The Glade 4.0

50 more ICBMs

Just for reference, the last ICBM the US produced was the LGM-118 Peacekeeper (MX).. and that was retired 10 years ago. The only ICBM we have is the Minuteman III which was fielded in 1970 and is projected to remain until 2030.

But Russia has been making and improving them steadily.

The party is over folks. The post-cold-war mentality is obsolete. It wasn't the end of major conflict; it was a vacation from it.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Oh boy. More fearmongering. I wondered what the new scare topic was going to be now that Arab terrorists haven't done anything scary in over a decade.

I am glad it's the Russians. I'd missed them.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

They're a lot more fun than our current baddies. Of course, it doesn't have to be this way. Man, remember ol' Baghdad Bob?



Good times, good times.

Because clearly when we have not built a new nuclear system in over 20 years and Russia just keeps righ on doing so, its fearmongering to point out that the "world without nuclear weapons" and other disarmament ideas are not actually a thing. Remember folks, facts aren't important. We face no credible threats and never will again.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

DE, what's the rationale for the US to develop new nuclear ICBM's at this point? Is Russia developing a missile defense system capable of thwarting an attack with the existing missile system? Are the existing missiles and support systems becoming too outdated or degraded to effectively maintain them any longer? Are there no longer enough of them to ensure a second strike capability? And so on. In short, is the existing system still capable of obliterating the Russians in both first strike and second strike scenarios and thus still capable of fulfilling its MAD doctrine role, and if so, why bother updating it?

Russia does not fear the USA. They count on the UN and NATO to keep us in check. On a very real level they fear the Chinese. The last thing the Chinese want is Russia hurting its number one customer.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

We don't necessarily need a new ICBM, and as far as I'm concerned I'd rather we not emphasize ICBMs too much due to their vulnerability issues.

The point was not that we need necessarily more of X or more of Y, but rather that we need to stop pretending that eliminating nuclear weapons is a realistic goal and certainly not one shared by Russia.

More importantly, we need to have normal lifecycle replacement for systems so that we are not using systems that are 40-70 years old. In part, this situation has arisen because we've been all too eager to give up newer systems like the MX or B-1B because the Russians wanted it, generally in return for some trivial concession, because we desperately wanted to believe the Russians wanted disarmament as much as we did.

They don't and really never have. Russians have always had differently views of nuclear weapons tactically, strategically, and philosophically and we tend to forget that they tend to think of them in much more of a "never again" way after what they went through in WWI and WWII.

We simply have to get out of the idea that any new nuclear system is "a return to the Cold War" or "fearmongering". We really never should have gotten UT of the Cold War; it was not a stretch in the 1990s to imagine that Russia's reorganizational woes would not last that long nor that China wouldn't become a more significant power.

This is not an advocacy for any particular system or combination of systems, but there are not lot that need to be looked at, and not from a standpoint of "can we just upgrade the old just for the sake of not making anything new?"

We certainly do not need 30,000 or even 10,000 nuclear warheads ready to go, but we need more than we have. Russia has had an ABM system for a long time and while it isn't nationwide for them it illustrates the Russian attitude. They do not and never have bought into the idea of MAD. They have always regarded nuclear war as winnable and their positions on things like our missile defense have always been centered on gain of political and thereby strategic advantage.

We do not need a 1980's style SIOP targeting every road junction in Nowhereski Siberia for no apparent reason or 60 warheads on one air defense installation but we sure as hell need to start taking what we have seriously - and we need to start taking the Russians seriously.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Russia counts on our own political credulity to keep us in check. Russian leaders know perfectly well that the West has always had plenty of people that want nuclear weapons to just go away regardless of the cost or the reality. They are very good at exploiting that.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

It's not exactly crazy for people to have a problem with the position, "Human civilization is one bad executive decision from ending entirely, and this will always be true and nothing can ever be done about it."

Human civilization is not, in fact, one bad executive decision away from ending entirely. If that were the case, nuclear war would have already been triggered on numerous occasions. Everyone always acts like the Cuban Missile Crisis was the big "oh ****, there's going to be a war!" but there were several other incidents that were just as close a call or worse - and even more that were less risky but still dangerous.

