And trusting Russia and the US that they would protect Ukraine's sovereignty and "refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine".
This is a tough one, a real life trolley problem. To think there is an alternate version of history where this war is being fought with nukes right now.
I see this talking point a lot, and I feel it requires a bit more nuance.
Those bombs were Ukraine's in the same sense that the bombs in Minot AFB are North Dakota's. If the US were to suddenly fall apart (as the USSR did), North Dakota wouldn't suddenly become a nuclear power just because the bombs are physically stationed there. They could use them to jump-start a nuclear program, but those are otherwise orphaned bombs with no one having immediate means to control them.
Ukraine built those bombs/rockets. Replacing control electronics with ones under their control would have been much faster and cheaper than to build new ones from scratch.
I am deeply saddened to say that I agree. Keep the nukes.
Creating a world that results in that conclusion may go down as one of the greatest policy failures in history, and if we do in the end have an atomic war I think that's where the responsibility lay.
Ultimately we have failed as a species to rise morally above "might makes right" and I think we are going to pay for that.
Do you believe our species is capable of that in the collective sense? Isn’t “might makes right” basically the law for all animals? And if you agree with that, doesn’t it follow that to “rise morally above” that would require somehow transcending the limitations imposed by our biological reality?
We havent failed. People who think that is going away have failed to realize how there is a genetic component to personality that means it is functionally never going away. Instead you recognize violence is the basis of all power and make policy to shape that violence into rational, personal freedom and free market supporting institutions. Its what the american project has basically been at its base (partially unconaciously)up until butt hurt marxists started ruining it with what they think reality should be rather than with ways to make the reality that is better.
Some believe it was triggered by lack of water in Crimea after Ukraine blocked the canal that brought water there. So you can argue it was caused by scarcity.
You can see evidence for this as one of the first things Russia did was reopen those canals so water started flowing to Crimea again.
That might not have been the only goal, but it was certainly one of the bigger reasons for the attack.
The war started before that happened with the invasion of Crimea so that makes little to no sense. There are some people who believe almost any impossible idea. Also if it was a war about water the war would have been won now. Russia managed to achieve their aims a long time ago plus got extra land to bargain with. If that theory was true the war would have been finished a long time ago.
The war in Ukraine is only a war of resources in very minor ways. It is much more about egos, nationalism and the idea that Russia deserves to be an empire.
> The war started before that happened with the invasion of Crimea
That wasn't a war though, nobody called it a war between Ukraine and Russia at the time. Read news from the time, no mention of war between Ukraine and Russia.
The Ukraine war was very different than Russia other aggressions, the resource scarcity likely triggered this extra aggressive behavior. You can say this resource scarcity was ultimately their fault, but a starving beast will fight very aggressively regardless whose fault it is that its starving.
If the Crimean water crisis didn't happen then likely Russia would just have continued to incite rebellions and annex territory that way, and not declare a full scale war.
>The Russo-Ukrainian War began in February 2014. Following Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity, Russia occupied and annexed Crimea from Ukraine. It then supported Russian paramilitaries who began a war in the eastern Donbas region... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War
It not being in US news doesn't mean it didn't happen.
But everyone including the US acknowledges that they don’t need the ridiculous number of nuclear weapons any longer. Especially given that as Trump said Europe is responsible for itself now.
So, every European country should acquire nuclear weapons and develop MIRVs that can overwhelm Trump’s Golden Shower so they can dissuade the US from invading.
If Europe didn't already have top secret "Break in case the US goes rogue" plans then they were being negligent and I can assure you they are making those plans now.
I’m sure the plans are there. I’m unsure if they were adequately funded.
You see, for instance, a lot of high tech weapons come from the US and, presumably, have all sorts of kill switches. We, at least, need to stop buying those.
And yet we should build and struggle toward the conditions which would allow a massive reduction of the nucelar arsenal.
This would require a level of strategy and clear-mindedness as well as strengthening the US Alliance system so we can push against the autocracy superpowers in a united front, by nonviolent means.
Instead we get high school age kids with flash drives stealing the most sensitive federal government data and potentially injecting unknown code.
