Sure, but there must always be a fear that the military and public would not want to die in a nuclear inferno to defend national sovereignty. And may tolerate a coupe instead. Which then reduces the madness and the deterrent effect. The extra step the Dprk have taken is to try and build bunkers so that the regime could survive the destruction of the country. A step further into madness that goes beyond what western countries have been willing to accept.
With the rise of solid fuel ICBM and then MIRV leading to the truly massive number of warheads pointed at the US, the US switched to airplanes for the most important continuity of government issues, figuring that the skies 30,000 above the US will largely be secure (presuming the plane is appropriately EMP shielded) due to the many US geographic advantages, and so it is the best place to ride out the initial attack and then take stock, get to somewhere safe, and figure out what to do from there.
But the North Koreans can have no illusion that the skies above their country will be safe: there are several major enemy airbases a few minutes from their border, their entire airspace is routinely surveilled and powers hostile to them have made large investments in stealthy air superiority fighters, so the air is not a safe place for the DPRK continuity of government plans. The DPRK does have trains but I would not consider those safe in the event of a major war, since rails are difficult to keep secret.
There are something like 20,000 airports and heliports across the US. While not all of them can handle 747s probably there are several thousand fields that can take one of them, especially if there is no need for it to fly again.
And even if all of those fields are destroyed in the US, the 747s modified for AF1 (VC-25s) are capable of in flight refueling, they can stay up for about three days before the oil needs to be changed on the engines and they are forced to land. So they can still reach Australia or some place far away from the US if the rest of the US is totally destroyed.
Given the extent of planning that went into these types of doomsday survival scenarios, I wouldn't be surprised to find there are pre-prepared discreet runways in obscure locations unlikely to be targeted. Not full concrete runways, just a strip of prepared land that would see a 747 land without exploding into a ball of fire.
Dry lake beds abound in the US West. See Edwards AFB (big dry lake bed on which nearly everything, including the Space Shuttle, has landed). See also Groom Lake. These are enormous and couldn't be wrecked by conventional runway denial weapons.
I'd always been told this was planned into the implementation of the US Interstate Highway System. There are dead straight and level sections ever so many linear miles or per some gridsquare measure to serve as ad hoc landing strips in a national crisis. That's been 35+ years ago that I heard it and I haven't sought any supporting documentation since the dawn of the Internet. Any insight would be appreciated.
even a small country like Switzerland uses its highways to land fighterjets[0], wouldn't be weird to me if the US with their humongous highways uses them for the same reason. difference is that the swiss have to remove the middle crash barriers before landing, so less spontaneous.
The high end of the range of death estimates by the two atomic bombs is around 246,000. The estimated range of US military deaths from an invasion of Japan (Operation Downfall) was 250,000 to 1,000,000, and another 5 to 10 million Japanese. Dropping nukes was both barbaric and the more civilized option. Oppenheimer et al. deserve their acclaim.
Japan attacked the US first, and by Hiroshima the US had 110,000 dead in the Pacific theater. Imagine living through that before judging them.
> Dropping nukes was both barbaric and the more civilized option.
Also perhaps worth noting that after the first bomb the Japanese government was not planning to surrender. The second dropping moved things to a deadlock where half of the ministers—both in the small war council, and the larger full government—wanted to the surrender and the other half did not.
The Emperor had to be called in—an almost unprecedented action—to break the tie. Then, even after the Emperor had made his decision, there was a coup attempt to prevent the "surrender"† broadcast:
I do not know how anyone can think that Japan would have stopped fighting without the bombings when two bombings barely got things over the line.
The book 140 days to Hiroshima by David Dean Barrett goes over the meeting minutes / deliberations and interviews to outline the timeline, and it was not a sure thing that the surrender was going to happen: the hardliners really wanted to keep fighting, and they were ready to go to great lengths to get their way (see Kyūjō above).
The Japanese knew for a year before the bombings that they could not win the war, but they figured that by holding out—causing more causalities of Japanese, Americans, Chinese, Filipinos, etc—the US would lose their resolve and terms could be negotiated so that Japan could (e.g.) keep the land they conquered in Manchuria, etc.
† A word not actually used by the Japanese in the broadcast.
The US had already secretly intercepted cables from Japan with it looking to "terminate the war because of the pressing situation which confronts Japan" as far back as July 12th 1945 in which they also expressed a willingness to relinquish all claimed territories. [1] The only condition they were seeking is that the Emperor be able to remain as a figurehead.
