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I don't think cameldrv is saying that a first strike is really feasible right now. It's just that in the past, the second strike capability had layers upon layers to make 100% sure no war-hungry commander could delude themselves into thinking they had any chance of disabling it.

Now all of the 7 points have eaten away at this certainty. For now, it looks like the equation is still in favor of MAD, but it with a smaller margin. But what if Russia or China has some trick/secret weapon to disable the SLBMs? Or maybe they are just waiting until they know the locations of all carriers/subs - they have many years, and it might only take one random moment of 100% detection! I'm sure the odds are very low, but I'm not comfortable with a gamble when nuclear annihilation on the line.

The fact that the dominant military doctrine hinges on some increasingly uncertain calculations is terrifying to me.

> But what if Russia or China has some trick/secret weapon to disable the SLBMs?

Then do they have a secret / trick to disable all briefcase bombs? The Davy Crockett nuke is under 50lbs and was designed for infantry to use (in a almost certainly suicide manner). And then plenty of other types were invented as time went on.

If you can't get them with the big guns, you get them with the small ones, which are still devastating. There are still layers-upon-layers to ensure MAD, as far as I can tell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_demolition_munition

And let me remind you: the pipebomb guy from Jan6th hasn't been found yet, despite modern surveillance methods and nearly a year of FBI searching and interviews.

Generally the smaller the bomb the easier it is to sneak it past defenses. You couldn't do enough damage for it to matter on a country scale. You'd have to sneak many small payloads by which would be easier to detect, at that point a larger single payload would be easier to sneak in.

Radioactive payloads are harder to sneak in as ports are scanned with geiger counters, easier to do pipe bombs or fertilizer bombs, etc, but less effective.

To do real collateral damage you have to deliver the payload via the air.

Off-topic nitpick, the pipe bombs were planted on Jan 5th near the DNC and RNC headquarters. There's no known relation to the Jan 6th capitol protest.

> To do real collateral damage you have to deliver the payload via the air.

-My pet scenario is you just use DHL and ship the thing in a container.

Imagine a handful of nukes going off in, say, the Suez canal, in a lock in the Panama canal, Shanghai, Singapore, LA and Rotterdam.

You don't need to kill billions to bring the world to a halt. We'd face shortages of pretty much everything for quite a long time, with all the difficulties, suffering and general havoc that would bring with it.

- Can a state drop enough radioactive contaminants from the air that it would be impossible to detect a Davy Crockett bomb (20kt) in a container?

The weight delta between a man portable device like a Crockett and the expected load of a container is surely enough for a determined actor to shield and disguise the contents well enough to both appear as the normal stated cargo and shield the weapon's emissions from typical port of entry scanning.

A Davy Crockett may weigh only 50 lbs, but it only has a yield of 20 tons (not kilotons) All of the other super small nukes have small yields (less than 1kT). Besides the fact that they're all decommissioned, they just aren't big enough to the kind of damage people think of when they imagine a nuclear war.

If the technology you allege to exists really does exist, then the MH370 probably would have been found by now.

Keep in mind that the spooks are loathe to reveal their best technology so would never reveal it for something like finding the MH370.

* loath

You're right!

They don't need to. "Our proprietary modelling of sea currents suggests this search area", which just happens to include the known location of the wreck.

This sounds like "just looking for the Titanic"

Well, imagine if the Titanic was constantly on the move and much much smaller. And imagine if it used a nuclear reactor so that it left no debris (smoke or whatnot) behind.

And that's roughly the difficulty of finding a submarine. If anyone is seriously thinking that they can find all of an advanced nation's submarines and disabling them in a first-strike style attack... well... yeah. Its just not feasible with current technology.

At any given time, only about 3-4 SSBNs are out on patrol. The rest are in port or undergoing refits. Step one is to hit the ports, so you only have to worry about the 3-4 that are out. The subs patrol in defined patrol boxes which are roughly known to everyone.

Then you knock out the E-6s, E-4s, and all fixed VLF transmitters to remove VLF comms capability. Then you knock out, at minimum, the AEHF and Milstar satellites, but I've heard the SSBNs now can send up an Iridium buoy, which is good, that is a lot of satellites to take out. I don't know the feasibility of that. This buys some amount of time before a launch message can be received by the sub.

Now we would presume that before such a strike, the locations of the patrolling SSBNs are known. There are a number of new types of sensors such as green lasers, enhanced sonars, satellite wake detection, even antineutrino detection, about which some has come out in the open literature. There is also the emerging possibility of swarms of sonar equipped underwater drones that could aid in detection.

As for destroying the submarines, that could be any combination of attack submarines, underwater drones, aircraft with torpedoes, or aircraft with nuclear depth bombs.

It's also instructive to think about how a potential pause due to comms unavailability could affect deterrence as well, since an adversary could launch a first strike limited to military targets, and if the SSBNs were alive but out of communication, an adversary could threaten a follow up attack on cities if the remaining SSBNs did not surrender, and this would be an extremely difficult ultimatum to refuse.

> Then you knock out the E-6s, E-4s, and all fixed VLF transmitters to remove VLF comms capability

Okay, so... explain to me how Russia and/or China plans to to destroy an E-6 stationed in Nebraska before a second-strike is launched by the USA.

It takes something like 20 minutes for a missile traveling at Mach 20, launched in Russia, before it reaches Nebraska. And the whole world will know that an ICBM was launched because those things aren't exactly subtle.

And once you figure out how to kill the one in Nebraska, then you have to tell me how you kill the one in Kentucky. I guess you launch both missiles simultaneously, but... I'm sure you can see where this is going. You're gonna have to launch hundreds of ICBMs simultaneously, and then wait 20 minutes, and then hope the entirety of the USA's defense is caught sleeping on their job for 20 minutes.

With a quadcopter drone, a rifle from a helicopter, whatever. These planes are very fragile. You take out the windshield and it doesn't fly. They are much better protected up at 35,000 feet.

The other possibility is depressed trajectory SLBMs. Those could hit most targets in the U.S. in 7 minutes or less. The only problem is that the depressed trajectory means that the reentry vehicle spends more time in the atmosphere, so they're less accurate. With a maneuvering reentry vehicle, you can get better accuracy.

You're welcome to test that theory of yours by flying a quadcopter into your nearest air-force base and seeing if you can hit a grounded airplane.

Or at a minimum: think about the logistics behind such an attack. Even if you get one military base, there are hundreds of them across the USA, and you're suggesting that someone has the capability to attack all of them simultaneously.

No. The alert E-6s are normally at Travis AFB and NAS Patuxent River. There are two planes you have to take out.

Now, I have seen some evidence that this vulnerability is being more acknowledged and that they're moving around the alerts more. It's not a full roving alert because of course there are a limited number of crews, they have families, and there are not that many bases that have the working alert facilities that Pax River and Travis have.

I actually happened to be driving by a random air force base on a road trip recently and happened to see an E-4 taxiing for takeoff, which was interesting to me. They may be using those more to try to increase the alert coverage.

I saw some congressional testimony from 2019 about this issue, and the general was asked why they can't move back to continuous airborne alert like they did before '91, and the answer was that the E-6s are old and they don't have very many, and that they would only be able to do this for a couple of months before maintenance requirements precluded them from launching. Sitting on the ground puts less hours on the engines and airframes and so they can maintain that alert.

The biggest risk to the above is that with modern precision weapons a nuclear first strike to remove a nations nuclear retaliation capability. It's debatable whether a large and successful conventional first strike would trigger a retaliatory nuclear strike.