Why Is America Getting a New $100 Billion Nuclear Weapon? (thebulletin.org) 403
"America is building a new weapon of mass destruction, a nuclear missile the length of a bowling lane," writes the contributing editor for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (in an article shared by Slashdot reader DanDrollette):
It will be able to travel some 6,000 miles, carrying a warhead more than 20 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It will be able to kill hundreds of thousands of people in a single shot.
The U.S. Air Force plans to order more than 600 of them...
Based on a Pentagon report cited by the Arms Control Association Association and Bloomberg News, the government will spend roughly $100 billion to build the weapon, which will be ready to use around 2029... The missile goes by the inglorious acronym GBSD, for "ground-based strategic deterrent." The GBSD is designed to replace the existing fleet of Minuteman III missiles; both are intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs... The official purpose of American ICBMs goes beyond responding to nuclear assault. They are also intended to deter such attacks, and serve as targets in case there is one. Under the theory of deterrence, America's nuclear arsenal — currently made up of 3,800 warheads — sends a message to other nuclear-armed countries. It relays to the enemy that U.S. retaliation would be so awful, it had better not attack in the first place...
Many of the missile's critics are former military leaders, and their criticism has to do with those immovable silos. Relative to nuclear missiles on submarines, which can slink around undetected, and nuclear bombs on airplanes — the two other legs of the nuclear triad, in defense jargon — America's land-based nuclear missiles are easy marks.
The U.S. Air Force plans to order more than 600 of them...
Based on a Pentagon report cited by the Arms Control Association Association and Bloomberg News, the government will spend roughly $100 billion to build the weapon, which will be ready to use around 2029... The missile goes by the inglorious acronym GBSD, for "ground-based strategic deterrent." The GBSD is designed to replace the existing fleet of Minuteman III missiles; both are intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs... The official purpose of American ICBMs goes beyond responding to nuclear assault. They are also intended to deter such attacks, and serve as targets in case there is one. Under the theory of deterrence, America's nuclear arsenal — currently made up of 3,800 warheads — sends a message to other nuclear-armed countries. It relays to the enemy that U.S. retaliation would be so awful, it had better not attack in the first place...
Many of the missile's critics are former military leaders, and their criticism has to do with those immovable silos. Relative to nuclear missiles on submarines, which can slink around undetected, and nuclear bombs on airplanes — the two other legs of the nuclear triad, in defense jargon — America's land-based nuclear missiles are easy marks.
Fixed missile are job programs... (Score:2)
The entire MIC is a jobs program (Score:2)
Unusual to hear the total cost estimate (Score:2)
Usually the reported number is per-year or short term and not the total cost if it is military spending... this was a better sourced article than usual.
When it's for the people it's a 10 year projection to inflate the cost but when it's industry pork it's yearly or within an election cycle; generally speaking.
Clearly this is pork and it's hard to believe a senator is so weak they need to steal federal money to prop up a tiny community in their state.
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Wonder what these "high paying jobs" are. Last I checked, these things were maintained by the military, which is hardly "high paying", not by civilian contractors (which aren't all that high paying, except for the lobbyists)....
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Well, these missiles are intentionally installed in parts of country where barely anyone lives. Hence, yes, an officer working there has a good job relative to the neighborhood. The placement of missiles in states like Dakotas is intentional. They call it nuclear sponge, because it is believed that if an all out nuclear war starts, the locations of these silos will be attacked first, so they were placed in remote unpopulated parts of country.
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100 Billion for 200+ missles. (Score:2)
The same happened with the navies spending on the standard missile. Somehow the same platform has proven ABM, anti sat and other specialized sub variants that were never funded to any extent in the public budget.
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Raytheon has had so many openly announced contracts for Standard Missile variants (SM-2, SM-3, SM-6, and their subtypes) that it is hard to pick out the contract that covers particular new functions, but they are generally part of the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense program. That program's development budget is very much on the public books, for example as discussed at https://news.usni.org/2020/10/... [usni.org] .
Re: 100 Billion for 200+ missles. (Score:2)
Being on the books isn't the issue.
Everyone has heard about the $600 hammers the pentagon bought, with whatever grain of truth is in the story.
Re: 100 Billion for 200+ missles. (Score:5, Informative)
it was grains, indeed.
There was *definitely* an issue with small quantity purchases going through bureaucracies. In one example I saw, a roughly $1 part got to over $100 entirely for the time spent handling the order at multiple review levels.