That urgency and willingness to surrender was before Japan knew that the USSR had already agreed with the allies to declare war on them at the Yalta conference in February. The USSR committed to declaring war on Japan "two or three" months after Germany fell, which happened on May 8th. They declared war on Japan on August 8th.
We did not forward any of this information onto the other allies. Instead we chose to nuke Japan on August 6th. The Emperor was allowed to remain as a figurehead.
Pro tip: if your enemy is really about to surrender, nuking them once will suffice. Even after the second bomb was dropped, the Emperor faced assassination threats from the military high command for running up the white flag.
More to the point, while Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrible events, they were cheap lessons compared to what it would have cost humanity to establish the taboo of nuclear warfare later, in Korea or elsewhere, with bombs 10x to 1000x their size.
Like you're indirectly acknowledging, the nukes had no real impact on their decision. Half their way cabinet wanted to fight to the last Japanese, half wanted to surrender. This was both before and after the nukes. The Emperor wasn't like a super-politician - he was seen as a [literally] living deity who was above politics. So the cabinet called upon him to make the final decision, which he had made long before the nukes - which was to surrender. There was no danger to him. Even the plots to undermine his decision involved destroying his announcement of surrender and leaving him under house arrest. And that plot was stopped by a speech from another officer, leading to most of the plotters to commit suicide for their dishonor.
And I don't think there were any real lessons learned. We nearly nuked ourselves during the Cold War multiple times. And today, with bombs that make Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like primitive weapons, you have people acting like nuclear war isn't something 'that' fearful. We killed hundreds of thousands of people largely for the sake of trying to get a slight geopolitical edge over the USSR. And that's far better than the alternative of there being no reason at all. In no world are the arguments about it saving lives valid, even if you attach 0 value to the life of the Japanese for having audacity to be born in the wrong country.
----
Leo Szilard was a critical scientist in the story of the atomic bomb, and he's also full of just amazingly insightful quotes. [1]
- Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?
- A great power imposes the obligation of exercising restraint, and we did not live up to this obligation. I think this affected many of the scientists in a subtle sense, and it diminished their desire to continue to work on the bomb.
- Even in times of war, you can see current events in their historical perspective, provided that your passion for the truth prevails over your bias in favor of your own nation.
You're right, in that there's no reason to assume the bombs were entirely decisive by themselves. The truth is that from the target's POV, there was nothing particularly special or interesting about the atomic bombs of the day, except that they were dropped from a single plane.
So no, they wouldn't be considered war crimes, any more than the equally-destructive firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden would be considered war crimes. Meaning, of course they would be considered war crimes, but only if the victims had won the war. That's the idea behind war. War is about doing the worst stuff you can do to the other guys, then doing whatever you can to claim the moral high ground afterward. So it's best avoided when possible.
Szilard was a great guy, and in fact he was behind the original missive to FDR that kicked the program into gear. It's as impossible -- and as inappropriate -- for us to judge him and his motivations as it is for us to second-guess Truman's decision to drop the bombs. However, he's all wet with that particular argument. Unlike Germany there was never any question that the Allied side would win the war, bomb or no bomb. The question was, what would be the cost, and who should pay that cost. I'm fine with Japan paying it. They would certainly have done the same to us, and they would certainly have skipped the subsequent navel-gazing.
By the way, it's easy to argue that the 'slight geopolitical edge' that the Bomb gave us over the USSR saved millions of lives in the future. For instance, it's far from clear that North Korea wouldn't be better off today if MacArthur had been allowed to have his way.
Imagine that the Russians had either somehow beaten us to the Bomb, or had invaded Japan in the absence of our ability to deter them. Given a choice between suffering Hiroshima and Nagasaki at our hands, and suffering a half-century of Communist rule, do you really think Japan would be better off in the latter scenario?
The reason nuclear bombs are "uncivilized" isn't directly related to the number of deaths due to use of a single one. The reason is that the by using nuclear bombs, the US created the precedent for the usage of the only weapon humans have created that, if used by all sides, can result in effectively billions dead at extremely low cost.
To kill a billion people by conventional bombs would require years of sustained effort costing trillions of dollars, and I imagine the army doing that killing would collapse under the moral horror of its own actions far before that number is reached. On that other hand, thousands of nuclear weapons can be deployed by a very small group of amoral people with instantaneous destructive effects.
It wasn't the a civilised option. Japan would have lost and surrendered with or without nukes. The USA nuked two cities just to demonstrate their nuclear capabilities to the Soviets.
