Opening, and fixed the typos in the thread title.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
So, the INF treaty expired yesterday. The National Security Archive has put together various documents relating to it from the Cold War, for anyone who is interested.
Declassified documents show major advances on verification, missed opportunities for conventional and strategic arms cuts
She/Her Pronouns
The current US President
is attempting to set up trilateral talks for a new one, involving China and Russia.
I'd trust about anyone but him for these negotiations, but a weak treaty is still probably better than no treaty at all. Fingers crossed.
The awful things he says and does are burned into our cultural consciousness like a CRT display left on the same picture too long. -Fighteer
Disasturbator
A weak treaty serves no purpose and can not enforced if it has no teeth
New theme music also a box
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Despite Trump's bluster, this falls squarely on Russia, since they're the ones who were initially in violation of the treaty and then given six months by NATO to destroy the offending missiles, but they refused, which led to the agreement being rescinded.
In the name of being honest
Has there been any sanctions implemented for the INF violations, specifically? Might be a radical stance, but I believe that when the other party breaks a mutually-agreed-upon rule, the correct response is to enforce it, not to tear it up.
Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)
No, it was based on trust. And the reality is there's no actual way of preventing either US or Russia developing new nukes if they decide to do so.
Edited by TerminusEst on Aug 4th 2019 at 10:07:27 AM
Si Vis Pacem, Para Perkele
Hiroshima making the anniversary when American planes bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the a-bomb.
Another possibility for the recent explosion in Russia besides the Russian Skyfall missile is Poseidon, the nuclear-powered and armed torpedo-drone thing.
Mind you, most of this stuff (including what carries them) aren't even slated to become operational until a few years in the future. If ever.
Edited by TerminusEst on Aug 18th 2019 at 3:07:46 AM
Si Vis Pacem, Para Perkele
I’d go with “if ever”. They’re just red meat for the base.
The proliferation of nuclear weapons is a societal evil that would best be remedied with all nuclear weapons banned and destroyed. But Russia is building weapons that can and are designed to wipe out entire countries and I honestly think the only reason they don't fire them is the threat of retaliation.
So we just "need" as many nuclear weapons to destroy the country that hits first.
Even a first strike ban is iffy because, what if Russia invades Eastern Europe? Is it best to take nukes off the table? Even if a a conventional war will mean millions of lives and leave them with the first strike option.
Probably. I'm going to even go so far to say yes.
But it's not a easy decision to make.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
There’s not a weapon anywhere on the planet that can take out a whole country in one go. That’s why these new “doomsday” weapons are nothing but hot air. They’re not going to change the strategic calculus between the US and Russia in any way because both sides still maintain first and second-strike capabilities.
It’s just Russia posturing, trying to show off how strong and smart it is.
Edited by archonspeaks on Aug 18th 2019 at 6:57:12 AM
They should have sent a poet.
One missle that can smash a state is no different from 3 missiles launched that can destroy a state.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
No single missile can destroy a state or its capacity to resist. There's a reason why targeting lists are comically long.
Remember, a belief in limited use was and is a thing. Retaliation does not guarantee deterrence, which is why plans are drawn up even in a case where both sides are fighting in a heavily irradiated environment.
Edited by TerminusEst on Aug 18th 2019 at 7:14:26 AM
Si Vis Pacem, Para Perkele
One missile can’t smash a state. Check out Nukemap [1] which lets you see the expected damage radii of different nuclear weapons. The kinds you see mounted on modern missiles only knock down buildings out to about 7-10km from the blast. Even the very largest bomb ever built only shows that level of damage out to about 30km. A single warhead could take out a small town, 2 or 3 would be used for a city.
This is why infrastructure and command and control is targeted first. Destroying literally every population center isn’t really a realistic objective.
Edited by archonspeaks on Aug 18th 2019 at 7:15:27 AM
They should have sent a poet.
Well maybe some of the really small countries {eyeballs Monaco, San Marino and Lichtenstein} though on a practical level that would always lead to the question of why.
Still, it's evident that the need for a second strike capability has not run it's course.
As the INF is gone, the game is on: DOD Conducts Ground Launch Cruise Missile Test
Meanwhile, some others are arguing that the US should have a "dead hand" system.
How does "dead hand" work in a multipolar world?
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
You get nuked and you nuke everyone else. Simple really.
On a more serious note, I'd suspect that if such a system were developed it would already know where to target the weapons in case of a decapitation strike.
If there's one thing I'm looking forward to is the inevitable suggestion to reinstate Green Light Teams.
Edited by TerminusEst on Aug 19th 2019 at 11:14:06 AM
Si Vis Pacem, Para Perkele
It kinda doesn't matter where the nukes actually fall.
