The good CDR Salamander has just put up a must-read post about nuclear war, nuclear theory, and preventing ‘the unthinkable.’ It is very well written; very well considered; and, refreshingly honest about where we are in terms of deterrence.
There are several points he makes with which I fully agree and endorse fully. We’ve been stuck in a mindset that is indeed “stuck in aspic” (LOVE that whole paragraph!) with the mouldering corpse of Kahn-ic thought for far too long. The so-called elite thinkers have little touch with reality that I can find, can’t agree on definitions to save their lives, and given that he is right (very) and they have not gotten a single non-nuclear war right in more than fifty years is less than re-assuring. I would also note that the times nuclear launch was averted it was not by the elites; rather, good and unpretentious men who saw the data didn’t add up and didn’t act to launch. In fact, of the times of which I am aware, it was the elites (and the politicians they advised) who had pushed things hot.
He’s also absolutely right about war games and war gaming things out. Remember, I wasn’t allowed to be OPFOR because I didn’t play the war game game. I played to win. I played to try to use them to figure out problems and solutions; which is a sin in the eyes of some for whom the games were a way to game pet theories into acceptance and use.
Two other points to make. First, I’ve never been comfortable with a triad. Remove one and it’s no longer stable. You need multiple legs. Second, I have always thought MAD was an abomination to God and to Man. It was and is morally, ethically, socially, and philosophically reprehensible. MAD is countervalue and gives you Philip Wylie and Triumph, or On The Beach. Disgusting concept and we can and should do better.
Sal gives a LOT of good food for thought. I would like to add the following to the mix, however.
First, while not nuclear, we should be looking at adding KEVs to the mix. If we can drop a deep penetrator down air shafts, we can drop a KEV. Which also means we need to consider weapons in space, which is a can of worms but one I think has already been opened. KEVs are flexible and yield can be adjusted via speed. When I say flexible, look at what Jerry Pournelle wrote about Project Thor, which was basically a crowbar with a semi-smart guidance package. Then look at some more recent work. Thing is, a range of options with a lot more flexibility than a nuke is likely to.
Second, we need to be looking at defense. Yes, Trump has announced Golden Dome and I have some hope for it. However, keep in mind that politicians on the left have done everything in their power to stop any and all work on defense against nuclear attack. We need layers and options, and the thing is some of what was done for SDI is still out there and works. The more layers, the better. Also, keep in mind those politicians who pushed for no defense were happy for you to die, though they would likely be secure and safe in their shelters.
Third, we need to look at civil defense options. I don’t think the program of the 50s is needed; but, we do need some civil defense. As I’ve noted before, there are aspects of it that are useful in other situations such as storm, fire, etc. It’s a concept that needs to be explored if we are going to have a serious talk on nuclear reform (including ways to keep the genie in the bottle).
Finally, I do think we also need to consider the need to transfer nukes to safety when portions of Europe fall to the invaders. Along with building a bulkwark in the East as discussed here with related discussion here.
I know some of you have experience and made some good points before in previous posts on nuclear war. Sound off here and there, keeping in mind this is a public forum.
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“Which also means we need to consider weapons in space, which is a can of worms but one I think has already been opened.” This can has been open for decades. Almost 100% that either, or both, China and Russia have “rods from god” amongst their satellites. Two hot spots for me on the nuke issue over the past few years is to eliminate the silo based missiles, and removing our nukes from Turkey.
I won’t argue with you on the can already being open. Reasons I phrased it as I did. Also, as I noted on X, I remember visiting Morton-Thiokol for Shuttle-related stuff and seeing work on Peacekeeper: which is one of three or more proposed replacements never made. The land-based nuclear ICBM is a concept that needs to have a fork stuck in it as it is done. Sal’s right and we need to look at conventional ICBMS instead. As for Turkey, yeah. That’s all I’m going to say.
Land-based ICBMs are a warhead sponge. They exist to make the enemies strike/counterstrike assumptions difficult. It also means they have to assign multiple warheads per silo and those are warheads they can’t use on cities, nodes of transport and communication, ports…etc.
I’m not sure that is true, particularly now. It was a theory, and perhaps a good theory. But, I don’t think it is valid at this point. For all that we are in better shape with our Minutemans than the Russians (particularly with SARMAT), I think our land-based side is pretty much toast without a single ICBM launch. Look at land purchases, look at shipments, and tell me drone swarms and jamming could not take out our current land-based side.
