US, Russia Reach Nuclear Arsenal Agreement 413
Peace Corps Library writes "The United States and Russia, seeking to move forward on one of the most significant arms control treaties since the end of the cold war, announced that they had reached a preliminary agreement on cutting each country's stockpiles of strategic nuclear weapons, effectively setting the stage for a successor to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start), a cold war-era pact that expires in December. Under the framework, negotiators are to be instructed to craft a treaty that would cut strategic warheads for each side to between 1,500 and 1,675, down from the limit of 2,200 slated to take effect in 2012 under the Treaty of Moscow (PDF) signed by President George W. Bush. The limit on delivery vehicles would be cut to between 500 and 1,100 from the 1,600 currently allowed under Start. Perhaps more important than the specific limits would be a revised and extended verification system that otherwise would expire with Start in December. The United States currently has 1,198 land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-based missiles and bombers, which together are capable of delivering 5,576 warheads, according to its most recent Start report in January, while Russia reported that it has 816 delivery vehicles capable of delivering 3,909 warheads. 'We have a mutual interest in protecting both of our populations from the kinds of danger that weapons proliferation is presenting today,' said President Obama."
Robert Strange McNamara 1916 - 2009 (Score:5, Interesting)
The indefinite combinations of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations. - Robert S. McNamara
Slightly offtopic but in high school I read a few books by Robert S McNamara who died yesterday [nytimes.com]. It's too bad he didn't get to see this agreement between old enemies. He was Secretary of Defense from 1961-1968. Although I did not agree with a lot of his views he shaped a lot of the nuclear buildup during the cold war. I believe he was responsible for abandoning Eisenhower's policy of massive retaliation in the event of a nuclear war. He was first tasked by Kennedy of explaining nuclear fallout [wikipedia.org]. McNamara favored non-nuclear power and one of the books I read "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam" shed a lot of light on the Vietnam war for me.
If you haven't seen Erol Morris' "The Fog of War [wikipedia.org]" you should.
Rest in peace Robert Strange McNamara. You revealed to me the horrors that leadership must face during war.
Re:Down to 95% of the world's arsenals! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Down to 95% of the world's arsenals! (Score:5, Interesting)
As one of the Rand Corporation's stone cold game theorists said, those would be "tragic, but distinguishable, outcomes".
General Turgidson: Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching a moment of truth both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, truth is not always a pleasant thing. But it is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless *distinguishable*, postwar environments: one where you got 20 million people killed, and the other where you got a 150 million people killed.
President Muffley: You're talking about mass murder, General, not war!
General Turgidson: Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.
Re:Robert Strange McNamara 1916 - 2009 (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't feel too bad. He did get to see the far more important breakthrough agreements negotiated and signed by Presidents Reagan and Bush 41.
Re:Down to 95% of the world's arsenals! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Really?!? (Score:5, Interesting)
'Launch vehicles' also includes aircraft. B-1, B-2, B-52, and F-16. All of these can also be used with conventional munitions. So bringing down the total number of 'launch vehicles' to 500 will, of necessity, bring the numbers of these aircraft down to some very low, possibly unsustainable, number.
I'd fully agree with bringing down the number of actual warheads. But when you include aircraft that can also be used for other functions, we may be getting into a place where the conventional forces are too small to do anything.
The argument could be made that this is a good thing, but that's a discussion for another day.
Re:Fallout (Score:5, Interesting)
Getting rid of obsolete weapons (Score:3, Interesting)
Both sides are developing SDI/anti-missile defenses. This makes many of these weapons obsolete, as they no longer have a guaranteed first-strike capability.
The old arms race was big missiles and bombers; the new arms race is drones and micro-cruise missiles.
But it was a nice press opportunity for both men to come out smelling like roses while they quietly plan each other's destruction.
Quick agreements are often bad agreements. (Score:2, Interesting)
A member of the bipartisan Congressional Strategic Posture Commission -- headed by former secretaries of defense William J. Perry and James R. Schlesinger -- warns that the preliminary agreement signed by Barack Obama guts part of the American nuclear arsenal but does not demand significant gutting of the Russian nuclear arsenal. Two points of serious note are (1) nuclear launchers and (2) tactical nuclear weapons.
Nuclear launchers are mechanisms for launching the intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Russians are demanding that we Americans reduce the number of our launchers to 500, but the Russians were already (before the signing of this agreement) planning to reduce the number of launchers to close that number because they cannot afford to replace the launchers that must be shutdown due to reaching the end of their operational life. In other words, the Russians do not make any sacrifice on this matter but demand that the Americans make all the sacrifices.
As for tactical nuclear weapons, the Russians successfully insisted that these weapons be removed from coverage in this preliminary agreement. The Russians have a 10-to-1 advantage over us Americans in tactical nuclear weapons.
Didn't we learn ANYTHING from the 80's? (Score:3, Interesting)
The only winning move is not to play
How about a nice game of chess?
Re:Robert Strange McNamara 1916 - 2009 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Down to 95% of the world's arsenals! (Score:5, Interesting)
You are really underestimating the power of nuclear weapons, or you're using a different definition of complete destruction than everyone else. If by complete, you mean "vaporized," then you may be correct. However, according to this site [pbs.org], a one-megaton surface blast would leave a crater 200 feet deep and a thousand feet across, and everything within about 3200 feet of of the detonation would be gone except for some foundations. Out to 1.7 miles, only heavily reinforced building still have some remnants. Out to 2.7 miles, some multi-story buildings would still have their skeletons standing, and significant damage to structures would extend out to about 4.7 miles.
