How many nukes do you think we need?

[dainthomas]

Originally posted by: K1052

Originally posted by: dainthomas

Originally posted by: ironwing
At the beginning of the Cold War the US had ~5 nukes. It was sufficient to deter the Soviets from overrunning western Europe. I'm going to go with an even dozen.

Exactly. Would you attack a country that had even a dozen highly accurate ICBMs? One of our standard 1MT warheads would turn a several mile radius into a glass bowl and give a fatal radiation bath out to ~90 miles (depending on wind).

No country would want to basically sacrifice a dozen major cities. The thousands of warheads we have now are fairly superfluous, and launching all of them would probably kill a good chunk of our own population anyway.

We don't mount megaton range warheads anymore. Our Minuteman IIIs have been fitted with single W87s (300kt nominal yield upgradable to 475kt by adding extra oralloy) left over from the Peacekeepers.

The problem with investing solely in one deterrent system is it's vulnerability, which is why nuclear nations maintain more than one delivery method.

In that case lets make it a couple hundred spread between subs, land-based missiles, and bombs. That way we can hit each large city with 4-5 and have plenty left for military targets.

I still think having thousands is silly.

 

[miketheidiot]

Since 50 Mt is 2.1×10^17 joules, the average power produced during the entire fission-fusion process, lasting around 39 nanoseconds, was about 5.4×10^24 watts or 5.4 yottawatts. This is equivalent to approximately 1.4% of the power output of the Sun.[9]

lulz

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Originally posted by: OCguy
Enough to ensure a MAD relationship with every nuclear power.

Exactly. That is enough. 6-12 is not enough to ensure MAD relationship. 6-12 is essentially a tactical strike. It's either you take out military bases or a few cities. Pointless.

MAD was the most effective deterrent. You don't need 10,000 but several hundred should be enough.

 

[ElFenix]

precision munitions that can result in an actual decapitating strike would be better than nukes.

 

[Painman]

Originally posted by: Infohawk
I was against the Iraq war but I am a big fan of our nuclear arsenal. It effectively means no rational power can invade our country. The deterrent is based on overwhelming destruction of the enemy. We need lots of nukes to do this. I think people overestimate the power of nuclear weapons that can be delivered by rockets or planes. Sure there have been some ridiculous tests like Tzar Bomba but the average mirv warhead isn't that big.

Check out this site

Detonate some nukes on your favorite city. (And use a modern nuke that can be realistically be delivered to a distant target.) You can see it takes quite a few to anihilate a metropolitan area. If you want to devastate hinterlands you need even more.

I think we should keep developing unconventional weapons (including missile defense) and drastically reduce our conventional force. We don't need to invade Iraq or North Korea. We do need to be able to turn Russia, China, or North Korea into ash.

Wut?

You are completely nuts to be rationalizing the viability of nuclear war in any capacity. What, you think someone could vape L.A. and it would be biz as usual, except that everything from there to Phoenix would have to be rerouted for 10,000 years?

This forum needs a "nuts" emoticon.

:nuts;

 

[K1052]

Originally posted by: ElFenix
precision munitions that can result in an actual decapitating strike would be better than nukes.

though pretty destabilizing, everyone and their brother would rush to implement some kind of fail-deadly system

 

[Toasthead]

all of them

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

Originally posted by: MovingTarget
I'll stick with about a thousand. Less than what we have now, but do you really need enough to destroy the planet many times over? Just once will do.

I wonder what new sorts of WMD we have developed... We could always go for orbital mass drivers...

1,000 to 2,000 is more than enough. You need enough warheads to be in the field and station so that several strikes can not take out your entire arsenal. You want them on mobile launching platforms and hardened bunkers. But the rate at which they were produced was IMHO stupid and nothing but fear mongering. Oh no, the Russians have more than we do, we need to build more. As much as I love military hardware and said bomb Iraq and Afganistan back into the stone age, even I say there is a limit on how many nuclear weapons you need.
Several large yield nukes are all it would take to destroy a country. If you detonated a large war head at the industrial captial, major sea port, and largest population center of almost any nation, that nation would disolve into anarchy and the people would destroy it from the inside as the fought for survival.
Now nations such as the US, Russia and China with their large land mass and very spread out resources would take more weapons to achieve the same effect, but effectively it would only take 50 nukes tops to destabilize a large nation.
The key to securing the US mainland is to support the 2nd Amendment. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian military files were obtained that said that a prolonged occupation of the US mainland would fail because the Americans( specifically mention the South) was to well armed. The Us has the highest percentage of gun owners in the world. Look how well the russians faired against the Afagani's. And we have military arsenals all over the place to pick up missles and shit if it came down to it.

In todays age, Nukes are only deterents from getting nuked by someone else that is sane and rational, now we are dealing with insane and irrational people trying to or already having obtained nukes. (N. Korea and Iran), so all bets are off.

 

[tk149]

As many as it takes to ensure that we can retaliate against an enemy strike and destroy many strategic targets. That includes the possibility that not all of our nukes will launch and detonate on target because the launch sites were taken out by pre-emptive attacks (nuclear, infiltration, whatever) or the warhead fails to explode or goes off course.

