This is not particularly true. Hypergolic fuel mixes are less efficient than LOX/LH2 (which is nontoxic (exhaust is water vapor) though still hazardous of course) and LOX/RP-1 (more or less nontoxic again. RP-1 is just fancy kerosene). The only real reasons to use them in first stages^ is that you can store them in the rocket (problematic with cryogenic fuels/oxidizers like LH2 and LOX since they will boil off over a short period of time) and the ignition system is simpler (not really a big deal).
LOX/RP-1 was actually used with earlier ICBMs like the Soviet R-7, the American Atlas. Storable hypergolic fuel mixes followed these, though now modern ICBMs are solid fuel rockets (storable, and safe for people on the ground).
Hypergolic fuel mixes have caused issues for non-military rockets too. During Apollo-Soyuz there was a leak of N2O2 into the Apollo capsule. Not a very good situation at all, but for that application they are really the best tool for the job. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo-Soyuz_Test_Project#Re-en...
^ Hypergolic fuels are also useful in engines that you need to start/stop multiple times, and in upper stages that need to store their fuel for a while.
Nice anti-nuke story. I know people want us to give up our Nukes, but with a host of middle eastern countries within grasp of nuclear technology, doing so would be asinine.
It's also interesting to note no where in the article do they talk about how the US has continually reduced its nuclear stockpile, or that we've been at the forefront of promoting non-proliferation.
What's also missing from the article is several policies from the Bush Administration which sought to update the technology we already have to keep the technology a lot safer and easier to maintain like the Reliable Replacement Warhead program:
"The Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) was a proposed new American nuclear warhead design and bomb family that was intended to be simple, reliable and to provide a long-lasting, low maintenance future nuclear force for the United States. Initiated by the United States Congress in 2004, it became a centerpiece of the plans of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to remake the nuclear weapons complex.
In 2008, the Congress denied funding for the program, and in 2009 the Obama administration called for work on the program to cease."
Seriously, so what if they have nukes? Simply having them doesn't mean you can use them.
After all, that's what the Cold War demonstrated. If you're going to use them, you have to use them in numbers great enough to wipe out every city in every nation opposing you. In essence, your own use must be heavy enough to absolutely ensure no possibility of retaliation.
Accordingly, it's not enough for Tehran to nuke Tel Aviv. They also have to nuke every city in every nation that's part of NATO and they'd have to do so at the exact same time.
In the Soviet era, we mitigated a threat of this magnitude with the Nuclear Triad, which distributed our weapons on moving platforms around the globe, ensuring that even if we were obliterated by a Soviet attack, we could make our very last act one of equally devastating retaliation. The resulting situation, known as Mutually Assured Destruction (yes, MAD), was the thing that not only kept the Cold War cold, but ensured (in theory) that any direct conflicts that did break out would never go nuclear.
You must realize that there is absolutely no way for any middle eastern country to build arsenals and delivery platforms formidable enough to replicate the Soviet stance. And even if there were, the enormous gulf between the size of their economies and ours means they couldn't get a quarter of the way there without the US rearming - even from from scratch - and recreating the MAD dynamic.
The nuclear logic is simple: unless you can use them on a scale large enough to avoid any threat of retaliation, you cannot use them at all. You can't even threaten to use them without putting your own life at risk. In that regard, they're like trying to take hostages on an airplane post-9/11. Knowing what we all know now, every one of passengers will be thinking the exact same thing: corner the bastard and either cripple or kill him.
Like soldiers dressed in bright red coats, nuclear arms are a relic of age that has passed, never to return. The more openly we can acknowledge this, the better off the world will be.
"You must realize that there is absolutely no way for any middle eastern country to build arsenals and delivery platforms formidable enough to replicate the Soviet stance."
Why bother replicating the Soviets? You flip flop from building multiple soviet naval carriers to the concept of nuclear arms in general, which is hard to read.
The delivery vehicle of the future is COTS shipping containers for inland cities, "anything that floats" for coastal cities.
You have to realize this is not 1900 anymore. World trade means that part of the world ships out millions of barrels of oil per day. Not literally inside individual barrels, but you might be surprised. And as the illegal drug trade and the illegal alien invasion shows, the US borders are basically wide open. No need for hollywood plots when UPS / fedex / DHL / USPS will do just as well.
Always think outside the box. More than a dozen years ago, how would Saudi Arabia knock down skyscrapers in NYC? That's insanity, they'd have to launch cruise missiles or build a battleship and successfully park it off the coast of NYC, or invade overland with bulldozers or something. The actual solution turned out to be a somewhat simpler social engineering hack against existing hostage rescue procedures.
