Lately, the topic has gotten some air. That’s good, because – in my opinion – most people do not adequately understand the tremendous whopper-level lies that governments have told about nuclear weapons. I have raised some of this topic before, but it’s worth hammering on: the stated use of nuclear weapons is as a deterrent, yet none of the countries that might be involved in a nuclear war have nuclear arsenals that are oriented toward a deterrent purpose. If that doesn’t make you wonder, what will?
A deterrent nuclear force would include buried ground-burst weapons – essentially nuclear IEDs – that would make occupying a defeated power an unattractive option. And it would be heavy on survivable counter-strike weapons that could rain delayed death on a victorious enemy. Instead, the nuclear powers of the world (most notably the US) have oriented their forces toward a quick, stealthy strike that might win a war, but certainly would reduce the enemy’s ability to retaliate in kind.
Think about it for a couple of minutes, and you’ll realize that stealth cruise missiles have no value as a retaliatory weapon, but they’re great for a well-timed first strike. The new US high precision warheads and delivery systems are useless for retaliation – for retaliation you want great, big, population-killers – but they’re ideal for a “decapitating” first strike against a targeted nation.
That all probably sounds like a broad, dramatic accusation but I don’t need to say anything to back it up; anyone with any awareness of how nuclear weapons work can think it through and realize that “mutual assured destruction” was always a sham. For example, the US has consistently used NATO as a cover for positioning close-reach nuclear weapons around the USSR/Russia – including a weird bit of theater in which the US provided NATO aircraft with capability to drop B-61 nuclear bombs, while still claiming it was not “proliferating” because there were Americans guarding the revetment where the bombs are kept. “Proliferation” apparently is something that occurs on very short notice. But, in a counter-strike situation, what are a bunch of F-16s in Turkey and Germany going to do? Fly over Russia and make the rubble bounce? No, what’s useful is stealth aircraft dropping a carefully coordinated first strike on command/control. Which, in the case of Russia means, of course, cities burn and millions die.
The most difficult part of the lie to deconstruct is that part that is partially/mostly true: the ballistic missile submarines. It is true that a ballistic missile submarine represents an incredible deterrent. A former friend who was deployed on a “boomer” (ballistic missile submarine) had a unit patch that read “sunshine from the depths” just to give you an idea of the mindset of the men who lurk in mobile death platforms. A ballistic missile submarine like a US Ohio-class (we have 14 of these monsters) carries 24 missiles, each of which carries in turn 12 W88 warheads on independent re-entry vehicles. That’s 288 times 1/2 megaton and they have a range of 6,000 miles. From one sub. Multiply that times 14 and you’ve got 4,000+ burning cities. Is that not a sufficiently credible “deterrent”? But the problem is more complicated – a missile might take 1/2 hour to cover 5,000 miles of distance but what if the super stealthy sub scootches closer to the target, and the boomers launch their cloud of warheads timed to arrive 60 seconds after a wing of stealth bombers fly past Moscow and vaporize the city? A ballistic missile launch is not exactly “fast” by anyone’s terms, but if you supplement the stealth bombers with a few stealth cruise missiles, you might be able to put enough photons on a target country that they’d have no time to respond before they were wrecked. Ballistic missile subs are good deterrent but as soon as the US started deploying cruise missiles on them, the whole game changed: now they are a stealth attack platform that is hard to trace and hard to destroy pre-emptively.
I hope you sit and think over what I just wrote above, and realize that – yes – you’ve been lied to. Horribly, ruthlessly, and callously. The US is like a mass-casualty shooter who buys a sniper rifle and says it’s for “home defense.” Weapons systems embed aspects of their strategic purpose and it is simply impossible to make nuclear weapons acceptable. By the way, perhaps you remember the “neutron bomb” – enhanced radiation warhead. Whatever happened to that monstrosity? It was a big deal in the 1980s. It never was successfully or widely deployed because US war planners realized it wasn’t cost-effective. There is, and was, no need to prepare a zone of nuclear death to keep the Soviets from invading Germany – the US would simply launch a pre-emptive strike against the entire USSR when Soviet troops began massing to attack. Neutron bombs were not cost effective and that’s the only reason the US didn’t bother with them anymore, and instead pursued its current strategy of trying to build a first-strike capability that is more threatening than mutual assured destruction. The US first-strike capability is more like “I don’t know if you’ll get any of us, but there will be none of you left to find out.” Basically, that was the US attitude toward N Korea in 2019, when Donald Trump paraded his love/hate relationship and psychological disorders as he attempted to get Kim Jong Un to unilaterally disarm for no good reason.
