This is how you shoot down a nuclear missile:
http://cnn.com/US/9910/03/missile.defense/
When a treaty no longer serves your interests, you break it.
For the record I am going to side with DH and Sake here. With more and more nations going “semi-nuclear” I think we would be foolish not to have a defense against a limited exchange. (and pray it stays limited) Factor in some rich but wacko country getting ahold of a foreign nuke and thats all the excuse I need.
A missile defense that could protect us from a full exchange would be moot. The resulting ecological impact from the bombs that did detonate added to all the radioactive crap released by the ones destroyed in flight would leave a huge mess. (read; end of the world as we know it)
I think it is far more likely this thread is transfered to the GD forum than a massive exchange taking place between two superpowers with so much to loose.
Hardened silos? giggle snort
Consider, if you will, that by the late stages of the Cold War not even Cheyenne Mountain was considered nuke-proof. Yes, ladies and gentlemen. Crystal Palace, the home of NORAD, built into a mountain, was a soft target for purposes of a nuclear exchange.
Knowing that, I’m not confident that any of our missile silos were safe.
True, but you have to screw up those electronics first. (FWIW, I always found those movies where the protagonist had to “disarm the nuke” to be ludicrous. Chances are, if James Bond whacked the damn thing with a sledge hammer a couple of times, it would be disabled.) If you don’t inflict damage to the warhead itself and/or its guidance package, you still get a detonation. There are several fuzing systems on each warhead to ensure that it works. Something as simple as an air-pressure gauge is hard to hurt, and you can use one as a fuze. You have to hurt the weapon itself, not just its delivery system.
This sure is a fun topic. What do you think that says about those of us who are gleefully participating in it? 
–Da Cap’n
Hardening a silo is not the same as hardening a mountain full of people. You design it to handle X amount of overpressure, and you can guarantee surivability as long as the strike warhead doesn’t hit within X meters. Due to nuclear testing we had very good numbers on the amount of overpressure caused by bombs of various size, and we knew the size of the Soviet weapons. We also knew their accuracy.
So, the math looks something like this: You design a silo that can withstand a hit no closer than say, 300 meters. You know that the Soviet missile has an accuracy such that there is a 10% chance it will land outside of the 300 meter radius. Therefore, you’ve just built a missile that has a 10% chance of withstanding a first strike.
Boris: You’re thinking like an American. The damage from 432 missiles would be unacceptable to us. Would it be unacceptable to them? This is a country that lost 20 million people in WWII, and slaughtered almost 30 million of its own citizens in order to collectivize agriculture. To the old-style politburo, it just wasn’t about saving lives. It was about the preservation of the state. Reagan called them an “Evil Empire”, and they surely were. If the Soviets thought they could first strike and have enough infrastructure and military left to begin a conquest of Europe they might have done it. The number of civilian dead was pretty much irrelevant.
Going off topic–What if something link the Tunguska “event” were headed our way?
How much lead time would we have?
Couldn’t the same technology used in developing ABM systems be used to blast incoming space rocks?
dhanson:
I will gladly accept your explanation of how a silo can be hardened against an airburst more effectively than Cheyenne, because you probably know better and I don’t want to argue.
Considering the nature of former Soviet tactics, though, and their willingness to sacrifice anything to win (their policy included the infamous Scorched Earth, in which they’d nuke their own territory if an enemy force occupied it), how about this: Accuracy or no, could those same silos be sufficiently hardened against a groundburst? Instead of detonating at 10,000 feet, the warheads could be set for 100 feet. Imagine the crater. I can’t imagine that missing by 300 meters would matter all that much, since the silo hatches would probably be buried.
Groundbursts, as we know, are the biggest threat in a nuclear exchange, since they kick up the most radioactive fallout, though I think they trade blast radius to do this. I wouldn’t put it past the old Soviets (or us, for that matter) if the objective were important enough. Nowadays, when fissile and fusile weapons are being used by various nations for active sabre-rattling in their centuries-old grudge matches, I have more fear of “dirty nukes” like this.
–Da Cap’n
Sake Samurai
My point was not that the 288 warheads could destroy all the Russian land-based missiles in a first strike, but rather, that they could destroy pretty much all of the Russian population in a second strike. I’m talking about the deterrent effect of our submarines, not their potential war-winning effect.
