Nuclear Arms Cuts, Supported By 56% of Americans, Would Make the World Safer 615
Lasrick writes "Kingston Reif of the Nukes of Hazard blog writes about nuclear arms reductions are back in the news, thanks to President Obama's State of the Union address and now also a Gallup poll that shows 56% of Americans support U.S.-Russian reductions. From the Article: 'A recent report by the Center for Public Integrity revealed that senior Obama administration officials believe the United States can reduce its arsenal of deployed strategic warheads to between 1,000 and 1,100 without harming national security. Those numbers would put the total below levels called for by New START...' Congressional Republicans of course are against those cuts; Reif lays out why the cuts would make the U.S. and the world safer."
Do we even need a thousand nuclear warheads?
US/Russia? but no China? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why are talks between us and Russia while China is rapidly increasing their nuclear stockpile?
Project Orion rebooted (Score:5, Interesting)
Do we even need a thousand nuclear warheads?
If we ever want to travel to Alpha Centauri we do. How about putting those nukes toward the construction of an interstellar pulsed nuclear space drive? [wikipedia.org]
Re:Instead of killing the world five times (Score:4, Interesting)
where do you get the absurd idea that nuclear weapons could even kill all the population once? Hollywood?
Re:SDI's? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:SDI's? (Score:2, Interesting)
You'd be wrong.
The nuclear material is HIGHLY refined. More effort was put into refining the material than the entire cost of the rest of the missile. That isn't even including mining and other processing it takes to get useful material.
The hardest part of making a fission weapon is refining your source material into something that will actually go critical in a way that uses up at least a few percent of the material in the bomb.
Keep in mind that when a bomb detonates, the 'radiation' damage you suffer is from the 'dirty' aspects of the bomb ... i.e. the nuclear material that is dispersed by never splits, but is just blown apart with the explosion. The radiation from the blast itself will never be what you need to be worried about. If that radiation is going to bother you, the heat will have vaporized you before your cells have had the chance to even consider being affected by it.
Re:No (Score:3, Interesting)
Even now, they just launched a new solid missile, the DF-41, that is a MIRV with 10 warheads. The DF-31s which had 3 warheads was fairly short range and would target Russia, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Phillipines, and India. They are known to have over 1000 of these. Now, with the new DF-41's, they can go all the way around the globe. These are designed for Europe and America. And apparently, they have started active production of these. It is unknown what the quantities will be. BUT, I doubt it will 10 missiles.
Regardless, China obviously has a LOT LOT LOT more than 240 warheads. And the nuke site that was discovered during the earthquake (along with their military tunnels), would hint that they are in active production on these.
Re:No (Score:4, Interesting)
In addition, they are NOT a democratic gov. or even a capitalist economy. The fact is, that the economy is split into 2 with those companies that export being capitalists, while those that are tied to the gov, esp. the PLA, being a pure command situation.
With China's earthquake loads was discovered about them. That 3000 miles of underground railway was a shocker. And the fact that they had an underground hidden nuke operation by the reservoir was also a shock. That alone should be a sign that it is very possible for China to have a reactor down there, being cooled by the reservoir and would NEVER be seen by space.
Now, as to MAD, let me explain how this works. Basically, both sides have to have systems that are either 100% first strike, with limited retailiation, OR nearly 100% defense, with limited first strike. Most importantly, neither side can have a true missile defense system. Now, W killed that and the neo-cons are pushing for us to put up a BMD system. However, it should be obvious to all, that we have gone nowhere with it. As such, we are still playing by the MAD logic that America and USSR had. Now, along comes China who does not tell what they have. However, we are finding out all the time that they are far more advanced than they let on to. In particular, they DO appear to have loads more BMD than is acknowledged. For starters, they took out a sat that was quite high (500 miles+). But it continues to get better. For starters, they have multiple ground based lasers designed to shoot into space. They have already taken out multiples of our sats. In addition, their space station is a military base. It is NOT a civilian program. They have stated that no civilians or non-chinese will be on-board. All in all, it is obvious that China is working against MAD, and is looking for a number of leg ups. That implies first strike and their entertaining the idea of winning a nuke war. And I am not wild about ANY military officer thinking that. EVER. That is why the worst thing that could happen is to cut down warheads.
So when can Iran threaten the U.S. over NPT? (Score:5, Interesting)
We've surrounded [current.com] Iran with dozens of military bases, crashed [bostonglobe.com] their economy and currency with sanctions, illegally threatened [salon.com] them with military force, and committed multiple acts of war [nytimes.com] on a country over the....nuclear weapons program both the CIA [thedailybell.com] and Israelis [pbs.org] admit they don't have.
So when does Iran get to threaten the United States for being in "material breach" of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which requires disarmament [wikipedia.org] for countries already in possession of nuclear weapons?
Re:US/Russia? but no China? (Score:2, Interesting)
The point of most nukes is to destroy other nukes in their silos. That's what nuclear war was all about - who has the capability to strike first and who can take a strike and have enough warheads left to have a credible retaliatory strike. This is called the "counterforce" mission and is very important in nuclear strategy. The strategy of hitting cities is very secondary and is called "countervalue". Hitting population centres is not primary goal of nuclear war - usually you go for their nukes, their military installations, their oil production and refining and their manufacturing. Where this is close to cities then the cities get roasted. It turns out to do these things it actually takes quite a few nukes, especially if your opponent has anti-ballistic missile (ABM) capabilities as the US and Russia do (and to a limited extent, Israel), and presumably China is also working on this.
The principal effect of 50 nuclear warheads aimed at remote silos (notice how in the US, Russia and China the silos are in the middle-of-nowhere?) is probably insignificant on a national scale and certainly on a global scale with regards to blast and fallout. They can have an effect on the climate but this is peanuts compared to something like Krakatoa and probably even smaller events like the Iceland volcanic eruptions or Mount St Helens.
One doesn't have to agree, or disagree, with nuclear war to understand that it is not entirely madness to wage it. The thousands of nukes weren't built for no reason - a careful calculus was made to ensure first strike survivability. As each side in the Cold War did new calculations the numbers climbed - but the numbers weren't arbitrary - they were the result of careful study.
Oh, and here's a total babe, Rebeccah Heinreichs, talking about Obama's unilateral cuts to the US nuclear triad - who *analysis* believes that around 2700 warheads are needed:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JY0r2rxZPk [youtube.com]
Note that Obama's cuts are not really about saving money money. After all, he'd save vastly more by limiting entitlements and social programmes (the unfunded liabilities being promised completely dwarf even the current US deficit). The cuts also are not because the nukes aren't needed, they are needed for decades to come and for unseen threats in the next 50 years. The cuts are all purely ideologically based on Obama's (flawed) world view. Sadly, his supporters don't want to face the truth about his intentions to remake America by first breaking it by overspending and weakening its traditional strengths. Obama wants to unilaterally disarm and surrender the US to the world. He's already abandoned many allies. The world is about to get very chaotic as a result of a lack of strong leadership from secular democracies lead by the US.
safer? (Score:3, Interesting)
The world would also have been safer if the USSR had won the cold war and we'd all be living under a communist dictatorship. Safety isn't all that matters.
Re:SDI's? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is dead on correct. Balloons on trajectory traveling just around mach 25 won't hit atmo with sufficient density to slow them down until about 5 minutes before the real warheads impact. There is no way to effectively respond in that time window. This is a completely effective strategy.
Re:Get rid of some (Score:5, Interesting)