> The estimated range of US military deaths from an invasion of Japan (Operation Downfall) was 250,000 to 1,000,000, and another 5 to 10 million Japanese.
I've read convincing arguments (sorry, I cannot find them now) that this reasoning is mostly bogus.
One, the decision of dropping the bombs wasn't coordinated with planners of Operation Downfall, so casualties weren't a consideration. As such, it cannot be "civilized" (because the intent to be civilized just wasn't there).
Two, those casualty numbers rest on arbitrary assumptions about what the Japanese would or wouldn't do that don't hold up to real scrutiny, and ignore a host of options other than "full scale invasion" or "nuke".
Three, you cannot discount the flex towards the USSR, an argument many Japanese to this day maintain was a major reason. Which wasn't a civilized reason either.
On the other hand, it doesn’t matter how off the estimates were because they’re our people and their lives matter more.
It seems rather immoral to a high degree to send some Americans to their deaths unnecessarily because we didn’t want to use a weapon we had in our possession to end a war that we did not start.
The history on this is pretty sound ... a major bombing campaign was started much earlier to avoid any invasion or boots on the ground.
Seventy two Japanese cities, including Tokyo, were already completely destroyed before the two atomic bombs were dropped. The two cities destroyed by atomic bombs were on a list to be destroyed regardless.
To the people killed, injured, or left in the shell of a city with no food or water it made very little real difference whether the cause was HE+incendiaries OR high burst shockwave from atomic bomb - the M&M statistics (death and injury, both immediate and following) were similar in either case.
The greatest military imperative to drop the atomic bombs were pragmatic .. they were developed at vast expanse for use on Germany but were not ready until after Germany surrended .. to close off an R&D program without a live target test on targets already targetted for destruction just seemed ... wasteful.
After the bombs were dropped, everything changed. Public awareness and perception. The need for post war PR. The start of the Cold War race with soviets over atomics. The pressing need for auto biographies and centre staging from actors late to the story, etc.
Much of the "justification" for dropping atomic bombs was retconned after the fact.
> On the other hand, it doesn’t matter how off the estimates were because they’re our people and their lives matter more.
"Our" people?
That kind of moral calculus simply doesn't track with me: I'm neither from the US nor Japan, plus I think considerations of "civilization" fly out the window once you start thinking like this.
But also, it's a kind of goalpost shifting. Either the calculations were the justification, in which case it matters whether they were right, or they weren't. It's not right to argue "well, the actual numbers don't matter because...".
I am not following this rationale at all. Because you're not Japanese or American, Americans are uncivilized for using a weapon that caused lots of Japanese people to die after Japanese people attacked the United States (and Australia, China, the Philippines, and more) and wouldn't stop?
> Either the calculations were the justification
The person I responded to was trying to suggest the number of American lives saved was a lot fewer than estimates. Instead of saving 1,000,000 Americans it "only" saved 50,000 or something and because of that, the calculus to use the bomb wasn't as "good" as it otherwise would be if it had saved more lives.
I say if it saved a single American life it was worth it, and was righteous, thus the shifting around of how many American lives saved is pointless because we know the lower bound is 1, and 1 was all you needed.
It was pretty simple: you said "they’re our people and their lives matter more" and I explained that they are not "our" people because you're not talking to an US American: you're talking to a South American. They are not "my" people.
I also claimed that, in any case, arguments out of "our" vs "their" people are fundamentally not about being civilized (which was the root of the argument, let me quote it for context: "dropping nukes was both barbaric and the more civilized option. Oppenheimer et al. deserve their acclaim.").
You can make "us vs them" arguments, but it has nothing to do with being civilized, and it doesn't save anyone from accusations of barbarism. I mean, Hitler also thought in terms of "us vs them", and look how he is regarded today.
> The person I responded to was trying to suggest the number of American lives saved was a lot fewer than estimates. Instead of saving 1,000,000 Americans it "only" saved 50,000 or something and because of that, the calculus to use the bomb wasn't as "good" as it otherwise would be if it had saved more lives.
The person you responded to was me. Your understanding of my argument is incorrect. I argued that the number mattered because the actual number is used to say "the invasion [Operation Downfall] would have caused more casualties than dropping the bomb, therefore the bomb 'saved' Japanese lives too". Please don't tell me you haven't heard this argument, which is very well known and in fact was mentioned by the original commenter I was responding to. This moral calculus has been quoted thousands of times; I'm pointing out it's misleading and dishonest.