Polaris launch. You can see that the sub is barely submerged, look at the right hand side of the frame
There has been a lot of discussion lately about the nuclear “football” and launch codes, but that’s all window-dressing. Sure, some of the weapons’ targeting systems embed a PAL (Permissive Action Link) but most of the ones that matter, don’t. The 4,000+ warheads on the boomers don’t have PAL, because the US says they’re a “deterrent” and as such they need to be operable in the situation where NCA (National Command Authority) is unable to authorize a release because they’re all dead or whatever. But there are still multiple controls: the sub must be at the right depth (which the captain can order but does not control, the pilot does that), the tubes must be flooded and the hatches opened, the sub must be immobile, etc. The captain cannot lose his shit and go trigger a launch – the entire crew of the sub must be involved to some degree or other. The commander of a B-52 cannot unilaterally decide to drop a bomb, either, the bombardier does that, the pilot does that, the navigator does that, etc. I have a story to tell about unauthorized nuclear weapons releases, which depends on this information – that is why I am struggling to expose it to you, so you more fully understand that story when I tell it. And, if you understand it, you’ll believe it and not dismiss it as theater.
Speaking of theater: I was thinking last night of writing a posting as a series of fictitious message artifacts regarding Donald Trump’s attempt to actually order a missile launch. What if his mysterious trip to the Naval Observatory was because he was sedated by a quick-thinking team of White House security, when he tried to order a full-up strike on N Korea? They decided to make it look like perhaps he had a heart attack or mild stroke but, in fact, he was berserk bat-shit insane, and everyone knew it. They had to throw themselves on him to calm him down. Remember, that was around the time when he started playing musical chairs with the staff at the pentagon? What if? How would a political party and his hangers-on handle a situation like that so they could stay in power in spite of the fact that the president was obviously insane? They did it for Reagan, too, but he was never as bad as Trump. And Trump came back, bragging about his high score on a cognitive test for Alzheimer’s – as if it cleared him of suspicion of being a dipshit. Maybe they strapped him down at the Naval Observatory and told him that he was going to get 25th’d out of office if he didn’t calm down and spend the rest of his presidency playing golf. Trump clearly envied Kim Jong Un’s dictatorial control over N Korea’s arsenal – I wonder why. And then there was the sudden frosting of relations with China’s Xi, who was probably terrified that a bat-shit Trump would launch a first strike against them, if China didn’t agree to help him win the next election. What if the conspirators put Rudy Guiliani on Trump’s team to make them look stupid? Go ahead and write the screenplay, toss me a bone when you sell it to Amazon.
Now, it’s time to talk about SIOP.
SIOP stands for “Single Integrated Operations Plan” and it’s described in multiple corroborating sources including Daniel Ellsberg (who does not come out as a hero; he was a nuclear war planner specializing in making nuclear attacks more effective) But if you want a really interesting view into the underside of the US monster-beast, you should read Fred Kaplan’s The Wizards of Armageddon – [wc] – its a detailed history of the personalities and process from which the doctrine of MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) arose. A view into the government-proximal “think tanks” like RAND and Sandia is fascinating and disgusting in its own right: these are people who kissed their kids good morning then went to the office and planned to burn everyone in Russia with transcendent heat, then came home and slept comfortably.
When the US began building its nuclear arsenal, everyone wanted some: Army, Navy, Air Force, etc. It was from the beginning a great big inter-service pork-barrel that everyone grabbed importance and money from. Quickly thereafter it turned out that the US plans for using the new weapons were nonexistent or inadequate. This was at the same time that the Soviets only had 4 or so ballistic missiles that had maybe a 50/50 chance of working at all, but the US was laboring under the self-created impression that there was a “bomber gap” – the Soviets had a much bigger arsenal than the US. Later upgraded to a “missile gap.” I personally doubt that any of the higher-ups believed any of it, but it was a classic case of intelligence agencies telling their bosses what they wanted to hear. Anyhow, the analysts began looking at the hodge-podge strategy the US was setting up and realized that it was utterly incompetent. Curtis LeMay, in charge of the SAC (Strategic Air Command) was only planning a first strike which was obvious when anyone noticed that the SAC’s bombers were all parked on airport taxi-ways ready to fly or get blown to bits in a first strike. The analysts concluded that the US war-plans were inadequate, further, because basically everyone planned to hit Moscow ridiculously hard, then, um, everything else. There were actually concerns that there would be so many warheads in the air over Moscow that the first one which went off would destroy all the others, etc. Unlike the kind of war that LeMay was familiar with “throw all the shit at the enemy” was not an effective strategy. Ironically, the US military was so incompetent at that time that the Soviets probably could have sent a few bombers over and blown up Washington and New York and the US would have surrendered because there was no effective counter-strike. That realization was then the doctrine of MAD started to evolve: “how do we stop a rational enemy from attacking us?” At that time, Curtis LeMay said, “Easy. We burn everyone, right now.”