**dhanson[/]
I think we’ll have to agree to disagree on this one. I think the Soviet leadership had an instinct for self-preservation just like anyone else. All major Russian urban areas would be destroyed by the three-sub second strike, and then some. Radiation sickness could easily account for the rest. I don’t know why anyone, no matter how Stalinist, would want to run a country composed only of the populations of a few lucky fallout shelters in mine shafts outside the 72 areas.
Nothing I write about any person or group should be applied to a larger group.
- Boris Badenov
Okay, putting aside the question of whether ABM development was a good idea in the 70s, the changing World Order does call for a re-visitation of the subject - as pointed out by a number of callers.
And the first thing that comes to my mind is: given the porosity of our borders and the proliferation of high-quality nuclear weapon technology (thank you, Los Alamos), ABM systems are a short-term answer if at all. Sure, we don’t want North Korea lobbing missiles our way - but in the long run, that’s an unlikely Top Threat anyway.
It’s often said that we can be thankful terrorists are stupid… Well, evolution occurs on a societal level, too; do you want to bet your grandchildren’s happiness on the proposition that “terrorists” will ALWAYS stay stupid?
It seems obvious to me that the best ABM system in the world won’t stop someone determined to cross our borders with a nuclear device. Likewise, the CIA has proven itself incapable of discovering every threat (which should be logically obvious, anyway). “Closing the borders” is a flat out stupid answer. The All-Encompassing All-Safe Police State is not only impossible, but evil.
What’s left?
I propose that, the American propensity to immediately embrace “simple answers” aside, there IS no solution. All that can be done is of the nature of “problem management.” And that means: fight proliferation, and refrain from making anyone mad enough to want to nuke us.
And it seems that that begins with putting our own house in order. Stop the leaks, work HARD at making better friends, try to stabilize the world, and above all take a long term outlook (rather than making ~all decisions based on the next quarter’s results) and try to reign in the more acquisitive members of our community who are screwing things up around the world for the rest of us.
Pollyanna-ish? Maybe, but I submit that “more of the same” - or ANY “simple fix” - will probably push us farther down the road to World Insanity. ALL constructive proposals are welcome, of course - but we have to get over this “magic bullet” mentality we have developed.
Leftist? Hell no, unless you think that even having an expected standard of behavior is “wrong.” What I’m addressing are such things as our multinationals going abroad, making deals with cabals-in-power, and arming them so they can slaughter the inhabitants of the lands containing something we want - say, oil. You know what? That kind of crap makes enemies. Bad enemies. (Kind of like overthrowing a democratically-elected government, installing a Shah, and helping train his secret police. Turned out not to be in our interest.) Morality aside (it deserves its own thread), I would say that, to the extent that that sort of behavior screws things for me and mine, I have the right to expect those management teams, and government agencies, to refrain. And if that means buying those companies’ stock and replacing the management teams, or voting outside the two-halves-party system, so be it. (And what’s leftist about that?) The real point is: WE as a nation aren’t accustomed to thinking about what is being done in our name, but had better get in the habit fast. For our own good.
ABM systems? Rated: short-term attractive; long-term market underperform.
Just some random numbers to throw out for your run-of-the-mill land-based Russian ICBM:
“Boost phase” 1-2 minutes
“Mid-course phase” 20-25 minutes
“Re-entry phase” 1-2 minutes
Presumably ours don’t have times dramatically different from these.
I wish I could remember the way Sagan described a hypothetical WW III in “Cosmos,” something like, “Imagine a Rotterdam, or a Dresden, or a Hamburg, or a Tokyo happening every second for an afternoon.”
About a half-hour from launch to KA-BOOM.
“…refrain from making anyone mad enough to want to nuke us.”
Of course, it doesn’t help America’s image in the world when we back dictators or support corruption. But do you really think that everyone who’s mad at the US is in the right, and that in every case the US did something wrong to make them mad at us? Do you really think that if we acted simon-pure in the world that we would suddenly be safe from terrorists because nobody would hate us anymore?
*Some countries are mad at us because we did the RIGHT thing, or at least what we thought was the right thing. Whether one thinks it was right or wrong to use force in Kosovo, it’s obvious that it was done with the best of intentions; no conquest for “gold, God, or glory.” Yet that didn’t stop many Serbians from hating and demonizing the US (and ignoring what their own gov’t was doing).