You simply can't have your cake and eat it too. Either the numbers matter or they don't; and if they do matter, it matters that they are well justified and accurate. And it matters whether they were really thinking of these numbers when they decided to use the Bomb(s), or whether they are an a posteriori justification!
(Besides, as a sibling commenter argued, more aptly than I did: US planners wanted to use the Bomb because they had it and had spent a lot of effort developing it. They were primed to use it. They wanted to test it on a real city, with real humans, and they wanted to send a message to the Soviets, too. All excuses -- Operation Downfall, American vs Japanese lives, etc -- were a posteriori, retroactively deployed to not be portrayed as cold hearted).
> I say if it saved a single American life it was worth it, and was righteous, thus the shifting around of how many American lives saved is pointless because we know the lower bound is 1, and 1 was all you needed.
This is fundamentally wrong and doesn't support the argument from "civilization" which, again, was the argument I was responding to.
If you are going to argue American lives are worth preserving more than lives from other countries, not only do I disagree (how would you feel if I told you they are less worth preserving?), but it's also not about being civilized. So we can abandon that pretense!
I think that lesson from World War Two is that civilization is all the things we do to prevent another World War Two from happening. And that what we owe to all the people in Hiroshima, Tokyo, Nanjing, the Warsaw Ghetto, Katyn, Bengal, Manzanar, and a thousand other places is to prevent anything like that from happening again.
The US is vulnerable to that scenario as well, even though the military’s willingness to comply with literally textbook illegal orders is not encouraging.
According to some deep dives into the budget figures for the East Wing Ballroom .. there are new bunkers going in as we type .. and likely being networked underground.
> the military and public would not want to die in a nuclear inferno to defend national sovereignty
Erm, it's kind of demanded for people to go out and die to defend national sovereignty in nations that have a draft. For myself, I'd prefer to be vaporized than bleed out in a trench if it really comes down to it.
Realistically speaking you'll die of an infected and untreated burn wound though, the severe blast and burn area is just much much bigger than the fancy "everything just goes poof" core.
Realistically speaking you're going to die of starvation or get shot by marauding gangs, or die of cancer a few decades later from radiation in the food change. NukeMap [1] has good visualizations of the relative fireball vs. blast vs. thermal radiation vs. fallout radiuses. One thing that stands out: most of the suburbs is going to survive the initial nuclear exchange. At worst, they'll have a few broken windows.
The problem is that if you eliminate ~20% of a nation's population, supply chains, continuity of government, and the economy aren't going to last long. Social organization breaks down much more widely than people die. The resultant pullback of all the trapping of society - reliable food supply, clean water, transportation infrastructure, electricity, heat - is going to kill many more people than the nukes will.
Not only 20% of the population, but wiping out cities is going to make everything grind to a halt. Best case, tiny pockets of social order is going to remain in very hard to reach, remote rural areas which also has local access to food. We are talking about maybe thousands of people in a population of hundreds of millions. The rest are in for a decade of pure hell.
Yah, but you could enter the ruins of some shop, get some booze there, and walk straight into ground zero. Feeling the buzz. Getting tired...drifting away...
Note that MAD only works when there are a small number of players. Once it gets up past around 12, a.) it becomes too easy to detonate a nuclear weapon and then blame somebody else to take the fall and b.) the chance of somebody doing something crazy and irrational becomes high. Same reason that oligopolies can have steady profit but once you have ~10-12 market players you enter perfect competition and inevitably get a price war.
There are 9 nuclear-armed states today. Likely this has set us on a path where nuclear war is inevitable.
People massively simplify the dynamics of launching a nuke. If Russia launched a nuke on a Ukrainian military target away from civilians there is virtually 0 chance of nuclear retaliation. Ukraine doesn't have them. Does anyone think the US, France, etc. would nuke Russia? Of course not.
It's scary, but in some scenarios one nation can absolutely nuke another nation without threat of getting nuked themselves. In reality, the cat coming out of the bag looks more like that than nuclear armageddon.
The problem is the precedent that sets. Russia launches a nuke on Ukraine, and there are no repercussions. That will teach every nuclear-armed state that they can freely nuke non-nuclear-armed states without consequence. But then what happens when somebody makes a mistake? China nukes Japan, but maybe Japan had a secret nuclear program and actually does have a retaliatory capability and nukes China back? Or China invades Taiwan (doesn't even have to nuke it), but the U.S. decides that the loss of Taiwanese semiconductor is actually an unacceptable red line and nukes the invasion fleet? Pakistan nukes India, but China misjudges the trajectory of the nuke and thinks it's actually under attack. Israel nukes Iran, but winds carry the fallout over Pakistan and India.