So the best bet is this $946B will flow down to other innovations and market translation through the small business set-aside laws. One can always hope.
There's 'x' number that is effective and practical. You have to have x1 number of submarines deployed at any time, x2 in ICBM silos, x3 on carriers, x4 on destroyers, x5 stationed at air bases. Of that pool, probably 50% have to be rotated off for maintenance, etc.
Whatever that number is, the 31,000+ we used to have was stupid. 3,500 in a historical context is a relief.
The real conundrum these days is that you can't test more. You want to be 100% certain it goes off when needed, but it's pretty hard to test that theory without... testing one.
If all that could be done with 1,500 I'm all in. Just a lot of 'practical' considerations that go into whatever 'x' number is.
I wonder to what extent simulation can reliably test the mechanical and detonation aspects? I always imagined simulation assumed you have an explosion and you want to see the effect.
If you can’t run physical experiments to adjust your models, you are limited with what you can do in terms of new designs. I would assume manufacturing and maintenance of nuclear warheads is very conservative with their designs.
That's where the NIF comes into play, the National Ignition Facility. They use lasers to generate conditions similar to a nuclear explosion for testing purposes.
There are probably economies of scale associated with maintaining nuclear weapons. Whether you have 1500 or 3500, you need a “large scale nukes” program. You’re not going to cut costs in half by cutting nukes in half.
You also have to consider that nukes have to be distributed around the world, so that you can target enemies throughout the world, so that enemies don’t know where to target their missile defense systems, and so that you still have adequate threat if sites are attacked.
This was true before missile defense systems started becoming a factor. If 1500 is an effective deterrent, you need 1500 multipled by the inverse of whatever percentage of those bombs your adversary can plausibly stop.
I can just see, shaking with horror, the image of missiles and anti missiles smashing into each other, raining immense radiation into the oceans poisining everything. And thats the best case, where the earheads are intercepted successfully.
That is like 5E6 bananas, that is like 3E3 tones of bananas.
Assuming 3500 warheads on each side, thats line 2E7 tones of bananas.
The anual production of bananas is 8E7 tones of bananas per year. So dropping all the warheads in the see is like dropping 3 months of the banana production.
---
Anyway, most of the radioactivity of bananas is due to potasium, that is very soluble so it goes to the pee that goes to the river that goes to the sea. So it's not necesary to sink the ships, just eat the bananas and wait.
---
Anyway, potasium is very soluble and does not accumulate too much in animals and plants. I'm bot sure about plutonium.
You can also think of the warheads detonating before it reaches the target but before it’s intercepted. A high atmosphere EMP is much better for the attacker than a couple kilograms of enriched fissiles being distributed over your target.
Not if ABM programs such as Golden Shield (I’m inclined to call it Phantom Menace, because it’s a crappy sequel to Star Wars) succeed. If you launch all your 1500 warheads and only 15 reach their targets, you’ll need a lot more warheads.
It's complex, for sure. I look back to the JFK era and how those folks handled far larger nuclear arsenals -- and then created the space program as we know it today. Peaceful exploration of space during the Cold War, with much of the same technology as ICBMs.
We're a far cry from that at the moment. In my view, US democracy is being contested (to say it with understatement), and US and Allied security also -- both more than probably any time in the Cold War. Worse than this is the threat to the alliance system.
The difference is now, China is ramping up its nuclear arsenal and has the economic backing to make it happen. The Russians can't be ignored either as their systems are very advanced and quite numerous. So I think to get past our internal problems in the Western world, we need a time margin of maybe 20 years.
Seen in this light, $956B over 10 years is not extreme, assuming it will indeed produce many other economic effects and technological breakthroughs (not just more graft for the billionaires). It's just I'd rather also see a massive increase in NASA funding with clear programmatic goals (instead of 'worship SpaceX'), international cooperation, and tie it to restoration of funding at the civilian agencies. We're far from that being viable at this point, however.
It’s kind of a running joke that in order for your propulsion research to get funding it needs military applications. So, unless you can make the case to put a nuke in front of your highly efficient electric thruster, you are fighting for scraps.
Given the Palestinians attacked Israel completely unprovoked with no regard to the hell that would rain down on themselves in retaliation I am horrified by the thought of them armed with nukes.