Reading this stuff is chilling, because it reveals the utter immorality of US leaders and its military. We knew Stalin was a monster and Krushchev was a badass who survived a lot of nazis and Soviet politics. But we were beglamored by the shallow Kennedy and the affable militarist Eisenhower, and never realized that our leaders gave Krushchev nightmares. And Reagan hadn’t come into office, yet.
So, SIOP:
By the Navy’s definition of “minimum number,” the SIOP would be a war plan that allocated just enough weapons to “accomplish the specific objectives” and nothing more. Consistent with the Navy’s own doctrine of “finite deterrence” it would suggest an upper limit to the number of nuclear weapons that SAC could build and deploy. By SAC’s definition, on the other hand, the SIOP would amount to firing off all the weapons at once, with no logical limits on how many targets the US would have to destroy to accomplish those objectives and, therefore, no limit on the number of weapons needed.
…
Everywhere SAC Intelligence looked, they found targets, thus justifying the need for more weapons. They thought the Soviets would have 700 ICBMs by 1962, the Navy thought there would be only 200; the Air Force won the battle, to the extent there was one, with the result of 500 extra targets, requiring more than 500 extra weapons. Similarly, SAC listed 1,115 airfields that should be targeted; the Navy analysts found only 770.
Then, to top it off, the Air Force assumed a built-in attrition rate – up to 1/3 of the bombers wouldn’t make it or would have weapons failures, You guessed it: more bombs, more planes.
Once the SIOP started to get sorted out, it turned out that it was very difficult to assign megatonnage and targets, and the original idea of having multiple plan options was not going to happen. The computers of the time simply could not handle it. So instead of having “War Plan A” and “War Plan B” etc., there was “The War Plan” – the SIOP. The account of Robert McNamara’s visit to SAC is priceless but I don’t want to type it all in. Basically, the generals tried to outright fool McNamara and it didn’t work – he was a monster, but he was a really smart monster.
Its printed in tiny type
There was something else that troubled McNamara. What SAC labeled “Plan 1-A” of SIOP-62 – suggesting that it was the basic plan – called for an all-out preemptive first-strike against the USSR, Eastern Europe, and Red China, in response to an actual or impending Soviet invasion of Western Europe that involved no nuclear weapons at all. That was the crux of SIOP: a first-strike plan that held back nothing, that killed hundreds of millions of people, just because they lived under Communist rule, without any Communist government’s having so much as scratched a square inch of the United States. As much as anyone else who witnessed this spectacle, if not more so, Robert McNamara was horrified.
That’s the Robert McNamara who oversaw bombing Vietnam flat with conventional weapons. It would take a lot to horrify McNamara but the SAC succeeded. Go back and re-read the previous quote and remember it because it’s extremely relevant to the second story I’m going to tell you about nuclear weapons command/control. I’ve been sitting on this stuff for years and it’s been too painful to contemplate. It’s still tough – if McNamara was scared, how do you think a normal decent human feels?
It was just too damn hard to come up with detailed targeting for the USSR and it was too hard to discriminate what should be a target so the Air Force decided “nuke ’em all.” That was US policy because that was what was embedded in the plan. Elsewhere LeMay said that he was uninterested in planning for the SAC to survive a first strike because his plan was to be launching the first strike and never receiving one. He did not say “MAD my ass” but that was basically the plan.
The capper came from General Tommy Power. Not the least appalling detail of SIOP-62 was the virtual obliteration of the tiny country of Albania – even though it had dramatically disassociated itself from the politics of the USSR – simply because within its borders sat a huge Soviet air-defense radar, which, according to the SIOP had to be taken out with high assurance. As Power was leading McNamara and his entourage outside the briefing room after finishing his presentation, he smiled at McNamara and said, with a mock straight face, “Well, Mr Secretary, I hope you don’t have any friends or relations in Albania, because we’re just going to have to wipe it out.
McNamara stopped in his tracks for a moment and glared at Power with all the contempt he could muster.
I probably should mention, at this point, that SAC and Navy had both chosen a mix of military and civilian targets. In fact, as the development of the targeting program proceeded, it turned out that it’s pretty hard to determine a difference between civilian and military targets with 1-megaton nuclear weapons. If there’s a military facility outside of a city – let’s say 3 miles outside – like the pentagon is to Washington (1 mile, just across the river) – you can’t hit the pentagon without flattening the city, too. And in order to be sure that the pentagon is destroyed you target “overkill” – 3 1mt warheads and, sure, the city won’t be there afterwards, either. Nothing will be left of mankind’s works within miles of that spot, and the ensuing fires will burn for miles and days.
