Every time I’ve seen nuclear stockpiles and the reduction thereof discussed, I’ve wondered: Assuming for some reason the United States needed to ramp back up to an absurd number of warheads (ignore the MAD/political practicalities), how quickly could they do so? What’s the lead time or rate limiting factors in production?
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.
It works the same as industrial capacity for things like planes or artillery shells. Once you ramp up production you can produce lots very quickly, the US produced 70,000 between 1945 and 1990, averaging 30 per week with a peak rate around 54 per week; but building out the factories to ramp up takes a long time - for the first 10 years the US averaged 6 per week. Most of the US's nuclear production capacity was dismantled. With WW2 levels of hustle and disregard for safety, we could probably build new facilities in around a year or two. These efforts would be pulling resources from attempts to ramp up production of other wartime necessities. Also you don't just need to build the nukes, you also need to build adequate delivery systems, which are all advanced aerospace manufacturing.
If you eliminate your arsenal and then decide later you want it back, you're giving adversaries a lot of time to beat you to the punch, all the while advertising that you are pursuing nuclear as opposed to conventional weapons to fight your war.
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?
Hmm yes but the other things you mention are made of steel which is plentiful.
Things like uranium and plutonium require digging up a lot of earth to obtain a tiny bit and the enrichment process is very complex and laborious as well.
Pit production is likely the rate limiting factor.
We disassembled a bunch of AFAPs so have a lot of weapons grade plutonium around. But Pu is nasty to work with & Rocky Flats--the previous pit production facility--closed down years ago. Pit production moved to Los Alamos but it is at a much reduced capability.
Also, Pantex--where nuclear weapons are assembled--isn't exactly the model for speed & efficiency.
I guess mass produced nukes would rather be enriched uranium based, due to the far easier construction. No fiddly implosive lens assembly. No weird multi-phase cristallization that goes critical if you blink. Metal that is merely as dangerous and nasty as lead, magnesium or arsenic, not plutonium.
If you really want to go carpet-bombing with nukes, miniturization isn't as important as having a lot, quickly and reliably.
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.
That is assuming nuclear war breaks out with zero warning. There is usually a build up to wars that could involve ramping up production of a nuclear arsenal before any nuclear weapons are actually used.
full scale nuclear war where the full quantity of warheads is used would be over in maybe 1hr tops. Initial attack, detection, response. Then probably another attack and another response from remaining SLICBMs and then that would be it. I don't think any capacity to create more would survive or change the outcome and therefore is not much of a deterrent.
Correct but it's still a deterrent to a conventional invasion even if it doesn't deter a nuclear first strike. Japan and South Korea are nuclear threshold states and that would factor into China's decision making.
Nuclear proliferation is the main reason I am pessimistic about nuclear power as the main global solution to decarbonizing. I don't think a world with 200 threshold nuclear states is a good idea, nor would that be in the interests of any of the major powers, most smaller countries should be aiming for a 100% renewables grid.
Force replenishment in the event of nuclear war is a moot question, but if someone can go from 100 to 1,000 warheads in a couple months, that has a lot of relevance in a growing crisis--what would Russia have done in 2022 if Ukraine had kept the ability to manufacture them and was able to build 100/year?
> googling required to get an answer would put me on lists I don’t really feel like being on.
But asking in the clear under the pseudonym "transcriptase" here isn't going to get you put on the exact same lists? How do you think this list making process works?
I would assume that asking a question in the comments section of a relevant article, and making clear why I’m doing so is slightly less flag worthy than randomly googling questions about logistics and production.
> 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?
Possessing an overwhelming amount of retaliatory force and the combined ability and willingness to deliver it immediately in the face of an enemy's first strike serves a useful purpose for deterrence. "Mutually assured destruction" means that both sides are prevented from attacking, because the other side can respond in kind. It's irrational for either side to attack, since everybody would just die. (and yes, MAD comes with its own problems)
The ability to build a bunch of bombs in the future is entirely unrelated. I mean, who cares?
I'd also like to add to this; that the ability to consecutively create additional warheads is not of any particular inherent value, especially when our reserve count is more than enough to wipe out any and all civilization - regardless of target diversity.
It's not like missiles or ammo, where the more we produce in times of conflict, the more of an upper-hand we have. We've already reached the ceiling for the finite amount of nuclear warheads required to do the most conceivable damage. Beyond is irrelevant.
The US has plenty of any conceivable war. There is probably long time to restart production since haven’t done it in a while.
The big factor is that the deployment platforms are limited. There are 400 Minuteman III missiles sitting in silos. They could put more warheads on them, but those are sitting in storage. The same is true of Trident missiles on submarines.
They could make nuclear gravity bombs but those aren’t really useful. We also have lots of those in storage.
Standing stockpiles matter in a ever changing and destabilising world. We can't imagine it now but what if the US (or any other nuclear power) started to destabalise, maybe end up in a civil war, fracture up into smaller pieces, what ever. The less nuclear weapons you have lying around during and after that process the less opportunities for things to go terribly wrong.
> 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?
There's probably a declared number where this matters, but the current number of warheads is high enough that's there's no need to make more. 3,000 is plenty to retaliate against an opponent with 30,000. More doesn't provide a benefit.
