No you don’t, as this clearly demonstrates. Israel doesn’t advertise, but its nuclear deterrent exists nonetheless. South Africa had the bomb for what, 30 years before officially acknowledging and dismantling them. Again, it was an open secret that everyone who would be deterred knew about, yet it wasn’t advertised.
Back in the 70s, there was an "unclaimed " nuclear test I believe in the Southern Indian Ocean.
There was a suggestion that South Africa & Israel had “clubbed up” to build a joint nuke design.
Dated input? Y/N?
No, all you have to do is make sure the actual decision makers know about it.
cruise missiles now, as well as long-range?
Nah, nice bluff.
Israel don’t play dat.
‘Israel’ isn’t’ leaking’ the story.
The problem with applying hydrocodes (numerical cods that simulate dynamic response of materials or fluid continua) to nuclear weapon designs isn’t length per se but the small time interval for precise simulation (timestep) and the complexity of the interactions. Modeling a star on the main sequence, for instance, is pretty simple and not too numerically complex because it is hydrostatically stable (i.e. all global pressures are balanced, and local pressure fluctuations are heavily damped). This allows you to make a number of simplifications and use a large timestep in the simulation, potentially on the order of years. With a more unstable star, the timestep has to be much smaller, though it can still be minutes or hours.
For a nuclear weapon, the detonation of which occurs in two to four “shakes” (1 shake = 10 nanoseconds) depending on the type of weapon. So one can see that the timestep for simulation needs to be much smaller, although the active duration of the weapon detonation is also small. However, the real issue is how many different interactions occur in that small time interval and the fact that it changes regimes very rapidly, which means that you either need to characterize these changes very accurately based upon physical testing, or you need to use a very small timestep and accurately represent all relevant phenomena. The basic problem with any numerical simulation is that your result is only as good as your inputs and assumptions, and if you leave out a critical interaction or get the parameters wrong, it may give you a wildly inaccurate result. As for computing capability, a cluster of commercial grade PCs (in a form called a beowulf cluster) can run circles around scalar supercomputers of old, and this is exactly the type of problem they were designed to run.
You could design a pure fission weapon from scratch using only hydrocodes (mostly for the chemical implosive charges) as long as you were willing to build some conservatism into the model. A compact or low mass fission weapon would probably require testing A boosted fission or thermonuclear fusion device, on the other hand, would need testing to assure that there aren’t any unintended interactions that spoil (“poison”) the fusion reactions that contribute significantly to the weapon yield or cause the weapon to blow itself apart prematurely. The NIF at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is intended specifically to provide direct fusion reaction data for refinement of nuclear weapon simulation codes, and it is the only such facility in the Western world. The ISKRA facilities at Sarov (used to be Arzamas-16) are used for the same purpose.
Even having as “tested” design isn’t good enough for reliability unless all of the components and materials come from the same sources, as any slight variation can cause major differences in the result.
Stranger
For the record, Israel is a global leader in missile technology. Plenty of world militaries, including several European ones, employ Israeli AT and cruise missiles.
Actually I can totally confirm the accuracy of the article.
A bloke in the pub told me he knew it was true because a friend of his brothers knows an Israeli who actually SPOKE TO SOMEONE IN THAT VERY FLOTILLA!
So not so cocky now are we ?
Israel has already more than adequately advertised its deterrent. Everyone knows they have nuclear weapons.
What you don’t have to do is tell people exactly where your nuclear-weapon-carrying submarines are going to be. The entire point of putting nukes on a submarine is that submarines are hard to find.
Nukes aren’t a deterrent to someone who believes their owner would never dare use them. And isn’t that the case?
One of the cites above says that Israel’s subs have a 30-day endurance. Is that time at sea, or time continually underwater? What’s it limited by, and how can it be extended? Because it’d surely take longer than 30 days to round the Cape of Good Hope and back, and sending them through the Suez Canal would ruin any chance at secrecy (which is, after all, the whole point of a submarine).
[ol]
[li]Israel has a port or two on the Red Sea[/li][li]Subs can be resupplied at sea.[/li][li] Hi Opal. As per our previous communique.[/li][li]No diesel-electric sub can stay submerged for 30 days. That figure (if correct) is endurance without re-supply.[/li][/ol]
If Iran Nukes Israel I’m pretty sure that the Israelis would use them.
It isn’t as though Iran has the capability to track subs in the blue ocean. There’s really no problem with them cruising on the surface to somewhere near Iran, submerging, and then scooting to somewhere undetected.
I believe it would be greatly to Israel’s advantage for the Iranians to think it was the case. So it doesn’t matter if “O” exists or not.
It reminds me of when there was a great deal of funny “Mossad” derived information coming out about Iraq back in 2002/3 (anyone remember the Iraqi underground dune-boring chemical weapons labs supposedly chuntering through the desert like something out of Dune, for example). Clearly it wasn’t Mossad saying all of this. But it didn’t hurt the chances of going to war that this kind of information was floating around.
I believe, though, that there are a number of mechanisms that modern diesel-electrics use to extend their underwater loiter ability. For example, some of them can carry oxygen specifically to operate the diesel engine: Air-independent propulsion - Wikipedia
As for less exotic options - snorkels. The Germans used them seventy years ago, for Ford’s sake.
Don’t know what the Dolphin class is equipped with, but it’s certainly possibly that it can hang out underwater far longer than a WW2-era boat.
If the purpose of the submarines is to serve as a deterrent, there’s no reason for Israel to have them in the Persian Gulf at all. Assuming Israel does in fact have nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, they could hit Iran from twenty miles off Tel Aviv.
The only reason to plant a submarine with a theatre-range nuclear weapon delivery capability really close to your target - and Iran being a big place, not everywhere in Iran is all that close to the Gulf anyway - wouuld be if you planned to strike first. And even then, I’m not sure Iran has the ability to detect a cruise
missile launch from anywhere.
It’s not so much that any one part of the Time story is doubtful as it is that the entire thing is weird and isn’t sourced.
Hell’s bells, the USAF uses a version of the Israeli Popeye cruise missile as the AGM-142 Have Nap on its B-52s.
Why do you say that? A shorter flight would be advantageous whether you shot first or not, I would think. Less time for something to go wrong, less time to shoot at it.