So send out a fleet of 100 "fishing boats" to all the major ports. Each with innumerable radios to communicate with each other. And (at least) one capable of going boom.
Yes, I think the odds of someone replicating the USSR .mil, holodeck style, and then actually pressing the button are somewhat minimal. On the other hand, the odds of someone actually trying something equally effective are pretty good.
For a political statement, a nation could make it very clearly demonstrated you have, say, a dozen. "Yo, Bush the Third, err, I mean, Obama, pick a number between 1 and 12" and then some desert gets zapped. Then ship a disarmed, shut off one to a high value target via USPS or any other service. It'll cost two working models and you need perhaps a dozen packed up and well hidden to be effective. I would imagine the reaction would never be declassified, and I'll be surprised if it hasn't already happened.
I don't know about anyone else, but the simple fact that a large portion of human beings would elect other human beings with the capacity and resolution to press the button in case of a MAD-type event to be completely asinine. The people with the drive and resolution to press the button that would cause assured destruction of you and your kind are the absolute last people that should ever be in a position of leadership. How we, the Russians and several other countries reached the conclusion that such people should be leading us is frightening and reflects quite poorly on the capacity of our species to scale.
Is there any other social, colony-creating species out there that has developed a similar mechanism for retaliation against some threat that also guarantees the wiping out of their own colony?
> Why would it be asinine?
Seriously, so what if they have nukes? Simply having them doesn't mean you can use them.
After all, that's what the Cold War demonstrated. If you're going to use them, you have to use them in numbers great enough to wipe out every city in every nation opposing you
That's not true. The U.S. bombing of Japan demonstrated that you can use nuclear weapons in conventional war as long as the other side doesn't have any (or doesn't have very many). That's a good reason to have lots of nuclear weapons on hand against other countries that might have just a few.
> After all, that's what the Cold War demonstrated. If you're going to use them, you have to use them in numbers great enough to wipe out every city in every nation opposing you. In essence, your own use must be heavy enough to absolutely ensure no possibility of retaliation.
That only works as long as your allies have nukes and are willing to use them on your behalf. Uncertainty is one of the more dangerous things when it comes to balance of force.
Even assuming that other nations held on to the things. The question then becomes whether your enemy's allies would actually strike at you if you held something in reserve. Who's going to go first in striking back at you when they know that their payment for that's going to be their twenty largest cities? Who's that loyal that they'll get millions of their own killed for however many remain of yours?
You can't be sure, and your enemy can't be sure, quite how that's going to work out. Someone with their back against the wall in some sense; religiously, economically - whatever; may well reason the uncertainty there is better than the certainty of defeat along some other line.
Nice anti-nuke story. I know people want us to give up our Nukes, but with a host of middle eastern countries within grasp of nuclear technology, doing so would be asinine.
Not sure. Nuclear weapons serve a purpose in war, that is to take out a large installation, an air force or a navy base, say, with just one hit. Then you send in ground troops. But whatever "host of middle eastern countries within grasp of nuclear technology" there may be, they still have no capability to invade North America. On the other hand, the United States have the capability to invade any Middle Eastern country. The scenario is very unlikely.
The real risk is false alarms, and the true heroes are Vassili Archipov and Stanislav Petrov. These, and their unknown American, British, French, Chinese, Indian, Pakistani and Israeli counterparts.
The real risk is false flag ops. Say Tel Aviv vaporizes tomorrow and no one takes responsibility. Who do we nuke? They'll be demands we blast "somebody" of course. As everyone knows, the enemy of the day would probably be Iran. Now the Iraqis have no great love of the Iranians, so the logical thing for any upwind country to do, is when they obtain a special weapon, use it to frame a downwind country that's known to be further along the process than they are.
I believe this is a major part of the motivation for the Iranians to build their own nukes. Obviously their neighbors benefit by framing them, so their only hope is to build a deterrent force before they get framed.
Who benefits if Pakistan and India degenerated into a limited nuke war? Well whoever that is, is somewhat likely to want to encourage it, which wouldn't take much.
This is the hidden danger of the US/Russia MAD scenario, we could take onesie-twosie potshots at each other with no retribution because someone else would be blamed (probably China) The fact this fairly likely scenario hasn't played out is pretty interesting.
Not really, in a tactical sense in any war short of WWIII. No one can really use them without the threat of massive reprisal. No rational player would use them to take out an air force base.