Nuclear disarmament, as practiced by the US and Russia is a negotiation to reduce the number of warheads in a coordinated fashion so that it's possible to convince warmongers on both sides that it's reasonable. The benefits are primary a reduction in cost to maintain and secure the warheads and a significant reduction in the risk of accidents related to the warheads. Mutual destruction is still assured --- you'd need a lot fewer warheads for that and involvement of other nuclear states; but then your question of production capacity would be more interesting.
> 3,000 is plenty to retaliate against an opponent with 30,000. More doesn't provide a benefit.
I think a big part of this is that the long-distance missiles, when all of this was invented, were not very accurate. Sending 10 to do the job of 1 might have been necessary just to hit the intended targets.
Modern missiles are quite capable of precision strikes.
Let's talk about just how destructive nukes are, because I think most people grossly underestimate this. One bomb in Hiroshima killed hundreds of thousands. And that was a tiny little bomb relative to modern standards - 16kt of yield in a mid-sized city of ~350k people. Modern tactical weapons (weapons intended for battlefield use) can have yields exceeding 100kt. Strategic weapons (weapons intended to end other civilizations) go into the thousands of kt. The strongest weapon ever tested being "Tsar Bomba" which had a yield of 55,000kt, so a few thousand times greater yield than the Hiroshima nuke - which was by itself enough to instantly destroy a mid-sized city and kill more than 40% of its population.
I think it's easy to lose scale/context when looking at things like nuclear test footage, so let's go the other direction. This [1] is the "Mother of All Bombs / MOAB / GBU-43" that was detonated in Afghanistan. It's the second largest conventional weapon ever fielded, weighing more than 20,000lbs and and 30+ft long (so that little blip on the screen is 30 ft for scale). It had a yield of 0.01kt. So now imagine something with literally hundreds of thousands of times greater yield - that's a modern nuke. Or, if it helps for visualization purposes, imagine hundreds of thousands of those raining down - same net effect.
So if nuclear war ever breaks out it's not going to be countries using their nukes to target isolated (and nuclear fortified) launch silos and bunkers in the middle of nowhere - they're going to try to destroy the other country (targeting things like population, economic, health, agriculture), so that they can completely eliminate the threat. And suffice to say - it won't take many nukes. The only reason you'd have thousands is to overwhelm any sort of future-tech missile defense systems as well as to eliminate any possibility for an effective first strike attack attack against you. Although even the nukes themselves are also designed to deal with missile defenses, with one missile often breaking up into multiple independent warheads on approach. This also maximizes the damage for reasons outside the scope of the post.
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So the point of this is that thousands of nukes is already enough to basically destroy every single major city in the world and thus destroy basically every single country in the world. There's no scenario where suddenly you need to scale up to tens of thousands of nukes or whatever. In fact nations like North Korea already clearly have an effective deterrent with a stockpile that's in the tens of missiles.
> So if nuclear war ever breaks out it's not going to be countries using their nukes to target isolated (and nuclear fortified) launch silos and bunkers in the middle of nowhere - they're going to try to destroy the other country (targeting things like population, economic, health, agriculture), so that they can completely eliminate the threat.
There are at least two falsehoods here. Of course missile silos will be targeted if it's possible to do so. If you're the Russians you might need to make an honest assessment of whether your weapons are accurate enough to destroy a hardened silo, but the US believes they can target silos (and has since at least the eighties).
And prioritizing destruction of enemy population over destruction of the enemy's nuclear weapons and other military assets would just be dumb.
You don’t have to imagine, here’s a web site that lets you model the impact: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/. I positioned the “moderate” 1MT single warhead strikes at all nearby army and naval bases and concluded that I won’t be incinerated right away, but will die of radiation sickness and starvation instead.
The US has tons and tons plutonium from old nuclear weapons. Enough to build tens of thousands of nukes.
Also, centrifuge aren’t used by advanced nations to make nukes. They use plutonium from spent reactor fuel. The US has lots of spent fuel that could be reprocessed for the plutonium.
The final cost of an h-bomb at industrial scale was estimated at 10k in the 1960s (for low yield).
However for practical purposes. One simply needs enough missiles and warheads of sufficient yield to overwhelm opposing interceptors, avoid risks of pre-emptive strike/miss-fires+500.
After that there are rapidly diminishing returns for more warheads.
Like many other things in the US that we don't do any more, if you found the right people (many of whom are retired) and gave them the right amount of money (copious) and eliminated all the "pesky" bottlenecks (environmental analyses, legal challenges, etc), it would take a year to start producing weapons.
On the other hand, that's how we ended up with Hanford Site.
This has not shown to be the case as we have seen with American artillery shell production. The companies are not yet ramping up, because they don't want the ground cut out from under them if the war ends early next year and congress decides to cut any funding.
Turns out having fickle, lazy, stupid, feckless politicians have the ability to destroy projects with the stroke of a pen on a whim after every election means nobody is willing to put up their own investment, and having a business sector that is largely run by shithead middle management types who have never worked a day in their lives that wasn't just balancing a spreadsheet are unwilling to do something because it doesn't promise a HIGH ENOUGH return on investment.
What an odd situation, where we can applaud "the transparency" (and I do, honestly) while the US is also simultaneously cheerfully delivering a public reminder that "we have more than enough to absolutely annihilate anyone and everyone... so don't fuck with us."