The $10,000 (or so) coffee pots were a different story.
It made good press and screaming material, but these were a discontinued model for which commercial airlines paid $4,000. The high price came from having to machine up another production run.
And *why* buy pots that cost thousands instead of $20 generics? Something to do with objects suddenly flying about cabins and breaking in the cockpit while full of hot liquid being considered a Bad Thing (TM).
The P-3s these were going on spent 12 hours in the air. Whoever was piloting the last 4 hour shift had already tried to sleep for four hours (mandatory), let alone who would be flying if they got extended to an extra four hours (at which point the first pilot had had his four hours of "sleep".
The cost of keeping them caffeinated was small potatoes . . .
.
Meanwhile... (Score:3, Insightful)
Drug prices like insulin are out of control.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world... [bbc.com]
How about taking 0.1% of the military budget and putting it towards public health? Or is that socialism bad?
Trump already fixed Insulin prices for U.S. (Score:2, Informative)
Trump already took action [hhs.gov] last year to lower Insulin prices, for the U.S, maybe that's why you had to use a BBC source to highlight insults woes...
Of course, maybe Biden undid that? Not sure.
As someone with a close friend who's T1 diabetic (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Meanwhile... (Score:5, Informative)
No they aren't. The article states that people are paying $275 a vial for Eli Lilly Humalog. However, if you live in the UK, you can buy the same vial of Eli Lilly Humalog for $30:
https://pharmacyoutlet.co.uk/p... [pharmacyoutlet.co.uk]
You don't need to increase health funds to solve that problem. You just need to stop drug companies ripping off your own citizens.
Re:Meanwhile... (Score:5, Funny)
Its pretty obvious that Americans lost when they kicked the British out in 1776.
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No, that's a horrible strategy. Because instead of just capping the price of insulin, it's just giving money to drug manufacturers. There's a reason the US spends twice what Britain and Canada do per capita on healthcare. It's not that the military is draining the budget (that's a completely unrelated question). It's because Britain and Canada negotiate with several vendors to supply their drugs a
You can't touch the military budget (Score:2)
And let's be clear here, not retraining, _jobs_. If you lay somebody off who makes or maintains missiles then they better have a job lined up that week.
This is what the "Green New Deal" is for. It's a jobs program that we can run parallel to the milit
Re:Meanwhile... (Score:5, Insightful)
What on earth are you refuting from the above post? After all you said drug prices on insulin are still out of control and at no point was the parent claiming we didnt already spend a lot on health care in this country. You literally decided to just go off and talk about whatever you wanted to talk about and then go off and claim the parent wasn't being "factual" when you arent even addressing anything they said.
It should be noted though that the real problem with health care costs in this country has nothing to do with us needing to spend more but on our massively inefficiently private healthcare system. Every other first world nation in the world spends around half what we do for their socialized services that give free, world class health care to all of their citizens. All we need to do to massively bring down healthcare costs in this country is to copy one of the incredibly successful systems operating in any one of dozens of countries.
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He asked us to redirect 0.1% of the military budget to public health. We already spend far more than that on public health. The Department of Veterans Affairs spends about $82 billion (with a B) each year on veterans' health care. The DoD spends about $43B/year on health care for active duty military. Those represent about 11% and 6% of the military budget, respectively. (VA is a separate department, so its budget is not part of the military budget.)
US governments -- federal, state and local -- spend a [datawrapper.de]
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We have ALREADY done far more than what the troll up-thread asked us to do. It did not help. In fact, it made things worse. See also higher-education costs -- the government keeps dumping more money towards trying to make colleges and universities less expensive, but it ends up triggering cost inflation. It is the same syndrome, different context.
Don't blame me because you are too stupid to recognize this.
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Well there you go, now you're actually making a bit of a case for something. Maybe follow it up with data on how prior increased government expenditures on healthcare didn't make a difference as you seem to still be leaning on the "spending more money is inherently bad" crutch when that is hardly a universal sentiment nor would it stand up to even the mildest of critical thought as the exact same thought process can be used in raising the budget of anything including the military.
Regardless of any of this t
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Of course the same cost pressures apply to military budgets. That is one reason that those programs cost so much. That, and the facts that they scale terribly, have a huge number of boutique requirements, and generally have broken incentive schemes. Those factors also apply to healthcare and education and major construction projects, but not nearly as much to -- say -- pocket computers with wireless communications capabilities, long-distance data communications, battery-powered automobiles, or tiny homes
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What on earth are you refuting from the above post?
