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Some weapons do use GPS. The Joint Direct Attack Munition, the US's most common "smart bomb", is GPS-dependent. There's an inertial backup, but it's not that good. With GPS, it can hit a bunker or an artillery emplacement or a parked vehicle. Without GPS, small targets are out.
DARPA has been working on small, low-cost inertial systems with enough accuracy to remove GPS dependence. Exactly how good those systems are and which weapons systems now use them is not talked about much. Here's the project poster.[1] This is an improved form of MEMS accelerometers and gyros, not new physics. DARPA has a project for that, too, but the near term goal is small, cheap, and disposable for munitions.
There's much current interest in weapons which combine gun, bomb, and missile technology to boost range. Bombs with a small jet engine and wings for extra range exist. Both the US and Russia have them. Artillery rounds with a rocket upper stage are becoming available. The general idea is to have stuff you can shoot into heavily defended territory.[2]
[1] https://eri-summit.darpa.mil/docs/ERIsummit2020/posters/25_P...
That's how the original Third Reich V-rockets worked as well, and they were shockingly inaccurate. It didn't matter for the Nazis, as their intention was to spread terror among the British population instead of actually hitting specific military targets, but in a modern war waged under the rules of war, "collateral damage" can actually be a war crime, and even if not, it will provoke significant opposition.
This can at the moment be seen in Ukraine, where Ukraine regularly (and rightfully, IMHO) claims that Russia's strikes violate the rules of war by hitting civilian infrastructure en masse, and where Ukraine's strike capability against Russia is severely impeded by Russian GPS jamming (that also causes serious safety issues for civilian airlines [1]), but also in the current Israel/Palestine war, where Hamas regularly claims that Israeli strikes are too imprecise [2] or unguided [3], while Israel claims it hits hidden weapons caches that subsequently explode and cause a lot of secondary damage [4].
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/finland-estonia-gps-jamming-russia-...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-attack-raf...
[3] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/05/31/i...
[4] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/military-experts-discuss-i...
Million-inhabitants city nearby: burns to the ground due to garbage guidance
President: …dig out the plan for world war 3, I guess.
Nobody would fire a warning shot using an ICBM, because if things are hot enough to require a warning shot, that leaves a whole lot of interpretation up to your adversary who is quite likely to respond with their own ICBMs, before finding out yours were loaded with conventional munitions to make a point.
There are however, shorter range ballistic missiles, Russia has a lot of them (the US mostly gave up mid range ballistic missiles in a nuclear treaty) and has even launched a few with concrete "nuclear warhead simulation masses" at Ukraine.
> Before the invention of this new fuzing mechanism, even the most accurate ballistic missile warheads might not detonate close enough to targets hardened against nuclear attack to destroy them. But the new super-fuze is designed to destroy fixed targets by detonating above and around a target in a much more effective way. Warheads that would otherwise overfly a target and land too far away will now, because of the new fuzing system, detonate above the target...
> As a consequence, the US submarine force today is much more capable than it was previously against hardened targets such as Russian ICBM silos. A decade ago, only about 20 percent of US submarine warheads had hard-target kill capability; today they all do.
https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni...
But when it's the difference between hitting a hardened target or being off by 200 meters, that doesn't really affect normal people.
Which is precisely why even the mere ownership of nuclear weapons was ruled by the ICJ to be illegal: a violation of inter alia the Hague [1907], UN Charter and Geneva Conventions.
Specifically the Geneva Convention Protocol I (1977) states that ‘the civilian population shall not be the object of attack’.
The 1977 Geneva Protocol was ratified by the USA, so its not even that mystical international law thing - its domestic law.
The nuclear powers have spent the next 25 years trying to lobby and bully their way out of this inconvenient bit of international law. Expect to see some in the comments.
https://www.icj-cij.org/case/95 https://cnduk.org/resources/tridents-compatibility-internati...
[1] If Ukraine kept the nuclear weapons post USSR collapse we probably would not have the war on Ukraine, lots of dangerous threats but nothing else.
If Ukraine tried to keep the nuclear weapons they would have been invaded within half an hour of that becoming apparent in or around 1994. They had no meaningful operational control over them, thus it would not have acted as a deterrent against that invasion.
Yes, nukes are really potent deterrent. Ukraine's case is not the right one to show this.
If you are looking for an example where nuclear deterrent works Russia's case is much better. They are badly bogged down in Ukraine. The reason why nobody dares to escalate and turn Moscow to rubble is because they have the nukes as a credible deterrent. All the tiptoeing around the range of missiles given to Ukraine and the constraints they have on not targeting Russia directly with them is due to that.
Only until someone escalates! Or a sufficient number of sensors misfire concurrently, as I suppose that isn't quite what we refer to as escalation.
Its just that after the invasion of Nicaragua in 1984 it decided to abide by the court "on a case to case basis". Russia also decided to ignore the ICJ in 2022.
FWIW I agree that everyone should have nukes, there would be a lot fewer military adventures. But that's not the _current_ USA/UK/FR domestic* and international law.
* ratified treaties become domestic law.
It has some use and does prevent someone trying. But there is a downside to it that is too much. But for some cases like Taiwan or Ukraine …
Yip, what about Guyana fending off Venzuela? Why can't they play? At some point its immoral to say "this level of security is only for us".
This is just naive. They'll become more and more common, and their usage is inevitable. In fact, the US has already used them in war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
The hard part is doing that during re-entry.