlife is left today would run out quickly if there were no conservation laws.

That said, even if the population would drop by 99% there would still be 70 million humans on the planet and humans would still be the most numerous mammal species except for the ones that live off of our economy such as rats and other rodents. Even if the population would drop by 99.99% we would still not qualify as a threatened species, not even nearly. In short: there are a lot of humans and killing us all won't be easy by any means.

Re:wrong

[Alioth]

It's not about the energy released. The nuclear winter is not a direct cause of the nuclear explosion or energy released by a nuclear weapon, it is caused by the cities that burn in huge firestorms for some time afterwards. Volcanic ash isn't like the soot you get from our highly flammable cities (all laced with hydrocarbons, plastics, you name it). The nature of the soot from burning cities has a far greater effect than the ash from a single volcano, blocking far more light and absorbing far more infrared radiation, which in turn heats the stratosphere (destroying ozone, so when it finally dissipates you now have to deal with having no ozone layer).

Re:Orbital rocket = ICBM

[sjbe]

Your ignorance surrounding the analog between pinpoint-precision MIRV/MARV'd solid-fueled stellar-guided advanced ICBM's and orbital rockets is pretty impressive

First off, screw you for the needless insult. Second off did you even read the links you posted? They directly contradict your assertions:

"The Second Artillery continues to modernize its nuclear forces by enhancing its silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and adding more survivable mobile delivery systems. In recent years, the road-mobile, solid-propellant CSS-10 Mod 1 and CSS-10 Mod 2 (DF-31 and DF-31A) intercontinentalrange ballistic missiles have entered service. The CSS-10 Mod 2, with a range in excess of 11,200 km, can reach most locations within the continental United States. China may also be developing a new road-mobile ICBM, possibly capable of carrying a multiple independently"

Furthermore what you are claiming isn't even remotely logical. The Chinese clearly maintain a nuclear deterrence capability but they cannot do that without having at least some of the weapons easily armed and ready to be delivered. The Chinese are not so stupid as to leave their missiles disarmed when it is a certainty that Russia and the USA (and others) have nuclear tipped missiles pointed at China and ready to go on short notice.

you don't even address the most important issue regarding the potential for offensive use of the Chinese strategic rocket force: THEY DON'T HAVE REMOTELY ENOUGH launchers.

"China’s nuclear arsenal currently consists of approximately 50-75 ICBMs, including the silo-based CSS-4 (DF-5); the solid-fueled, road-mobile CSS-10 Mods 1 and 2 (DF-31 and DF-31A); and the more limited range CSS-3 (DF-4)."

That is more than enough launchers to wipe out every major city in the United States or Russia. Just because they don't have as many as the US doesn't mean they don't have enough.

If you can't decapitate and then neutralize the US's strategic defence forces, then how you can you utilize your nuclear forces to prevent annihilating counter-battery? The answer is that you can't.

Did it occur to you that China's strategy may be merely one of deterrence? The notion of "winning" a nuclear war is an absurd one. The Chinese leadership appears to be smart enough to realize this.