It's not so much a refutation as simply pointing out that 0.1% of military spending moved to health care spending would increase that by less than 0.05% which probably isn't worth the time in paperwork.
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The US military budget for this year is $721.5 billion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. . .1% of that is 721,500,000.
That's some truly expensive paperwork there.
Given that 10% of the 328 million strong US population has diabetes https://www.diabetes.org/resou... [diabetes.org] and only a small fraction of that will need regular insulin it seems like that would be just the right amount of money for insulin cost assistance.
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Um... that's because they pay private companies (Score:2)
Seriously, you're putting cart before horse. The fed spends so much because it's a slush fund for billionaires. The way you get that under control is with single payer healthcare like the rest of the world has, where the gov't uses its status as single payer to negotiate prices and if negotiations break down they make the drugs themselves.
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And yet the USA still has large numbers of people with no healthcare or healthcare that will bankrupt them should they actually try to access it.
Re:Meanwhile... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why did Biden reverse Trump's EO freezing insulin prices? The price has gone up 5x in the past three weeks.
If you were paying attention, you'd realize that Trump's EO hadn't gone into effect yet [statesman.com], so any relationship between between insulin prices, Trump's EO, and Biden's freeze (not reversal! he simply froze it for another month under the guise of allowing more study of it - which is probably a good idea as he generally put people into government positions based on their perceived loyalty to him rather than aptitude), simply makes no sense. I understand though, as you have some Trumplican senators tweeting about it implying that Trump's EO a) already had an effect that was very positive and b) Biden changed that. In reality Trump's EO would have only minorly affected the insulin prices in small group of drug recipients, it would not have affected your insulin prices at your general local pharmacy (ie Target/CVS, Walmart, Hy-Vee, yeah I'm from the "great" red Midwest), it was mostly a big bait and switch - Art of the Deal.
Re:Meanwhile... (Score:5, Informative)
Trump issued an EO in the summer that dramatically decreased insulin prices but expired before the inauguration. He issued another one that Biden froze for some inexplicable reason. Does someone in his family have a Hunter job at Big Pharma?
Which order? You mean the thing he said he did that he didn't actually do [poynter.org]? Or do you mean this executive order explicitly targeting insulin and epipens [federalregister.gov], which is what I was referring to above that Biden froze and hadn't actually gone into effect yet? I'm sorry, but you've been misinformed - Art of the Deal.
Don't believe me? It was all over the media that Trump signed four executive orders on July 24, 2020, targeting drug prices. Here, you can look for them. [federalregister.gov] One was magicked away to reappear in September but still not actually do much. Order 13937 linked above explicitly targeted Insulin and Epipen prices when obtained through FHQCs (there aren't that many of them, and you'd generally know it if you use one) and is the one that Biden has been in the news lately for "freezing". Order 13938 [federalregister.gov] is an allowance for import from Canada etc to specific individuals upon them being granted waivers for drugs like insulin and it's been extremely unclear how you get a waiver and whether the Secretary has decided that it is necessary. Order 13939 [federalregister.gov] is simply an order to finish implementation of a rule that was proposed in the spring of 2019 but withdrawn in the summer of 2019 because it effectively raised costs instead of lowering them. Trump's order said to basically "try again" and do it if it lowers costs. Unfortunately 2+2=4, the earth is round, and without substantial changes this executive order isn't going to actually change anything. [vikinghcs.com] Yet again, the last administration made a whole big deal out of not doing much at all. Art of the Deal.
Redundant, only for business (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yeah, while China and Russia continue to update their nuclear arsenals we should stop all new development and hope those 50 year old missiles actually fly in the extremely unfortunate scenario that we would need them.
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We don't have to hope. Most of what Lawrence Livermore labs [llnl.gov] does is to make sure those missiles will work if ever called upon.
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You're link goes to the generic front page of their website. Were you informing me of the existence of Lawrence Livermore Labs with that link?
Regardless though, things can't be maintained forever, eventually they need to be replaced. Entropy is a bitch.
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If it comes to that, I don't know if it it matters if we "took them with us" in a retaliatory strike. In fact, they (and the rest of the world) get to die slowly of starvation in the nuclear winter vs. quickly in a nuclear fireball.
