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US Preparing to Put Nuclear Bombers On 24-Hour Alert (defenseone.com)
DefenseOne reports on new preparations at Barksdale Air Force Base:
The U.S. Air Force is preparing to put nuclear-armed bombers back on 24-hour ready alert, a status not seen since the Cold War ended in 1991. That means the long-dormant concrete pads at the ends of this base's 11,000-foot runway -- dubbed the "Christmas tree" for their angular markings -- could once again find several B-52s parked on them, laden with nuclear weapons and set to take off at a moment's notice... Gen. David Goldfein, Air Force chief of staff, and other senior defense officials stressed that the alert order had not been given, but that preparations were under way in anticipation that it might come...
Already, various improvements have been made to prepare Barksdale -- home to the 2d Bomb Wing and Air Force Global Strike Command, which oversees the service's nuclear forces -- to return B-52s to an alert posture. Near the alert pads, an old concrete building -- where B-52 crews during the Cold War would sleep, ready to run to their aircraft and take off at a moment's notice -- is being renovated. Inside, beds are being installed for more than 100 crew members, more than enough room for the crews that would man bombers positioned on the nine alert pads outside... Large paintings of the patches for each squadron at Barksdale adorn the walls of a large stairway. One painting -- a symbol of the Cold War -- depicts a silhouette of a B-52 with the words "Peace The Old Fashioned Way," written underneath.
General Goldfein, the Air Force's top officer and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "is asking his force to think about new ways that nuclear weapons could be used for deterrence, or even combat... 'It's no longer a bipolar world where it's just us and the Soviet Union. We've got other players out there who have nuclear capability. It's never been more important to make sure that we get this mission right.'"
Already, various improvements have been made to prepare Barksdale -- home to the 2d Bomb Wing and Air Force Global Strike Command, which oversees the service's nuclear forces -- to return B-52s to an alert posture. Near the alert pads, an old concrete building -- where B-52 crews during the Cold War would sleep, ready to run to their aircraft and take off at a moment's notice -- is being renovated. Inside, beds are being installed for more than 100 crew members, more than enough room for the crews that would man bombers positioned on the nine alert pads outside... Large paintings of the patches for each squadron at Barksdale adorn the walls of a large stairway. One painting -- a symbol of the Cold War -- depicts a silhouette of a B-52 with the words "Peace The Old Fashioned Way," written underneath.
General Goldfein, the Air Force's top officer and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "is asking his force to think about new ways that nuclear weapons could be used for deterrence, or even combat... 'It's no longer a bipolar world where it's just us and the Soviet Union. We've got other players out there who have nuclear capability. It's never been more important to make sure that we get this mission right.'"
I know folks who voted Trump because they saw Hilary as a war hawk. She is (more a Chicken hawk than anything else since I can't see her ever in harms way) but Trump certainly wasn't the answer. At least Hilary wouldn't be riling up Iran just to appeal to her base.
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It's most likely that the weapon of choice vs North Korea is a B61-11 or B61-12, the most recent versions of an air-dropped weapon.
The air-dropped weapons are likely more precise and more suitable to use against reinforced underground structures with less surface yield.
Ballistic missiles, whether land based or sea-based can only use one particular warhead intimately configured with the delivery system and guidance, because of the need to match the mechanical dynamics & mass with the guidance. I.e. there is no way to change the weapon. Additionally, they are not as precise--they re-enter the atmosphere at extreme velocities within a giant ionization cloud, and prior to re-entry they have only one chance for guidance, immediately after release, and are thereafter falling, unpowered.
The ICBM and SLBM warheads are also very large (200-500 kt) and intended as retaliation. If you want genocide, any of them will do, but if you intend a military attack then you'd want to be more specific.
Against DPRK you'd be looking at using 'bunker buster' weapons---there are rumors that there are nuclear designs which may direct maximum force downward seismically (e.g. use the primary to accelerate a secondary penetrator downward?)---and probably low-yield neutron weapons against the artillery units threatening Seoul. Probably under 10kt.
Those need to be launched by bombers, or maybe from cruise missiles carried by those bombers.