Overall, I'd prefer to see as few nukes as possible, while maintaining a retaliatory ability.

I'm more worried about suitcase nukes. I really wonder how hard it would be to smuggle a suitcase nuke (or it's components) into a country. I bet you could probably do it pretty easily.

Plus, what about when the aliens invade?

 

[dainthomas]

Originally posted by: JeffreyLebowski

The key to securing the US mainland is to support the 2nd Amendment. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian military files were obtained that said that a prolonged occupation of the US mainland would fail because the Americans( specifically mention the South) was to well armed.

With Patrick Swayze fighting cancer, now may be the time to strike!

 

[BrownTown]

Originally posted by: Painman
Wut?

You are completely nuts to be rationalizing the viability of nuclear war in any capacity. What, you think someone could vape L.A. and it would be biz as usual, except that everything from there to Phoenix would have to be rerouted for 10,000 years?

This forum needs a "nuts" emoticon.

:nuts;

you do realize 1000+ nukes have been detonated throughout history including 100+ on this countries soil and yet there is not the nuclear fallout you describe.

Here are several dozen within 100 miles of Las Vegas and nobody has any problem going there like you suggest. There is a monument at the exact point that Trinity (first nuke) exploded on and you can stand there and look at it just fine. Same is actually true about Chernobyl too. Its just people have a pretty overblown fear of radiation that is sometimes silly. For example how many of ya'll knew the Chernobyl power plant ran for 15 years AFTER the accident?

 

[fskimospy]

Originally posted by: BrownTown

Originally posted by: Painman
Wut?

You are completely nuts to be rationalizing the viability of nuclear war in any capacity. What, you think someone could vape L.A. and it would be biz as usual, except that everything from there to Phoenix would have to be rerouted for 10,000 years?

This forum needs a "nuts" emoticon.

:nuts;

you do realize 1000+ nukes have been detonated throughout history including 100+ on this countries soil and yet there is not the nuclear fallout you describe.

Here are several dozen within 100 miles of Las Vegas and nobody has any problem going there like you suggest. There is a monument at the exact point that Trinity (first nuke) exploded on and you can stand there and look at it just fine. Same is actually true about Chernobyl too.

Uhmm, no. There are certain areas of Pripyat that you can stand without much worry, and then there are plenty of other parts that are pretty damn unhealthy for you. The 'visitors center' (ha) there gives you about 7 msv per hour. While this isn't very high, as a point of contrast people working with radioactive materials are generally only allowed a 25-50 msv yearly exposure rate. Considering you will get that in an afternoon, this is not exactly a place you want to camp out, and it certainly isn't somewhere people should be living. The main reason the place is somewhere people can go at all is the sarcophagus built around the ruined reactor that quite a few people died from radiation to build.

Many of the weapons detonated were done so specifically in a way to minimize radioactive fallout to avoid exactly the situation he describes. To use those tests as proof against what he's saying doesn't really hold up.

 

[BrownTown]

Originally posted by: eskimospy
Uhmm, no. There are certain areas of Pripyat that you can stand without much worry, and then there are plenty of other parts that are pretty damn unhealthy for you. The 'visitors center' (ha) there gives you about 7 msv per hour. While this isn't very high, as a point of contrast people working with radioactive materials are generally only allowed a 25-50 msv yearly exposure rate. Considering you will get that in an afternoon, this is not exactly a place you want to camp out, and it certainly isn't somewhere people should be living. The main reason the place is somewhere people can go at all is the sarcophagus built around the ruined reactor that quite a few people died from radiation to build.

Many of the weapons detonated were done so specifically in a way to minimize radioactive fallout to avoid exactly the situation he describes. To use those tests as proof against what he's saying doesn't really hold up.

what is it exactly you are saying no to? As for all those nuke explosions, explain how you blow up a nuke in the atmosphere to reduce the fallout exactly? I know the ones I showed were underground so most of them don't release much radiaiton, but there are plenty more above ground explosions, they just don't leave obvious craters for me to link to.

 

[fskimospy]

Originally posted by: BrownTown

Originally posted by: eskimospy
Uhmm, no. There are certain areas of Pripyat that you can stand without much worry, and then there are plenty of other parts that are pretty damn unhealthy for you. The 'visitors center' (ha) there gives you about 7 msv per hour. While this isn't very high, as a point of contrast people working with radioactive materials are generally only allowed a 25-50 msv yearly exposure rate. Considering you will get that in an afternoon, this is not exactly a place you want to camp out, and it certainly isn't somewhere people should be living. The main reason the place is somewhere people can go at all is the sarcophagus built around the ruined reactor that quite a few people died from radiation to build.

Many of the weapons detonated were done so specifically in a way to minimize radioactive fallout to avoid exactly the situation he describes. To use those tests as proof against what he's saying doesn't really hold up.

what is it exactly you are saying no to? As for all those nuke explosions, explain how you blow up a nuke in the atmosphere to reduce the fallout exactly? I know the ones I showed were underground so most of them don't release much radiaiton, but there are plenty more above ground explosions, they just don't leave obvious craters for me to link to.

An 'air burst' detonation of a nuclear weapon generally creates much less fallout than a surface explosion due to the fact that far less dirt/whatever is actually vaporized and blown skyward.