The fact remains, though that the deterrent is needed precisely to make sure no one pushes the button, and that requires the threat to remain credible. The nice side effect is the money flowing through the MIC.
It's a bizarre situation, multiple governments sinking billions into
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They're replacing 3000 missiles with 600. That seems to me like fewer weapons, and less reliance on chips (or tubes) from the 1970s still working. That seems better for world peace to me.
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Yeah... I’m not a big fan of nukes, but this actually strikes me as a responsible program. If you want to reduce the number of weapons, going for smaller warheads and fewer missiles seems like a big win.
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They're replacing 3000 missiles with 600.
Nonsense. On many levels (amazing for just six words).
First the U.S. does not have 3000 nuclear missiles. It has 640 ballistic missiles, or 1120 if you count all cruise missiles too.
Second they are not reducing U.S. weapon deployments at all with this procurement. It is a one-for-one replacement of a new ICBM for an old Minuteman II ICBM.
The exact math is that they replacing an existing force of 400 deployed Minuteman II ICBMs (and 40 spares in storage) with 650 newly acquired missiles. Only 400 of these wi
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The doubl
It's just the new cold war with China (Score:4, Informative)
The goal is to see who's economy collapses first. In the last war, we won when the Soviet Union collapsed. China has a lot more money and stronger economy though - this might take a while.
Re:It's just the new cold war with China (Score:5, Insightful)
China is busy selling us the rope with which they intend to hang us. Unfortunately, Western countries are still happily buying it. At least when Nixon went to China, China's game plan was not so obvious or so entrenched.
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China is busy selling us the rope with which they intend to hang us.
Yup, and everyone who buys from Amazon is contributing to this hanging.
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No, the goal is to to deter anyone from starting a war with us by assuring the world that we will turn them to glass if they do. Obviously the goal isn't to bankrupt China, in 20 years or so their economy is going to be larger than ours meaning their government will likely have more purchasing power than us. If bankrupting the other was the ultimate goal of a nuclear arms race we'd be setting ourselves up for disaster here.
Re: It's just the new cold war with China (Score:2)
R.I.P. personal liberty. If China style government takes over they aren't going to limit their rule to one continent.
The answer is in the headline (Score:2)
$100 billion.
The actual answer is in the headline (Score:2)
So, let me get this straight... (Score:3)
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Um, yeah. We don't want adversarial countries to our own to have WMDs. I don't understanding why you seem to be having such a hard time with that.
Imagine what would have happened if Iraq had Russia's nuclear arsenal when they invaded Kuwait. They'd still own Kuwait today and Sadam would still be in power is what would have happened.
Don't get me wrong here though, I do realize those claims about Iraqi WMDs were made up but that's not what you were talking about.
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Imagine what would have happened if Iraq had Russia's nuclear arsenal when they invaded Kuwait. They'd still own Kuwait today and Sadam would still be in power is what would have happened.
You mean Iraq would be a functioning country with running water, electricity, women's rights, a highly educated workfoce and one of the highest standards of living in the world rather than a place where ISIS took hold [independent.co.uk] and rampaged across the country and into Syria, where the U.S. is spending billions of dollars each occupy
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Correct me if I'm wrong here but I do believe that Iraq was still under control of Sadam after we kicked Iraq out of Kuwait so you're not really addressing anything I said. Furthermore, we know WMDs weren't the actual reason we did finally overthrow Sadam in the second war as we know the claims that he did were fabricated. If Sadam actually had meaningful amounts of WMDs we in fact would likely not have gone in in our second or first war as he would have likely lobbed them at regional US allies potentially
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This bit of nonsense always cracks me up. It's like you people think international relationships are just like personal relationships, and you shouldn't be "hypocritical". It's so childish, you should probably be embarrassed. How exactly do you think the world works?
International relations are about power and self interest, not about being "fair". Fairness has nothing to do with anything. It's not in our interests to allow unstable, hostile regimes to have weapons that could kill tens or hundreds of thousan
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We invaded Iraq because they were developing WMDs, but when we do it we brag about it?
Perhaps this is more like the difference between a nation with a free press (the US) and those without (Russia, China, etc). At least in this case it wasn't just a word-for-word regurgitation of a government press release. You should be proud.
