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| I'm sure someone here knows -- how many actively procured munitions could have their payload swapped for a nuclear payload? Are there "rules" against building "nuclear compatible" munitions? |
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| Are treaties still worth something? In a world where authoritarians defect the "global community" and start wars of conquests that violate MAD , are those papers and laws still worth something? |
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| The "global community" was never a thing. In the fist decade of the UN some countries made an effort, quickely it became a power grab political nightmare that never actually resolved anything. |
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| The core of the big modern (relative term here given these designs are pretty old by now) bombs are implosion fission devices that then trigger a secondary fusion explosion. The core of that primary bomb is a plutonium ball called a pit that gets crushed to trigger the initial explosion. Then the xrays released by that get reflected and use in a secondary fusion device in the tiny amount of time the shell of the bomb lasts.
https://ananuclear.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/53f947439e... |
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| Plutonium is very corrosive and sensitive to phase changes so it needs to be refurbished and replaced regularly. The weapons grade plutonium lying around is probably not bomb ready. |
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| >but basically WWII but with small nukes and regional missile defense systems playing a huge role
So a total war scenario, but with multi megaton nuclear weapons? That sounds civilization ending to me. “There was a strong wind that night and as I came out of the shelter, all I could see around us was fire…burning clothing, 'tatami' mats, and debris were blowing down the road and it looked like a flowing river of fire… I remember seeing other families, like us, holding hands and running through the fires…I saw a baby on fire on a mother's back. I saw children on fire, but they were still running. I saw people catch fire when they fell onto the road because it was so hot.” [1] This isn’t an account of the atomic bombs. This is the firebombing of Tokyo, which killed more people and destroyed more homes than either atomic bombs. The US was firebombing Japanese cities week after week, leveling over 60 Japanese cities and killing between 330,000 and 900,000 people (though we will never know for sure because the very records needed were obliterated in the conflagrations). WWII destruction was limited completely by the technology of the time. Total war means total war. [1] https://www.dw.com/en/tokyo-firebombing-survivors-recall-mos... |
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| > I would expect some type of escalation beyond the position we have been in for the better part of the last 80 years.
We have escalated beyond the point we have been in for the last 80 years. Russia have lost more troops than in any war since WWII. That is a lot of dead Slavs. Their strategic nuclear defences have already been attacked [0] and NATO currently appears to be organising direct strikes on Russian territory. They've made it quite clear that they want the war to continue until something in Russia breaks. When more warnings are you expecting to see? There are a lot of warnings out there. We could easily discover that someone tried to launch the nukes already in this conflict. It would be precedented; the situation is more tense than it ever has been before and we've had fortuitous near misses in similar situations. We're already in territory where we are rolling the dice for a catastrophe with low odds. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/world/europe/ukraine-dron... |
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| That's simply not going to happen. The West isn't sending enough military aid to tip the scales, and this is an existential war for Russia and they are managing it well enough. |
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| > Your argument here appears to literally be that Russia invades countries randomly. Not just without provocation
No, not randomly! There's has been a plan in motion since well before 2014 to reinstate the former Soviet Union. Putin has repeatedly said that this is his "dream". These countries aren't picked at random, they're all former members of the USSR. Look at it this way: Belarus is a puppet state without border controls, a part of the new Russian empire all but officially. Ukraine very nearly fell within days during 2022. If it had, the Russians would have kept right on rolling through Transnistria and into Moldova. Kazakhstan or one of the smaller -stans would be next, and so on, until the former USSR was reformed. > Not just without provocation. Countries can be invaded even if they didn't "provoke" it. I want you to pause for a second here and think about what you just said. Are you the type of person to believe that everyone that gets punched in the face "provoked" it somehow? Or every woman that got raped was responsible by "provoking" the rapist? I ask you to ask yourself these questions because there are people that think that YES, every woman that got raped was at least partly responsible for it. Are you that person? If not, why does the same logic not apply to Ukraine? Must they have "provoked" Russia? And if they did provoke them somehow, was Russia justified in killing hundreds of thousands of people in response? What... exactly... was the thing that Ukraine did that justifies 200K dead, 500K+ wounded, millions displaced, etc. Please be specific, outlining how the provocation is somehow a worse outcome for Russia than the dead and wounded they have caused. Just to reiterate: before you go off on a tangent, please very specifically explain how Ukraine joining NATO has a "greater material impact" on Russia than hundreds of thousands dead and wounded. By specific, I mean: "If Russia hadn't invaded, they would have lost N million people to X because Ukraine would have done Y, and the evidence for this is Z." Make sure 'N' is > 200K and the source of the information predates 2022. > In the 90s it decided it "wanted" to give Ukraine independence [0] and through the 90s and 00s decided that it was happy to have Ukraine as an independent state. At no point was Russia happy about the USSR member states leaving, and Putin has repeatedly stated that this is the "greatest geopolitical disaster of the last century". You're arguing against the core motivation stated by Putin himself repeatedly in personal interviews. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7632057 https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-rues-soviet-colla... https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2022/12/putins-long-w... Etc... |
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| We have the warning. Now would be the time to start building more weapons. Maybe that is what the transparency report is about, so we can show that we've done so next year? |
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| France being the only sensible one putting Putin back in his place by telling him "we also have nuclear warheads" instead of "we avoid escalation". That's how nuclear deterrent is supposed to work. |
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| During times of escalating tensions with a resourceful geopolitical adversary, you would try to cool things off with diplomacy but simultaneously... start building lots of new nuclear weapons?