Even with the Russian mentality that nuclear war is ultimately winnable, it's still obviously very bad. While game theory tells us that in terms of abstract theory there are situations under which it is advantageous to make a nuclear attack, that advantage is basically academic - the real-world consequences of doing so are easily dismissed in a simulation but even the people that conduct such simulations don't want actual nuclear devices initiating over their homes.

History actually tells us that nuclear weapons tend to be paralyzing - and the more, the more paralyzing. Throughout the Cold War, the US and the USSR and the major allies fought each other mostly through proxy because the threat of full-scale confrontation was too much to risk. While people might (understandably) object to the consequences of civil wars in Africa or Central America to the locals, the simple fact is that it's preferable

There's also the fact that even at the height of the cold war, that would not have happened with a full-scale nuclear war. It certainly would not happen with today's reduced arsenals.

Finally, the simple fact is that it's pretty asinine and silly to think that "but we shouldn't have to live with this threat!" is actually a meaningful argument. It's like "no one should have to die of cancer." I think you will be hard pressed to find anyone that actually thinks people dying of cancer is a good thing, or that nuclear war actually might be a good idea.

Similarly, the aforementioned civil wars are loudly decried by treehugging peace activists and such, but complaining that such things happen (and given the present situation in many of those places we can see that they are perfectly willing to fight each other anyhow) essentially amounts to complaining "but the world isn't perfect!" and then laying all the blame on the bigger countries while failing to hold the small ones accountable for the circumstances that make them useful as proxies in the first place - or more frequently, blaming whichever side of the conflict (usually the West) for the proxies while conveniently forgetting the Soviets were as much or more involved than we.

This sort of complaint, that "but it's just so horrible!!" is actually part of the problem. We're in this situation because we've been sold this line of goods that we can just roll back the clock on technology and make nukes go away if only we just get everyone to agree, and that never works. It didn't work after WWI with battleships either. This idea is indicative of an inability to confront the subject in a sober and rational manner and basically just indicates that some people just do not deserve to sit at the adult table in such conversations. We have, since the 1970s, found ourselves continuously because we are up against people that simply don't play by the same political rules in their countries. Even Ronald Reagan was not immune to this sort of nonsense, putting forth SDI as an idea to make nuclear weapons obsolete. This was not realistic at all (and Reagan probably knew that) for even if it made ICBMs and SLBMs obsolete it would have just pushed the manned bomber and the cruise missile back into dominance.

People's visceral horror is not a good basis for policy on defense any more than it is on any other matter. A lot of people are viscerally horrified at the idea that someone would have sex on camera for money; that does not make banning porn a good idea. People are viscerally horrified at drunken men going home and beating up their wives; that did not make Prohibition a good idea. You seem to find the idea of Greece having to actually deal with its debt to be horrifying because of the economic consequences for Greece; that does not make bailing them out again a good idea. Similarly, defense policy should not be addressed from a basis of how much we dislike the prospect of actually employing such weapons. We cannot exercise deterrence if those we are trying to deter get the idea that we will never employ such weapons because they horrify us too much.

As to what can be done about it, the main thing that hopefully will eventually be done about it is that we will colonize more planets.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Stanislov Petrov

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Depends what your goal is. If your goal is a utopian world in which everyone forsakes nuclear weapons forever, then sure, pushing for limits, disarmament, non-proliferation, etc. will never succeed, but then again, neither will anything else, because utopia is impossible. However, if you have a more modest and realistic goal - say, to use disarmament as a tool to ratchet down tensions and reduce potential friction points between the great powers and to use a combination of non-proliferation norms and diplomatic/economic carrots and sticks to discourage secondary powers from pursuing their own nuclear programs - then I would say we actually have a pretty successful track record over the last 30 or 40 years.