Strategically, they're only really good for holding a gun to everyone's head (including your own). That can apply on a scale from the small and crazy (North Korea) to the huge, dysfunctional, and bankrupt (USSR).
Shrug. The article is mostly a tale of two, uh, causes of excitement. It doesn't make a sweeping claim about getting rid of anything.
"continually reduced its nuclear stockpile, or that we've been at the forefront of promoting non-proliferation."
I'm amused. Its easy to promote other people not having weapons :). Its worth noting that the US is still the world's largest nuclear power. The RRW program would have featured replacing every existing weapon, probably the US resuming tests, and it was pretty expenvise - are you really surprised it got cancelled?
To make things crystal clear here: the US has vastly reduced its deployed nuclear warheads and stockpiles over time. The US currently has less than 1/10th as many warheads deployed as during the peak of the Cold War, and that number is continuing to drop.
Also note that in fact Russia has more deployed warheads than the US currently.
"with a host of middle eastern countries within grasp of nuclear technology"
Who?
Israel already has a significant nuclear arsenal and very capable delivery systems - and given their history who would grudge them this? [NB I say that as someone who theoretically lives within range of their weapons.]
Apart from Iran, who might soon be able to build fission bombs and who would have difficulty delivering them very far, who are to be included in this "host" of countries?
Syria was developing a nuclear program before they had their facilities bombed by the Israelis. Saudi Arabia has shown interest though they don't want to rock the geopolitical boat, but if Iran developed the bomb then it would likely set off a local arms race. Egypt has the industrial capacity, wealth, and local nuclear technology to develop nuclear weapons if they desired and their government is in so much flux that the chances of a future Egyptian regime deciding to develop the technology (especially if Iran were to acquire it) can't be ruled out.
America's commitment to non-proliferation is debatable, especially in the middle east. We block requests for our client state to join existing nuclear treaties. America's belligerant aggressive posture/actions in the region make nuclear programs the most viable defensive strategy for nations attempting to protect themselves.
Personally, I suspect that a few governments track where pretty much all the nuclear material is in the world, given the public state of ground penetrating radar technology and the likelyhood of advanced versions of that tech being put on satellites.
Peculiar thing is that the Middle Eastern threat is created by the US itself, artificially. Even if, which is unlikely, some of those countries manage to develop a viable nuclear weapon and a viable delivery system, its hypothetical launch will be triggered not by an act of terror, but by the US aggression.
It may actually be a good thing for the Middle East to acquire nuclear weapon. It just might soften the US militant zeal a bit.
... obligatory recommendation of the book "Normal Accidents" if you want to see this trend discussed across a broad range of threat vectors, from nuclear plants to shipping disasters ... and the common threads that link them all.
"The warhead had a yield of nine megatons—about three times the explosive force of all the bombs dropped during the Second World War, including both atomic bombs"
My god. That alone is enough to scare me. Why on earth would you create a single weapon so powerful when you aren't limited to only one? I guess I don't fully grasp the concept of an arms race because no matter how I think about it that just seems grossly irresponsible.
The Soviets had (and the Russians still maintain) the one anti-ballistic missile system allowed by treaty. It's emplaced all around Moscow. In addition, Soviet leadership had constructed a series of deep bunkers and transport systems under Moscow -- there is/was another subway system underneath the civilian Moscow system for Kremlin leadership to use.
So should a missile (of several targeted against Moscow) make it through the ABM system, it would still have to destroy a very hard target. And so you need a big bomb to ensure destruction.
Interesting. That sounds like urban myth material - a special subway under the subway.
But from my limited knowledge, bigger and bigger nukes wouldn't make a difference against deep hardened bunkers since they don't penetrate before detonation. When you look at pictures of atomic bomb damage you don't see deep craters, you see a wide area of surface level damage.
That comparison is a bit misleading... the force of a nuke is essentially omnidirectional, so a lot of that energy doesn't end up creating much except heat, much of that going into the atmostphere. A conventional bomb is going to deliver all of it's force in a highly localized area.
The Tybee Island B-47 crash was an incident on February 5, 1958, in which the United States Air Force lost a 7,600-pound (3,400 kg) Mark 15 nuclear bomb in the waters off Tybee Island near Savannah, Georgia, United States. During a practice exercise, the B-47 bomber carrying the bomb collided in midair with an F-86 fighter plane. To protect the aircrew from a possible detonation in the event of a crash, the bomb was jettisoned. Following several unsuccessful searches, the bomb was presumed lost somewhere in Wassaw Sound off the shores of Tybee Island.