Smart! |
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| >"Iran’s underground nuclear facility could be between 80 meters (260 feet) and 100 meters (328 feet) below the surface... That could be a problem for the GBU-57 since the US Air Force stated that the bomb could rip through 60 meters (200 feet) of cement and ground before detonating. US officials have talked about detonating two of these bombs consecutively to guarantee the destruction of a location. However, the new depth of the Natanz tunnels still poses a significant obstacle." [1]
[1] https://www.eurasiantimes.com/us-flaunts-massive-ordnance-pe... |
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| I can see how it comes off as dismissive my bad - it was intended to be a "take such analyses with a grain of salt if you aren't privvy to classified, relevant information". |
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| I take the disarmament claims with some degree of skepticism. Alot of these weapons provide substantial flexibility and destructive capability, which superpowers are generally not fond of relinquishing. A lot of the nuclear disarmament stuff hit its peak in the years following the collapse of the USSR, at which point US and Russian relations looked very positive and optimistic moving forward. We're now back to lows not seen since the Cold War.
In any case, for the specifics - Wiki gives 2004 [1] as the date the US reportedly dismantled its nuclear artillery, and in 2000 Russia reported that "nearly all" of its nuclear artillery had been dismantled. Nuclear landmines [2] fall under 'atomic demolition munitions' which are basically any sort of small/mobile nuke, so you get everything from landmines to the suitcase nuke weirdness. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_artillery [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_demolition_munition |
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| I'm pretty sure she isn't. I take it as more of a research effort into highly classified areas of the government. She doesn't really push a narrative IMO. |
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| It could have been interesting if tying our grids to, and providing some amount of free energy to, non-nuclear states was a concession given for non-proliferation treaties. |
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| Replacing the electronics is fairly trivial compared to building an atomic weapon from scratch.
Arming codes gives a nation time to recover or destroy them, but it’s not a long term solution. |
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| It's not a strange question: many falsehoods get repeated over and over on the internet and here on HN.
The conversation around nuclear winter focused on burning petroleum storage tanks because (in contrast to burning houses and burning trees) those kinds of fires produce the darkest smoke with a particle size small enough to get high in the atmosphere and to stay in the atmosphere for a long time. "100 oil refinery fires would be sufficient to bring about a small scale, but still globally deleterious nuclear winter," said one prominent paper. Then Saddam lit 700 oil wells on fire (and deployed land mines to slow down firefighters with the result that it took 7 months to put the fires out), and although there was some slight cooling effect, you really had to go looking for it with precision instruments to detect it at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in... |
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| I saw 9/11 cloud on TV. That was one building.
If Earth's megacities get nuked I refuse to believe that it would not have consequences for the climate. |
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| It's not just about accuracy. Targeting silos comes with multiple problems. The first is that they are deep underground and fortified to withstand nuclear blasts. The second is that even if you believe you can disable a silo, there's a very good chance that by the time your nuke gets there - what was in the silo has already been launched. There are also other practical issues - you don't know where every silo is, there are likely dummy silos meaning you end up completely wasting a high yield weapon, and so on.
