The US is now deploying its next-generation nuclear warheads. The ones that it must have designed and built while it was still under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty it withdrew from in 2019.
When you look at the amount of time it takes to design, build, and test a new weapons system, it beggars the imagination to think that the US was able to withdraw from the treaty and be deploying new nukes in 8 months. No, what had to have been happening is that the US was cheating on the treaty so obviously that finally it became time to just give up. If that’s accurate, then it means that Donald Trump was accidentally honest about something; that’s one of the most shocking things about this entire story.
don’t believe it
The other, as I have mentioned before, is that the US media has done a so-so job of pretending to believe that the US nuclear arsenal remains a “deterrent.” What’s needed for a deterrent is hard-hitting robust missiles that can’t be stopped, and the new generation are fast-moving, precise, first-strike weapons. Instead of stealthy subs that lurked deep and distant waters, to bring retaliatory death, the submarines are dual-use: they can stealth in close to a target and launch a devastating attack that arrives so quickly nobody has time to react before precise nuclear bursts wipe out their ability to respond. The survivors in the rubble are expected to surrender once they get their feet back under them and put the fires out. This is a huge strategic shift because it changes the US (and by extension the British) Trident force from being a part of mutual assured destruction, into a weapon of aggression. Naturally, all of this happened without any public discussion, or review: the military government of the US decided to make the world a much more perilous place, and only is breaking it to the people that paid for it once it’s too late to do anything about. Welcome to “Democracy, US-style.”
The nuclear family, a pernicious myth.
This got me thinking about a serious question: whether the US has a multi-administration strategy intended to accomplish something like that, or whether it’s just a side-effect of capability meeting opportunity. Is it an “emergent conspiracy” or is it an actual long-term plan? Other than global hegemony, why might such a plan exist? I tend to favor the idea of an emergent conspiracy because I don’t want to believe that government is that good at keeping secrets, but what if it is? What if the reason new presidents like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton come in to office pretending to be somewhat liberal, then get a secret briefing down in the “skull and bones chamber” deep below the situation room, and come out changed forever by what they hear? Eisenhower was probably the one to begin the construction, based on advice from murderous freaks at RAND Corporation. Stanley Kubrick heard about it, from a drunk and depressed conspiracy theorist, and made a movie trying to warn everyone. Or, perhaps the masonic core of oddballs who hang around the US government took a hand in it, and the secret room deep under the White House is decorated like one of their temples. Imagine the surprise when new presidents are blindfolded and led down the stairs, and they encounter the Necronomicon-like book containing The Plan, and they see other documents including Monroe’s real doctrine, and realize the marginal notes are in JFK and Henry Kissinger’s hand-writing.
Because of the way my brain jumps around, looking for connections, it fused some of this with a posting by Crip Dyke [pervert justice] about being an “imperfect pacifist.” It got me thinking: what if a person were a legitimate pacifist, so anti-war that they would be willing to risk everything on the throw of a pair of dice? What if you felt that you had a pretty good chance it would work and bring generations of lasting peace – perhaps save human life on the planet – if only you were willing to run the greatest bluff in all gambling, ever? And what if it suddenly wasn’t a bluff? Suddenly you realized you could do it, and save the world, as long as you didn’t roll ’00’ on those dice. ’00’ would be bad. Real Bad. But maybe Real Bad is where the situation is heading, anyway, so “alea jacta est.”
why does the US like to name its ballistic missile subs after genocidal racist assholes?
See, I think the US has sneakily positioned itself to win WWIII flat-out with ‘acceptable casualties’ and is not far from being able to declare victory and start dictating terms without having to incinerate anyone. Russia and China are the only countries that could realistically contest such a declaration and neither of them is geared up for the kind of massive first-strike that the US is preparing to deliver. Once the orbital delivery platforms are fully online, and the new Trident missiles are deployed, about the most an opposing power could do is trade a US city, maybe two, for collective death in fire. When the order to “stand down and surrender” goes out to the whole planet, who could contest it? North Korea might volunteer as a demonstration “pour encourager les autres” but the hard part would be convincing the French that “I guess we don’t value your allegiance that much after all, disarm, sit down, and shut up.”