Eventually the pentagon provided McNamara with a counterforce “no cities” war plan, that would have resulted, everyone knew, in wiping out the USSR anyway: the first strikes would hit every significant military facility and command/control with massive overkill and – if the surviving Soviets got off a shot in return, the second US “retaliatory” strike would make the burning rubble bounce and burn. The official strike doctrine was that the US would “launch on detonation” not “launch on warning” – that was what the US public was convinced to believe – the US would wait until a warhead went off somewhere, and then the four horsemen would gallop. But that was bullshit, too – the RAND analysts who looked at the SAC’s deployments realized that a first strike could disable virtually the entire SAC, so it was clear, sotto voce, that the US would launch on warning. As soon as Cheyenne Mountain detected a massive cloud of traces inbound, the US would launch its entire arsenal at everyone. LeMay’s answer was to launch at everyone, first.
If the creeping terror isn’t sinking in, to you, I don’t have enough words to explain this stuff further. Read The Wizards of Armageddon or Richard Rhodes’ The Twilight of The Bombs [wc] or Ellsberg’s confession The Doomsday Machine [wc] in which he naively apologizes for making the war machine much deadlier. The Wizards of Armageddon, however, is the most distilled view I’ve found of the horror that the US government created, and prepared to unleash on some clear blue-sky night. Can you wrap your brain around that? The US government’s plan, meticulously prepared, was for people around the world to wake up to sirens, run around for 15 to 30 minutes, and then burn like candles in the wind. That is what the world’s “essential democracy” put in place.
It could still happen.
Next episode, I will write about a truly scary incident that only makes sense if you know what you now know about SIOP. Oh, boy. In the meantime, be thankful that you’re alive.
Every US president since Truman (inclusive) has understood that this is what the US war machine is about. They planned these things, which are worse in concept than what the nazis did. But we should not forgive them because they did not act on their plans – they did act on their plans: they built the death machine to end all death machines, they just haven’t pushed the button yet. And pushing that button is what Trump wanted to do. In a just world, someone would have shot him in the back of the head, instantly.
National Security Archive has some good stuff on SIOP 62, [here] It’s tempting to just not believe this stuff, but that’s dangerous.
Back in the ’70s, I knew a guy who worked at Sandia on nuclear weaponry development & implementation. When I asked him why he chose that line of work, he said the only other job offers he had which would not have bored him to death (yes, he was really smart) required torturing beagles, and he just couldn’t face that.
Words, again, failed me.
Well, f*ck me.
Thanks for my future nightmares. (Grew up on military bases throughout the Cold War; had nightmares back then but they were uninformed.)
Next you’ll be telling me that the cops aren’t really there to protect and serve.
I mean, at least they didn’t murder everyone in that particular instance. So let’s not be unreasonable…. What more can you expect from them?
Eh? If you’re a “defeated power” in a nuclear war, your opponents have by definition done a pretty thorough job of making occupying you not just unattractive but basically impossible for centuries. Ground-burst area-deniers are just an accident waiting to happen with absolutely no strategic point.
I’m not intimately familiar with the full extent of the UK nuclear deterrent – warhead numbers etc. – but I can say with confidence that our missile count is zero and our bomber count is zero. Apart from anything else, where on this tiny island could you hide that stuff? We’re a “nuclear power”, but at any given moment that might mean we have just ONE nuclear armed submarine from the fleet of four at sea. . Our strategy is basically “go ahead… you’ll regret it later though”. It’s emphatically NOT a first strike capability. If you’re going to have weapons like that – and while the French have them, we are going to – then that’s how you deploy them in a vaguely civilised manner, at least near as I can see.
Deploying the way the US does is tantamount to a war crime even if they never get used.
sonofrojblake@#4:
England has a Polaris submarine, armed with US-provided missiles in what is totally not proliferation because the missiles have tags on them that say “property of US government.”
Polaris missiles are missiles. The “England has no missiles” is convenient hair-splitting but the people fall for it.
BTW – security on the English sub(s?) is legendarily poor.
I doubt that any country that currently has nuclear weapons will get rid of all of them – there just isn’t the level of trust in international relations that would be required for that. Still, the US and Russia should definitely reduce their arsenals so that they are no bigger than those of China or France.
@1 Pierce R. Butler – I suspect that a lot of people who worked on nuclear weapons bought into the deterrence idea that the more nuclear weapons their side had, the less likely they would ever be used. It wasn’t necessarily true, but it was (and is still) widely believed.
@springa73:
A measly dozen warheads would turn England into an unrecoverable shambles for 100 years.
China had around 200 last I checked – enough to knock the US back to the 1800s.
bodach @#2
As a teen my friends and I agreed that one of the advantages of growing up in Oxford was that when the bombs fell we’d be vaporised rather than surviving, as Oxford was well within the blast radius of three USAF bases.
I’d say it’s more absurd than that….
In Boris Johnson’s voice:
“Did I hear you right? Only a single nuke in the middle of London? Well then, we’ll just have to keep a stiff upper lip about it, but I’m sure we can shake that off in no time. Do your worst.”
[…]
“Oh, I was misinformed? You say there will be twelve? That rather changes things, doesn’t it? Alright — whoops! — you’ve called my bluff. I relent. What a remarkable adversary you are. Good game, sir. Still meeting for tea tomorrow?”