US Cold War targets have been declassified. [1] That was from an era with less effective detection, and also where launching would generally involve planes, so airfields were targeted, but again you can see the extreme focus on agriculture, industry, medical, economic, and many targets simply labeled "population." The USSR's target list would have looked, more or less, identical. Modern target lists likely aren't even bothering with silos and just going for complete destruction of the enemy civilization. Nuclear war, has as a prerequisite, the end of any sort of norms. It's not about destroying the opponent's military, but about literally destroying the opponent's country. Military can be rebuilt and redeployed - by targeting population, industry, economic, medical, population, and so on you completely eliminate the enemy's ability to ever be a threat again. [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/23/us/politics/1950s-us-nucl... [1] - https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb538-Cold-War-Nuclear... (a much more informative, but less approachable article/datacache) |
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| Not necessarily. That's the entire point of US American nuclear weapons.
Edit: Unexplained downvotes are hopefully for my unclear wording. MAD is the doctrine of the US, but other places have doctrines ranging from "don't disturb our geopolitical sacred cow" to "escalation in armed conflict." Obviously there's reason to wonder whether everyone, pushed hard enough, would resort to nuclear weapons (an important consideration before putting an enemy on 'death ground'), but having stated policy that the weapons are not on the table is better than a stated policy that use would be justified “… also in the case of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons, when the very existence of the state is put under threat”, as Putin signed in 2020. https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/read-the-fine-print-russias-... |
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| Looks like only about half of them have been deployed. The rest are mostly retired but not yet dismantled, or in inventory (https://thebulletin.org/premium/2024-05/united-states-nuclea...)
Apart from the absolute number, is the collection of current weapons "more effective" (whatever that would mean -- some sort of fit for purpose) than the ~23K warheads at the end of the cold war? Or is it simply a subset of the devices in 1989, with some maintenance since then? I believe the US is designing a new warhead, maybe the first since the end of the cold war (source, discussion at the nuclear testing museum in Las Vegas last month, perhaps not the most reliable source). What about delivery? |
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| The US plan for new warheads- the Reliable Replacement Warhead- was killed by Obama in 2009. (There are minor improvements like the Mod 12 version of the B61 is under production, which is really a remaking of the Mod 4 version, stuff like that.)
However, most of the delivery mechanisms are reaching block obsolescence and will need new replacements soon: the Columbia class ballistic missile submarine to replace the Ohios, the B-21 Raider to replace the B-2, the GBSD to replace the Minuteman III, and the LRSO to replace the ALCM from the same B-52s that flew in 1963 (literally the last year of production for a B-52). It's probably going to be something like a trillion dollars over 30 years, is what outside analysts figure. Because basically Stratcom has been saying "we'll just keep doing what we did in 1989, but smaller" since 1991, and the service lives of all the equipment has run out, and so everything needs to replaced at the same time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renovation_of_the_nuclear_weap... for the price tag. |
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| Do you need to do delivery? If nuclear winter is going to end humanity as we know it, then couldn't you blow up an uninhabited wasteland part of your own country and still hurt everyone? |
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| "In Search of a Bigger Boom"
https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/09/12/in-search-of-a-bi... The scientist Edward Teller, according to one account, kept a blackboard in his office at Los Alamos during World War II with a list of hypothetical nuclear weapons on it. The last item on his list was the largest one he could imagine. The method of “delivery” — weapon-designer jargon for how you get your bomb from here to there, the target — was listed as “Backyard.” As the scientist who related this anecdote explained, “since that particular design would probably kill everyone on Earth, there was no use carting it anywhere.” |
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| The data had already been declassified up to 2020, so they only needed to estimate changes over the past 3-4 years:
> Between 2010 and 2018, the US government publicly disclosed the size of the nuclear weapons stockpile; however, in 2019 and 2020, the Trump administration rejected requests from the Federation of American Scientists to declassify the latest stockpile numbers (Aftergood 2019; Kristensen 2019a, 2020b). In 2021, the Biden administration restored the United States’ previous transparency levels by declassifying both numbers for the entire history of the US nuclear arsenal until September 2020—including the missing years of the Trump administration. Source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2024.2... |
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| > it's still massive overkill
The bombs are there because “the only way to avoid being the victim of a nuclear first strike (that having the enemy hit you with their nukes) was being able to credibly deliver a second strike.” “Thus the absurd-sounding conclusion to fairly solid chain of logic: to avoid the use of nuclear weapons, you have to build so many nuclear weapons that it is impossible for a nuclear-armed opponent to destroy them all in a first strike, ensuring your second-strike lands. You build extra missiles for the purpose of not having to fire them.” https://acoup.blog/2022/03/11/collections-nuclear-deterrence... |
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| I could argue the claim on its merits, eg that the world has changed since The Delicate Balance of Terror was written in (checks) 1958, that omnipresent satellite surveillance means that a first strike could never wipe out the enemy nuclear arsenal, etc.