Are you aware that gaza has been under siege for decades? When Egypt refused to allow israeli ships throught the canal, Isreal invaded. According to israel, a blockade is cause enought for war.
Also why do you think gaza is so small? When did they lose access to the rest of the land around it? Why are there so many settlements?
You can really only say it's unprovoked if you ignore all of history before october 7th.
Oh and indiscriminately killing civilians is bad. Shame only one side of this 'debate' agrees.
Egypt's naval blockade was secondary. Israel struck preemptively mainly because it was clear that Egypt intended to invade, between the 100,000 troops they amassed near Israel's border, and Nasser's statements which left no doubt about his plans. The only debate is about how immanent those plans were.
It also seems misleading to talk about Israel's blockade of Gaza with no mention of all the rocket attacks that prompted it. A blockade might be an act of war, but it's sort of moot when it's preceded by acts of war from the other side.
You'd think so too if your supplies and trade with the world were disrupted while your neighbours are waiting for you to blink before destroying your entire society.
> your neighbours are waiting for you to blink before destroying your entire society.
The entire way the State was established was an unfortunate choice. Neglecting local politics and disrespecting the rights of the people already occupying the land was obviously going to lead to conflict and long term instability. While it’s impossible to undo the sins of the past, we can at least think of solutions to move forward without causing more harm.
The total net worth of all U.S. households is close to $160 trillion. A trillion dollars over a decade (100B a year) as an insurance policy is a very good deal.
I believe this budget includes supercomputer based simulations for reliability without testing. But even if it's not 100% reliable, it still works as a deterrent.
Why would the US start a nuclear war over reserve currency? You are an idiot.
Also, one reason they’re as expensive to maintain as they are is that we don’t test detonate them any more. We have to do a bunch of indirect testing with expensive equipment and supercomputers.
That’s probably a good thing; certainly the people complaining here about costs would not suggest we go back to doing so.
We could probably drive the cost down a bit by specializing in a delivery system (say, submarines) but I’m not a strategist and maybe those that are think it’s too risky. Certainly if we were to keep only one thing about the military it would be nuclear missiles.
I think the diversity of platforms is a small factor in the cost: nearly all of the equipment and people involved in the various delivery modes would still exist if there were no nukes at all, and possibly in far greater quantity. Further, I don't believe the figure cited here is actually meaningful: the net cost of nuclear weapons isn't calculable thing. There are far too many indirections involved, and the depth of the thinking and planning and interrelationships can't actually be reflected in a ledger, never mind thinking about what the cost of not funding this arsenal might be.
But, to the extent that the bean counters can, somehow, draw a bunch of arbitrary lines in the sand and directly attribute some 11% of the US military budget to the nukes keeping the peace on behalf of the entire Western world, it doesn't appear excessive.
The goal of the US nuclear unbrella isn't just to defend the western world, it's to inhibit the rest of the western world from building nuclear weapons.
At some point there may be a phase change where the US abandons this goal. In that world, the rational strategy becomes one of strategic disengagement, so that if nuclear war breaks out (or a conventional war that risks going nuclear) the US is not drawn in. The lesson becomes that of WW1, not WW2.
So say you. This is a discussion about costs, as opposed "goals." Were I to stipulate the claim you make, then it's all be a terrible failure: at least three US allies have built and currently operate a nuclear arsenal.
The thinking has always been that we need a triad of nuclear delivery systems, partially for deterrence and partially as a hedge against future technology. Submarines are survivable today, but who knows what new detection system a brilliant Chinese scientist might invent tomorrow? And SLBMs can't really hold deeply buried bunkers at risk, like the ones heavily used in North Korea and Iran. Hitting those takes an air delivered "bunker buster" nuke.
Similarly, part of the reason the UK has repeatedly decided to retain its remaining nuclear weapons (Trident submarines) is that nukes were and are, pound for pound, very inexpensive compared to other weapons.
> Feels like it doesn’t cost much to become a United States level nuclear superpower
Any country attempting to build a military nuclear capability will need to invest in manufacturing fuel from mining to highly enriched forms suitable for weapons. This is not something easy to hide, as Iran found out the hard way a couple times.