*And some of the poorest people hate the US just for being prosperous. Even if every cent US businesses made abroad was 100% honest, people who are impoverished will tend to think anyway that those businesses must have done something unfair to be so rich. It’s easier to think some distant corporation is bleeding you than that your own government or businesses are doing it or that your country can’t get its act together. Just as some people automatically hate rich people, no matter how they earned their money, there will always be some people abroad who hate the US and blame it for their troubles whether the US is actually the cause or not.
David: I’m sure we’ve all heard this arguement before but saying:
is awfully reminiscent of what we did to the Mexicans and the American Indians. We are all here very aware of our morally sordid political past.
It’s like a born-again Christian preaching on the corner. Only you find out he used to be a murderer and a swindler.
No one wants such a person telling them how they should live their lives according to the Lord and the Word of God.
The notion of:
is quaint, but ultimately unrealistic and dangerous.
Hell is Other People.
Hatred is one commodity the world will never be short of.
I somewhat agree that a defensive shield is useless against a terrorist attack (and many nations behave as terrorists would). The nightmare scenario is to see a major city turn into a mushroom cloud, and then get a notice from someone like Hussein saying, “Give in to our demands, because we have 20 more nuclear bombs hidden in your cities. To prove it, we’ll blow up another one tomorrow.” Whoosh. Up goes another one.
Now what do you do?
I’m guessing that this scenario drives the NSA completely bananas. And it explains their desire to monitor all communications coming in and out of the country.
I’m also sure that they have some kind of clandestine program working right now to prevent this. U.S. intelligence tries to track every ounce of weapons-grade material on the Earth. When some goes missing (and there is quite a bit unaccounted for, as I recall, due to the breakup of the USSR), it must give them nightmares.
I think the threat of nuclear terrorism is minimal. The technology is hard to master and easy to track. Military intelligence (no jokes, please) has done an amazing job of staying on top of who has what. So did the KGB. The radioactive aspect of the weapon is a dead giveaway.
Let’s say Saddam was able to do plant a hydrogen bomb in the mercantile building. He then proceeded to detonate the warhead and demand the U.S. get the hell out of the middle east ASSAP and wire him 2.4 trillion dollars?
The outrage of the american people, the federal government, and the international community would be swift and lethal. We would instantly vaporize Iraq and round up all arabs in the US and put them in internment camps until we were positive there were no more bombs planted. It would be mass hysteria and immense violence, but there would be no giving in, or even listening to, demands.
This is a big part of the reason this has never happened. The world has had this technology for 55 years, and ever since we detonated two over Japan, not one nation or individual has ever used a nuclear weapon for any reason other than testing. This is unparalled in the history of warfare and weaponry. There’s something special about a nuke.
Hell is Other People.
[1]Hell no. I don’t mean to make this some sort of mea culpa, “it’s all our fault” sob-session. I do think that we tend to suffer a self-defeating ethnocentrism with respect to the opinions and desires of others, i.e. if “they” don’t agree with “us,” “they” are wrong/ignorant/stupid/evil/etc. The result of this is that others who are mad at us are probably right about that (which is subtly different from being “in the right”) more often than we recognize or would want to admit (not “always,” but it sometimes seems that WE are “always” protrayed as being in the right).
[2] If by “wrong” you mean ‘morally wrong’ then no, not in every case. If by “wrong” you mean ‘seriously mistaken’ then I’d say a good argument could be made in that direction. It is usually a mistake to get deeply or violently involved in other’s affairs, or to use them as pawns in a larger game that doesn’t involve them. And I can’t think of a single case of someone who hates us where we didn’t go there and get involved in some way first.
[3]Nope. No magic bullets, no sudden (or easy) safety. But I do think that a couple of generations of trying to do things better, of building a new reputation, would result in more safety than would, to use a metaphor, going and sticking our noses into other families’ business every time we hear them arguing.