I’ll say for the record that I don’t think that this is what’s happening. I think we are experiencing what I’d call “normal government stupidity.” But what if you were president, and had this window of opportunity, and could declare an end to nationalism and war at such a low cost – a short “war to end all wars” or maybe even just the threat of it? Then, you could re-focus the entire planet toward 1) maintaining US hegemony (because we’re the good guys) and 2) re-tooling human civilization to combat climate change. The orders would go out, “beat your swords into plow-shares, and most ricky-tick, because our satellites and orbital platforms are watching, and so are our subs, and your alternative is to:
- die now.
- die later.
- or do as we tell you.
B-61 nuclear bomb – .3-340kt
The planetary administration would be structured along the US’ flawed model, with the rest of the world being treated like poor southern states, gerrymandered so their opinion counts but only so far. National identities would become “states’ rights” and national banners would be as meaningful as the confederate battle flags some ignorant USAins still fly. Economies would (for a start) be run under the same administrators that currently run them, though the regime would install oversight and begin to tighten the screws as they expected to observe war production shifting to green technology. “Or else.” In fact, I believe after the first (hopefully) bloodless World War III, it would get harder and harder for a country to re-militarize, once the satraps began to fan out and oversee what was going on. The book in the candle-lit room refers to this process as “Pax Romana” because it’s a familiar process: top-down administration where the local administrators can be corrupt as they want, within certain boundaries, or they’d encounter a horrible fate.
It would be a huge gamble. The biggest ever. But, in truth, humanity does not have what it takes to deal with climate change under a nationalist system. War is an inefficient way of getting what we want; it would be much better to be able to stand our own army down (mostly) and simply dictate orders, backed with the force of unrestrained nuclear incineration. Let’s do it, now.
I’m not serious about any of this, though I’d like to editorialize a bit more, in a less structured way. As some of you may know, I’m not a fan of consequentialism for, well, exactly this sort of reason. The consequentialist claims that they can access (ideally, some day) some kind of “moral calculus” that may allow them to argue in favor of “the greatest good for the greatest number.” Then, when someone presents a thought experiment like this one, they claw back rapidly from that position and start arguing that there are some basic rights and wrongs and threatening people by targeting a hydrogen bomb at them is immoral. Well darned skippy, it is, but what if the greater good for the greater number was world peace and surviving the climate crisis and the cost we had to pay was being a bit naughty with the threats of incineration but we really hoped nobody’d call us on it? Let me go a bit farther: the consequentialists would tell us that we can reason about trolley car scenarios [stderr] using some dubious “moral calculus” why can’t we reason our way forward from a more realistic scenario. What if I told you that there was only a 1% of global destruction when the US issued its “stand down” order? If we don’t handle climate change effectively, we could all die as a species, so let’s say it’s 90% versus 1%, just those odds alone should be convincing.
No doubt a rational pacifist would reply something like, “no! I am always a pacifist, and scenarios where I threaten to rain nuclear fire on people who aren’t peaceful is not pacifism!” Well, that’s a good point. Maybe it’s a problem with pacifism, then.
Many times in discussion/debate on the internet, I’ve had someone throw the move at me, “well, what’s your solution wise guy?” and my usual answer is “if I were in charge of the planet, as I would have to be in order to ‘solve’ this problem, nobody would like it much.” And now you see why. I’ll note that it’s odd when someone asks, “well, how would you solve the Palestine/Israel problem?” and my reply is “I’d give the Israelis a chunk of Austria and give them 6 months to go back to Europe, and 6 months for the Austrians to evacuate while they contemplated the consequences of centuries of European anti-semitism” – suddenly nobody wants to know my solution after all! Of course that solution would result in litanies of complaints from everyone involved but I can fairly easily argue that it’s more ethical than the current situation and its antecedents. Besides, isn’t peace worth something? Oh, it’s not? What’s your solution?
Final observation: humans have long displayed a behavior that argues that we are willing to contemplate a moral crime in order to somehow reduce or punish a wrong. That’s why our prison populations (in principle, not fact) are full and our torturers and war criminals are all in The International Criminal Court in The Hague. In my opinion, these behaviors amount to retroactive attempts to have two wrongs make a right, which we know is bad ethics. But if we’re willing to contemplate that sort of thing, why not have a proactive wrong make a whole lot fewer wrongs? Especially if there’s a good chance it would work, for some value of work.