The UK (soon to be just England, probably, after Scotland secedes, Ireland reunifies and Wales just empties of Welsh people because none of the buggers can afford to buy a house there) has zero “Polaris submarines” (i.e. Resolution class) since the mid-nineties. There are four Vanguard class submarines (I watched the first one get launched) carrying Trident missiles, MIRV jobs that can reach the Kremlin (possibly). We guarantee, honestly, that at least one of those boats is on standby at all times. You people better hope the shipping forecast doesn’t get interrupted, as that’s legendarily one of the indicators to the captains of those things that the balloon has gone up and it’s time to open the safe.
As indeed are Trident and I sort of see your point. However, what I meant was we don’t have any sitting-in-a-silo-waiting-to-launch type missiles like you see in the movies, or indeed any missiles you could fire/drop from a plane (or any planes to drop them from, RIP Vulcan*…). We have 40 warheads at sea, minimum, and a likely maximum of 120 (can’t imagine they’d ever have all four boats out). That’s it.
Interestingly, we cancelled a missile programme called Blue Streak in the 60s, explicitly because it was too vulnerable to attack and therefore only any use as a first strike weapon.
—————
*after one of my longest-ever flights on a paraglider (just over 100km) I was hitchhiking back to my car when I was picked up by a chap with a big tattoo of a Vulcan bomber and a mushroom cloud on his arm, . Turned out he was an ex-pilot of the things. Prior to Vulcan, he’d flown English Electric Lightnings, which is how he’d gone deaf, as that plane was apparently legendarily noisy. On being demobbed, he’d qualified as a sign language instructor and interpreter, so now if you’re in the East Midlands and you have to go to court and you’re deaf and need an interpreter, he’s yer man. One of the best and most inspiring examples of turning a shit situation into something positive I’ve ever encountered. Fascinating chap and took me almost all the way back to my car bless him.
sonofrojblake@#10:
There are four Vanguard class submarines (I watched the first one get launched) carrying Trident missiles, MIRV jobs that can reach the Kremlin (possibly)
Of course it can, assuming that the crews haven’t somehow screwed the gizmo up.
One interesting thing is that apparently the missiles don’t carry targeting data at all times – it would take several days to get the missiles capable of finding their arse with a warhead, as it were. It’s uncertain but I assume that means that the Brits would have to wait for a FEDEX package to arrive with a floppy from Washington, or whatever arcane process is in place (“hey we put it on our dropbox account, download it!”) That’s all part of the weird and stupid window-dressing that allows the US to claim that it hasn’t been proliferating nukes – which is bullshit that fools nobody. And the Atlas B missiles we used to have stationed in the UK, that wasn’t proliferation, either.
With respect to the question of whether it’s Polaris or Trident, a few points: clearly I’m not in your league as a quibbler so I won’t try, but I don’t know when the missile sharing began and whether it was in the Polaris or Trident period. I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that it was a 90s thing but it may be more of a 2000s thing. The missiles are basically the same, anyhow, I believe the launch systems in the subs are pretty much the same but the missile’s internals have changed over several versions. The naming and versioning is complicated by the US’ desire to appear to be building new missiles (hence “Polaris” -> “Trident”) and then once the missile development treaties were signed the US shit all over them by producing basically a new version of the missile “Trident” -> “Trident II”) By continuing to call it “Trident” they imply that it’s just, you know, more of the same missile, only missile-ier. I don’t know. It’s easy to get confused because it’s deliberately confusing. As is the question of what the British were paying for versus what they were “loaned” – I believe we did force the Brits to pay for the missile system and launch systems and guidance interfaces but the warhead – oh, that’s sovereign US territory, deployed in the tube of a British sub, but they can’t do anything with it except with the US’ say-so, or something like that. That was the same fiction used when the Atlas B’s were stationed in the UK “oh that’s a US base with Americans controlling the missile, we didn’t proliferate at all, it’s just, ummmmm… a piece of British soil that is forever a part of Sandia Labs.” Honestly, I can’t be arsed to figure it all out, and besides there are probably layers of classified bullshit under the normal bullshit.
However, what I meant was we don’t have any sitting-in-a-silo-waiting-to-launch type missiles like you see in the movies, or indeed any missiles you could fire/drop from a plane (or any planes to drop them from, RIP Vulcan*…).
I am in awe of your quibbling skills. Are you employing them in defense of some geopolitical agenda, or are you just keeping your edge keen?
The “launch tube” in a ballistic missile submarine is a fucking silo. You can call it “Monique” if you like, but it’s a silo. And if the Type-45 missile frigates aren’t capable of launching special warheads in the modular Sea Ceptor missiles, I’d be pretty surprised. On the other hand, I doubt the US would be stupid enough to give the British wee little nukes. Aahahaa, I’m funny.