Game theory works when players know the payout matrix. When the assumed payout matrix is shown to be false, you get very chaotic, almost random results, because you can't assume that your opponents will correctly choose the rational choice. With WMDs, the consequences of that can be deadly. That's why both nuclear proliferation and "limited" nuclear war are such fraught choices, and why the major nuclear powers have worked so hard to avoid them. They've run the game theoretic simulations and understand that it doesn't lead anywhere good.
>The problem is the precedent that sets. Russia launches a nuke on Ukraine, and there are no repercussions. That will teach every nuclear-armed state that they can freely nuke non-nuclear-armed states without consequence. But then what happens when somebody makes a mistake?
I agree with you. It's really bad and it's a slippery slope. It's also true that there are many scenarios where you can launch nukes without repercussions. That's the misperception I'm pointing out.
It's happened before, although with no loss of civilian life.
In 1998 neither India nor Pakistan were considered members of the nuclear warhead club.
Then India detonated 5 warhead sized kiloton and sub kiloton class thermonuclear (fusion / hydrogen) weapons .. and within 20 days Pakistan responded with six atomic tests (non fusion, larger than warhead size).
The interesting thing about that exchange is that India suprised the world intelligence community pants down with capability and execution, and Pakistan's speed of response was equally suprising.
Despite the spectacle of rapid cross fire of eleven nuclear weapons and tense international responses the small nuke treats didn't escalate into anything larger .. and likely served to keep heads a little cooler wrt both India and Pakistan.
All up there has been > 2,000 nuclear detonations across the globe, some definitely intended to intimidate or otherwise push the envelope of possibility.
In that light another small nuke that avoided civilians and had a military target is unlikely to escalate although it would certainly cause a collective intake of breath and give pause.
I said Russia dropping a nuke on a Ukranian military site will not escalate into a nuclear war. I say this because so many people assume that it would and it makes no sense.
Ukraine might have some possible retaliatory options in that case though. Far from ideal, but they could for example load a big ship full of explosives and blow up much of St Petersburg.
Of course, other options such as biological weapons have been explored in the past. Ukraine wouldn't necessarily have to invest all that much to prepare retaliatory operations capable of killing millions of Russians in the case of a nuclear attack.
The only problem with such less orthodox means is that they're almost necessarily covert, and therefore can provide limited deterrence. "We have ways to impose immense costs if necessary" just doesn't sound that scary when the means are a secret.
The nukes are to deter the US. They have been steadily increasing their missile range to first reach regional bases like Guam and now the all the way to the continental USA, and are now even launching a nuclear powered and nuclear armed ballistic missile submarine https://www.hisutton.com/DPRK-SSN-Update.html
The nukes are a bargaining chip (disarmament). Basically, if your country has the human and tech capital to develop a nuke, you probably should because it's free money.
I don't believe that NK's nukes deter the US from doing anything. Would NK nuke Guam and risk getting carpet-bombed with nukes for endless days and nights until even the ants are dead? Artillery on Seoul doesn't matter. The US would just ask SK to evacuate it.
The US doesn't do anything about the DPRK because it's not economically relevant (i.e. it doesn't have the world's largest oil reserves etc). In an ironic way, their economy being closed-off and mostly unintegrated with the Western world maintains the peace.
The nukes have many roles perhaps but I think the fully developed weapons are for retaliatory strike.
They are the North Korean leadership saying that if the US (or China or anyone really) tries to surgically decapitate them (like the US just did in Venezuela) then the nukes are used to take the attackers with them
Yes that's the orthodox doctrine of nuclear deterrent. To be truly effective you need a triad of land-based ICBMs, nuclear-armed submarines, and aircraft-based delivery systems so that your second-strike capability remains intact through any decapitation attempts.
If you don't have the triad then you need to brandish your capability more ostentatiously, like France does with its deliberate refusal to commit to a no-first-strike policy. This is (one of the many reasons) why North Korea does so much sabre-rattling: they don't have a (publicly known) nuclear triad for deterrence.
Just a note that the importance of the triad is a very American perspective on deterrence and most other countries don't seem to approach this the same way the US does.