Say China decides to get cheeky and nuke the shit out of Russia. Russia's Dead Hand activates and blows the shit out of NATO. America's surviving nukes fire back at Russia, while the British subs...(dice rolling)...it's BoJo the Clown writing the letters, so they fire back at Russia.
China isn't directly hit by any of this and doesn't even take too much fallout in the short run, but they're still going to have to deal with a global nuclear winter and the collapse of their food supply, and therefore their civilization giving out. No winner.
I guess that depends though on if it's a "If nuked, hit X" vs a more likely "Hit back whoever nuked us." Also, when you have a few thousand Nukes, you don't have to pick any one. It's "You get a nuke! and you get a nuke! and you get a nuke!" If you have a deadhand system, for it to be effective, you've got to nuke the person who actually killed you.
She/Her Pronouns
A cursory look at wikipedia suggests that it may usually be switched off, only activated in case of emergencies. Chances are, if tensions were high with China, Russia would switch its targeting to hit the Chinese instead of NATO, so that when the missiles flew they would not end up engaging other countries at the same time.
Either way, its ultimately an academic difference between "who dies immediately" and "who dies when the aftereffects begin to destroy human civilization". As Ramidel said, there is no winner.
Edited by AzurePaladin on Aug 19th 2019 at 3:50:54 PM
The awful things he says and does are burned into our cultural consciousness like a CRT display left on the same picture too long. -Fighteer
Servant of the Omnissiah
With Nuclear Weapons, the only winning move is not to play.
Once the missiles are in the air, everyone loses - no matter who gets hit first. And even if you don't get hit, but the other guy does.
That's not even factoring in the Nuclear Winter and the subsequent collapse of modern civilization.
I hold the secrets of the machine.
Why the Democratic Debate Revived an Old Question About Nuclear Weapons
After letting Warren explain that a “no first use” policy would reduce the odds of accidental nuclear war without denying the U.S. anything it would actually do (at least under responsible leadership), Tapper turned, for some reason, to Montana governor Steve Bullock for a rebuttal, and got one, though it was tossed in a word salad:
I wouldn’t want to take that off the table. I think America’s strength — we have to be able to say that. Look, never, I hope, certainly in my term or anyone else, would we really even get close to pulling that trigger.
But by the same token, America’s strength — and, look, this president has made America first as America alone. Our allies no longer trust us. Our adversaries are with us. But going from the position of strength, we should be negotiating down so there aren’t nuclear weapons. But drawing those lines in the sand, at this point I wouldn’t do.
After a bit more back-and-forth between the two candidates (in which Warren mentioned Trump’s erratic and destabilizing leadership, and Bullock mentioned the need to deter overseas crazy people), the debate moved on, probably leading many viewers to wonder: What was that about?
Actually, as Fred Kaplan very thoroughly explains at Slate today, arguments for and against a “no first use of nuclear weapons” declaration go all the way back to the earliest stage of the Cold War, when a series of U.S. presidents from both parties believed it was critical to offer our allies an assurance that a Communist invasion would be — or at least might be — met with a nuclear response. The very specific context was the likelihood that Soviet forces could sweep through Western Europe before a conventional response from the U.S. would take shape, though the failure to threaten North Korea with nuclear weapons prior to its invasion of South Korea in 1950 was also an issue. As Kaplan recalls, you didn’t have to believe America would actually drop the Big One to think it was prudent to keep potential aggressors mindful of the possibility.
It wasn’t just a few crazy generals who made this argument. The leaders of West Germany and other European nations — civilian and military — believed it, too. The threat of nuclear first-use — the assurance that we would risk New York for Paris, or Washington for London — lay at the heart of the U.S. security guarantee for the NATO alliance. It was — and still is — called “extended deterrence” and the “nuclear umbrella.”
As Tapper noted in asking Warren the original question, Barack Obama considered shelving this Cold War approach and making a “no first use” declaration. But eventually he demurred, fearing negative reaction from allies and also acknowledging that first use of nukes might be appropriate if something even scarier — such as biological weapons — was first deployed by adversaries. Obama did change policy somewhat, though:
He came up with this formula: The United States would not use nuclear weapons first against countries that (a) did not possess nuclear weapons and (b) had signed, and were abiding by, the Non-Proliferation Treaty. This preserved the option of going first against what many considered the main threats—Russia, China, North Korea, and (if it ever developed a bomb, as it seemed to be doing at the time) Iran.
That became U.S. policy — and, though few noticed, the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, signed in 2018 by then–Secretary of Defense James Mattis, preserved that language precisely.
Someone suggested we needed this thread, so here we are. First question, should we have a 'no first strike policy'. I don't think so, if only to keep our options open. Obama's formula is a solid one, and if we kept that I wouldn't mind.