[The new world order would have to use a Roman/Mongol trick, namely to station overseers internationally so as to break down national identity and solidarity. So, while (say) the US republican-led south might continue to be racist, homophobic assholes, their overseers would be from (say) the state formerly known as Nigeria. If you don’t like that, raise a hand and the shooty guys will come explain it to you. Most successful empires, including the US empire, assign their satraps from remote populations for exactly that reason. If done with an eye toward improving formerly inter-national but now global relations, I think it could be a positive thing! Get to know your new overlords!]
Speaking of Trident and the Brits: the Brits are just now in the process of discovering the disadvantage of having a fake deterrent that is actually based completely on US technology: they are getting the new nukes whether they want them or not because the Brits don’t actually make nuclear missiles any more; they sail a ship around to North Carolina every so often and get a missile-swap of good old-fashioned American missile proliferation know-how. I bet the Brits really wish they knew what was in the software of those things – but, in the meantime, worry about Huawei, suckers!
I’ve had a thought for a thriller for a while. The plot is that the US secretly has off switches hidden in the software of its modern weapons. If some country switches sides, or even just gets out of hand, the proper code is sent out and suddenly none of those weapons work properly. The fancier, more software reliant ones don’t work at all. But of course some baddy finds out, and gets his hands on the system, and Our Hero has to go out and get the damn thing back.
Unfortunately I think one of the Fast and Furious movies already did a pretty similar plot.
timgueguen@#1:
I think there was also The Weapons Shops of Isher.
Nobody in their right mind should sell weapons that work on them. Even the knives I make are designed to [CLASSIFIED: ISHER BLACK]
I’m pretty sure that if we told them to fire on Washington D.C. they would go “Ha ha! No.”
Hell, if we told them to fire anywhere, they might to that anyway.
How could we even tell without trying?
The problem with threats is you have to be willing to follow through on them. It’s one thing to have a bunch of soldiers shoot civilians, but how many countries are they going to be willing to nuke? It’s not going to work, and if anyone tried it would just result in a lot of fallout
My bet is these new missiles are just because the brass didn’t like a weapon they couldn’t use
There are non-military options. China holds enough US treasuries to turn the dollar into toilet paper overnight if they really wanted to. A determined trade embargo could do a lot of damage, even if it wasn’t universally observed. As discussed elsewhere, even if a decent proportion of the world started trading oil in some currency other than US dollars, that would cause you a great deal of economic trouble… And it’s only the economic strength that comes from being the world’s default reserve currency that enables you to afford these expensive toys in the first place. Are you going to start nuking people because they don’t order their financial affairs to your liking?
I think it’s fairly safe to assume that we can’t fire them without your say-so. The interesting question is whether you can fire them without our say-so…
Dunc@#5:
The interesting question is whether you can fire them without our say-so…
Almost certainly not. There are many things a sub has to do, to prepare to launch missiles – it has to be immobile, level, a certain depth, the missile tubes have to be purged of water, etc.
I kind of wish I understood better how a missile like Trident works. Getting a multi-ton rocket out of a submarine, to the surface, and flying has to be quite a trick. There are probably details atop details atop more details. Even launching a missile from a surface vessel is tricky – I remember reading somewhere about what launching a brace of missiles does to the center of gravity of an Arleigh Burke-class aegis boat – something about having many tons of metal and propellant trying to go supersonic below decks. They don’t go supersonic, but they try. There are forces and byproducts going everywhere.
dangerousbeans@#4:
The problem with threats is you have to be willing to follow through on them. It’s one thing to have a bunch of soldiers shoot civilians, but how many countries are they going to be willing to nuke? It’s not going to work, and if anyone tried it would just result in a lot of fallout.
I am concerned by the US Air Force and Missile Command’s habit of choosing christian ideologues as the commanders of missile batteries and bombers.
Marcus, @ #6:
Those boats run Windows, IIRC… I would only be moderately surprised if it turns out they can be remotely controlled – technically very tricky, true, but then so is building and operating them in the first place.