If you want to keep nukes on alert, ready to go, ICBMs are the cheapest option. They’re stored in a controlled, secure environment. The crews don’t need any exotic training, unlike pilots and submariners. In fact, you can train a theology graduate to do (seen that done). And you can keep that entire leg on alert, unlike the other two.
The one thing they have is accuracy. You need that to take out hard and superhard targets. You dang near have to put the fireball on the facility to take it out.
Further, unlike the olden days of SAC, we have far fewer bombers, and bomber bases. Two B-52 bases and one B-2 base (B-1s are non-nuclear). Their biggest threat is not offshore SLBMs but offshore SLCMs, which NORAD admits they can’t see. Russia’s Kalibr cruise missile has enough range to cover almost anything in the US.
If you want to keep nukes on alert, ready to go, ICBMs are the cheapest option. They’re stored in a controlled, secure environment. The crews don’t need any exotic training, unlike pilots and submariners. In fact, you can train a theology graduate to do (seen that done). And you can keep that entire leg on alert, unlike the other two.
The one thing they have is accuracy. You need that to take out hard and superhard targets. You dang near have to put the fireball on the facility to take it out.
Further, unlike the olden days of SAC, we have far fewer bombers, and bomber bases. Two B-52 bases and one B-2 base (B-1s are non-nuclear). Their biggest threat is not offshore SLBMs but offshore SLCMs, which NORAD admits they can’t see. Russia’s Kalibr cruise missile has enough range to cover almost anything in the US.
Good points, and very true. We need to be re-thinking a lot of things.
I’m familiar with Known Exploited Vulnerabilities in IT; not sure what you mean here.
Google “rods of god”
KEV = kinetic energy vehicle. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
I never really understood MAD. I understand the concept of “you blow up my capital, I blow up your capital” but the whole “we gonna do this to we all dead” thing doesn’t wash with human nature. It might have washed for the USSR. We saw the strategy of them having more bodies than the Germans had bullets in WW2 and that brings me to my point: the US has more to lose.
Look at the Russians in Ukraine…can you imagine an American soldier putting in the effort to loot a toilet? Which is to say, we have different expectations from life than people in these totalitarian shitholes do.
Lets imagine a schoolyard brawl. On one side is the good-looking rich kid, on the other is the low rent kid missing an adult front tooth. The rich kid lands a shot that knocks out another of the kid’s front teeth. So what? Its the same crappy deal he already had with the only difference being one of degree. Then the low rent kid lands a shot and knocks out the rich kid’s front tooth…this is an entirely new situation for the rich kid and he’s not entirely sure it is worth it.
While the poor kid is saying, “oh yeah, knock my teeth out and I’ll knock yours out!” the rich kid has different expectations from life. He is probably gonna think that this argument is not worth losing teeth over. He’s gonna put the tooth in a glass of milk and head straight to the dentist.
The point is, Russia, China, some future Muslim hell hole in Europe will be willing to lose a lot more people than we will. MAD is not a balanced equation.
If I were a shithole country with China’s satellite resources, I would have Rods-of-God and EMPs already in space. Knock out the power with EMPs then hit fuel depots/refineries and grain elevators with the KEVs…the cities will burn themselves out in short order and the rural areas plant so many hybrid crops that they’ll get one or two seasons of crops out of whatever grain they have left, if they can even plant it. In a couple years we would be relatively harmless.
Wonder why the Chinese need such a big navy? Transport perhaps?
“The point is, Russia, China, some future Muslim hell hole in Europe will be willing to lose a lot more people than we will. MAD is not a balanced equation.”
Exactly. The term of art for going after their cities is ‘countervalue’. It’s based on the assumption that they actually value their population, which is questionable if not dubious. Also, it’s immoral. If we or they hit a military target and a lot of people die, that’s ‘collateral damage’. It’s regrettable and we need to look for ways to reduce it, but it’s a thing that happens in war. If we or they hit a city just to kill people, it’s murder. Immoral and illegal under the Geneva Conventions.
A real ‘countervalue’ attack on Russia would be one that kills a lot of generals, politicians, and especially Putin. If Putin knows he will personally die, he may be reluctant to start throwing nukes. To do that, we need to keep tabs on Putin’s location, and we need weapons that will crack open the deepest ‘hard and deeply buried’ bunker.