On the other hand, we also can't exercise deterrence if those we are trying to deter think we're likely to employ such weapons in anything other than the absolute worst case scenario. In short, maximum deterrence requires a delicate balance where our enemies know we won't use our WMDs unless they use theirs first or they're otherwise about to overrun us or our core allies in a conventional attack.

It doesn't, but that does not stop alarmingly large numbers of people - you can identify them because among them are the sort of people that have time to wave signs in the streets, but can't be assed to ever do anything to propose realistic solutions - from demanding precisely that. Or, more frequently, a watered-down version of Utopia where everyone still has some minimal military capability but no one really uses it and everything gets talked out - which appears reasonable compared to the actual idea of utopia but only because the full-on version is so patently absurd. In reality the value of simply being intractable goes up as your opponent's capabilities drop, and when everyone has only spoons, it behooves you a lot to keep a Bowie knife hidden inside your coat.



I'd say recent events indicate that the lesser frictions since 1991 or so have been a vacation from those tensions, and they certainly cannot be traced to disarmament. As I originally pointed out, we have not produced a new nuclear system in 20 years + - but the Russians have been developing new ICBMs, new SLBMs, new SSBNs, continuing to produce new bombers, and retain such things as tactical nuclear weapons aboard naval vessels; I believe I posted something on that a few years back. I also relatively recently posted a discussion of how they see the INF treaty as not really in their interests.

Tensions tend to ebb and flow, but they really have only been reduced over the last 30-40 years if we use numbers of nuclear weapons and states having them as the measure, and that becomes a circular argument. Tensions are lower because there are fewer nukes, and fewer nukes in turn mean lower tensions. Furthermore, I don't know that it's so much a matter of us succeeding in nonproliferation as a lot of countries simply deciding it's not worth the effort and a few exceptions pretty much giving everyone else the finger.

Major limitations on naval construction similarly failed to reduce tensions, and like now Europe just got a 20-year break after WWI. Russia, having recovered from the "defeat" of the Cold War (and ironically replaced an authoritarian central government with a questionable democracy, just like Germany) is re-arming, and starting to nibble at the territory of its neighbors. Its far less spectacular since Russia's "loss" of the war was far less severe than the defeat of the German Empire and because Putin is a vastly more calculating and practical man with different internal motivations than Hitler, but the parallels are strong in nature if not in degree.



The problem with this argument is A) it works both ways; we can't deter them unless we know the same thing about them and B) it isn't backed up by the historical record. Both sides continually overestimated the willingness of the other to attack during the Cold War. Russian bellicose rhetoric convinced us they would happily overrun Europe and vaporize North America to make it happen and so we came up with readiness procedures that meant we would always have something ready to retaliate, which in turn only convinced the Russians of our willingness to attack. This didn't just happen because of some vicious cycle either; after the experience of WWII, Russian leaders from that era (which was basically all of them prior to Gorbachev) tended to see confrontations as another Great Patriotic War. The possibility of a nuclear attack was like another Barbarossa to them, and if it happened they aimed to win just as they had before.

In 1983 during Able Archer, the Russians were convinced that the entire exercise was a cover for an imminent attack and readied themselves to retaliate, seeing the whole thing as a repeat of 1941 - yet they didn't strike first.

In other words, there's very little evidence that we can't exercise deterrence if our enemies think we might use our weapons first. They've thought that for large periods of time where deterrence did work. Moreover, we thought it about them during the same period of time. As to the conventional attack, one of the things that nuclear deterrence did was exercise conventional deterrence as well. If a conventional conflict started and one side felt it was losing too badly, it would escalate to nuclear weapons. This gave both sides a strong incentive not to get into a full-scale conventional conflict either because the ultimate nuclear conflict was a near-certain outcome and even if you thought you could win, it wasn't worth it. We haven't seen any more WWIIs because such a conflict would rapidly escalate into a nuclear exchange that would destroy the means to sustain the conflict in the first place- but once you get down to a certain level, gaining an advantage by striking first and reducing the capacity for retaliation to a low enough level where the retaliation you'd suffer is merely "very bad" and suddenly the incentive to avoid major conventional wars drops a great deal.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."