But I think that's giving Brett too much credit here. His argument rests purely in the realm of game theory and logical-sounding ideas. In actual practice, the US military has never in its existence ran an analysis of how many nuclear weapons would be necessary to achieve strategic objectives in any specific scenarios. Brett later points out that: > This buildup, driven by concerns beyond even deterrence did lead to absurdities: when the SIOP (‘Single Integrated Operational Plan’) for a nuclear war was assessed by General George Lee Butler in 1991, he declared it, “the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life,” Having more warheads than targets had lead to the assignment of absurd amounts of nuclear firepower on increasingly trivial targets. Brett notes this, but it doesn't seem to give him pause or to cause his to reevaluate the validity of the doctrines he cites, even though those doctrines were largely written to justify what he rightfully describes as absurdities. The US military has always, from the moment the nuclear bomb was invented, operated with the mindset of "more nukes is better". There is no conceivable number of nukes that would make the military go "okay, that's enough, we have enough to achieve our strategic objectives in any plausible scenario". As the quote above points out, giving them more nukes just makes them assign more per potential target. The only administration that chose to conduct a survey of the SAC's war plan for deploying nukes, the fucking Bush administration under Dick Cheney, found that the plan was ridiculously overkill (hence the quote above) which directly lead to the US signing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.[1] HN commenters in this thread are giving a bunch of rationalizations why the US's nuclear policy is perfectly reasonable game theory, but any times military analysts with clearance actually looked at the US's nuke arsenal and the plans to deploy it, their conclusion was the same: "We have way more than we need". [1] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/the-illogic-of-nuclear-esc... |
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| I already gave another in-depth reply, so I'll keep this one short: the idea that the current US nuclear arsenal would be fully needed to cripple Russia or China's military and industrial capacity is ridiculous, and has been thoroughly rejected any time military analysts were actually asked by the government to make a survey of the US's nuclear plans (which is, not that often).
You don't need to bomb every station of a train line to cripple the line. If you want to stop car production, you don't need to blow up the car factory, the bolt factory, the windshield factory, and every single rare earth mine in the country. Yet those are the kind of assumptions the US doctrine relies on. Quoting from [1]: again: > Another jaw-dropping example: One part of the nuclear war plan called for destroying the Soviet tank army. As a result, JSTPS aimed a lot of weapons at not only the tanks themselves, but also the factory that produced the tanks, the steel mill that supplied the factory, the ore-processing facility that supplied the steel mill, and the mine that furnished the ore. [1] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/the-illogic-of-nuclear-esc... |
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| Like I said. A lack of war will be taken as direct evidence that it works (not any other causes). And the only way to disprove it conclusively is if we all wipe each other out. |
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| > how long a nuke in storage lasts
Decades, certainly. All but the first few generations of bombs were designed for long periods of storage. Notably, many of the TOP500 supercomputers were built with the singular goal of simulating the ageing of nuclear weapons in storage. If a supercomputer is owned by the DoE or SANDIA, then that's what it is for. > turn those swords into ploughshares relatively easily. Yes! Cold-war era warheads from both the Soviet Union and the US have been used as nuclear fuel. A notable one was the Megatons to Megawatts program: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program The plutonium in bombs is essentially "super high grade" reactor fuel. Even degraded after decades in storage it is still far, far better than what is typically used. It just needs to be converted into the MOX (metal oxide) fuel pellets and then used in a reactor, pretty much as-is. |
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| It takes quite a bit of work to maintain nuclear warheads. All active US weapons contain plutonium 239, which has a half life of 24,100 years. It's radioactive by alpha decay, which leads to changes in the material properties due to energetic collisions and the buildup of microscopic helium bubbles (alpha particles are merely ionized helium nuclei, so stopped alpha particles become helium). Since the US stopped testing actual nuclear warheads in the early 1990s, it takes a great deal of indirect theoretical and experimental evidence to make sure that nuclear warheads are reliable without live fire tests. That's part of "stockpile stewardship." [1] If the plutonium has deviated too far from its original mechanical behavior, it would need to be removed from warheads, purified, and remanufactured into replacements that match the original specs. And again, the rebuilt components need to be reliable but they can't actually be tested via explosion.