The Russians really have a quad (they also have mobile, truck mounted ICBM's that form a significant part of their deterrent, offering some of the guaranteed second-strike advantages that the US gets from SSBN's- and which their SSBN program does not provide nearly as well as the USN does). The Chinese only recently added a manned aircraft leg of their triad with the JL-1. The Indians technically have a triad- just no silo based systems, all of their land based missiles are from TELs, and they only have two SSBN's and do not do alternate crews so more than 1/3 of the time they don't have any deterrent at sea. The Israeli's are not believed to have any sea-based ballistic missiles, their sea-based deterrent would be Popeye cruise missiles and so vulnerable to interception. The Pakistanis are still building their first sea-based deterrent. The French and the UK have no land-based missiles, they are only sea-based and airplanes. The South Africans invested in the Jericho missile more for its space launched capabilities than its warhead delivery abilities, and never really looked at anything sea-based, so far as is publicly known.
I don't think they fill the same strategic purposes, though. The value of silo based missiles to the US is as a missile-sponge, taking most of the warheads from a Russian first strike and keeping them from American cities (forcing any Russian first-strike to be counter-force instead of counter-value). This is not particularly valuable, honestly, which is why only the USSR during the height of the Cold War (largely in reaction to Minuteman) and China very recently have also made the investment into large numbers of ICBM silos.(1)
I won't claim to be as much an expert on Russian doctrine, but they seem to consider their mobile missiles to be a survivable second strike weapon, while silo based missiles are obviously not. Because their boomer fleet does not offer the same assured second strike, they rely on those mobile missiles to play a greater deterrent role then the US does.
1: That is the official justification for the US silos. The real reason for silos is, if you want to build a truly insane number of strategic warheads, silos are the only way to afford it- ships and planes and even TELs are too expensive. So first the US (worried they were behind because of the Missile Gap) built a thousand Minuteman (then tripled the deployed warheads with MIRV on the Minuteman-III). Then the Soviets responded with 1000 SS-11s of their own. But if you are only building a few hundred warheads total, you don't bother with silos, they don't add as much value as other delivery mechanisms.
I'm saying: Whether or not the Russians consider their silos to be more or less survivable than their truck-based missiles is immaterial, and doesn't change the calculus at the strategic level, because one of two things has to happen in a first-strike situation:
- You blanket the entire country in nuclear detonations and pray that you catch all the trucks scurrying around like nuclear-armed mice
or
- You spam dozens of missiles at a small number of hardened targets and hope you dent them (missile sponge silos)
Either way, you're severely depleting your arsenal to an infeasible level to do this. These are both counter-force attacks where targeting is the only difference, which the Strategic function does not concern itself with. That's a tactical consideration. Survivability of a land-based asset achieved by different means is still survivability of a land-based asset. In other words, it's still functionally a triad.
In the case of France in particular, the argument I recall reading is that: a) France was entering a period of austerity in defense spending as the Cold War ended, b) its siloed missiles were obsolete and in need of upgrades which promised to be costly, and c) France isn't very large geographically, so the "missile sponges" were limited to that little plateau north of Marseille which is pretty darn close to several major population centers, where an Ivy Mike-sized airburst could endanger Avignon and Marseille, not to mention leave a plume of fallout all the way into Germany.
But I'm just an ex Air Force officer who's been to France a bunch, so idk how accurate that is.
>The real reason for silos is, if you want to build a truly insane number of strategic warheads, silos are the only way to afford it
Yeah, I guess I mentally slot road mobile missiles as more like "less effective SLBM on the cheap," at least for a country the size of Russia (not sure that is as true for someone like North Korea where I speculate there is a larger use-it-or-lose-it penalty). There is definitely more of a continuum here between "missile-soak" and "survivable deterrent"- e.g. at the limit you could, in theory, vaporize all of the oceans with nuclear weapons to kill all the boomers, which turns them into missile soaks, but at a truly insane level.
I've seen open-source estimates that the 33rd Guards Rocket Army can distribute their three divisions of mobile missiles across something like 5,000 square miles of Siberia, mostly steppe/taiga (which the 7917/79221 are supposed to be capable of launching from, again according to open source reporting). That's more than 10% of all of North Korea, to give an idea why it would be different for the two countries. Being open-source, I don't have a good estimate for the survivability of the TEL, but let's somewhat arbitrarily say 5PSI is the limit. A 300kt W87 can put 5PSI over 3 mi^2, so doing 5,000 mi^2 would be about 1700 of them, for a grid-square blanket search. That seems to be impracticable, just for one third of their missiles(1).