We actually lost a nuclear weapon just off the coast of Spain. Even scarier is that these are not the only two instances in which nuclear weapons have gone (and still remain) missing due to negligence or accident.
The only reason to keep nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert is if you're worried you might have to use them or lose them in a first strike. Now that we have almost impossible-to-target (in quantity alone) nuclear submarines with missiles capable of serving whatever strategic purpose you'd need, there's no reason to be spreading the risk around to land- and air-based systems as well.
I'm not sure if I believe this, but the US argument for retaining the triad is this:
We need to at least retain the land ICBM because they are responsible for most of the aim points for an enemy counter force strike. They are basically the size of several states, and sink hundreds or thousands of missiles, making a first strike implausible for anyone except the Russians.
With the SSBN force, they are pretty safe while at sea, but supported from two bases, each of which could be destroyed by a single missile. If you had 10 weapons, you could basically take out all long term US strategic forces, except for at-sea SSBN, if you got rid of the land ICBMs. The submarines would then be in a horrible position of "use them or lose them."
I think you could accomplish this by keeping the entire force on lower alert, which has largely been the case since the fall of the USSR.
I would hope that most of these first strike targets sit at the bottom of deep valleys, so that if a missile strike were to hit them that much of the resulting damage was buffeted and contained by the valley walls. I imagine that much of the fallout would also be captured by valley itself and that any future rains would funnel all contaminated material to the lowest point in the valley. In essence, every single one of these first strike targets should be designed to be massive sinks for radioactivity.
On your second comment, I'm actually surprised that those two bases are that vulnerable. I was under the impression that they would be fortified the same way Russian naval bases like Object 825 GTS, one of the bases for nuclear armed submarines, is.
because they are responsible for most of the aim points for an enemy counter force strike.
I hadn't thought about this aspect. If you assume your opponent has a limited number of missiles (because of treaties and/or intelligence gathering), you build your own missile launchers not only as a weapon system, but as targets to divert incoming missiles away from cities. They can't not target them without leaving a retaliatory capability in place.
Readit News
This is not particularly true. Hypergolic fuel mixes are less efficient than LOX/LH2 (which is nontoxic (exhaust is water vapor) though still hazardous of course) and LOX/RP-1 (more or less nontoxic again. RP-1 is just fancy kerosene). The only real reasons to use them in first stages^ is that you can store them in the rocket (problematic with cryogenic fuels/oxidizers like LH2 and LOX since they will boil off over a short period of time) and the ignition system is simpler (not really a big deal).
LOX/RP-1 was actually used with earlier ICBMs like the Soviet R-7, the American Atlas. Storable hypergolic fuel mixes followed these, though now modern ICBMs are solid fuel rockets (storable, and safe for people on the ground).
Hypergolic fuel mixes have caused issues for non-military rockets too. During Apollo-Soyuz there was a leak of N2O2 into the Apollo capsule. Not a very good situation at all, but for that application they are really the best tool for the job. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo-Soyuz_Test_Project#Re-en...
^ Hypergolic fuels are also useful in engines that you need to start/stop multiple times, and in upper stages that need to store their fuel for a while.
http://www.amazon.com/Ignition-informal-history-liquid-prope...
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jI8TuufCp0M
There is a PDF available here, since it's a wee bit hard to get from Amazon: http://www.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf
It's also interesting to note no where in the article do they talk about how the US has continually reduced its nuclear stockpile, or that we've been at the forefront of promoting non-proliferation.
What's also missing from the article is several policies from the Bush Administration which sought to update the technology we already have to keep the technology a lot safer and easier to maintain like the Reliable Replacement Warhead program:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliable_Replacement_Warhead_Pr...
"The Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) was a proposed new American nuclear warhead design and bomb family that was intended to be simple, reliable and to provide a long-lasting, low maintenance future nuclear force for the United States. Initiated by the United States Congress in 2004, it became a centerpiece of the plans of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to remake the nuclear weapons complex. In 2008, the Congress denied funding for the program, and in 2009 the Obama administration called for work on the program to cease."
Seriously, so what if they have nukes? Simply having them doesn't mean you can use them.
After all, that's what the Cold War demonstrated. If you're going to use them, you have to use them in numbers great enough to wipe out every city in every nation opposing you. In essence, your own use must be heavy enough to absolutely ensure no possibility of retaliation.
Accordingly, it's not enough for Tehran to nuke Tel Aviv. They also have to nuke every city in every nation that's part of NATO and they'd have to do so at the exact same time.