Oh look, they’re wargaming “limited” scenarios with them (and giving an unusual amount of detail to the press): US staged ‘limited’ nuclear battle against Russia in war game. Interesting choice of scenario:
Now, I don’t want anybody to get the idea that I think the Russians are the good guys or anything, but I don’t find that scenario particularly plausible… As I’ve observed before, Russia’s somewhat shaky economy* (not to mention the personal fortunes of quite a number of very powerful Russians, including Putin himself) is largely underpinned by selling gas to Europe, and nuking your customers does not seem like a great business strategy.
On the other hand, this strikes me as entirely plausible:
Meanwhile, this is (or at least should be) obvious nonsense:
The idea that those are the only two military options available to the US is absurd, as they’re perfectly able to flatten half of the cities in Russia with entirely conventional weapons at the drop of a hat.
* It’s worth remembering that Russia ranks right next to Greece in terms of per-capita GDP, according to the IMF. Or Croatia, if you ask the World Bank… They only look economically powerful because of sheer size.
@9
When that story came out yesterday I wondered if Marcus knew about it when he posted this, or only the earlier admission of the existence of tactical devices.
Or the fact that the only Russians you ever hear about have eaten *all the pies* on a scale the Bloombergs/Kochs can only dream about. (Hmm. I guess there is a second type of “Russian you ever hear about” which are the ones that are in prison or dead for complaining about the first sort…)
OP:
But they could, I think.
Is there really any doubt that any advanced economy (e.g. the UK, Australia) could make nukes within several weeks, if the circumstances were serious enough? Happily enough, they aren’t, for now.
(One of the reasons Oz sucks up to the USA is its nuclear umbrella)
Weeks seems a bit optimistic, unless you just happen to have a stock of HEU lying around… Building an enrichment facility isn’t exactly a weekend job, and then actually enriching your material takes time too.
John Morales@#11:
Is there really any doubt that any advanced economy (e.g. the UK, Australia) could make nukes within several weeks, if the circumstances were serious enough? Happily enough, they aren’t, for now.
Weeks? No, maybe a year if they had help.
The question is what “making a nuke” means. Does that mean going from advanced physics and replicating the Manhattan Project? 4-5 years minimum and it’d be hugely obvious what was going on. Assembling a bomb from plans provided by a helpful proliferator? Maybe a year or two, if the plans included how to do refinement and enrichment, how the explosive lenses are made, and how the switches and power systems for the detonators are designed. As Feynman said “It’s all engineering.” But it’s really hard engineering.
Also: nuclear forensics is pretty good. It’s possible to identify which centrifuge cascade refined the plutonium for a bomb and what reactor it was bred in (the isotope traces amount to a precise “fingerprint”) – if a proliferator put a bunch of enriched fission/fusionables on a boat and shipped them somewhere, it’d be possible to determine who and when, if a bomb were detonated.
As the old hot-rodders used to say: “speed is a matter of money, how fast can you afford to go?” Some of the process could be pulled in dramatically but there are a few parts of it (enrichment mostly but also designing and machining lenses) that require practice.
Lastly, there’s the knowledge required to weaponize a system. It’s one thing to detonate a nuke, it’s another entirely to make one that you can load into a ballistic missile and launch and expect it to still go off in the right place. One of the things that’s nice about the N Korean program is that the US media cheerfully reports their failures – which gives a pretty good idea how hard it is to do this stuff. The N Koreans are not stupid people; what we’re measuring is the effectiveness and effect of high tech restrictions.
When Pakistan made its nukes, their first centrifuge cascade blew apart because of a small earthquake. So they had to build another one (and clean up a building full of gaseous uranium hexaflouride and uranium powder!) and that entailed pouring a concrete block that sat on bedrock, 20 feet thick. That kind of thing takes time. Years.
But they could, I think.
Eventually. But they’re spending all their money brexiting and maybe they’re not stupid enough to resume a missile/warhead design program. The US has spent trillions on its arsenal. Adjusted for inflation since the start of the Manhattan Project I seem to recall an estimate of about $12tn so far.
Dunc@#9:
Oh look, they’re wargaming “limited” scenarios with them (and giving an unusual amount of detail to the press): US staged ‘limited’ nuclear battle against Russia in war game. Interesting choice of scenario:
“The scenario included a European contingency where you are conducting a war with Russia, and Russia decides to use a low-yield limited nuclear weapon against a site on Nato territory,” a senior official said.
