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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

The difference between having 1,000 and 10,000 nuclear weapons is fairly meaningless from a MAD standpoint, but the second still costs ~10 times as much. That’s where the waste is, not simply having a military but having a pointlessly large one.

Worse, it’s even counterproductive. Investing in useful economic assets pays dividends thus increasing your long term military capacity. Buying excessive military hardware on the other hand just gets outdated over time. So, the winning strategy is to spend slightly less than your opposition.

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Agree with the need for moderation. But to 'spend slightly less than your opposition' might be insufficient; you don't usually have one opponent but a few. In that case your first opponent knows if you have to spend all your ammunition taking them out you won't have enough resources to fight off the second opponent. So they reason they can push you around quite a bit because you can't afford to retaliate.

IIRC in its heydays the British government had 'the rule of three': a policy of making sure the Royal Navy could take on the top 3 naval powers and still come out ahead. Something like that is what the US is going for today, and I'm not sure they're wrong.

The US has over 5,000 nuclear warheads. That's more than enough to drop 25 on every single country. I don't think there's any scenario justifying that arsenal.

> I don't think there's any scenario justifying that arsenal.

The scenario isn't based on a need to drop 25 nukes on every other country on earth but to be able to get back at anyone even in the case of a massive unwarned pre-emptive strike.

Same on the Russian side, they probably still also have many more warheads than they need to obliterate any chosen enemy.

Also, these systems takes decades to build, I don't think Putin and his leadership was/is particularly afraid of Bush, Obama or Trump planning a massive pre-emptive strike - or vice versa - these systems are probably in place because of presidents long dead and the risk of future presidents who still aren't more than bullies in elementary school.

Pre-emptive Nuclear strikes are shockingly ineffective vs a country the size of the US with Nuclear submarines. The fastest strike from a sub on each of the coasts gives plenty of time for Nukes in strategic locations to be detected and a strike to be launched.

If it was needed, you can also design a bunker to survive a direct strike and launch after the fact. Though subs in the Great Lakes would be most cost effective option for the US.

Trump made a threat of using nuclear force many times if he had to. Other countries being afraid of US having nukes sounds fair. US then having more nukes also makes sense.

Remember US govt spends trillions on the military complex. All that money has to go somewhere.

I think you’re talking about the Naval Defence Act 1889, which stipulates the Royal Navy to maintain the number of battleships to be at least equal to the sum of next largest TWO navies.[0]

Anyway, back to the point of spending just less than what your (main?) opponent do. Another big problem is that back in Cold War days, it is rather hard to work out your opponent’s exact military capability. US use this to their advantage by starting up Strategic Defence Initiative (aka Star Wars Programme) to bluff the Soviets to spend more of their crippling economic capability to their military, ultimately accelerated their collapse.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Defence_Act_1889

First, the British navy was a subset of total Britaish military spending.

Still, in that situation diplomacy is generally far more cost effective than military capacity. Also, wars between roughly equivalent militaries don’t end in an afternoon and generally favor defense over offense.

Anyway, remember the British Empire failed, as did the Spanish, French, etc. It’s simply not a long term winning strategy.

> The difference between having 1,000 and 10,000 nuclear weapons is fairly meaningless from a MAD standpoint, but the second still costs ~10 times as much.

Forget about MAD, that was an interim doctrine that faded out in the late 1960s.

Once delivery systems demonstrated sufficient accuracy to hit point targets the doctrine changed to counterforce.

For counterforce, targeting individual weapons and enablers, you need lots of lower-yield warheads. The total yield of the nuclear aresenals actually declined as a result.

Counterforce is a strategy for pre-emptive nuclear strike aka starting a nuclear war when retaliation could occur during transit. Even at the peak of our nuclear capacity we had zero ability to prevent retaliation or a first strike. Thus MAD was the still the core defensive strategy.

At best it was a fig leaf enabling ~10 Trillion dollars in pork spending, but counterforce was hardly a useful military doctrine.

You build your first 1000 warheads and develop a delivery method. Soon the other party develops countermeasures. So you still have 1000 warheads, but the delivery is no longer guaranteed.

You develop a better delivery method, and it's easier to build another 1000 warheads than repurpose the first 1000. You end up with 2000.

It won't be long you will have to build more. As the warheads are not consumed, you end up having more and more. But only 1000 of the latest generation, that really counts.

By far the most expensive component of a nuclear warhead is the enriched uranium, which is much easier to recycle into a new warhead than make from scratch.

Between 1940 and 1996, the U.S. government spent at least $9.49 trillion in present-day terms[5] on nuclear weapons, including platforms development (aircraft, rockets and facilities), command and control, maintenance, waste management and administrative costs. Saving ~8 trillion was very much a viable option. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_...

By comparison China built about 600 warheads since 1964 which was a significant deterrent for the US. The US on the other hand built ~70,000.

PS: The Minuteman-III was in service from 1970 to now, it’s scheduled to be retire in 2030. While bombers where replaced ICBM’s where hardly a quickly outdated weapon.

As in the bombers example, the previous generation is hardly quickly and completely outdated. They're still nukes. And that's exactly the reason to keep them in service.

Then, when a better tech becomes an option, it doesn't replace the previous weapon, it complements it.

So the options are: 1) retire old weapons, recycle them to build weapons which are expected to be better, keep the military potential about the same, reduce costs but still spend a lot and 2) keep what's in service and build a better weapon. Option 1 is hard to justify politicaly. Scraping something perfectly functional that costs billions sounds like a career ending decision. It also affects too many people. Option 2 is almost a guaranteed way to improve military potential, and a way to have a stellar career. Assuming that funding is available.

So yes, the decisions are not always the most economically efficient. That's a wrong objective function. Especially if we're talking about defense.

If the new weapon systems are about as good as the old ones then what’s the point of building them? Presumably there is a significant threshold for spending 100’s of billions of dollars on a significantly improved nuclear stockpile.

Justifying it to the American taxpayer is meaningless when it’s hidden from them. But, justifying it to Congress was just a question of pork spending which is really what the excessive nuclear stockpile was. It’s no accident that all 3 major branches of the military had Nukes, though currently that’s down to Air Force and Navy.

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