They are replacements (Score:5, Insightful)
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They are replacements for sitting ducks. And because land-base missiles are sitting ducks, they pose an enormous threat to us - if there's an attack reported, we'd have only a few minutes to use them or lose them. Subs, by contrast, are not sitting ducks. Decades ago, land-based missiles were justified on the grounds that sea-based missiles were as accurate, but that time is long past.
The only reason to maintain land-based missiles now is inter-service rivalry which is, indeed, a very powerful force.
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The only reason to maintain land-based missiles now is inter-service rivalry which is, indeed, a very powerful force.
I don't see what inter-service rivalry has to do with it. If that were the issue, the Air Force should be pushing for more, better, faster, higher-flying nuclear-armed bombers, and funding to keep large numbers of them in the air, 24x7.
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Bombers are obsolete, but the Air Force won control of land-based missiles a long time ago. Their rivalry is with the Navy and their subs.
Here's a long history of inter-service rivalry in nuclear weapons, first between the army and the air force (the air force won), and then between the navy and the air force (still going on): https://www.airforcemag.com/ar... [airforcemag.com]
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This. Land-based ICBMs should be retired ASAP because they pose orders of magnitude greater risk by imposing a very short timeframe for a second-strike decision.
It appears another reason for the land-based assets is that they made a first-strike action very clear. Compared to a sub-based asset that is difficult to know who it is. That made some sense many years ago, but now that more nations have nuclear weapons and the big ones have very large arsenals not based in fixed silos, it doesn't really seem
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Uhh, didn't it literally say something fairly obvious in the article? Namely, these missiles tend to be in fairly low population density areas. Nukes used to target them are not raining down on cities.
Not that it probably matters much, if we hit the point where someone is nuking our nukes then our entire way of life and hundreds of millions if not billions of lives will be lost worldwide.
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Do the fixed, land based ICBMs really buy us any deterrence that the submarine-based and aircraft launched missiles don't provide? Land based ICBMs were handy 60 years ago, but now they seem to be obsolete with the drawbacks of being fixed targets themselves and not recallable once they are on their 30 minute trip. The USA could make a statement about nuclear disarmament by getting rid of the land based ICBMs and still maintain unstoppable nuclear deterrent forces. Put the ICBM money into modernizing se
Bowling Lane (Score:2)
A bowling lane is 60 feet long. The Falcon 1 rocket was 68 feet tall. So it's about the size of a Falcon 1 (not the newer and larger Falcon 9).
Of course, for a missile that will be stored for years while ready to launch on a moment's notice, these will be solid rockets, not liquid fuel rockets.
As a deterrent, fixed missiles are OK (Score:2)
America's land-based nuclear missiles are easy marks.
That really doesn't matter when you have 200 of them, because no way are you going to take out many of them before any kind of first strike detection kicks off a response.
These smaller missiles make a lot of sense to me, because then you can target military or key government installation without killing millions of people.
That is the kind of change you need to make when many modern militaries are happy to use the civilian population as human shields.
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Why? The answer is simple (Score:2)
Defense contractors need profits
The simple answer is... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because, china and Russia are doing the same thing, just without the advertising part, i.e.,they do not let people know what they are working on unlike the US.
Mostly correct, but Russia actually does constantly tell the world that they have just developed some superduper weapon that is much more superduper than anything they or their "enemies" have ever developed before. Russia claimed not too long ago that they totally have solved the problems of ultrasonic weapons and they have tons of them ready to go. My guess - they hit a roadblock they can't get over so they want to spur the USA into getting these working first so they can just steal our technology and
What is the plan if an enemy invents a new weapon? (Score:4, Interesting)
600 is pork only need 10-20 to take out NK (Score:2)
600 is pork only need 10-20 to take out NK
Normal (Score:2)
The Military–industrial complex wants its pound of flesh.
Weapons go bad (Score:3)
Much like your OS install, weapons do go bad over time. That's why they're tested. And they do have an EOL. You don't want your ICBM to explode on the pad, or in mid-air, or not explode when it's over the target.
And it's a triad, because targeting three separate delivery systems is harder to do, costs more, and is more complicated - which should theoretically make attempts to do so easier to discover.
Plus, you always need more better weapons. After all, when Thanos comes he's not going to negotiate.
What's the fuckin' point? (Score:3)
We already have mutually assured destruction, now we will have even better assured destruction? Their destruction will occur whole seconds before ours? I would have hoped that we'd be past this by now.