Interestingly, we cancelled a missile programme called Blue Streak in the 60s, explicitly because it was too vulnerable to attack and therefore only any use as a first strike weapon.
The Blue Streak was cancelled because it was turning into an F-35-esque boondoggle that probably would never work well, and the sticker shock of producing a stable arsenal of H-bombs was daunting, given that Britain pretty much sold its heart and soul and gave all its cash to the US in return for goods and services in WWII. There’s a pretty decent book on the program, which I have somewhere on my shelf (and I’ve even read!) and it’s a litany of everything that can go wrong with a procurement program except even the Brits weren’t stupid enough to outsource the engine maintenance to Turkey.
By the way, if I recall correctly – and I may not – the British subs have to periodically sail their missiles down to King’s Bay in Georgia for maintenance, because the warheads are stamped all over with “US PROPERTY. NO DIRTY BRITISH MITTS MAY TOUCH” or something of that ilk. It’s another of the crazy lengths/leaps of reasoning the US has gone to in order to preserve the fiction that it isn’t proliferating.
Meanwhile, imagine the mega-horking shitfits that would occur if the North Koreans “loaned” a warhead to sit on a missile in Iran “because we don’t have storage space on our warhead shelves and we’re just lending them this thing to hold their missile down in return for a bunch of oil” Who am I kidding? The US would probably launch nuclear strikes on both countries. They’ve been dying to for over a decade, now, and Israel has already purchased its pompoms and cheerleader outfits.
or indeed any missiles you could fire/drop from a plane
Since you’ve got NATO-compatible weapons racks on your Harriers (do you have any left) Eurofighters and F-35s(tee hee) can sling B-61 nuclear bombs, Mind the bomber gap!
Geez, Marcus. You’re just bad a using facts and logic. If you kill absolutely everyone everywhere, then you’ll have no enemies left. Simple! Strategic genius!
Oh, wait, you weren’t talking about that. You were concerned with the ethics of using nuclear weapons. Excuse me while I laugh my ass off for ten minutes straight.
Seriously though: The moment we humans learned how to build the “fuck everything” machine, and then actually built it (a million times over) that was the precise moment when we disqualified ourselves from any further consideration. Since then, our species has firmly operated in a realm ‘beyond good and evil’. It is no coincidence that the same breed of psychopath ends up in the positions that allow them to make these decisions.
There is, simply put, NO WAY you can use a nuclear weapon in a responsible fashion. Becase what is a nuclear weapon? It’s essentially you telling your enemy: “I have the means to make reality disintegrate you and everything even remotely close to you.” The exact mechanism or level of ordinance stop mattering at some point. Just having that kind of power is inherently wrong, IMO. You can split hairs about it. There’s probably a lot to be said about it by a bunch of psychopaths, I’m sure. Still, this is my stance. There’s a level of horror to certain things beyond which it is not necessary to contemplate further, basically.
I still appreciate the nightmare fuel, though.
Actually I guess I am. Specifically: one of these things is not like the other. You describe what a legit deterrent would look like, and I’m pointing out that that is what – no, that is ALL – that the UK has. Not even as much as you’d want. This is as far away from the US trifecta as any nuclear power is.
They tell us that’s not true any more. I’m not buying it.
No…
Well, yes, if we send off for some in the post first… or the US “commandeers” them in an “emergency”. Which I suppose they might need to given the notorious unreliability of the F-35… but that’s assuming ours are deployed, or even working.
@klatu, 13:
I agree, up to a point – that point being when a country who is historicallly belligerent towards you has that power over YOU. It’s then, IMO, not inherently wrong to want to balance the scale. There’s an argument over wisdom and risk, but once the genie is out of the bottle you can’t any longer say “well you just shouldn’t do that” with any credibility.
Also, this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTCqXlDjx18
I’ve never bought the idea that nukes were solely a weapon of retaliation. I remember seeing a cartoon depicting a conversation between a general and a peacenik:
P: Nuclear weapons are inherently evil: you’re targeting civilians.
G: Nonsense! We would only use them against military targets.
P: So they’re a first-strike weapon?
G: No, they are for deterrence and retaliation only; we will never launch a first-strike attack.
P: So what’s the point of launching your nukes at empty missile silos?
===================
I also vaguely recall from my CND days in the 80s that at least part of the US nuclear arsenal was (still is?) aimed at us here in the UK (and the rest of western Europe), perhaps as some kind of area-denial strategy. How does a deterrent work against what is ostensibly your own side?
That general needs some media training.
P: Nuclear weapons are inherently evil: you’re targeting civilians.
G: You’ve been watching too many movies. Targets are designated at the time of war. We don’t have enough warheads to have them individually pre-targetted. That said, I take your point that civilians will inevitably be impacted by any use of them, but that’s part of the point.
