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Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

This is true, but once you start looking into it is highly misleading. A huge (and maybe only) reason for this is advances in targeting systems.

In the 70s and 80s targeting systems were much worse, so you might expect to send tens of nukes to destroy a single reinforced bunker, since many would miss by hundreds of meters to kilometers. So often you needed tens of nukes for a single strategic target.

Nowadays targeting systems are so good and launch / reentry vehicles so reliable that a single nuke can hit exactly in the right x-y coordinate and in the exact z coordinate sweetspot to destroy that bunker. So you don't need as many.

So the number of nukes has gone down, but the destructive power is quite similar, although I suppose in the event of an all-out war we'll have less fallout.

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"So the number of nukes has gone down, but the destructive power is quite similar" is very, very false.

The military efficiency is quite similar, however, the destructive power has dropped significantly - these targeting improvements resulted in much less powerful warheads being necessary to achieve the same goal, so not only there's much, much less warheads (10000 vs 60000 at the height of cold war, and "only" 3000 of those 10000 are available at short notice) but also each warhead is much less destructive, the "default" warheads have gone down from multiple megatons to 100-150 kilotons.

This means that an all-out war will not only have much less fallout than in 70s, but also much less civilian casualties, much less destruction of cities, etc, etc. In the 70s, if a military base near a city would be targeted, then the city would be eliminated along with the base; now it'd likely be targeted with just something like 100kt bomb with much smaller impact; if the target was in the middle of the city, then most of the city would survive.

It is still perverse that we allow some few countries to stockpile 100 of thousands of Nagasakis. All of the world is held hostage to the whim of a hand full old men in the US, China and Russia.

A big reason why this stockpile is considered necessary is to prevent questions in the form of "why should we allow ..." - if you have such a stockpile, then the obvious answer to any such questions is that you don't have to ask for permission for anything ever, as nobody can force you to do anything or prevent you from doing what you want, you have the ability to not care about what someone would "allow" you to do. This is the ultimate guarantee of "noone orders me around" sovereignty; if it was technically possible for the world to disallow USA, Russia or China "to stockpile 100 of thousands of Nagasakis", then it might become possible for the world to disallow USA, Russia or China some other actions against other countries or their own people, and that's not acceptable to their leaders.

It's good that you make the distinction between leaders and population, because when it comes to nuclear weapons we are all losers.

“allow”?

That is a really interesting point. We've been so conditioned that nuclear war == "end of humanity" that if it happened as you described, everyone would lose their minds for no real reason (inasmuch as the consequences would be no worse than for a conventional war).

But taking that further, what is the point then, of taking out your enemy's bases or bunkers? I realize how dense that question sounds. But in the context of a surgical nuclear strike, ok you wiped most of their airbases off the face of the earth...now what?

It seems rather pointless unless you intend to actually invade, in which case you're in for millions of very hostile civilians and not much to gain

The hostility can be dealt with, if you are sufficiently bestial. Reinhard Heydrich did suppress the resistance in Czechoslovakia, and the reprisals after his assassination convinced Allied leadership never to mount another assassination attempt of Nazi top brass.

Thank you for mentioning this. It is an astonishing story that I did not know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Heydrich#Assassinatio...

The realistic scenarios of nuclear war occur as an escalation of some large scale conventional conflict.

If you take out enemy airbases and nuclear capability, then you can use tactical nukes (or, more likely, you already started using them) to win that conventional war and achieve whatever goals you had in it. There's no reason to invade - just as with Japan in 1945, you can subjugate a country without invading it

That would seem to indicate that reducing civilian loss wouldn't be a likely result of targeting improvements. After all, we ended the war in Japan by intentionally inflicting civilian casualties to force surrender. Seems likely future leaders would make the same calculation. So, the strategy would likely involve destroying the opponent's ability to retaliate add then start massacring civilians until you get an unconventional surrender.

Carpet bombing failed to undermine morale both in Britain and Germany. Here's an anecdote: the village priest when I was little lived through WW II and was a pacifist, a serious one, but he had a vicious hatred for Bomber-Harris, as he was called.