Most of the stockpile remains or grows solely due to senators from colorado, Wyoming and montana who host the ground based strategic nuclear arsenal. Force reduction would mean lost jobs and revenue.
At least the transparency can start a discussion hopefully.
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.
Hans has always been the guy keeping count. Just about anytime you hear someone cite the US stockpile count, it’s his number. Truly impressive how accurate he is able to be with no special accesses. Only 40 off.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.”
My understanding is that the theory behind nuclear winter is that all of the nuked cities will ignite, and the massive firestorms will eject ash into the upper atmosphere where it will persist for years. Aka you still need to blow up some cities to cause the winter.
Also nuclear winter is somewhat controversial, I don’t know what the latest model results are.
"Hurt everyone" is not most people's ideal strategy. Maybe North Korea would go for that, but it's really preferred to hurt the enemy more than yourself.
Yes. It looks like the new warhead will be the W93, to be deployed on the new Columbia class SSBNs. I assume they'd deploy on some sort of upgraded/refurbished Trident missile.
3000 nukes is better than Cold War highs, but it's still massive overkill.
Even with a 90% interception rate, 300 nukes would be enough to kill tens of millions of citizens of any country from the blast alone. If an enemy leader isn't deterred by that, 2700 extra nukes aren't going to change their mind.
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.”
Thus, the need for the Air Force to appropriate a multitrillion dollar black-box budget to develop a Sub-Supersonic Invisible and Noiseless Defensive Second-Strike Offensive Attack Bomber that flies faster than light so that you can bomb someone yesterday.
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".
They aren't targeting cities anymore but Russian and Chinese weapon installations. Consider the number of these. And that the ballistic missile defense is concentrated at these locations. It is surely more than 300.
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.
Oddly it seems useful for the US to have that large of a stockpile. Perhaps it's from watching too many sci-fi movies, but having a bunch of nukes on hand in the event of a massive asteroid on a trajectory to hit earth seems useful to me.
Alternatively if non-linear greenhouse process cause something like "all clouds disappearing suddenly", then nukes could be part of a last ditch effort to induce a nuclear winter to allow us time to find Ling term solutions.
Lastly, it is the USA. Why have 300 weapons when you can have 3,000.
There is no system in existence that would provide a 90% interception rate. Existing anti ballistic missile systems are designed to intercept smaller attacks with low single digit warheads, no MIRVs and no decoys not a full scale attack.
I can’t believe that people still believe in MAD. It’s such a galaxy brain theory that weapons of mass destruction will actually make us safer because that other guy over there have them as well.
And the theory will only be conclusively disproven if someone pushes the button.
It kept war out of central Europe from 1945 until 2022 (I'm not 100% sure we shouldn't count Georgia/Bosnia/Chechnia/Kosovo, so I'll say "central Europe").
I don't think two nuclear armed powers have ever declared war on each other - despite two nuclear armed powers currently being in active conflict (India and China) and another few being incredibly geopolitically unfriendly (India/Pakistan and Israel/Iran).
The whole idea behind MAD initially was that if Russia decided to get ideas in Europe, the Western powers would stop them with a nuclear curtain. That's why France has a "warning shot" nuclear doctrine, and the US hasn't ruled out Nuclear First Strike.
IMO, for what it was trying to stop, it worked. Ask people in China and India - it seems to be working for them as well.
EDIT: as an amendment to this: would Russia have been so bold as to invade Ukraine if the 1994 surrender of Ukraine's nuclear arsenal hadn't happened?
I wonder how long a nuke in storage lasts - ie, how much work does it take to maintain a stockpile of x nukes, and if you can turn those swords into ploughshares relatively easily.
I think it’s shorter than you would imagine. I recall an episode of the podcast Arms Control Wonk talking about the nukes in possession of Ukraine during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Professor Lewis stated that those warheads likely had a service life of 5-10 years. But that may be specific to those Soviet warheads, and I think that different components need to be replaced at different intervals.
Russia's nuclear stockpile -- at least the strategic warheads -- have all been built anew since the end of the Cold War. The US is also modernizing its stockpile in the same way, but it has not finished yet.
"built anew": made with all new components except that the fissile material is recycled from an old Cold-War-era warhead. (They probably re-cast and re-machine the fissile material.)
The reader might be asking, How can Russia, a poor country, afford that? Well, nukes aren't that expensive once you have the fissile material and the design and manufacturing expertise and infrastructure. The pay for the soldiers to guard the nukes and constantly be on the ready to launch them is more expensive, according to one report I saw recently (and Russia has low personnel costs).
So this varies depending on what kind of nuclear weapon is and the delivery system.
The major deterrant is the LGM-30G Minuteman III [1]. Most of our rockets use liquid propellants. Since the alert window is under 10 minutes, you can't keep a liquid-fuelled rocket permanently fueled so the Minuteman was developed as a solid rocket fuel booster.
There's a whole team responsible for maintaining the boosters and warheads of this first line of defense [2].
But there are a variety of other systems. Some dropped by strategic bombers, others on mobile launchers, shorter range missiles deployed in Europe (eg MRBMs in Turkey), nuclear weapons deployed on submarines and so on. Also you have a mix of types. AFAIK the US was moved away from highly-enriched uranium weapons in favor of plutonium. Or at least, HEU reactors have shut down. Maybe there's a sufficient stockpile? Also, a lot of these weapons will be thernonuclear so you have to worry about the production and storage of tritium. IIRC a lot of tritium is a byproduct of plutonium production.