In the Soviet era, we mitigated a threat of this magnitude with the Nuclear Triad, which distributed our weapons on moving platforms around the globe, ensuring that even if we were obliterated by a Soviet attack, we could make our very last act one of equally devastating retaliation. The resulting situation, known as Mutually Assured Destruction (yes, MAD), was the thing that not only kept the Cold War cold, but ensured (in theory) that any direct conflicts that did break out would never go nuclear.
You must realize that there is absolutely no way for any middle eastern country to build arsenals and delivery platforms formidable enough to replicate the Soviet stance. And even if there were, the enormous gulf between the size of their economies and ours means they couldn't get a quarter of the way there without the US rearming - even from from scratch - and recreating the MAD dynamic.
The nuclear logic is simple: unless you can use them on a scale large enough to avoid any threat of retaliation, you cannot use them at all. You can't even threaten to use them without putting your own life at risk. In that regard, they're like trying to take hostages on an airplane post-9/11. Knowing what we all know now, every one of passengers will be thinking the exact same thing: corner the bastard and either cripple or kill him.
Like soldiers dressed in bright red coats, nuclear arms are a relic of age that has passed, never to return. The more openly we can acknowledge this, the better off the world will be.
Why bother replicating the Soviets? You flip flop from building multiple soviet naval carriers to the concept of nuclear arms in general, which is hard to read.
The delivery vehicle of the future is COTS shipping containers for inland cities, "anything that floats" for coastal cities.
You have to realize this is not 1900 anymore. World trade means that part of the world ships out millions of barrels of oil per day. Not literally inside individual barrels, but you might be surprised. And as the illegal drug trade and the illegal alien invasion shows, the US borders are basically wide open. No need for hollywood plots when UPS / fedex / DHL / USPS will do just as well.
Always think outside the box. More than a dozen years ago, how would Saudi Arabia knock down skyscrapers in NYC? That's insanity, they'd have to launch cruise missiles or build a battleship and successfully park it off the coast of NYC, or invade overland with bulldozers or something. The actual solution turned out to be a somewhat simpler social engineering hack against existing hostage rescue procedures.
So send out a fleet of 100 "fishing boats" to all the major ports. Each with innumerable radios to communicate with each other. And (at least) one capable of going boom.
Yes, I think the odds of someone replicating the USSR .mil, holodeck style, and then actually pressing the button are somewhat minimal. On the other hand, the odds of someone actually trying something equally effective are pretty good.
For a political statement, a nation could make it very clearly demonstrated you have, say, a dozen. "Yo, Bush the Third, err, I mean, Obama, pick a number between 1 and 12" and then some desert gets zapped. Then ship a disarmed, shut off one to a high value target via USPS or any other service. It'll cost two working models and you need perhaps a dozen packed up and well hidden to be effective. I would imagine the reaction would never be declassified, and I'll be surprised if it hasn't already happened.
Is there any other social, colony-creating species out there that has developed a similar mechanism for retaliation against some threat that also guarantees the wiping out of their own colony?
That's not true. The U.S. bombing of Japan demonstrated that you can use nuclear weapons in conventional war as long as the other side doesn't have any (or doesn't have very many). That's a good reason to have lots of nuclear weapons on hand against other countries that might have just a few.
That only works as long as your allies have nukes and are willing to use them on your behalf. Uncertainty is one of the more dangerous things when it comes to balance of force.
Even assuming that other nations held on to the things. The question then becomes whether your enemy's allies would actually strike at you if you held something in reserve. Who's going to go first in striking back at you when they know that their payment for that's going to be their twenty largest cities? Who's that loyal that they'll get millions of their own killed for however many remain of yours?
You can't be sure, and your enemy can't be sure, quite how that's going to work out. Someone with their back against the wall in some sense; religiously, economically - whatever; may well reason the uncertainty there is better than the certainty of defeat along some other line.
Not sure. Nuclear weapons serve a purpose in war, that is to take out a large installation, an air force or a navy base, say, with just one hit. Then you send in ground troops. But whatever "host of middle eastern countries within grasp of nuclear technology" there may be, they still have no capability to invade North America. On the other hand, the United States have the capability to invade any Middle Eastern country. The scenario is very unlikely.
The real risk is false alarms, and the true heroes are Vassili Archipov and Stanislav Petrov. These, and their unknown American, British, French, Chinese, Indian, Pakistani and Israeli counterparts.