Agree with you that MAD was NEVER a balanced equation. When dealing with an opponent who is cheerfully willing to sacrifice people, and a lot more people than you, you are always at a disadvantage. There are, however, some ways to deal with that. As Clancy pointed out, they are good with it up and until it is them. There are ways to make it plain that they will die, not their people. That is one of the avenues we should have pursued rather than MAD. Also, as others have pointed out of late, make it as personably horrible for them and theirs and wars end far more quickly. Just look at Gazq: the leaders live abroad in luxury, and could give a rip about death and suffering so long as it advances the cause and their lifestyle. Make it where they are targets, and then you might see true change. As for your last two paragraphs, spot on! And I do fear they are well set for that.
We need to revive the Army’s Tethered Aerostat radar program to provide a look down capability to detect and track cruise missiles on the East Coast, task the Missile and Space Intelligence Center (MSIC) to analyze road mobile ICBMs, and base Ground Based Interceptors at Army bases in the NE. (Ft Drum?), SE (Ft Stewart or Ft Bragg) and S (Ft Hood).
YES! In fact, we could do a much better aerostat program today with COTS even. Agree with putting interceptors where you cite, and even a couple of other places. We really need to be expanding THAAD and other programs, and making a metric bleepton of the missiles. There is so much more that we could, and should, be doing.
Phib never gives up. I have watched his descent into his China craze for the last 15 years but he is like the epitome of the modern major general and all those NATO staff years and Atlantic Fleet idiocy is spring loaded to do the stupid about China and now he’s rolling in nuclear war. If you are familiar with Phib, one of the things you start to notice is the complete absence of any of us Pacific/Middle East guys reflexively taking the let’s fight a naval war with China and there several reasons but high on the list is that China is not a military threat to us unless we make it one. Just look at their nuclear force over 50 years when they were not MAD and found 350 warheads was enough for deterrence. That didn’t change until the damned neocons started building China up as the next big threat.
China is simply not a power out looking for a fight and their interest in Taiwan is very much a strictly China issue. It is not worth a single American life or city and most Taiwanese would tell you the same.
Coming in late, here….
I generally agree with ‘Phib, but sometimes he starts to sound like a Bomber General when it comes to robbing the other services to pay for the Navy. Personally, I see great value in ICBMs as a nuke sponge in a counter-force fight. They’re out in the boondocks, well away from most major metropolises. Sure, they’re “best” as a zero-planning first-strike/preemptive weapon, but as long as we have enough SSBNs at sea to handle second-strike duties, the ICBMs are best left in the ground as targets the enemy has to at least consider striking; any surviving missiles can be rapidly aimed at emerging targets that survive our return volley. I do agree that there is no reason that a new ICBM should go massively over-budget; that’s just ridiculous.
That said, I am increasingly-concerned with the potential future threat of a mass drone attack against key assets. Our (mostly) free way of life makes it much easier to pull one off against us, and in any event most of our key targets are on the coasts which means that container ships or modified cargo planes can delivery an attack force large enough and cheap enough to cripple most of the USN and USAF. Everybody’s seen “Slaughterbots”, right? That… takes a few liberties with what’s possible or practical, but if you scale the drones up to carry a shaped charge of several pounds, and then program them to look for targets like radar panels, radio masts, aircraft, etc., it’s not impossible to think that we could rapidly left with little more than whatever is at sea, especially if we have an intel failure (how many attacks against us have been accurately predicted, again?). So, what if OPFOR figures out how to damage a silo with multiple drones attacking key targets like the hatch mechanisms? That, I feel, is a much better argument against replacing Minuteman, and therefore a better argument for focusing on additional SSBNs so that more can be at sea at any given time, plus a large force of LRSOs that can be widely dispersed if we *do* have some warning that something might be coming (a Rapid Dragon option would be extremely valuable, as the current arms-control treaties that might prohibit it only really apply to Russia and are therefore of waning value as Russia’s economy and military decay and/or they continue to cheat on treaties–we should be having serious conversations about either a new buildup or negotiating treaties with the PRC, which would itself only work if they were actually afraid of us conducting a new buildup).