So I think it's more about guaranteed second-strike than soaking (e.g. at three warheads per silo you'd need ~600 missiles to soak up that many warheads, instead of the 70-odd from mobile). Which is why I have seen some people consider those missiles as more about assured second-strike than missile-soak, with hints that the Russians consider that their role. The Russian doctrine does not align exactly with the American one (2) for sure and there are hints that the Russians consider road-mobile to be different from silo deployments.
1: I'm not as clear on how much deployment space the 27th Guards Rocket Army, in the European parts of Russia has, and whether they will run into similar problems to the French wrt population centers. There is also a whole separate discussion about how much counter-force and counter-value are truly separate on the receiving end, given, e.g. if Barksdale gets nuked Shreveport is going to be very very sad. But the RAND people were sure they were distinct!
2: At least, as far as this monolingual American can tell. My main source for this is the Arms Control Wonk blog and podcast, which actually does read and report on what the Russians describe as their doctrine, they are my source for the "Russians seem to consider road-mobile as more survivable second-strike than silos."
> To be truly effective you need a triad of land-based ICBMs, nuclear-armed submarines, and aircraft-based delivery systems
The core parts for MAD land-based missile silos (to soak up the enemy's missiles) and submarines (to ensure a second strike). Planes are largely a diplomatic deterrent inasmuch as they're easy to send out and easy to recall.
But Pyongyang isn't playing MAD. It's playing credible threat. And for a credible threat, you just need missiles. (On land or on subs.) The point is that you raise the stakes of e.g. a Maduro operation to risking Los Angeles.
Strategic bombers are just as important because MAD itself is fundamentally a political and diplomatic tool. The reason you have strategic bombers is, as you correctly said, so that you can signal your posture and intent by stationing them, dispersing them, launching them, and (most critically) recalling them.
But again, because MAD first and foremost is a deterrent, you want to provide diplomatic offramps for both you and your adversary. This is crucial. Putting the B-52s on airborne alert sends a very strong message, but so does recalling them from airborne alert.
By their very natures, SSBNs and ICBMs are not capable of playing this role.
Maduro may have been aligned with them, but that is a completely different thing than being protected by them. The DPRK is actually protected by the PRC, in the sense that the PRC is willing to and historically did deploy millions of soldiers to push back Americans from North Korean territory.
But note that happened in rhe 1950s, when Mao was in power and the PRC was an upstart separatist regime with very limited recognition. Now China may want to act very differently.
The reason Mao helped Pyongyang still applies: namely, it would make China less secure to have on its border a regime allied to a great power other than China.
They already have a border with Pakistan and got exactly zero problems from it (if anything, China is the one to stir up shit on that border). You seem to be repeating Putin-style propaganda points. Stalin and Mao were never threatened by the West really, that was part of the Marx-mandated global commie land grab.
Saying "The West is no threat to anyone" at the same time you're advocating for an invasion and abduction of a country's leader is certainly a position to hold. Not a very internally consistent or convincing one, though. And I suppose Vietnam never happened in your constructed reality.
China, Cuba and Russia sent him air defences and some personal guards. What would China's millions do if Kim was kidnapped? Invade Seoul that had no say in it?
Us has these nifty things called aircraft carriers, which were used to capture Maduro as well. They can be in international waters, the choppers fly quite far. China would not retaliate against the US.
That is a bold assertion to make considering China literally did retaliate against the US in North Korea once already, to the tune of war. Kidnapping heads of states is an act of war. Venezuela can't defend itself, but China certainly will do whatever is necessary to secure its vassal if the alternative is NK collapsing and having US military bases on its border.
You also rule out the possibility of an invasion of Seoul, as though it would be "unfair" -- when you're advocating for and actively in the process of tearing whatever remains of the concept of international law to shreds, what makes you think PRC would be inclined to play nice?
Other than by launching nukes (and getting 10x on themselves) China has no capability to attack the US. I don't think attacking SK is unlikely because it's "unfair", but rather because there's no incentive to do so. The concept of "if you attack Cuba we'll attack Europe" is an old playbook for the commies, and I think was always a bluff.
My point is that since in this scenario SK would likely be involved in some capacity (granting safe passage, harboring US planes, etc) they would suffer retaliation by NK and possibly China.
I don't see what's unlikely about this, it's basically NK's defense strategy.