Ask Ukraine how much it cost them to get rid of theirs.
And trusting Russia and the US that they would protect Ukraine's sovereignty and "refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine".
[flagged]
This is a tough one, a real life trolley problem. To think there is an alternate version of history where this war is being fought with nukes right now.
I see this talking point a lot, and I feel it requires a bit more nuance.
Those bombs were Ukraine's in the same sense that the bombs in Minot AFB are North Dakota's. If the US were to suddenly fall apart (as the USSR did), North Dakota wouldn't suddenly become a nuclear power just because the bombs are physically stationed there. They could use them to jump-start a nuclear program, but those are otherwise orphaned bombs with no one having immediate means to control them.
Ukraine was pretty much military factory of the USSR. Do you seriously believe they couldn’t decode and take control of the nukes?
Russia even threatened invasion if Ukraine started messing with those nukes.
Ukraine built those bombs/rockets. Replacing control electronics with ones under their control would have been much faster and cheaper than to build new ones from scratch.
I am deeply saddened to say that I agree. Keep the nukes.
Creating a world that results in that conclusion may go down as one of the greatest policy failures in history, and if we do in the end have an atomic war I think that's where the responsibility lay.
Ultimately we have failed as a species to rise morally above "might makes right" and I think we are going to pay for that.
Do you believe our species is capable of that in the collective sense? Isn’t “might makes right” basically the law for all animals? And if you agree with that, doesn’t it follow that to “rise morally above” that would require somehow transcending the limitations imposed by our biological reality?
> transcending the limitations imposed by our biological reality?
IMHO that's almost the definition of civilization.
I agree somewhat at the collective level. I don’t think that applies as much at the individual level though.
Why wouldn’t it?
We havent failed. People who think that is going away have failed to realize how there is a genetic component to personality that means it is functionally never going away. Instead you recognize violence is the basis of all power and make policy to shape that violence into rational, personal freedom and free market supporting institutions. Its what the american project has basically been at its base (partially unconaciously)up until butt hurt marxists started ruining it with what they think reality should be rather than with ways to make the reality that is better.
> Ultimately we have failed as a species to rise morally above "might makes right"
We really need to get out of the economy of scarcity. Without that, war and aggression are unavoidable.
But Ukrainian invasion is not caused by scarcity.
Some believe it was triggered by lack of water in Crimea after Ukraine blocked the canal that brought water there. So you can argue it was caused by scarcity.
You can see evidence for this as one of the first things Russia did was reopen those canals so water started flowing to Crimea again.
That might not have been the only goal, but it was certainly one of the bigger reasons for the attack.
The war started before that happened with the invasion of Crimea so that makes little to no sense. There are some people who believe almost any impossible idea. Also if it was a war about water the war would have been won now. Russia managed to achieve their aims a long time ago plus got extra land to bargain with. If that theory was true the war would have been finished a long time ago.
The war in Ukraine is only a war of resources in very minor ways. It is much more about egos, nationalism and the idea that Russia deserves to be an empire.
> The war started before that happened with the invasion of Crimea
That wasn't a war though, nobody called it a war between Ukraine and Russia at the time. Read news from the time, no mention of war between Ukraine and Russia.
The Ukraine war was very different than Russia other aggressions, the resource scarcity likely triggered this extra aggressive behavior. You can say this resource scarcity was ultimately their fault, but a starving beast will fight very aggressively regardless whose fault it is that its starving.
If the Crimean water crisis didn't happen then likely Russia would just have continued to incite rebellions and annex territory that way, and not declare a full scale war.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/19/world/europe/ukraine.html
Check out:
>The Russo-Ukrainian War began in February 2014. Following Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity, Russia occupied and annexed Crimea from Ukraine. It then supported Russian paramilitaries who began a war in the eastern Donbas region... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War
It not being in US news doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Before Russia invaded Crimea was there a water crisis?
And then they blow up the dam which supply water to Crimea assuring no water will flow through the mentioned canal for decades.
Russians tried to occupy Ukraine and destroy Ukrainian culture and identity for centuries. That is the real goal.