Meanwhile, the cost to tax payers of a working healthcare system, you know, like every other developed nation in the world has, is deemed too expensive.
Two years of "Free College" (Score:3, Interesting)
The Atlantic, in 2014, added up the cost of "Free College" and came up with $40B/year. That's seven years now, and there are more kids, and college has gone up even more. Let's round up to $50B.
The great article on this is by Olivia Wilde's dad. No, really, the lovely and talented Miss Wilde is the daughter of two distinguished journalists, and her Dad, Andrew Cockburn (you can see why she took Oscar's surname as a stage name), wrote an amazing six-page summary in Harper's in 2019:
https://harpers.org/archive/20... [harpers.org]
I noted in a few newspaper comments that the January 17th, 2021, sixtieth anniversary of Eisenhower's departure speech went completely unremarked by the media. It was the Diamond Jubilee of the term "Military Industrial Complex".
The proposition that this weapon is actually needed can be dismissed with contempt, of course. We have far better deterrents already. We barely need deterrents at all, certainly - war between separate nations has no business-model in the modern world. It only ever costs elites money, these days, so they have no reason to start one. North Korea and Iran can only bring down ruin upon themselves by attacking neighbours, with tanks, much less nukes. Iran wants to be invasion-proof, not to do any invading.
Because the nuclear triad works! (Score:3, Interesting)
Frothing silly clueless butthurt aside, MAD keeps the peace between rational actors and the reason it does is by making a first strike impractical.
All warheads devoted to killing missile silos are unavailable for use elsewhere. This redundancy is why we have "nuclear peace" instead of nuclear war which lest we forget was proved quite PRACTICAL at a TACTICAL scale which arms reductions make more not less likely.
Read some serious works on nuclear war instead of assuming you know something about it beyond "big thing go boom" and AssUming "survivors will envy the dead" (not the case in Hiroshima or Nagasaki or they'd have joined the dead, suicide being acceptable and accepted at the time).
A supposedly techy audience should know old tech doesn't last or perform reliably forever.
Now cue the waterfall of utterly ignorant comments because Slashdot is no longer a tech site. 8-P
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Re: I wish... (Score:2)
I wish...COVID Wars. (Score:3)
Who needs nuclear weapons when the poor man's biological will do?
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Fool, your statement is the equivalent of saying 'I didn't die because I'm wearing a lucky rabbits foot'.
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Have you noticed how few humans have died in war since nuclear weapons were invented, compared to before? Why would you want to return to that horrible time of world wars and millions dead?
Which is exactly why Iran should proceed with its nuclear weapons program. Look how many wars have broken out between India and Pakistan since both got nuclear weapons. Imagine if Iran had nuclear weapons it could use as a deterrent to the bully in the region, Israel.
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When has Israel ever had leaders lead their people in chants for Death to Iran? Iran has leaders calling for the annihilation of Israel and its people. Further Iran is a theocracy and rules by theocrats that have extremely flawed views on reality and some even have apocalyptic dreams. Do you really think that Iran having a Nuke is going to lead to stability?
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What was your stance on the Iraq War, at the time? It was America's last attempt to bring stability to the region.
If you were for it at the time, perhaps you should reconsider your track record.
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Trying to understand the correlation between your response and my post.
Nevertheless, I was totally against Bush's war... The entire premise was insane. Iraq had nothing to do with 911 even though that was the opinion of a good number of Americans who supported the war. Bush did a real good job of making that association without being explicit. And I listened to Gen Powell's "evidence" to the UN security council where he imagined a wink wink in an intercepted radio communication between Iraqi military perso
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The Iraq invasion was one of the most blatant resource grabs in modern time. Remember its original moniker?
O peration
I raq
L iberation
They weren't even pretending it was anything else to anyone but the US public.
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Do you really think that Iran having a Nuke is going to lead to stability?
I think this is called for:
"Woosh"
As Expensive as cold wars are ..... (Score:3)
They are significantly cheaper than hot wars. Thats the problem with the so called progressives .. lets do away with all weapons yay!! Unfortunately the Chinese and Russians would love nothing better. Then their cost of going to war with a de-weaponized west is next to nil. So yes it sucks we have to spend all this money on weapons, but the alternatives are worse. Besides the answer to better education and health care is not to just throw a bunch of money at it.
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There have been no shortage of hot wars since 1945, millions have been killed by proxies of the US or Russia or China, and millions more by soldiers of those countries directly. If you think since troops aren't marching through Kansas that means that we're not involved in multiple "hot" wars then you're willfully blind.