For the lazy like me, here's wikipedia's article on sir Arthur "bomber" Harris:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Arthur_Harris,_1st_Baronet

I'm not terribly comforted by this. The outcome would still be a disaster on a scale never seen before, and would wreck modern civilization.

It baffles me how the threat of nuclear war has essentially disappeared from the public consciousness. People seem to think that the danger evaporated with the USSR, but it's still there, as likely as it ever was, quite possibly more so now that there are so many more nuclear powers.

To be more precise, recent improvements in hard target kill probabilities are actually due to improvements in fuzing rather than improvements in targeting. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has a rather good article describing the tech and its strategic implications: https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni...

This is mostly wrong.

For a period accuracy on ICBMs wasn't very great (on the order of a kilometer), which is why they made use of very high yield weapons in the several megaton range. Large warheads were necessary to take out targets (such as population centers) with those accuracy levels. Then several things changed: accuracy improved greatly, the ability to put multiple warheads on a single missile arrived (MIRVing), and anti-ballistic missile defense (ABM) started taking off. This lead to the use of more, higher accuracy, lower yield warheads to take out targets. You could blanket a city with sub-megaton MIRVed warheads instead of using one big 10 megaton bomb. And then the calculus of "but how many will be lost to the ABM systems?" came into play, which resulted in use of "penetration aids" like decoys as well as the deployment of vast numbers of warheads to ensure enough of them made it through. That led to a massive rapid escalation in warhead deployment during the '60s and '70s until the ABM treaty flattened it out.

But this is only half the story. The other half is the massive deployment of tactical (battlefield) nukes. With the invention of smaller nuclear warheads combined with the massive production capability of the weapons procurement pipelines in the US and USSR it became possible to deploy tens of thousands of tactical warheads. These would be used for everything from anti-ship missiles and torpedoes to anti-aircraft weapons to short range ground strike missiles.

The late Cold War and post Cold War arms limitations significantly reduced the deployed number of warheads of both the US and USSR. They massively curtailed the number of tactical nukes deployed, and they resulted in a lot of "de-MIRVing" of missiles. A modern Ohio-class nuclear missile submarine can carry 24 missiles each of which can carry up to 12 W-88 (475 Kt) warheads. Potentially that's up to 288 warheads and over 130 megatons of total destructive power, basically WWIII in a can. However, today they carry far fewer warheads than that due to treaty limitations. Similarly, most of our land based ICBMs have been de-MIRVed and we've retired new weapons systems (like the MX/Peacekeeper) which were heavily MIRVed.

All of this has translated into far fewer warheads in service or on alert and a much reduced overall destructive capability. It is still an overwhelmingly enormous nuclear destructive capability but it has been reduced significantly through treaty obligations over the years.

The ideal outcome of a nuclear war would be an exchange that destroys all military installations of all sides with the smallest nessesary nukes and no civilian casulties. In that sense, increased targeting capabilities are great.

Now we just need to work on not targeting civilians, not destroying the electrical grid, minimizing fallout etc.

That defeats the purpose of MAD and makes the use of nuclear weapons more likely. If the response to a nuclear attack is devastating then there is less chance that one will attack in the first place.

I firmly believe nukes are the reason we haven't had world war 3 yet. If no nukes existed the USA and the USSR would have gone at it in the 60s/70s.

I agree. I have no background in military strategy so I try not to feel too comfortable in making conclusions about warfare tactics, but it seems like the reason we haven't had a classic major land war between two superpowers since WWII seems to be because of nuclear weapons.

MAD ( countervalue ) was discontinued as a policy under President Carter when Poseidon & Minuteman III made counterforce viable.

The Soviets made a similar transition, moving away from city-crushing 25MT unitary warheards to much smaller silo-busting MIRVs.

MAD did its job through the 60s but faded away as technology improved.

Is not the purpose of weapon of mass descruction to destruct as much as possible? This includes not only cities, factories and civilians, but for example, polluting soil with radioactive materials so that it becomes unusable for living. Don't forget that civilians are potential soldiers, guerilla warriors or military factory workers so it doesn't make sense to leave them alive.

If you need to destroy a military base or a factory, you can just use non-nuclear weapon.

I think the main targets for ICBMs are densely populated cities or areas. So large countries have much higher chances to survive while overpopulated European countries, or East Asian countries can be severely destroyed.