The war was inevitable. Here is from 2014: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28229785
It would help but I don't think that would be enough. Wars and power games would continue out of either boredom or because of ideology.
I’m confused. Why is this being flagged? The discussion is civil and this is a topic that’s usually interesting to the crowd here.
[flagged]
No mention of the moral obligation to the other 100+ compliant nations in the non-proliferation treaty to disarm?
No one is talking about disarming the US.
But everyone including the US acknowledges that they don’t need the ridiculous number of nuclear weapons any longer. Especially given that as Trump said Europe is responsible for itself now.
So, every European country should acquire nuclear weapons and develop MIRVs that can overwhelm Trump’s Golden Shower so they can dissuade the US from invading.
You can only lose trust once.
If Europe didn't already have top secret "Break in case the US goes rogue" plans then they were being negligent and I can assure you they are making those plans now.
I’m sure the plans are there. I’m unsure if they were adequately funded.
You see, for instance, a lot of high tech weapons come from the US and, presumably, have all sorts of kill switches. We, at least, need to stop buying those.
Trump has talked about disarming the US.
[0] https://apnews.com/article/trump-china-russia-nuclear-bbc1c7...
Sadly, we need it.
And yet we should build and struggle toward the conditions which would allow a massive reduction of the nucelar arsenal.
This would require a level of strategy and clear-mindedness as well as strengthening the US Alliance system so we can push against the autocracy superpowers in a united front, by nonviolent means.
Instead we get high school age kids with flash drives stealing the most sensitive federal government data and potentially injecting unknown code.
So the best bet is this $946B will flow down to other innovations and market translation through the small business set-aside laws. One can always hope.
We don’t need it. We have about 3500 warheads and another 1500 awaiting dismantlement
I’m not going to say that a country doesn’t need nuclear weapons in the modern era. As disappointing as that is.
But I really do not see why we need 3500
Surely, 1500 nuclear bombs is an effective deterrent
There's 'x' number that is effective and practical. You have to have x1 number of submarines deployed at any time, x2 in ICBM silos, x3 on carriers, x4 on destroyers, x5 stationed at air bases. Of that pool, probably 50% have to be rotated off for maintenance, etc.
Whatever that number is, the 31,000+ we used to have was stupid. 3,500 in a historical context is a relief.
The real conundrum these days is that you can't test more. You want to be 100% certain it goes off when needed, but it's pretty hard to test that theory without... testing one.
If all that could be done with 1,500 I'm all in. Just a lot of 'practical' considerations that go into whatever 'x' number is.
> The real conundrum these days is that you can't test more.
This is why the DOE has the most powerful supercomputers in the world. They have to simulate nuclear explosions because they can't test them.
I wonder to what extent simulation can reliably test the mechanical and detonation aspects? I always imagined simulation assumed you have an explosion and you want to see the effect.
If you can’t run physical experiments to adjust your models, you are limited with what you can do in terms of new designs. I would assume manufacturing and maintenance of nuclear warheads is very conservative with their designs.
That's where the NIF comes into play, the National Ignition Facility. They use lasers to generate conditions similar to a nuclear explosion for testing purposes.
There are probably economies of scale associated with maintaining nuclear weapons. Whether you have 1500 or 3500, you need a “large scale nukes” program. You’re not going to cut costs in half by cutting nukes in half.
You also have to consider that nukes have to be distributed around the world, so that you can target enemies throughout the world, so that enemies don’t know where to target their missile defense systems, and so that you still have adequate threat if sites are attacked.
This was true before missile defense systems started becoming a factor. If 1500 is an effective deterrent, you need 1500 multipled by the inverse of whatever percentage of those bombs your adversary can plausibly stop.
I can just see, shaking with horror, the image of missiles and anti missiles smashing into each other, raining immense radiation into the oceans poisining everything. And thats the best case, where the earheads are intercepted successfully.
Assumimg each warhead has 5kg of plutonium and each side launches 3500, that's 35 tones of plutonium.
The estimation is that the sea has 4E9 tones of disolved uranium.
I'd better not try, but there is already a lot of natural radioactive materialas in the sea.