Yeah, I saw that. I see a lot of these stories and try not to comment on them because it’s endlessly depressing.
The wargame is, naturally, horribly dishonest – as usual it assumes that the Russians would do something incredibly stupid, and follow it up by sending an certified letter in Putin’s own handwriting saying “please kick the shit out of us.” Maybe if Putin’s mind starts to go like Trump’s but that does not bear thinking about…
Given that any European “contingency” in which NATO is
in the process of getting the shit kicked out of it by the Red Armygoing head to head with Russia, the Russians would bewinning handilynot likely to use nuclear weapons. The entire US strategy to keep that sort of thing from happening presumes a US first strike. That’s why the US has designed a new generation of first strike weapons. And, by the way, the first strike scenario has always been the US strategy – all that stuff about “deterrence” is propaganda. There was a brief period of parity in the 70s and 80s in which neither side could risk anything, but the US broke that deadlock bycheating like fuckmiraculously having a whole new series of weapons designs suddenly pop into researchers’ heads right after the US withdrew from the medium range treaty.“Medium Range” btw is code for “first strike” – there is absolutely no reason to have medium range weapons for any other purpose, if you think about it. A retaliatory deterrent doesn’t care if it gets there in 10 minutes or 2 weeks so long as it gets there. Medium range weapons are designed to get in the air, across a border, and blow away the target’s counter-strike capability and command/control very quickly – 5-10 minutes – less time than the target would need to roll back silo doors and punch in targets and launch.
My advice is to not study US nuclear weapons strategy closely, because if you do you’ll realize that everything the US has ever said about nukes is lies. And then you’ll be like this:
And the answer is: “yep.”
So, those wargames amount to practicing a first strike on Russia. But they don’t call it that because we don’t talk like that because the Russians are the baddies, not us.
I must elaborate: the iron laws of logistics say that the US cannot “defend Europe” quickly. Our force structures simply wouldn’t allow it anymore, and they really didn’t in WWII either. The idea of “defending” a continent while you’re originating from another continent 2,000 miles away is not even a funny joke, it’s funny like Bill Maher is funny. The only way to “defend Europe” is to be in Europe with massive forces sitting around ready to “defend Europe” at any time. The problem with that is that those forces are a) expensive b) targets c) expensive targets d) all of the above. In the scenario where the Russians decide to suddenly use a theater nuke, it would only happen if the entire US military was so stupid as to park in a field in Germany, say, to “defend Europe” and it could be wiped out with one or two shots. Not gonna happen. Never. Also, there’s the question of motivation, i.e.: why would Russia want to go starting wars when they can buy what they want with money from pumping fossil fuels? Only Americans are stupid enough to go around starting wars in faraway places to secure access to fossil fuels when they already control them politically. Anyhow. The point is: that’s all lies, too. Large land masses defend themselves simply by being large.
I wrote:
Medium range weapons are designed to get in the air, across a border, and blow away the target’s counter-strike capability and command/control very quickly – 5-10 minutes – less time than the target would need to roll back silo doors and punch in targets and launch.
That’s why medium range/first strike weapons make the world a much more dangerous place. A potential target for a first strike has to be on the edge of their command chair the whole time, ready to go. So imagine you’re Kim Jong Un and you see something that may be a bunch of US nukes inbound and you have less than 60 seconds to order a launch against Seoul, or die anyway? What are you gonna do.
Exactly! This is a point I keep making to people: there is literally nothing that Russia might want from Europe that is not already for sale at a much more attractive price than the cost of a major war. Not only do they not want to nuke their best customers, they definitely don’t want to nuke all that very expensive real estate their oligarchs are using to launder and store their massive, dubiously-acquired fortunes. Even DIck Dastardly wouldn’t be that stupid, and whatever else you think of him, I’d hope that we can all agree that Putin is not a stupid man.
Belated, but re #13:
Good point about procuring fissionables, but otherwise:
Datum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_hydrogen_bomb_programme
The Brits did it by 1952. This is 2020. I think 70+ years-old tech would be replicable rather quickly, and would suffice.
For example: re
Granting that, so what? Again: even a Nagasaki-bomb sized bomb is something with which to reckon. And nuclear physics (or just physics) is significantly advanced these days, whereas the Manhattan Project boffins were winging it and doing it the hard, brute force way at that.