[4]This is a real good example. a) Just because something is “right” according to our lights, doesn’t mean it’s smart, and doesn’t mean it is right in the big picture/long run. This was “what we thought was the right thing” - but who died and made us Pope? (Okay, maybe that’s an unfortunate turn of phrase.) If you personally know someone who always thinks they’re right, who thinks that their values are best, who always acts without regards to the concerns or feelings of those around hi/r - I bet you think s/he is an arrogant asshole, and I bet you don’t agree that they’re always right. And if that persons just kept stomping on you in some area that mattered to you, what would YOU ultimately be driven to do? b) It’s NOT obvious that our Kosovo involvement was done with the best of intentions. WE (or most of us) believe so, largely because we were all brought up in the same mass culture, and because we find it hard to believe otherwise. (What do you mean “they” just wanted to test their weaponry and give more money to the contractors? That’s not what it was about at all!) But to outsiders, WHO PROJECT THEIR OWN EXPERIENCES AND THOUGHTS onto our actions, our good intentions are clearly less-than-obvious. (And it doesn’t help when we apply our standards differentially…) From such misunderstandings danger flies, and grudges are born…
I think this is a pretty good illustration of my intended point. You say “Even if” every cent earned was honest - BUT IT’s NOT. And that’s not an unimportant point. If we de-emphasize the fact that we still profit, sometimes dishonestly, from a colonial system that was unjust to begin with, we take the focus off something WE could do better and put it on “other” factors (it’s their own leaders; maybe “they” just CAN’T improve; it’s too complicated). THIS ISN’T A BLAME GAME. The point is, WE BECOME SAFER if we make the world better. The easiest - and most just - place to start is WITH OURSELVES.
If you look at the four related issues - 1) groups within Less-Developed Countries who sell out their folk for personal profit; 2) multinational entities that are sometimes less-than-honest in their dealings with others; 3) economies that have been orchestrated to enrich us without concern for those who labor in them; 4) “random” hatred - you see that we can affect 3 of them through our own actions. I suspect that the last - just being a target for other’s jealousy - would be greatly ameliorated if we were clearly not making things worse. (Currently, it’s a sort of give-and-take operation.) It’s amazing how much good will can be generated by just a little thoughtfulness and concern.
Sake Samurai: yes, it’s reminiscent of past misdeeds. That wasn’t my intent; I was speaking to recently-past events in Africa and South America. Some (European, US) companies continue to be involved, if not directly as an enabler, in such things. Look at Royal Dutch Shell (not a US company) and, I believe, Chevron. Being aware of a sordid past is important IF WE LEARN FROM IT. And of course we have learned…not enough yet, it just appears, and we’re not vigilant enough.
I think we’re thinking of separate things. We ALL live with expected standards of behavior, with a large congruence. (I may not be expected to do Bible study every night, but I am still expected not to kill my fellows, and I expect it of my neighbors. I am expected to show up at work on time every day. That sort of thing.) I think a relatively high expected standard of behavior for our corporate citizens is less dangerous than a high-legislated standard of behavior…and while it may be quaint, it’s clearly more in our national self-interest than NO standard of behavior (anything goes). In fact, we DO have expectations of our corporate citizens…but we might want to re-prioritze some of those expectations.
dhanson: I don’t know what we do, then. That’s why I figure doing what we can to avoid the scenario is SMART…but not foolproof. (No Magic Bullets. Repeat: no Magic Bullets.) And IIRC, there was a fair amount of weapons-grade material missing long before the Soviet Union broke up; it’s just more material - and ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more confusion - since that point.
So what does one do with regard to the NSA and its ilk? Just let the Oliver North cowboys have their head (to severely mix a metaphor)? Clearly I don’t want to live in one of those 20 cities. I can’t say I prefer to live in a Police State…and who knows what the next Dick Nixon would do?
I do believe that terrorist organizations exist because of perceived wrongs, and no nation hates another for no reason. To change the state of affairs from one of decreasing safety to one of improving safety requires a program of action. What that program should be is one of the Big Questions for our future. Clearly, we can only focus on elements we can control (a minority of the elements involved). I suggest that that’s where the plan should begin.
Sake (May I call you Sake?):
You do a reasonable job of summing up recent history and current thinking. The picture you outline will probably be true in 10 years. I think the question is: how about 75 years from now? 150?
Again, betting our grandchildren’s future on the continuing stupidity of others seems itself a fool’s bet. Concerning nukes, we have recently seen that our intelligence agancies can be surprised. But why limit it to that? There are other weapons of mass destruction that are much harder to detect…
Ain’t that the scary truth.
Biological warfare scares me AND it’s been used pretty consistantly for hundreds of years.
By the way. . .nice hairdew!
Hell is Other People.