---
Acording to a ramdon Reddit comment https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/96oprs/comment/... a core of a warhead in your hand gives 0.5S.
That is like 5E6 bananas, that is like 3E3 tones of bananas.
Assuming 3500 warheads on each side, thats line 2E7 tones of bananas.
The anual production of bananas is 8E7 tones of bananas per year. So dropping all the warheads in the see is like dropping 3 months of the banana production.
---
Anyway, most of the radioactivity of bananas is due to potasium, that is very soluble so it goes to the pee that goes to the river that goes to the sea. So it's not necesary to sink the ships, just eat the bananas and wait.
---
Anyway, potasium is very soluble and does not accumulate too much in animals and plants. I'm bot sure about plutonium.
You can also think of the warheads detonating before it reaches the target but before it’s intercepted. A high atmosphere EMP is much better for the attacker than a couple kilograms of enriched fissiles being distributed over your target.
> 1500 nuclear bombs is an effective deterrent
Not if ABM programs such as Golden Shield (I’m inclined to call it Phantom Menace, because it’s a crappy sequel to Star Wars) succeed. If you launch all your 1500 warheads and only 15 reach their targets, you’ll need a lot more warheads.
It's complex, for sure. I look back to the JFK era and how those folks handled far larger nuclear arsenals -- and then created the space program as we know it today. Peaceful exploration of space during the Cold War, with much of the same technology as ICBMs.
We're a far cry from that at the moment. In my view, US democracy is being contested (to say it with understatement), and US and Allied security also -- both more than probably any time in the Cold War. Worse than this is the threat to the alliance system.
The difference is now, China is ramping up its nuclear arsenal and has the economic backing to make it happen. The Russians can't be ignored either as their systems are very advanced and quite numerous. So I think to get past our internal problems in the Western world, we need a time margin of maybe 20 years.
Seen in this light, $956B over 10 years is not extreme, assuming it will indeed produce many other economic effects and technological breakthroughs (not just more graft for the billionaires). It's just I'd rather also see a massive increase in NASA funding with clear programmatic goals (instead of 'worship SpaceX'), international cooperation, and tie it to restoration of funding at the civilian agencies. We're far from that being viable at this point, however.
> with much of the same technology as ICBMs.
It’s kind of a running joke that in order for your propulsion research to get funding it needs military applications. So, unless you can make the case to put a nuke in front of your highly efficient electric thruster, you are fighting for scraps.
> And yet we should build and struggle toward the conditions which would allow a massive reduction of the nucelar arsenal.
Good luck convincing other countries to trust the US.
Imagine if you will a situation in which the Palestinians or Ukrainians had a few nukes.
At the very least every country including my own should have a way to drag the enemy down to the hell should all else fail.
That's exactly why Israel has the Samson Option. If you manage to destroy them, they will take you to hell with them.
Given the Palestinians attacked Israel completely unprovoked with no regard to the hell that would rain down on themselves in retaliation I am horrified by the thought of them armed with nukes.
Unprovoked?
Are you aware that gaza has been under siege for decades? When Egypt refused to allow israeli ships throught the canal, Isreal invaded. According to israel, a blockade is cause enought for war.
Also why do you think gaza is so small? When did they lose access to the rest of the land around it? Why are there so many settlements?
You can really only say it's unprovoked if you ignore all of history before october 7th.
Oh and indiscriminately killing civilians is bad. Shame only one side of this 'debate' agrees.
Egypt's naval blockade was secondary. Israel struck preemptively mainly because it was clear that Egypt intended to invade, between the 100,000 troops they amassed near Israel's border, and Nasser's statements which left no doubt about his plans. The only debate is about how immanent those plans were.
It also seems misleading to talk about Israel's blockade of Gaza with no mention of all the rocket attacks that prompted it. A blockade might be an act of war, but it's sort of moot when it's preceded by acts of war from the other side.
> a blockade is cause enought for war
You'd think so too if your supplies and trade with the world were disrupted while your neighbours are waiting for you to blink before destroying your entire society.
> your neighbours are waiting for you to blink before destroying your entire society.
