5,113 Ways To Ruin A Lot Of People's Day

[elder999]

How?

I mean I acknowledge that the warheads will be usable. I just don't see how you get them to target without ICBMs. If the ICBMs have been decommissioned, they are probably not easily replaced.

Remember all that great Gulf War footage from the cruise missile cameras?

While all (?) of our ground based Tomahawk nuclear missiles have been deactivated in accordance with the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, we still have ship and airship based ones. Additionally, the modification of cruise missiles that carry conventional payloads to the ability to carry the W80 warhead is not technologically challenging at all, nor would reconstructing ground based platforms for them be. The Tomahawk has a range of (about) 1200-1500 miles, and the W80 warhead is what's called a variable yield (or, sometimes incorrectly, "dial-a-yield") that ranges between 5 and 200 kilotons. For perspective, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki devices were about 12.5 and 18 kilotons, respectively. While we couldn't attack Russia from anywhere but Alaska with a ground based approach with such a device-at least, not without deploying it on foreign soil like, Afghanistan, say.., we certainly could from the sea or air-and, with their GPS guidance, variable throttles, and Digital Scene Matching Area Correlators, we can pretty much park a nuke in someone's lap with one-under the radar, and in a matter of minutes.

ICBM's?We don't need no stinking ICBMs! :lol:

All of this was and is in keeping with the shift in nuclear doctrine away from "MAD," and the growing possibility of tactical, rather than strategic nuclear warfare, and the increasing likelihood of actually using the things in warfare (not even going to get into the times that we may or may not have considered it in the past....)

And, again, in light of your earlier post-your quite right: the number of thousands of warheads we have isn't stategically significant at all-safe to say that it's enough to destroy every major city in the world-including ours-at least twice. Not likely that we'll ever use all of them, anyway....in fact, it kind of brings up the question of why we have so damn many. Interesting history there, of course.....

 

[Bruno@MT]

While all (?) of our ground based Tomahawk nuclear missiles have been deactivated in accordance with the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, we still have ship and airship based ones. Additionally, the modification of cruise missiles that carry conventional payloads to the ability to carry the W80 warhead is not technologically challenging at all, nor would reconstructing ground based platforms for them be. The Tomahawk has a range of (about) 1200-1500 miles, and the W80 warhead is what's called a variable yield (or, sometimes incorrectly, "dial-a-yield") that ranges between 5 and 200 kilotons. For perspective, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki devices were about 12.5 and 18 kilotons, respectively. While we couldn't attack Russia from anywhere but Alaska with a ground based approach with such a device-at least, not without deploying it on foreign soil like, Afghanistan, say.., we certainly could from the sea or air-and, with their GPS guidance, variable throttles, and Digital Scene Matching Area Correlators, we can pretty much park a nuke in someone's lap with one-under the radar, and in a matter of minutes.

ICBM's?We don't need no stinking ICBMs! :lol:

Thanks.

All of this was and is in keeping with the shift in nuclear doctrine away from "MAD," and the growing possibility of tactical, rather than strategic nuclear warfare, and the increasing likelihood of actually using the things in warfare (not even going to get into the times that we may or may not have considered it in the past....)

I dread the day the first tactical nuke will be detonated.
The best kind of nuke imo are the strategic multi-megaton ones, for the simple reason that no one in his right mind will ever be the first one to launch one of those. With tactical nukes, the barrier is lowered significantly, and as soon as they exist, no doubt they will be used in a conflict in which the other side does not have nukes at all. Slippery slope. Especially because -no offense- the US seems to be prepared to go to war and / or armed conflict at the drop of a dime.

And, again, in light of your earlier post-your quite right: the number of thousands of warheads we have isn't stategically significant at all-safe to say that it's enough to destroy every major city in the world-including ours-at least twice. Not likely that we'll ever use all of them, anyway....in fact, it kind of brings up the question of why we have so damn many. Interesting history there, of course.....

Simple math I guess.
First you need enough to cover the MAD scenario against the major strategic targets of all major players. Of course you need to have multiple sites with that capability in order to have a guarantee of being able to launch. Then you also need enough to arm the submarines carrying strategic nukes.
And you also need various types of nukes for various purposes, if only to be able to produce a bigger bang than the soviets.

And also, many ICBMs carry multiple warheads.
The multiplication quickly adds up.