Maintaining a significant nuclear arsenal is actually really complex and expensive.
> you can't keep a liquid-fuelled rocket permanently fueled so the Minuteman was developed as a solid rocket fuel booster.
You absolutely can! The Soviet doctrine was to use storable liquid propellants in their ICBMs - typically unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) as the fuel and nitrogen tetroxide as the oxidiser. I don’t know if they need the fuel/oxidiser replaced periodically but that combination is storable for over a decade.
The US went with solid rockets as they are more reliable - no turbines or valves etc - at the expense of performance, but the US perfected making large solid rockets before the USSR. The USSR however perfected oxidiser-rich staged combustion which extracted a lot more performance.
Storable liquid propellants are still used on satellites and deep space missions that need to perform large course corrections during their missions.
Forgive me if you meant all of your comment historically.
> Most of our rockets use liquid propellants.
Which ones? As far as I know the US only has solid fuel nuclear armed missiles. The Minuteman and the Trident.
> others on mobile launchers, shorter range missiles deployed in Europe (eg MRBMs in Turkey),
The US only has aircraft dropped bombs in Europe. The US retired their nuclear capable rockets and cruise missiles under the INF treaty in 1988. They retired their nuclear artillery etc at the end of the Cold War.
The (liquid fuelled) Jupiter missiles were removed from Turkey in 1962 after the Cuban missile crisis, in exchange for the USSR removing their nukes from Cuba, though there are still US nukes in Turkey.
> Also, a lot of these weapons will be thernonuclear
> Since the alert window is under 10 minutes, you can't keep a liquid-fuelled rocket permanently fueled so the Minuteman was developed as a solid rocket fuel booster.
Huh? The Titan II was developed to do precisely that and worked that way for decades, they were liquid-fuelled and kept fuelled in their silos.
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.
While many supercomputers were funded by stockpile stewardship, the goal was to produce high performance computers capable of a wide range of simulation needs.
One good example would be NERSC at LBL- it's unclassified research only, and their series of supercomputers were never intended to simulate ageing nuclear weapons.
Hard to say exactly what goes on in the classified supercomputers, but they certainly weren't spending much of their time simulating aging nuclear weapons- that was the ostensible reason.
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.
I really wonder what the state of Russia's nuclear arsenal is like then? Better or worse? Maybe that still have a lot of the old Nuclear power stations running to better supply the materials to maintain their warheads ?
> 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
That's peace time thinking. Little Boy was detonated over Hiroshima without ever having performed a full scale test of the design. Our knowledge and modeling capabilities today are more than sufficient to produce and stockpile a new design that is guaranteed to work -- without testing an actual weapon -- if that somehow became necessary.
There are many reasons why a nuclear power such as the US is unlikely to consider doing this, but lack of confidence in weapon design or manufacture is not among those reasons.
What you are thinking of is (or used to be, called a MIRV, a mulitiple independently-targeted re-entry vehicle). There's still only one atom bomb per warhead, but 6 warheads per mirv. Think of the MIRV like a cylinder on a revolver with 6 warheads per MIRV like the bullets in it. The warhead has the minimum amount of hardware necessary to make it blow up, while the MIRV has the computers and rocket engines on it. So the MIRV zips forward, backward, up down, then releases a warhead at the right moment for the warhead to fall to the ground. (which has no movement capability at all, not even fins). Then the MIRV zips around and releases another warhead and so on until all 6 are gone.
That being said, there are LOTS of ways to deliver warheads. The one that scares me the most is that the Russians have hidden ones pre-positioned in our 40 biggest cities or so.
Fun Fact: The russians don't even have to fire their missiles to wipe us all out. They could set them all off in their silos and create a nuclear winter that would accomplish the same thing.
edit: Sorry to pile on, you went from 0 to 3 replies in the time it took me to write this.
> Fun Fact: The russians don't even have to fire their missiles to wipe us all out. They could set them all off in their silos and create a nuclear winter that would accomplish the same thing.
There's a lot about nuclear winter that is controversial, but having nuclear weapons go off in their silos is one thing that almost everybody can agree can't cause a nuclear winter. The basic premise of nuclear winter is a) nuclear explosions on cities cause massive uncontrollable firestorms b) that pump soot into the stratosphere c) which causes massive global cooling. If any one of those links in the chain fails to hold, then nuclear winter just can't occur. A nuclear weapon going off in its silo will be more of a massive earthworks project than a firestorm, especially if the silo isn't located in the heart of a city with lots of juicy combustible material to cook off all at once.
What I was thinking was that whenever the U.S. enters into any form of weapons reduction agreement there has to be an enormous amount of internal reluctance to actually make those reductions.
Reagan's so-called "trust, but verify" policy.
I find it difficult to accept that any party to those agreements would actually reduce anything without having equivalent plans B, C, and D.
I am not a weapons expert so thank you for your insight.
> The one that scares me the most is that the Russians have hidden ones pre-positioned in our 40 biggest cities or so.
I find it hard to believe you seriously consider this, even in the absurd world of MAD-driven decisions.
Simply put, for it to be even remotely likely would require that none of these devices had as of yet been discovered, nor the intelligence nor logistics surrounding them been compromised or otherwise intercepted.