US weapons also rely on tritium gas "boosting" to operate reliably and efficiently [2], and tritium decays with only a 12.3 year half life. The gas reservoirs of weapons need their tritium replaced at significantly shorter intervals. Even manufacturing enough tritium to maintain the stockpile has become a challenge because the US has retired its Cold War era weapons-material reactors that used to operate at Hanford and Savannah River. Currently the US uses a power reactor owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority to make tritium for weapons [3]. It's possible to make nuclear weapons (even thermonuclear weapons) with only uranium 235 for fissile material and no stored tritium. Such weapons could last a much longer time without active maintenance, since U-235 decays thousands of times slower than Pu-239. However, they would be larger and heavier for the same explosive yield, which complicates delivery. They would also lose certain safety features. Finally, without being able to perform full scale tests, it is doubtful that the US would have the confidence to replace its current high-maintenance weapons stockpile with a new generation of low-maintenance weapons. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockpile_stewardship [2] https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq4-3.html#Nfaq4.3.... [3] https://www.wvlt.tv/2022/05/24/watts-bar-lone-source-nuclear... "Watts Bar lone source of a nuclear weapon material; TVA increasing production" |
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| You can try having a fruitful discussion with them if you want to.
Based on the carefully worded sibling comment to yours - it would seem they have other goals in mind. |
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| So very timely, reading The Economist from last week
https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/07/16/russias-vast-sto... (https://archive.is/Z9j7Y no paywall). I'd definitely trust The Economist over most anything on this kind of research.
Some choice quotes: "Vladimir Putin has the old politburo to thank for the huge stockpiles of weapons that were built up during the cold war" "Russia’s ability to build new tanks or infantry fighting vehicles, or even to refurbish old ones, is hampered by the difficulty of getting components. <...> The lack of high-quality ball-bearings is also a constraint." "They [military firms] also largely depend on machine tools imported years ago from Germany and Sweden, many of which are now old and hard to maintain." Given that the country has no ability to produce ball bearings - and in other news, even nails, and can only cast gun barrels in single digits on western equipment, consider me HIGHLY skeptical that any rocket modernization that was supposed to have transpired has gleaming ready to fly stuff. More likely the money was "razpil" (разпилено) - literally "sawn off". Still, lets hope we don't have to find out |
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| It's a hobby. I read a lot and I have enough formal education to digest primary sources (mostly; my highest qualification is auditing a neutronics course while in grad school).
If you too would like to know way more about nuclear weapons than is useful in civilian life, I'd recommend reading: Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb The nuclear weapons FAQ, authored by Carey Sublette, a hobbyist researcher who is extraordinarily dedicated to understanding nuclear weapons from declassified documents and physical principles: https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html Anne C. Fitzpatrick's dissertation Igniting the Light Elements: The Los Alamos Thermonuclear Weapon Project, 1942-1952: https://www.osti.gov/biblio/10596 The Arms Control Wonk blog/podcast: https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/ Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein's blog Restricted Data: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/ The nuclear weapons subreddit, particularly posts on it authored by Alex Wellerstein, Carey Sublette, and a few others whose names currently escape me: https://old.reddit.com/r/nuclearweapons/ Chuck Hansen's book "U.S Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History" (out of print, sadly; will have to pay $$$ or find a scanned pirate copy) and his massive book/PDF "The Swords of Armageddon" available for purchase here: http://www.uscoldwar.com/ |
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| I was hoping this book would be a recommended. It really, really focused, reinforced is really not the right word to use here, my views on nuclear weapons.
This should be required reading. |
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| It helps if you think of liquid-fueled rockets relying on cryogenics as something entirely different than those using hypergolics. Cryogenics can't sit there for a long time but hypergolics can. |
Because if they could start churning out a dozen or a hundred a week within a short period of time, why does the standing arsenal really matter? Does it really make a difference in global safety or geopolitics? I don’t know the first thing about the topic so this is all genuine curiosity, and I feel like the googling required to get an answer would put me on lists I don’t really feel like being on.