Sidestepping Tactical Nuclear Weapons Limits With Strategic Bombs 138
Lasrick writes "Benjamin Loehrke describes the rather odd definitions of what is a 'tactical' nuclear weapon and what isn't. 'There is enough ambiguity surrounding the capabilities of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons to render the term "tactical" all but useless for arms control purposes. As the United States and Russia pursue new arms control treaties, they should drop the tactical distinction and limit the total number of all nuclear weapons — strategic, tactical, or other.'"
Same as conventional weapons (Score:5, Interesting)
During similar talks over conventional weapons, a certain number of Russian Army Tanks were transferred to the Russian Navy, thus making them exempt from the treaty.
This is the best link I can find. Scroll down to the 'Cold War' section.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Infantry_(Russia) [wikipedia.org]
Is "tactical nuclear weapon" a bad word now? (Score:2, Interesting)
From TFA:
In any case, as a bonus for ratifying a single-limit treaty, the United States and Russia would be one step closer to retiring the term "tactical nuclear weapon," allowing this confused Cold War anachronism to drift into irrelevance.
This makes no sense to me. Tactical nuclear weapons would continue to exist, and would continue to be referred to as such. Plus, it's not obvious at all why they are any more anachronistic than strategic weapons, or why this guy seems more comfortable with the idea of weapons meant to be dropped on cities and kill vast numbers of civilians than ones intended to be deployed on a battlefield, with a much higher ratio of combatant to civilian casualties?
Re:Nuclear weapons are blase (Score:4, Interesting)
Mass drivers. Too expensive to get that much mass into orbit and no matter how fast you throw your projectile, it can only penetrate so far underground, as limited by physics.
Tactical lasers: Effectively banned as they are all too easily used, intentionally or unintentionally, as blinding weapons.
Also stupid easy to destroy such systems. Launch a missile straight up in a sub-orbital intercept trajectory. Payload is aluminum spheres that is released into a fan pattern once the missile has cleared the upper atmosphere. Any Nation that has SCUDs or similar could develop such a system. A SCUD-C has a max altitude of about 124 miles at the max range of 340 miles with a 1300lb warhead. Both system you propose would be in low earth orbit, 500 miles tops. If you shot straight up and reduced the payload weight I see no reason why a SCUD-C could not launch a payload of aluminum spheres 500 miles up. Once up there, the satellites own kinetic energy will destroy it when it hits one or more of the spheres, which relative to the satellite are not moving.
Such a system has the benefit of not creating space junk, as the spheres will simply fall back and burn up in the atmosphere. The only serious technical difficulty is targeting. The targeted satellites may have maneuver capability, but if it only has a short window of warning it will take a significant amount of fuel to maneuver out of the way of such a cloud. Running the satellite out of thruster fuel will be just as effective as destroying it.
Re:I have trouble seeing the point (Score:5, Interesting)
Then also remember that you don't want to use all your working weapons against the first aggressor nation, there are other nations that may take advantage of the strike to attack you, so you need to hold back some weapons in reserve in case you need to use them against other aggressor nations.
Going from 5,000 to 1,000, assuming 90-95% losses in a first strike, means you now only have between 50 to 100 warheads with which to retaliate with. When you look at it that way,you can understand why having 10,000 nukes is not seen as excessive by many in the military. They don't see us having 10,000 nukes. They see us having 500-1000 nukes after a first strike. less in fact when you consider that many will be offline for maintenance. Figure retaining half for continued deterrence and then you only have a max of 250-500 nukes to immediately retaliate with.
Of course then there is the fact that nuclear disarmament would probably make large scale war MORE likely. With nukes you do not need a large standing army for national defense. (For national OFFENSE, what the US is doing today, you do.) Without them you have to expend vast resources maintaining a conventional military for purely defensive purposes. Seriously, why DIDN'T the Soviet Union just steamroll until they got to Gibraltar? They could have done so with conventional forces largely at any time during the Cold War. Because they knew full well that such an action would result in nuclear retaliation.
Re:I have trouble seeing the point (Score:5, Interesting)
You can't just rip out the pass-coded detonator and wire all the blasting caps on the explosives together, to get the explosive "lens" in an implosion type weapon requires some blasting caps go off before others to take the core super-critical.If that timing is off all you get is a dirty bomb
Weapons that are not on active standby have vital parts removed including, when possible, the nuclear core.
This is done not only for safety, it prevents a saboteur from detonating a warhead. Worrying about a nuke accidentally going off is like me worrying about my car accidentally starting and driving over a little kid while I sit here in my house. Sure my car could accidentally catch fire, the horn could accidentally go off, but for the engine to accidentally start, the transmission accidentally shift into reverse, and the parking brake to accidentally disengage is an event so improbable that it is not worth considering.
They also don't store nukes in downtown New York, even though sometimes I think they should.
Re:Is "tactical nuclear weapon" a bad word now? (Score:5, Interesting)
Notice the mention of a 50-kiloton threshold for being "tactical", when bombs in the 15-20 kiloton range had strategic effects in 1945.
A real, non-hipster, way (Score:4, Interesting)
This guy thinks he's discovered some magic thought experiment that let you think everything away. No, not really. The problem is that there are hostile, sometimes crazy, nations that have nuclear weapons. There are other nations that are kinda bullies (like China) that have nuclear weapons too. So if the US, England, France, and let's say Russia too get rid of all their nuclear weapons, then all that happens is those nations have leverage to push them around.
Right now, China's nuclear arsenal is defensive only and that's all it can be. They tried to use it offensively, they'd risk total nuclear annihilation. However if nuclear weapons went away from the other nations, it would be feasible. China decides to invade Russia and don't say "that would never happen" realize a small border conflict, with fatalities, happened in 1969, and a larger one happened in 1929. So they decide to invade to take land, which they quite want and need. Russia responds with conventional weapons and is doing well in the fight but China threatens them off: Leave us alone or we'll nuke a few cities. What is Russia to do?
Or worse yet, you take North Korea. Again, right now there's an understanding that if they nuked SK or Japan, it would mean nuclear annihilation for them and crazy though their leaders may be, they don't want to die or become rules of the glass parking lot. However with the US nuclear threat gone? Maybe they decide to go for it, nuke the major military installations in SK and Japan, and invade. What do they care? The life of their citizens doesn't matter to them and they aren't getting nuked back.
That's why I say there's no viable strategy. Doesn't matter what you could talk the US and Russia in to, they aren't the only ones who have nuclear weapons and there are likely to be more nations in the future, not less. If you think you can "irony" North Korea or China or Israel or Pakistan in to giving up their weapons, good luck with that, however until that happens, don't bother trying with the US or Russia.