Consider that if such a situation were to be true, and uncovered, that the only possible responses would be either immediate action to have them removed, immediate retaliation, or allowing them to exist. In the first two scenarios, the weapons are no longer relevant, whether because they’re removed or war has started. In the final scenario, we’re functionally at the same place as we are with the traditional nuclear triad, albeit far closer to the precipice due to reasons made clear in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
All of this to say, the challenges, costs, and risks of enacting such a situation, as utterly ridicule-worthy in their totality as they are, can perhaps be hand-waved away by pointing to other Cold War era events. However, to argue this has actually been done, despite the entire lack of any strategic benefit, and the immeasurable net loss of position and risk to the Russians that results? Come on.
The nuclear winter thing is based on the paper where they assume that there's zero days of stockpiled grain isn't it? When in reality we could go for years with just the grain farmers keep to balance out market volatility.
The US recently improved trigger accuracy, detonating warheads at precise distances to maximize kills on hardened targets, which had the effect of increasing the number of effective warheads.
I remember reading about this a few years ago... the MC4700 "super-fuze"
It looks like it was deployed back in 2009 on the warheads on Trident SLBMs. From [0]:
"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.
The result of this fuzing scheme is a significant increase in the probability that a warhead will explode close enough to destroy the target even though the accuracy of the missile-warhead system has itself not improved.
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."
Are you thinking MIRV where multiple nuclear warheads are mounted to missile? The US has down rated lots of SLBMs and ICBMs recently. Many of the warheads in storage are from missiles. They could put them back, but then they would show in the active count.
That's insightful because it means it may be strictly an accounting issue versus an actual reduction in the number of warheads i.e. the number of warheads counted == the number mounted, not the total number possessed.
> MIRV ICMB produced and deployed by the United States from 1985 to 2005. The missile could carry up to twelve Mark 21 reentry vehicles (although treaties limited its actual payload to 10), each armed with a 300-kiloton W87 warhead. Initial plans called for building and deploying 100 MX ICBMs, but budgetary concerns limited the final procurement; only 50 entered service. Disarmament treaties signed after the Peacekeeper's development led to its withdrawal from service in 2005.
So, that's what we had been doing for a couple decades. The most crazy ass nuclear cluster bomb.
Now we're still trying to replace the LGM-30 Minutemen ICBMs we have had since 1962: Northrop Grumman's LGM-35 Sentinel. And it's taking forever & costing an unbelievable sum ($200B, $210M/missile including ground systems, although they're back to the drawing board to try to get costs down). https://www.defensenews.com/air/2024/07/08/pentagon-keeps-co...
This is after Minuteman was ~$7m/missile, a super-cheap cast-solid-fuel design, with McNamera shutting down efforts on more expensive & fancy Atlas and Titan missiles. Weighing 1/9th the weight of the monstrous Soviet R7. One persistent dude (Hall) convinced everyone we didn't need fancy we needed a survivable competent second strike capable missile swarm. Minuteman is wild. There are some great submissions on it; the communication network submission from three days ago was fabulous & shows very much a Paul Baram of RAND/Arpanet style network resiliency idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minutemanhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41019604
Also of note, Minuteman's original D-17B computer is also quite the thing. There are some great submissions on it. It uses an early hard-disk like thing as working memory. It uses diode-resistor logic (DRL) since diode-transistor-logic (DTL) wasn't reliable enough yet. Incredibly stunningly built guidance computer that was core to a reliable totally cutting edge inertial guidance system.
Anyhow yeah, we built them decommissioned utterly crazy multi-warhead missiles. And are trying and having trouble going back and building a new single warhead ICBM.
Note that the Minuteman 3, the currently deployed one, also had (has?) a MIRV capability (3 warheads). I believe it's just a single warhead now because of treaties (which may have expired), and I don't know how difficult it would be to re-MIRV it.
What was going through their minds in the 60s when they amassed 5,000...10,000 but went on to amass over 30,000? Was there any point after a few thousand?
Back in the day, most of these weapons were to be dropped from massed strategic bombers or launched on short range missiles. You needed lots both because a lot of these were never going to make it to the target and those that did would be highly inaccurate. This is combined with most of the nukes being intended to either take out the adversary's large stockpile, or survive the use of the adversary's stockpile.
Then there's the crazy use cases where they made nuclear weapons fitted for air-to-air missiles carried by interceptors as well as ground based air defense. The motivator being the poor accuracy of missiles at the time as well as why shoot N missiles at N incoming bombers when you can fire 1 and take out a whole formation. There must have been hundreds of warheads produced for those purposes alone.
Keep in mind that Sputnik only happened in 1957, so the chances of a nuke actually hitting its target were much smaller during the build up than after the rollout of ICBMs. A lot of these were tactical nuclear weapons deployed in Europe to be launched at invading Soviet forces (including by infantry! Look up the Davy Crockett if you want to see Fallout's mini-nuke's real life counterpart)
Readit News
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.
If you eliminate your arsenal and then decide later you want it back, you're giving adversaries a lot of time to beat you to the punch, all the while advertising that you are pursuing nuclear as opposed to conventional weapons to fight your war.
Things like uranium and plutonium require digging up a lot of earth to obtain a tiny bit and the enrichment process is very complex and laborious as well.