Re:As Expensive as cold wars are ..... (Score:4, Insightful)
All the proxy wars we had during the cold war were a drop in the bucket relative to what the death tolls and destruction would have been if the West and the Soviet Union had fought out a full blown conventional war after WW2. The death toll alone from Germany invading Russia during WW2 was 42 million people. Imagine what the death toll would have been from the Soviet army plowing through much more densely populated Europe complete with more modern bombs and guns.
Now imagine what the Russian death toll would have been if they had invented nukes and had an arsenal of them before the war. It would have been zero because Germany would never have declared war on a country that could just fly some planes over and wipe out all their major cities in a blink of an eye.
Nuclear weapons brought us into a new era in which major world powers no longer directly war with each other and while yeah, sure, the proxies are bad, they are most certainly preferable to what would happen if the major powers did fight directly.
Re: I wish... (Score:2)
There are unfortunately, reasons for such deterrent weapons. History is a good teacher. No two nuclear powers have engaged in direct conflict. The number of deaths worldwide from war has reduced to about a million a year. It was increasing decade after decade prior to the advent of the atomic bomb
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I wish all the nuclear weapons explode in their own countries right now world-wide.
I wish your mother would have had an abortion or a miscarriage rather than anyone having to listen to your braindead rhetoric.
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this missile program will turn thousands of nuclear missiles into hundreds
And if you believe that then I also have a bridge for sale that you might be interested in. Has a great view of Brooklyn and the East River!
Remember what the Pentagram did when they received a DIRECT ORDER from Commander In Chief Clinton to stop all development of new biological weapons? They changed the program's name and moved it to the Black Budget. People didn't even change cubicles, and the anthrax used to attack Americans in 2001 came from one of those cubicles.
MIRV would use "small" bombs (Score:2)
The article does not say, but 20 times a Hiroshima bomb is about 300 kilotons. I was not aware they made bombs that small anymore.
One of the individual bombs in a MIRV (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle) would be "small" in yield. Currently 3 to 12 independently targeted bombs in one missile.
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The article does not say, but 20 times a Hiroshima bomb is about 300 kilotons. I was not aware they made bombs that small anymore.
Earlier generation nuclear weapons had to be big because targeting (called CEP for "Circular Error Probability") was pretty loose, on average missing the target by a few kilometers or maybe even tens of kilometers depending the delivery vehicle (US warheads were more accurate which is why Soviet warheads tended to be higher yield). If you couldn't take out a hardened target directly with a 300-kiloton weapon, you could still probably destroy it with a nearby hit of a 4-megaton weapon...albeit with a huge a
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This is the result of Shrub abrogating the anti-proliferation treaties and Obummer not rejoining them. Besides, it's a MIRV warhead, there's at least half a dozen of the things in it.
Re:Exactly. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: It's the only way to make sure (Score:2)
I go bowling from time to time and while I know precisely how long a lane is, it is difficult to imagine how far or how tall it is because I've only ever seen a bowling lane from one end. Comparing it to a sperm wwnale might be a little easier for the layperson to imagine. or say it's 4 stories tall. or don't be a weirdo and say meters or feet (I can handle either)
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Comparing it to a sperm whale might be a little easier for the layperson to imagine
Because those swim by here in Denver all the time?
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Well to be fair if this is coming up right now then it was planned under Trump or under both Trump and Obama. New missile designs don't spring up in a matter of weeks.
As for the piece, it is a tad uncritical. The article seems to assume the reader already knows that our nuclear arsenal is based on half century old missiles and needs to be updated or it will ultimately fail to provide the deterrent it's supposed to.
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In military terms, it isn’t a big contract, although strategic value is high. As for “the previous administration,” they were the ones that put the program together. As long as an article doesn’t have that former president’s name in it discourse seems to generally be good, but its name is one that incites.
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Where does the 6 trillion price come from? The article says:
The entire package is expected to cost as much as $1.2 trillion through 2046 for development, purchase and long-term support
1.2T over 26 years as government goes is not expensive at all. That's LESS than the Department of Health and Human Services blows through each year.
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Indeed, nuclear weapons have given us a grand and prosperous era of peace.
Tell that to the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, a zillion and one countries in Africa and South America where proxy wars were fought, Egypt and Israel etc.