The entire way the State was established was an unfortunate choice. Neglecting local politics and disrespecting the rights of the people already occupying the land was obviously going to lead to conflict and long term instability. While it’s impossible to undo the sins of the past, we can at least think of solutions to move forward without causing more harm.
A blockade did not help with that.
The total net worth of all U.S. households is close to $160 trillion. A trillion dollars over a decade (100B a year) as an insurance policy is a very good deal.
You are assuming it’ll actually work. Will the US nuke countries that move away from the dollar as a reserve currency?
We're undermining it ourselves with allowing crypto to be legal & traded in the manner it is.
I believe this budget includes supercomputer based simulations for reliability without testing. But even if it's not 100% reliable, it still works as a deterrent.
Why would the US start a nuclear war over reserve currency? You are an idiot.
That's actually pretty cheap.
$94.6B/y, as compared to the $824B 2024 DOD budget. 11.4% of DOD to sustain the most important weapon system in existence.
I wouldn't use the word "cheap," but it doesn't look all that unreasonable, given what we're dealing with here.
Also, one reason they’re as expensive to maintain as they are is that we don’t test detonate them any more. We have to do a bunch of indirect testing with expensive equipment and supercomputers.
That’s probably a good thing; certainly the people complaining here about costs would not suggest we go back to doing so.
We could probably drive the cost down a bit by specializing in a delivery system (say, submarines) but I’m not a strategist and maybe those that are think it’s too risky. Certainly if we were to keep only one thing about the military it would be nuclear missiles.
I think the diversity of platforms is a small factor in the cost: nearly all of the equipment and people involved in the various delivery modes would still exist if there were no nukes at all, and possibly in far greater quantity. Further, I don't believe the figure cited here is actually meaningful: the net cost of nuclear weapons isn't calculable thing. There are far too many indirections involved, and the depth of the thinking and planning and interrelationships can't actually be reflected in a ledger, never mind thinking about what the cost of not funding this arsenal might be.
But, to the extent that the bean counters can, somehow, draw a bunch of arbitrary lines in the sand and directly attribute some 11% of the US military budget to the nukes keeping the peace on behalf of the entire Western world, it doesn't appear excessive.
The goal of the US nuclear unbrella isn't just to defend the western world, it's to inhibit the rest of the western world from building nuclear weapons.
At some point there may be a phase change where the US abandons this goal. In that world, the rational strategy becomes one of strategic disengagement, so that if nuclear war breaks out (or a conventional war that risks going nuclear) the US is not drawn in. The lesson becomes that of WW1, not WW2.
"The goal of the US nuclear unbrella..."
So say you. This is a discussion about costs, as opposed "goals." Were I to stipulate the claim you make, then it's all be a terrible failure: at least three US allies have built and currently operate a nuclear arsenal.
The thinking has always been that we need a triad of nuclear delivery systems, partially for deterrence and partially as a hedge against future technology. Submarines are survivable today, but who knows what new detection system a brilliant Chinese scientist might invent tomorrow? And SLBMs can't really hold deeply buried bunkers at risk, like the ones heavily used in North Korea and Iran. Hitting those takes an air delivered "bunker buster" nuke.
I thought the same. So we are still not gonna see any of the good stuff, ey?
Correct.
Similarly, part of the reason the UK has repeatedly decided to retain its remaining nuclear weapons (Trident submarines) is that nukes were and are, pound for pound, very inexpensive compared to other weapons.
That’s alarmingly cheap when spread over a decade. Feels like it doesn’t cost much to become a United States level nuclear superpower.
> Feels like it doesn’t cost much to become a United States level nuclear superpower
Any country attempting to build a military nuclear capability will need to invest in manufacturing fuel from mining to highly enriched forms suitable for weapons. This is not something easy to hide, as Iran found out the hard way a couple times.
OTOH, nobody is going to invade North Korea now.
Sounds like mostly maintenance, warheads etc. though rather than refinement of new materials?
We aren't expanding the weapons stockpile so there's not a of refinement needed, just enough for maintenance.
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Might be busy in cutting amount of eggs consumed government offices.
The doge website informs me that chocolate rations are UP
Of course all the SpaceX and Tesla contracts are 100% efficient. Nothing to see there, move on to science, health, education.