I wonder if this really ramps up so easily.
We disassembled a bunch of AFAPs so have a lot of weapons grade plutonium around. But Pu is nasty to work with & Rocky Flats--the previous pit production facility--closed down years ago. Pit production moved to Los Alamos but it is at a much reduced capability.
Also, Pantex--where nuclear weapons are assembled--isn't exactly the model for speed & efficiency.
If you really want to go carpet-bombing with nukes, miniturization isn't as important as having a lot, quickly and reliably.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/behind-the-scenes...
“pits,” which are spherical shells of plutonium about the size of a bowling ball
I assume that when weapons are decomissioned, the pits are put in storage. So, if they were able to use the same pit design, they could be reuse them?
Where full nuclear war means a full exchange of strategic fire, yes. For tactical nukes or bombardment of a non-retaliating state, less so.
megaton size has not been disclosed. The majority could be small nukes.
Nuclear proliferation is the main reason I am pessimistic about nuclear power as the main global solution to decarbonizing. I don't think a world with 200 threshold nuclear states is a good idea, nor would that be in the interests of any of the major powers, most smaller countries should be aiming for a 100% renewables grid.
But asking in the clear under the pseudonym "transcriptase" here isn't going to get you put on the exact same lists? How do you think this list making process works?
Possessing an overwhelming amount of retaliatory force and the combined ability and willingness to deliver it immediately in the face of an enemy's first strike serves a useful purpose for deterrence. "Mutually assured destruction" means that both sides are prevented from attacking, because the other side can respond in kind. It's irrational for either side to attack, since everybody would just die. (and yes, MAD comes with its own problems)
The ability to build a bunch of bombs in the future is entirely unrelated. I mean, who cares?
It's not like missiles or ammo, where the more we produce in times of conflict, the more of an upper-hand we have. We've already reached the ceiling for the finite amount of nuclear warheads required to do the most conceivable damage. Beyond is irrelevant.
The big factor is that the deployment platforms are limited. There are 400 Minuteman III missiles sitting in silos. They could put more warheads on them, but those are sitting in storage. The same is true of Trident missiles on submarines.
They could make nuclear gravity bombs but those aren’t really useful. We also have lots of those in storage.
There's probably a declared number where this matters, but the current number of warheads is high enough that's there's no need to make more. 3,000 is plenty to retaliate against an opponent with 30,000. More doesn't provide a benefit.
Nuclear disarmament, as practiced by the US and Russia is a negotiation to reduce the number of warheads in a coordinated fashion so that it's possible to convince warmongers on both sides that it's reasonable. The benefits are primary a reduction in cost to maintain and secure the warheads and a significant reduction in the risk of accidents related to the warheads. Mutual destruction is still assured --- you'd need a lot fewer warheads for that and involvement of other nuclear states; but then your question of production capacity would be more interesting.
I think a big part of this is that the long-distance missiles, when all of this was invented, were not very accurate. Sending 10 to do the job of 1 might have been necessary just to hit the intended targets.
Modern missiles are quite capable of precision strikes.
I think it's easy to lose scale/context when looking at things like nuclear test footage, so let's go the other direction. This [1] is the "Mother of All Bombs / MOAB / GBU-43" that was detonated in Afghanistan. It's the second largest conventional weapon ever fielded, weighing more than 20,000lbs and and 30+ft long (so that little blip on the screen is 30 ft for scale). It had a yield of 0.01kt. So now imagine something with literally hundreds of thousands of times greater yield - that's a modern nuke. Or, if it helps for visualization purposes, imagine hundreds of thousands of those raining down - same net effect.
So if nuclear war ever breaks out it's not going to be countries using their nukes to target isolated (and nuclear fortified) launch silos and bunkers in the middle of nowhere - they're going to try to destroy the other country (targeting things like population, economic, health, agriculture), so that they can completely eliminate the threat. And suffice to say - it won't take many nukes. The only reason you'd have thousands is to overwhelm any sort of future-tech missile defense systems as well as to eliminate any possibility for an effective first strike attack attack against you. Although even the nukes themselves are also designed to deal with missile defenses, with one missile often breaking up into multiple independent warheads on approach. This also maximizes the damage for reasons outside the scope of the post.
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So the point of this is that thousands of nukes is already enough to basically destroy every single major city in the world and thus destroy basically every single country in the world. There's no scenario where suddenly you need to scale up to tens of thousands of nukes or whatever. In fact nations like North Korea already clearly have an effective deterrent with a stockpile that's in the tens of missiles.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6rSxJnpGNg
There are at least two falsehoods here. Of course missile silos will be targeted if it's possible to do so. If you're the Russians you might need to make an honest assessment of whether your weapons are accurate enough to destroy a hardened silo, but the US believes they can target silos (and has since at least the eighties).
And prioritizing destruction of enemy population over destruction of the enemy's nuclear weapons and other military assets would just be dumb.
Also, centrifuge aren’t used by advanced nations to make nukes. They use plutonium from spent reactor fuel. The US has lots of spent fuel that could be reprocessed for the plutonium.
Deleted Comment
However for practical purposes. One simply needs enough missiles and warheads of sufficient yield to overwhelm opposing interceptors, avoid risks of pre-emptive strike/miss-fires+500.