The targeting systems from the 70s 80s were good enough to be in use still today because as far as the nuclear arsenal goes they are.

Don’t confuse the development of guided conventional munitions with nuclear ones it’s a completely different ball game.

Costs and size don’t mean much for nukes, nukes also can’t use GPS, CCD sensor or any other “modern” guidance system due to reentry and many other factors.

Are they? Without GPS? How I wonder?

Because the US will disable GPS for everyone but their own forces in a heartbeat in the event of war.

And China / Russia might be able to knock out US GPS pretty quickly - but all of that is very untested, moreover, the US may have a way to put up a bunch more satellites quickly.

Systems today have become really, really dependant on technologies that may not be available in a time of war.

It may very well could be that if the US has their act together they could shut down an advanced opponent pretty quickly without having to do much at all.

I'm actually pretty curious as to how advanced guidance systems would work in 2018 without GPS like technologies, not just in 'known tech' but behind the scenes, all the secret stuff.

It's hard because in some ways we could expect them to be way, way ahead with some things, but in others, they might be blindingly incompetent, for example, maybe the US really doesn't have a plan for rapidly popping up new GPS satellites in the event the Chinese knock some down.

Inertial guidance can be quite accurate when you only have 30 minutes to build up errors. Land-based missiles know exactly where they're starting from. Submarine-based missiles not so much, but they are given targets which don't need as much accuracy.

> the US may have a way to put up a bunch more satellites quickly.

That would require a stockpile of both satellites and launchers.

I've never heard of a stockpile of GPS satellites, and they take years to build. But even assuming that there are a few at the ready, what will launch them? I'm hard-pressed to think of many orbital solid rockets, and those that do come to mind (such as Shavit) are way too harsh to launch an atomic clock, not to mention not having the payload capacity to MEO. The liquids are gentler, but are far from launch-ready and much more constrained for launch locations and orbital inclinations.

>This is true, but once you start looking into it is highly misleading. A huge (and maybe only) reason for this is advances in targeting systems.

Yes, and Khrushev singlehandedly conducted a psy-op, ingraining the concept of "missile gap" into psyche of American political establishment.

At the time when ICBMs were still toy weapons, he successfully pushed NATO nations into spending enormous resources bringing up their strategic nuclear forces, while the bloc was popping T55s by thousands every week.

On a macro scale, all an every "lateral movements" were nothing but a ruse, disguising the fact that the only strategy he had was to send a patently enormous mechanised force over a wide front.

The more remarkable was, that, I think, that every military analyst pentagon had was coming to this very conclusion very easy, but none of them were ever heard in white house or by higher up generals.

Big name generals were themselves convinced that all of that itself was a ruse, and that Khrushev had a secret joker in his pocket, and that he will not resort to the most straightforward way to defeat them.

And American presidents, of course, only wanted to hear an opinion that was easier to believe in, coinciding with their own view of the world. What they believed in? They believed in a vision of a clean and fast war, where enemies are instantly vapourised at a click of a big red button.

Fallout is really bad. Radiation goes from a high lifetime cancer risk to LD 50/50 over a narrow (in exponential terms) band so twice the fallout can quickly kill a lot more people.

Nukes really don't destroy that much land directly, the difference with nuclear war over regular ones is mostly just the fallout.

The people intuitively scale up Hiroshima and say it's 1,000x as strong so it destroys 1,000x the area. But, it's non linear the giant hot ball of gas quickly gains altitude. Sure, the center get's more energy but it was destroyed anyway.

Also, the atmosphere cuts radiation exponentially with distance. So, if you block 1/2 the radiation at X, then you get 1/4 at 2x and 1/8th at 3x. Thus doubling only increases the lethal radius by X rather than say 5x which is the original lethal radius. (Note it's more complex as radius also reduces the received dose directly, and radiation turns into heat etc.)

PS: You can estimate direct damage as ~10000 * ~100 square miles (most nukes are sub 1MT) ~= 1 million square miles. But, the earth has 57 million square miles of land. So ~2% of total land though much of this would be over water as many cities are coastal. So, if you could ignore fallout and each nuke was targeting something else most land would still be untouched.

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