The real risk is false flag ops. Say Tel Aviv vaporizes tomorrow and no one takes responsibility. Who do we nuke? They'll be demands we blast "somebody" of course. As everyone knows, the enemy of the day would probably be Iran. Now the Iraqis have no great love of the Iranians, so the logical thing for any upwind country to do, is when they obtain a special weapon, use it to frame a downwind country that's known to be further along the process than they are.
I believe this is a major part of the motivation for the Iranians to build their own nukes. Obviously their neighbors benefit by framing them, so their only hope is to build a deterrent force before they get framed.
Who benefits if Pakistan and India degenerated into a limited nuke war? Well whoever that is, is somewhat likely to want to encourage it, which wouldn't take much.
This is the hidden danger of the US/Russia MAD scenario, we could take onesie-twosie potshots at each other with no retribution because someone else would be blamed (probably China) The fact this fairly likely scenario hasn't played out is pretty interesting.
Not really, in a tactical sense in any war short of WWIII. No one can really use them without the threat of massive reprisal. No rational player would use them to take out an air force base.
Strategically, they're only really good for holding a gun to everyone's head (including your own). That can apply on a scale from the small and crazy (North Korea) to the huge, dysfunctional, and bankrupt (USSR).
"continually reduced its nuclear stockpile, or that we've been at the forefront of promoting non-proliferation."
I'm amused. Its easy to promote other people not having weapons :). Its worth noting that the US is still the world's largest nuclear power. The RRW program would have featured replacing every existing weapon, probably the US resuming tests, and it was pretty expenvise - are you really surprised it got cancelled?
Also note that in fact Russia has more deployed warheads than the US currently.
Who?
Israel already has a significant nuclear arsenal and very capable delivery systems - and given their history who would grudge them this? [NB I say that as someone who theoretically lives within range of their weapons.]
Apart from Iran, who might soon be able to build fission bombs and who would have difficulty delivering them very far, who are to be included in this "host" of countries?
At least one study claims a conflict with few as 100 detonations could result in enough fallout to trigger a 10-year global famine:
http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/nuclear/
It may actually be a good thing for the Middle East to acquire nuclear weapon. It just might soften the US militant zeal a bit.
My god. That alone is enough to scare me. Why on earth would you create a single weapon so powerful when you aren't limited to only one? I guess I don't fully grasp the concept of an arms race because no matter how I think about it that just seems grossly irresponsible.
So should a missile (of several targeted against Moscow) make it through the ABM system, it would still have to destroy a very hard target. And so you need a big bomb to ensure destruction.
But from my limited knowledge, bigger and bigger nukes wouldn't make a difference against deep hardened bunkers since they don't penetrate before detonation. When you look at pictures of atomic bomb damage you don't see deep craters, you see a wide area of surface level damage.
The Tybee Island B-47 crash was an incident on February 5, 1958, in which the United States Air Force lost a 7,600-pound (3,400 kg) Mark 15 nuclear bomb in the waters off Tybee Island near Savannah, Georgia, United States. During a practice exercise, the B-47 bomber carrying the bomb collided in midair with an F-86 fighter plane. To protect the aircrew from a possible detonation in the event of a crash, the bomb was jettisoned. Following several unsuccessful searches, the bomb was presumed lost somewhere in Wassaw Sound off the shores of Tybee Island.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Tybee_Island_mid-air_colli...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_a_Real_Killing:_Rocky_Fl...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biohazard_%28book%29
We need to at least retain the land ICBM because they are responsible for most of the aim points for an enemy counter force strike. They are basically the size of several states, and sink hundreds or thousands of missiles, making a first strike implausible for anyone except the Russians.
With the SSBN force, they are pretty safe while at sea, but supported from two bases, each of which could be destroyed by a single missile. If you had 10 weapons, you could basically take out all long term US strategic forces, except for at-sea SSBN, if you got rid of the land ICBMs. The submarines would then be in a horrible position of "use them or lose them."
I think you could accomplish this by keeping the entire force on lower alert, which has largely been the case since the fall of the USSR.
On your second comment, I'm actually surprised that those two bases are that vulnerable. I was under the impression that they would be fortified the same way Russian naval bases like Object 825 GTS, one of the bases for nuclear armed submarines, is.
I hadn't thought about this aspect. If you assume your opponent has a limited number of missiles (because of treaties and/or intelligence gathering), you build your own missile launchers not only as a weapon system, but as targets to divert incoming missiles away from cities. They can't not target them without leaving a retaliatory capability in place.