After that there are rapidly diminishing returns for more warheads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank
On the other hand, that's how we ended up with Hanford Site.
Turns out having fickle, lazy, stupid, feckless politicians have the ability to destroy projects with the stroke of a pen on a whim after every election means nobody is willing to put up their own investment, and having a business sector that is largely run by shithead middle management types who have never worked a day in their lives that wasn't just balancing a spreadsheet are unwilling to do something because it doesn't promise a HIGH ENOUGH return on investment.
God forbid you don't make ALL the profit.
At least the transparency can start a discussion hopefully.
That's the entire point of nuclear weapons, isnit?
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-...
> 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...
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?
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.
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.”
Also nuclear winter is somewhat controversial, I don’t know what the latest model results are.
~$20 Billion requested for fiscal 2025.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
Even with a 90% interception rate, 300 nukes would be enough to kill tens of millions of citizens of any country from the blast alone. If an enemy leader isn't deterred by that, 2700 extra nukes aren't going to change their mind.
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...
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...
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...
Citation needed.
Alternatively if non-linear greenhouse process cause something like "all clouds disappearing suddenly", then nukes could be part of a last ditch effort to induce a nuclear winter to allow us time to find Ling term solutions.
Lastly, it is the USA. Why have 300 weapons when you can have 3,000.
And the theory will only be conclusively disproven if someone pushes the button.
I don't think two nuclear armed powers have ever declared war on each other - despite two nuclear armed powers currently being in active conflict (India and China) and another few being incredibly geopolitically unfriendly (India/Pakistan and Israel/Iran).
The whole idea behind MAD initially was that if Russia decided to get ideas in Europe, the Western powers would stop them with a nuclear curtain. That's why France has a "warning shot" nuclear doctrine, and the US hasn't ruled out Nuclear First Strike.
IMO, for what it was trying to stop, it worked. Ask people in China and India - it seems to be working for them as well.
EDIT: as an amendment to this: would Russia have been so bold as to invade Ukraine if the 1994 surrender of Ukraine's nuclear arsenal hadn't happened?
Current warheads = 3.7k
I wonder how long a nuke in storage lasts - ie, how much work does it take to maintain a stockpile of x nukes, and if you can turn those swords into ploughshares relatively easily.
Russia's nuclear stockpile -- at least the strategic warheads -- have all been built anew since the end of the Cold War. The US is also modernizing its stockpile in the same way, but it has not finished yet.
"built anew": made with all new components except that the fissile material is recycled from an old Cold-War-era warhead. (They probably re-cast and re-machine the fissile material.)
The reader might be asking, How can Russia, a poor country, afford that? Well, nukes aren't that expensive once you have the fissile material and the design and manufacturing expertise and infrastructure. The pay for the soldiers to guard the nukes and constantly be on the ready to launch them is more expensive, according to one report I saw recently (and Russia has low personnel costs).
The major deterrant is the LGM-30G Minuteman III [1]. Most of our rockets use liquid propellants. Since the alert window is under 10 minutes, you can't keep a liquid-fuelled rocket permanently fueled so the Minuteman was developed as a solid rocket fuel booster.
There's a whole team responsible for maintaining the boosters and warheads of this first line of defense [2].
But there are a variety of other systems. Some dropped by strategic bombers, others on mobile launchers, shorter range missiles deployed in Europe (eg MRBMs in Turkey), nuclear weapons deployed on submarines and so on. Also you have a mix of types. AFAIK the US was moved away from highly-enriched uranium weapons in favor of plutonium. Or at least, HEU reactors have shut down. Maybe there's a sufficient stockpile? Also, a lot of these weapons will be thernonuclear so you have to worry about the production and storage of tritium. IIRC a lot of tritium is a byproduct of plutonium production.
Maintaining a significant nuclear arsenal is actually really complex and expensive.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman
[2]: https://minutemanmissile.com/missilemaintenance.html
You absolutely can! The Soviet doctrine was to use storable liquid propellants in their ICBMs - typically unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) as the fuel and nitrogen tetroxide as the oxidiser. I don’t know if they need the fuel/oxidiser replaced periodically but that combination is storable for over a decade.
The US went with solid rockets as they are more reliable - no turbines or valves etc - at the expense of performance, but the US perfected making large solid rockets before the USSR. The USSR however perfected oxidiser-rich staged combustion which extracted a lot more performance.
Storable liquid propellants are still used on satellites and deep space missions that need to perform large course corrections during their missions.
> Most of our rockets use liquid propellants.
Which ones? As far as I know the US only has solid fuel nuclear armed missiles. The Minuteman and the Trident.
> others on mobile launchers, shorter range missiles deployed in Europe (eg MRBMs in Turkey),
The US only has aircraft dropped bombs in Europe. The US retired their nuclear capable rockets and cruise missiles under the INF treaty in 1988. They retired their nuclear artillery etc at the end of the Cold War.
The (liquid fuelled) Jupiter missiles were removed from Turkey in 1962 after the Cuban missile crisis, in exchange for the USSR removing their nukes from Cuba, though there are still US nukes in Turkey.
> Also, a lot of these weapons will be thernonuclear
All of them are.
Huh? The Titan II was developed to do precisely that and worked that way for decades, they were liquid-fuelled and kept fuelled in their silos.
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.