P: So they’re a first-strike weapon?
G: Absolutely not. Think about for a moment: we don’t have anywhere near enough to guarantee there’d be no retaliation in kind. A first strike with what we’ve got would be certain suicide.
P: So what’s the point of launching your nukes at empty missile silos?
G: I should have thought that was obvious: we consider our potential enemies rational enough to make the same calculation we did in my previous answer, and not strike first either. Obviously we have one enemy that is both probably equipped to safely carry out a first strike (because they can probably locate our nuclear missile sub(s) and/or destroy the missiles they’d launch before they reach their target) AND has a command and control structure that by design means they can’t be trusted to be rational enough not to launch first even if that isn’t true… but we can’t really afford to defend ourselves against the USA, any more than we can stop a volcano from erupting.
Or if the general is American:
P: Nuclear weapons are inherently evil: you’re targeting civilians.
G: Yup. What’s your point? I mean – the civilians aren’t American, so…?
P: So they’re a first-strike weapon?
G: Fuck yeah.
P: So what’s the point of launching your nukes at empty missile silos?
G: USA! USA!
I think the logic is that if/when Europe is overrun by socialism, the USA will save us from it (and prevent themselves from being infected by it) by killing everyone.
This reminds me of a scene from Hunt for Red October. If you recall, the movie is about how the Russians have built a nuclear sub with stealth propulsion that can sail right past any defenses or warning systems and nuke America with only moments to respond. As the movie points out, this is a first strike weapon and much is made of how horrible the Russians are for even building such a thing.
Except, there’s one scene, the one where Jeffrey Jones first realizes what the sub can do, where he offhandedly mentions “We tried messing around with this some years back, but couldn’t make it work.”
The movie makes no further mention of this, but if you’re paying attention, it’s a major admission. The US was trying to build this thing which has as it’s only purpose to launch a nuclear sneak attack? Why are the Russians the bad guys, again? Just because they’re smarter and actually got it to work?
There’s a lot of “it’s okay when we do it” going around on this subject.
LykeX@#19:
This reminds me of a scene from Hunt for Red October. If you recall, the movie is about how the Russians have built a nuclear sub with stealth propulsion that can sail right past any defenses or warning systems and nuke America with only moments to respond. As the movie points out, this is a first strike weapon and much is made of how horrible the Russians are for even building such a thing.
Yes, I caught that.
The problem, if I understand correctly, is that ballistic missiles are inherently pretty obvious. Even if you launch from right next door, the missile still wants to go up so it can re-enter. That’s why cruise missiles triggered such a freak-out in the 80s (before everyone had them) they can fly along the nap of the earth, are small, and are harder to detect on radar.
Otherwise, the point I am trying to make is that it’s a well-documented fact that the US’ deterrent stance has always been, at best, the sort I describe in the OP: it depends on being so scary that nobody wants to get into a war with the US, at all. Under any circumstances. The US’ way of teasing nuclear first-use whenever a war is going badly, also telegraphs the danger of winning a conventional war against the US. You may win but it may result in horrific payback.
sonofrojblake@#14:
You describe what a legit deterrent would look like, and I’m pointing out that that is what – no, that is ALL – that the UK has. Not even as much as you’d want. This is as far away from the US trifecta as any nuclear power is.
Fair enough. I wasn’t trying to accuse the UK of having a massive nuclear arsenal and I agree that mostly it has been the usual shell-game of hosting US nuclear weapons and not full-up secret proliferation. The situation with the loaned/rented/gifted warheads on the sub-launched missiles is unique and striking, that’s all. And I’m not certain what’s going on and nobody outside the circles of power really is – which is exactly the point. The US has been extremely cagey about strong-arming its allies into crimes against humanity.
So, how about the Australian nuclear submarine program that was just announced? And China’s freaking out, naturally, because it’s a nuclear triad delivery system in their back yard. Will the Australians build the subs with ballistic missile or cruise missile launch capabilities, and – if they do – will they be compatible with US warheads? Anyone want to bet against that? Building multibillion-dollar nuclear subs just to carry conventional warheads is exceptionally stupid – nuclear subs are attractive because they can submerge for a long time, move around so they are hard to track, and eventually launch “sunshine from the depths.”
I don’t know if you know anything about the US proliferation to Okinawa, in express contradiction of Japanese law and desires. My next posting will be about that, but the short form is that the US fooled everyone (none of whom were actually fooled) by moving the weapons onto and off of a ship, so they could say “there are no nuclear weapons on Okinawa at this moment.”
klatu@#13:
You were concerned with the ethics of using nuclear weapons. Excuse me while I laugh my ass off for ten minutes straight.