 

[Ken Morgan]

Knowing the business that you are in, I am hesitant to debate this issue with you, but here goes anyway.

I don't necessarily think that we were looking for an opportunity to strike first. I think that we were doing to them then what the Chinese are trying to do to us now.

We knew, based on the state of their economic condition and the nature of their government, that they would try to do whatever they could to defeat us militarily. And that included having a big enough arsenal of nuclear weapons to be able to destroy us. With SDI, then needed enough warheads to get through to do damage, and that meant more missles.

Not only that, but out of self-preservation, they wanted what we had to protect themselves, if only the Politburo members. So they again ezpend resources which they scarcely had to start their own SDI program.

With all of that, we knew that this would be economically unfeasable to them. We intentionally drove them to "bankruptcy" so that we wouldn't have to fight them, either nuclear or conventionally. And it worked.

Just my theory.

Well the Warsaw Pact outnumbered NATO in every catagory. 9-1 in tanks alone I believe. I still remember in armoured school someone saying that they had to kill 9 Russian tanks before they were allowed to die in battle.

NATO had a first usage policy against the WP, simply because they outnumbered us by such a huge margin. Plus unless your the West Germans, who cares about first useage? Germany will be glowing, not the US.

Russia went bankrupt because commoditiy prices dropped like a rock after the Arab oil embargo cleared up. Oil exports from Russia became worth seriously less then they ever had so $$ coming in dropped, thats what bankrupted the USSR, not an arms race.

BTW the USA is $10trillion in debt right now and growing, spending $600billion on the military every year...who's at risk of becoming bankrupt from military spending now?

 

[Empty Hands]

Well the Warsaw Pact outnumbered NATO in every catagory. 9-1 in tanks alone I believe.

Based on the usual Soviet quality standards, I'm guessing 7 didn't work at all and the 8th would need serious work before it could do anything.

 

[5-0 Kenpo]

Well the Warsaw Pact outnumbered NATO in every catagory. 9-1 in tanks alone I believe. I still remember in armoured school someone saying that they had to kill 9 Russian tanks before they were allowed to die in battle.

NATO had a first usage policy against the WP, simply because they outnumbered us by such a huge margin. Plus unless your the West Germans, who cares about first useage? Germany will be glowing, not the US.

I'm curious as to where you get your info that NATO had a first strike policy. I've never seen that.

I do know that the Soviets had a first strike policy as well. A couple of books that I have read written by defected Soviet military personnel actually stated so. What is also interesting is that they thought NATO weak because we didn't. Now obviously, I don't know where they might hve gotten this particular piece of information, but they stated they knew.

Russia went bankrupt because commoditiy prices dropped like a rock after the Arab oil embargo cleared up. Oil exports from Russia became worth seriously less then they ever had so $$ coming in dropped, thats what bankrupted the USSR, not an arms race.

I might have overstated the case that the U.S. policy caused the situation, however, considering their efforts to keep up with us militarily, one could certainly make the case that we helped to hasten it.

[quote[
BTW the USA is $10trillion in debt right now and growing, spending $600billion on the military every year...who's at risk of becoming bankrupt from military spending now?[/quote]

Interesting way to put it. Of course, the U.S. has an actual Constitutional mandate for military spending. It would argue that it would be more accurate to state that the things which will cause the U.S. to go bankrupt are those spending items for which it was never intended to spend money, such as business subsidies, farm subsidies, social welfare, education, etc. Oh, and bank bailouts.

Or did you pick the militarye because you don't like what the U.S. is doing with it, so you're making a political argument instead of a historical one?

 

[elder999]

. What possible good can come from publicizing how many weapons of which type we have? How does this revelation benefit the American people?

Kim Jong Il has announced he'll return to njuclear negotiations, probably after a bit of ***-chewing by China, accompanied by their tying it to aid.

The IAEA has put Israel's nuclear capability on their agenda for the first time in 52 years of existence.

Russia (and a variety of other nations) have renewed their solidarity with the U.S. over Iran's nuclear capability-symbolized by U.S. troops being invited to march in Red Square with Russian troops at the Victory Day parade this year for the first time ever.

Behind the scenes, basically, momentum is growing against what is rightly perceived as the greatest rogue nuclear threat in the world-Iran. This disclosure was part of what has fostered this, and partly based on analysis of the IAEA inspection of Iran's nuclear facilities at the end of last year.

...and now I've said enough.