In any event, it's insanity as it undoubtedly gets Seoul, Tokyo or maybe even Seattle obliterated. DPRK has plenty good enough missiles to put whatever size warhead they have already over Korea and Japan---and missile defense is awfully difficult. DPRK could easily launch 40 missiles simultaneously, four of which are nuclear, and each one puts out 10 decoys in space .
Also, only one Matrix film.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
That's a really interesting take on the Rosatom transaction. Did you get it from Fox News, perhaps? Or did you do your research by reading Clinton Cash?
What really happened is that Rosatom, the Russian atomic energy agency, bought a controlling stake in Uranium One, a Canadian company with 20% of the US uranium mining capacity. This deal had to be approved by a committee composed of a dozen different US government agencies, of which Clinton was the head of one (as Secretary of State), along with agencies in Canada and Kazakhstan, and stock markets in Toronto and Johannesburg.
Apparently none of them found sufficient reason to halt the sale. Are you arguing that Clinton has somehow secretly convinced all those people involved to permit the sale AND stay silent about the convincing? And even if Clinton had decided that the deal wasn't a good idea, she couldn't have unilaterally stopped it -- she would have had to convince Obama that there was a national security reason to do so.
So was there a national security reason to halt the sale? What Rosatom bought was the mines, meaning they can dig up rock and refine it, but they can only sell it to the same people that Uranium One could always sell it to. They don't have a license to export the uranium, so who cares?
dom
Somebody needs to send Trump a copy of "On the Beach". Radiation sickness is not a pleasant way to go. You vomit and deficate like the flu. According to the book, you might get better, but it only lasts for two weeks before the symptoms recall and then you die. http://www.atomicarchive.com/E... I think people need to hear the graphic effects of what a nuclear war would be like.
As much as I would like to disagree with you (as nukes are disagreeable), the fact remains that combat deaths, and the number of conflicts worldwide, has dropped dramatically since nuclear weapons were invented.
I'd like to see the stats to back up that claim.
Here you go: https://ourworldindata.org/war...
Only if launchers are modified specifically for tests. The deployed ballistic missile weapon systems, e.g. ICBM's and SLBM's have no such capability.
Firstly, there is no reliable means of reception by the missile or a reliable command system to transmit such messages, and if there were, it could be exploited by an enemy. Warheads are made to be very robust and sealed, given that they re-enter the atmosphere at stupendous speeds. They don't have any antennae or radios.
Our land-based ICBMs can really only hit Russia. The Minuteman III silos are basically pointed at Russia, and the missiles don't really have the ability to alter their trajectory enough to hit anything. MX missiles could, but those were a lot more expensive to build and maintain, so we retired them in favor of keeping the Minuteman IIIs going.
That leaves sub-launched ICBMs as the only ones that could reliably hit anywhere in the world. But sub-launched ICBMs suddenly appearing out of the water make a lot of countries very, very nervous since they can hit anywhere. So using them to attack North Korea has the very real danger of China or Russia retaliating in fear that it is a first strike.
Bombers are slow enough that other nuclear countries can take the time to watch where the bomber is headed, reducing the danger of retaliation.
There is no winning a nuclear war, ever. Radiation from Japan made it all the way to the west coast. The bombs of those days might as well have been a stick of dynamite compared to what we could release today.
Both are mostly true, but the implication doesn't necessarily follow. One of the reasons that modern nuclear weapons are higher yield is that they are more efficient. 'Radiation' didn't travel from Japan to the West Coast of the USA, because radiation only travels in straight lines and is blocked quite well by the curve of the planet. Radioactive fallout travelled that far. Radioactive fallout is the leftover radioactive material that is not consumed in the nuclear reaction and is dispersed by the explosion. In other words, it's a waste byproduct of inefficient nuclear weapons. The more efficient the weapon, the less radioactive material is left after the explosion to become fallout.
There's no such thing as a completely clean nuke (in theory there could be, but nuclear weapons are trivial to build in theory, it's only the engineering that's hard), but a modern weapon can have a much higher yield for the same amount of fallout.
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