Well, I’m not sure I am concerned about the ethics – those are rather obvious. It’s more that the whole thing is dumb and very, very dangerous and that the US has consistently lied to its people and the world about its actual intent. Or, it’s so stupid that it wasn’t able to figure that out, in spite of all the RAND analysts and John Von Neumann and Richard Feynman pointing out, “Hey, hang on a minute…” It has never added up and it never was part of the plan for it to add up.
If I were planetary overlord, I would have a special Nuremberg-style trial and bring everyone involved in setting the “deterrent” strategy and associated bullshit brought up on capital charges. The argument would be that planning and gearing up for a nuclear war is not as bad as actually starting one, but it’s tantamount to conspiring to kill everyone on the planet. 7 billion counts of attempted murder, more or less. Another argument would be “we have to prosecute you for this conspiracy, because if you actually do it, you’ll be beyond justice.” The US plan-makers coldly and thoughtfully planned to turn most of Europe into “collateral damage” – look at the chart I included in the OP: they shrugged “3 million in Poland? What did Poland ever do for us, anyway? Fuck Poland.”
I’m adequately cynical and I’m not shocked by any of this. It’s why I believe everyone should be anti-US, that’s all.
There is, simply put, NO WAY you can use a nuclear weapon in a responsible fashion.
Richard Rhodes and others have pointed out that it’s not even a very good weapon – it’s more of a liability. What if the US spent all that money on conventional weapons and troops?
call me mark@#15:
So what’s the point of launching your nukes at empty missile silos?
Right.
Nowadays it is possible (I believe) to re-target missiles fairly quickly – they have a pre-loaded set of targets that they can select from. So you could switch from counter-force to retaliation in a few minutes.
But that’s all crap. The US targets its missiles for counter-force and cities, because the targets are the same. Basically, what they do is say
General: “oh, no this missile is aimed at The Kremlin it’s not aimed at civilian targets”
Civilian: “But isn’t the Kremlin in the heart of Moscow? And that’s a 1mt warhead!”
General: “It’s not our problem if the Russians hide behind human shields.”
sonofrojblake@#18:
I think the logic is that if/when Europe is overrun by socialism, the USA will save us from it (and prevent themselves from being infected by it) by killing everyone.
Ding! Ding! We have a winner!
It’s the original scorched earth defense.
Besides, wasn’t Solidarity socialist? So that justifies a few million Poles in collateral damage. [ <- Remember, the nazis who said that were the baddies. We're the goodies.]
The thing with nuclear weapons is, for the people building and maintaining them, there is a greater incentive to make them not work than to make them work.
If the enemy have already launched their missiles and you are retaliating, who cares if your missiles go off or not? You are too dead even to worry about a bollocking. Whereas if the enemy have not already launched their missiles and your side’s launch fails, you are the hero who saved the world from nuclear annihilation.
And it’s not as though the process can be tested exhaustively, so the probability of your sabotage being discovered while anyone still thinks it’s worthy of punishment as opposed to reward is minuscule.
I believe the main purposes of the UK’s “independent” (ha!) nuclear deterrent are (a) to keep us on the UN Security Council, and (b) make UK politicians (and to a lesser extent, much of the citizenry) feel like we’re still a major world power. Geopolitical viagra, as it were…
Dunc@#26:
make UK politicians (and to a lesser extent, much of the citizenry) feel like we’re still a major world power
Having a nuclear arsenal wasn’t satisfying enough, “Hey let’s leave the EU! They’ll give us great terms because we’re England!”
Minor quibble: I think you’re giving John von Neumann too much credit. Yes, his brain was amazing. Dude was basically a living computer or something. Like, pack ten mathematicians into a singe meat blob and you get John von Genius. None of his contemporaries ever stopped ejaculating when they heard his name.
He still turned out to be an asshole, though.
Which, IMO, disqualifies him from being a “superior” intellect. He was for the nuclear bomb. He was FOR the complete annihilation of millions of innocent people. Really ask yourself if Hiroshima and Nagasaki were ever necessary. Wouldn’t it have sufficed to bomb some unhinhabited no man’s land, then follow up with threats? “Next time, we won’t miss?” Wouldn’t it have been worth TRYING?
Realize how NEW this kind of desctructive power was back then.
I find it hard to believe that the murder of millions was really inevitable. Also realize that the US is still the only nation to have done this unspeakable thing.
Whatever. Someone else would have (and probably already did, at the time) invented mergesort. So stop lionizing this charming asshole. Read his wikipedia article for all I care, but stop there. His super brain won’t infect you, either way. You won’t get better synapses by worshipping him.
(Also: Imagine a world in which every person is JvN… Pure hell!)
This was me, in a round-about-way processing the kind of garbabe perpetuated by the Sam Harrises of the world. Venerating experts for their expertise is fine. Measuring their skulls isn’t.
When it comes to JvN, it all seem to degenerate into the second kind.
I’ll shut up now.
klatu:
Your opinion is duly noted, but it’s silly.
They were not necessary, but they sure were convenient.
Heh.