This doesn't get anywhere close to the documented blast of Tsar Bomba [wikipedia.org], which was a 50MT bomb that had a 4.6km fireball, caused damage at significant distances (with atmospheric lensing causing damage hundreds of miles away), and would have caused third-degree burns to creatures 60 miles away. It was detonated on the island of Novaya Zemlya, and it broke windows in Finland and Sweden.
I don't think that either nation could ever have blanketed the entire planetary surface with nuclear weapons; blast effects and areas just don't match up. But to suggest that nuclear weapons are little more effective than conventional weapons -- which is essentially what your post says -- is dead wrong.
Re:US reduces, Russia increases (Score:1, Interesting)
Actually it does.. Just about half of all the uranium used in the US today for nuclear power generation comes from Russian nukes :-)
Re:Down to 95% of the world's arsenals! (Score:5, Interesting)
(See The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, and also "The Pentomic Army" for sources on this)
The 200-300m quoted distance is the "100% probability of kill" range, I believe. Double that range, and the probability halves.
You also have to remember that Hiroshima was almost perfectly designed to be obliterated in a nuclear blast. The topography is that of a bowl, so overpressure actually wraps around rather than just releasing in an outwards pattern. Also, a lot of the buildings were made of very weak materials - residences had a lot of paper and wood, which a) burned really well, and b) did little to absorb the blast overpressure on the way through.
Nagasaki actually fared quite a bit better, as have various test ranges around the world.
In a modern concrete and steel city, the reflective/absorbitive properties of building materials considerably reduce the spread of blast overpressure on a lateral trajectory. Additionally, few cities are built inside a bowl (New Orleans excepted!) - so most of the time, the overpressure only hits you once.
There really are only four lethal mechanisms that accompany a nuclear blast inside the atmosphere: prompt radiation, fireball, blast overpressure (and sometimes a secondary overpressure from air rushing in to fill the resultant vacuum), and residual radiation.
Prompt radiation travels in a straight line, and is blocked quite effectively by earth, heavy metals and some types of clay. At larger distances, even curtains can help with the flash. If you are in direct line of sight to the flash, within lethal range - you are dead. If not, you're probably ok - and the radiation types released in the flash typically don't stick around.
The fireball is typically not very large, but will incinerate whatever it comes into contact with. Most modern designs try to air-burst, and the fireball often won't ever touch the ground.
Blast overpressure hits just like a conventional explosive: a sphere of rapidly moving blast pressure, reducing in power over distance, and also losing energy as it hits things. The same protections against prompt radiation help here: a good wall of dirt does wonders for stopping overpressure, whether it's from regular artillery or a nuclear explosion. Note that studies have shown that blast overpressure is the primary kill mechanism for regular nuclear bombs, just like any other bomb.
Finally, you get residual radiation. This can be avoided almost completely with a carefully designed airburst - most "fallout" and residual radiation occurs when dirt is sucked into the fireball and irradiated there. Burst high enough to not have the fireball encompass a lot of dirt, and you don't have very much long-term radiation. It's largely unknown what the long-term effects of residual radiation are; the area around Chernobyl didn't behave at all like the models we had!
Then there are different bomb designs to consider. A really small nuclear bomb behaves a lot like a really large conventional charge: you could set it off in a football stadium, and probably not worry too much about damage to buildings a few hundred yards away; man-portable nukes were designed on that assumption, as were things like the horribly-design Davey Crockett round.
"Neutron bombs", which really should be called "reduced blast bombs" focus on enhancing prompt-radiation release at the expense of a MUCH smaller blast/fireball (and consequently very little residual radiation). Why would you want to do that? a) It greatly reduces long-term contamination of your target area (meaning you might get to go there!), but more importantly b) it's FAR more effective at taking out tanks and similar. Tanks are really, very, very good at withstanding blast overpressure (it's pretty much their primary defensive purpose - survive artillery and shells while they move forward). It's not at all practical to burst enough regular nuclear weapons to reliably take out a distributed, dug-in tank force. However, they are almost entirely made of metal - and prompt radiation does a "wonder
Re:Fallout (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't speak to the buildup of their conventional capacity, but China's nuclear intentions are about as honest as you're going to get from a nuclear power.
For more about NonProliferation (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the many things I learned from this book was the difference between nonproliferation and denuclearization. Kazakhstan didn't simply agree to store away the warheads like the U.S. and Russia have agreed to do, they dismantled them and shipped them entirely out of the country (basically to Russia and the U.S.). Then they dismantled the accompanying infrastructure, reseach facilities, education facilities, etc so that hopefully, nuclear arms would never again be deployed in Kazakhstan.
It's an interesting story.
Question! (Score:4, Interesting)
Would they be able to use up the dismantled nuclear materials to make another reactor with without having to pay for mining of the stuff...(plutonium, uranium, etc..), or is the materials wasted in the making of the warhead to begin with?
Re:Afro-American Racism Against Whites and Asians (Score:2, Interesting)
Is there a white equivalent of the NAACP? Is there a Caucasian College Fund?
At a certain point, the effects of ancient history have dwindled to nothing. I'd say that point is already past.
Re:Down to 95% of the world's arsenals! (Score:5, Interesting)
By the way, one thing you Westerners should keep in mind.
In my school days in Russia (which were late 90s, far more liberal and pro-Western than it is today), we still studied things such as an effect of an urban nuclear explosion, complete with a diagram of the bombed city with affected areas, and a simulated aerial photo. We were taught how to behave to maximize the chances of survival during the initial blast, how to find proper shelters and secure them (and what kinds of shelters are good enough at various distances), and so on. I think that's still being taught.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)