Ideally, I think we should retain the Triad. I could be talked out of it, but I would have to be convinced that the ICBMs are simply too vulnerable to a surprise drone attack launched from deep within our borders, not that they’re worthless except as a first-strike weapon that we’d never actually use. As far as Thor shots go, my understanding is that they’re not really any more powerful than the same amount of TNT, and therefore their only real value is the response time of a megaconstellation in LEO. And given the expected replacement rate of the (much smaller and less draggy) StarLink satellites in those orbits, that would seem to me to be a questionable value in the long-term, even with StarShip launch prices. For that matter, couldn’t you accomplish the same thing, either kinetic or atomic, with a modernized Skybolt concept, e.g., a Rapid-Dragon’d LHRW/CPS weapon?
Apologies, my paragraph breaks seem to have been eaten. I’ll try it again.
Coming in late, here….
I generally agree with ‘Phib, but sometimes he starts to sound like a Bomber General when it comes to robbing the other services to pay for the Navy. Personally, I see great value in ICBMs as a nuke sponge in a counter-force fight. They’re out in the boondocks, well away from most major metropolises. Sure, they’re “best” as a zero-planning first-strike/preemptive weapon, but as long as we have enough SSBNs at sea to handle second-strike duties, the ICBMs are best left in the ground as targets the enemy has to at least consider striking; any surviving missiles can be rapidly aimed at emerging targets that survive our return volley. I do agree that there is no reason that a new ICBM should go massively over-budget; that’s just ridiculous.
That said, I am increasingly-concerned with the potential future threat of a mass drone attack against key assets. Our (mostly) free way of life makes it much easier to pull one off against us, and in any event most of our key targets are on the coasts which means that container ships or modified cargo planes can delivery an attack force large enough and cheap enough to cripple most of the USN and USAF. Everybody’s seen “Slaughterbots”, right? That… takes a few liberties with what’s possible or practical, but if you scale the drones up to carry a shaped charge of several pounds, and then program them to look for targets like radar panels, radio masts, aircraft, etc., it’s not impossible to think that we could rapidly left with little more than whatever is at sea, especially if we have an intel failure (how many attacks against us have been accurately predicted, again?). So, what if OPFOR figures out how to damage a silo with multiple drones attacking key targets like the hatch mechanisms? That, I feel, is a much better argument against replacing Minuteman, and therefore a better argument for focusing on additional SSBNs so that more can be at sea at any given time, plus a large force of LRSOs that can be widely dispersed if we *do* have some warning that something might be coming (a Rapid Dragon option would be extremely valuable, as the current arms-control treaties that might prohibit it only really apply to Russia and are therefore of waning value as Russia’s economy and military decay and/or they continue to cheat on treaties–we should be having serious conversations about either a new buildup or negotiating treaties with the PRC, which would itself only work if they were actually afraid of us conducting a new buildup).
Ideally, I think we should retain the Triad. I could be talked out of it, but I would have to be convinced that the ICBMs are simply too vulnerable to a surprise drone attack launched from deep within our borders, not that they’re worthless except as a first-strike weapon that we’d never actually use. As far as Thor shots go, my understanding is that they’re not really any more powerful than the same amount of TNT, and therefore their only real value is the response time of a megaconstellation in LEO. And given the expected replacement rate of the (much smaller and less draggy) StarLink satellites in those orbits, that would seem to me to be a questionable value in the long-term, even with StarShip launch prices. For that matter, couldn’t you accomplish the same thing, either kinetic or atomic, with a modernized Skybolt concept, e.g., a Rapid-Dragon’d LHRW/CPS weapon?
Phib and I agree on a lot, but disagree on some important areas. He is a NATO prince, and fails to see a lot of the failings of same. That said, I agree with some key points he raises. There are no definitions in place that all agree on. The land-based ICBMS are a joke at this point, and I’m not sure they are even a sponge at this point. For all that our portion is in better shape than the Russians, we face some new and different adversaries who are not on the old page. Given those vulnerabilities, and drones are but one new threat we face, why would anyone waste warheads on them? As you rightly point out, containerships and even cargo aircraft change the equation. Give me 12 container ships and I can give you an overwhelming first strike that hits in about a third of our reaction time. That’s not even counting what can be launched inside the US from land sold near key bases. Or, heck, just jamming. I think the triad as we know it is gone. What we need is something new, something not based on three but more than three. Got some ideas, but need to flesh them out a bit. Just as I think we need to be preparing NOW to safely transfer nukes from England and Europe when they finish falling. Phib has indicated that such planning means I can’t be taken seriously. I think he’s full of it and foolish on that score. Especially since what we plan for never happens, so let’s plan for the worst and hope for the best.