One good example would be NERSC at LBL- it's unclassified research only, and their series of supercomputers were never intended to simulate ageing nuclear weapons.
Hard to say exactly what goes on in the classified supercomputers, but they certainly weren't spending much of their time simulating aging nuclear weapons- that was the ostensible reason.
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"
That's peace time thinking. Little Boy was detonated over Hiroshima without ever having performed a full scale test of the design. Our knowledge and modeling capabilities today are more than sufficient to produce and stockpile a new design that is guaranteed to work -- without testing an actual weapon -- if that somehow became necessary.
There are many reasons why a nuclear power such as the US is unlikely to consider doing this, but lack of confidence in weapon design or manufacture is not among those reasons.
1, 4, 8, etc. per warhead, thereby increasing your capability while claiming a reduction?
That being said, there are LOTS of ways to deliver warheads. The one that scares me the most is that the Russians have hidden ones pre-positioned in our 40 biggest cities or so.
Fun Fact: The russians don't even have to fire their missiles to wipe us all out. They could set them all off in their silos and create a nuclear winter that would accomplish the same thing.
edit: Sorry to pile on, you went from 0 to 3 replies in the time it took me to write this.
There's a lot about nuclear winter that is controversial, but having nuclear weapons go off in their silos is one thing that almost everybody can agree can't cause a nuclear winter. The basic premise of nuclear winter is a) nuclear explosions on cities cause massive uncontrollable firestorms b) that pump soot into the stratosphere c) which causes massive global cooling. If any one of those links in the chain fails to hold, then nuclear winter just can't occur. A nuclear weapon going off in its silo will be more of a massive earthworks project than a firestorm, especially if the silo isn't located in the heart of a city with lots of juicy combustible material to cook off all at once.
Reagan's so-called "trust, but verify" policy.
I find it difficult to accept that any party to those agreements would actually reduce anything without having equivalent plans B, C, and D.
I am not a weapons expert so thank you for your insight.
I find it hard to believe you seriously consider this, even in the absurd world of MAD-driven decisions.
Simply put, for it to be even remotely likely would require that none of these devices had as of yet been discovered, nor the intelligence nor logistics surrounding them been compromised or otherwise intercepted.
Consider that if such a situation were to be true, and uncovered, that the only possible responses would be either immediate action to have them removed, immediate retaliation, or allowing them to exist. In the first two scenarios, the weapons are no longer relevant, whether because they’re removed or war has started. In the final scenario, we’re functionally at the same place as we are with the traditional nuclear triad, albeit far closer to the precipice due to reasons made clear in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
All of this to say, the challenges, costs, and risks of enacting such a situation, as utterly ridicule-worthy in their totality as they are, can perhaps be hand-waved away by pointing to other Cold War era events. However, to argue this has actually been done, despite the entire lack of any strategic benefit, and the immeasurable net loss of position and risk to the Russians that results? Come on.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targe...
It looks like it was deployed back in 2009 on the warheads on Trident SLBMs. From [0]:
"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.
The result of this fuzing scheme is a significant increase in the probability that a warhead will explode close enough to destroy the target even though the accuracy of the missile-warhead system has itself not improved.
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."
[0] https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni...
Are you thinking MIRV where multiple nuclear warheads are mounted to missile? The US has down rated lots of SLBMs and ICBMs recently. Many of the warheads in storage are from missiles. They could put them back, but then they would show in the active count.
> MIRV ICMB produced and deployed by the United States from 1985 to 2005. The missile could carry up to twelve Mark 21 reentry vehicles (although treaties limited its actual payload to 10), each armed with a 300-kiloton W87 warhead. Initial plans called for building and deploying 100 MX ICBMs, but budgetary concerns limited the final procurement; only 50 entered service. Disarmament treaties signed after the Peacekeeper's development led to its withdrawal from service in 2005.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-118_Peacekeeper
So, that's what we had been doing for a couple decades. The most crazy ass nuclear cluster bomb.
Now we're still trying to replace the LGM-30 Minutemen ICBMs we have had since 1962: Northrop Grumman's LGM-35 Sentinel. And it's taking forever & costing an unbelievable sum ($200B, $210M/missile including ground systems, although they're back to the drawing board to try to get costs down). https://www.defensenews.com/air/2024/07/08/pentagon-keeps-co...
This is after Minuteman was ~$7m/missile, a super-cheap cast-solid-fuel design, with McNamera shutting down efforts on more expensive & fancy Atlas and Titan missiles. Weighing 1/9th the weight of the monstrous Soviet R7. One persistent dude (Hall) convinced everyone we didn't need fancy we needed a survivable competent second strike capable missile swarm. Minuteman is wild. There are some great submissions on it; the communication network submission from three days ago was fabulous & shows very much a Paul Baram of RAND/Arpanet style network resiliency idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41019604
Also of note, Minuteman's original D-17B computer is also quite the thing. There are some great submissions on it. It uses an early hard-disk like thing as working memory. It uses diode-resistor logic (DRL) since diode-transistor-logic (DTL) wasn't reliable enough yet. Incredibly stunningly built guidance computer that was core to a reliable totally cutting edge inertial guidance system.
Anyhow yeah, we built them decommissioned utterly crazy multi-warhead missiles. And are trying and having trouble going back and building a new single warhead ICBM.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_and_USSR_nuclear_sto...