China knows about carriers, and tracks them carefully. They have built a variety of weapons to sink them, too, but I don’t think they’d need to use them: note how the raid on Maduro went so quietly that people have been looking for evidence that some of the Venezuelan military were in on it? North Korea has built up a lot more paranoia and China wouldn’t need to sink a carrier, simply ensuring that the NK military knows what’s coming as soon as planes take off and communicates that in a way which makes it impossible for any potentially disloyal faction to act short of declaring a coup (you can’t “accidentally” miss something the entire chain of command knows about). I detest the NK government but I’d expect that to be a much bloodier fight, especially after a huge warning.
> Us has these nifty things called aircraft carriers, which were used to capture Maduro as well.
It wasn't just carriers in Maduro's case. The operation was carried from multiple places, including out of Caribbean countries aligned with the US. The US was literally signing deals with those countries months in advance.
Who would those countries be in an hypothetical NK strike? Because those countries would suffer retaliation.
China's primary concern is resource extraction from Venezuela, which is why Trump immediately clarified that they'd make sure China still got their oil deliveries.
Russia is stretched way too thin right now to do anything meaningful about it.
Venezuela was basically being run by Cuba. Maduro was really only a figurehead. The military and government was functionally run by imported Cubans which is why a coup wasn't possible.
That just sounds like more 'strongly worded letters' which never go anywhere and they never do anything about.
It's over for the EU. They rested on their laurels for too long and cowardice rotted them from the inside.
I don't think Denmark will put even a smidge of resistance up. Trump is going to bark some orders, boots are going to hit the ground and it's fait accompli.
What does action (i.e. not-strongly-worded-letters, i.e. not words) look like?
Capture Trump?
Invade the US?
The idea the EU is some bureaucratic hellhole incapable of anything is really odd and nigh-universal - I'm used to righties adopting it from Brexit & antipathy for social demoracy, but I'm not used to see it as a despondent wailing from people otherwise sympathetic to it.
Note no one even mentioned the EU - it's so universal a reaction to "US is acting bad" that it came out of nowhere. Not to pick on you: when I was first replying, I also replied as if it was the EU! Had to go back and read the comment I was replying to and corrected myself before posting.
One non military but economical retaliation that would affect our industry is to stop respecting American’s intellectual property. Some variation of the trade bazooka. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Coercion_Instrument
> What does action (i.e. not-strongly-worded-letters, i.e. not words) look like?
Europe withdraws from the non-proliferation treaty, publicly resolves to building and maintaining a European nuclear deterrent and greenlights members who have been militarily threatened (the Baltics, Poland and Denmark) to start clandestine programmes.
The last part doesn't even have to happen. Hell, none of it has to happen. But that would be playing from strength.
Unfortunately, Europe is not politically unified enough to do this. (Same for Asia.)
Isn't this comment just confirming GP's sentiment that the EU is a toothless sitting duck that's begging to be plundered? Yes, when another country threatens your sovereignty you're supposed to vigorously defend it through shows of force, prepare for war and possibly impose economic penalties on the aggressor. The most the EU can do is put out some mild condemnations on Twitter (without mentioning Daddy).
Any sort of pushback at all would be an improvement.
Even now, the EU Commission is trying to 'defuse' the Greenland situation by trying to invoke NATO's fifth article, as if that's worth anything without the will of the USA behind it. You know, instead of like actually drawing out plans for a military alliance, economic retribution (remember all those sanctions against Big Tech which fell apart the moment Trump made even the slightest comment against them?) or… just about anything.
Laws are worth even less than the paper they're written on, and no amount of naïve idealism (and calling it that is me being generous!) will change that. NATO membership is worthless other than as an aesthetic signifier.
Why set aside expense? You do it anyway by whatever means necessary, like the DRPK. And if you’re a “western democracy” (also known as capitalist dictatorship) and you’re part of the ruling class, you still have the incentive to protect your assets, things you exploit in your country, land, natural resources, etc, that the US won’t be sharing or that they want to decrease supply when they take over through puppets or multinationals, and you can always force the public to pay for such a project, like all the times western peoples had to bail out or spend their taxes to benefit private corporations, but now it would look like it’s to protect sovereignty, which is a bonus of course, it would be to protect the local ruling class’s interests, but anyway. It’s clear the Americans will stop at nothing to acquire whatever it is they want, including indirectly violent means like ordering their financial institutions and tech giants to destroy whoever is on the way. The monster was always there since the Cold War and just now it dropped any pretenses.
They're not dimwitted, they're next-level cowards. Big difference. They will gladly take whatever Trump gives to them because they're more afraid about actually standing up for something.
As much as I wish I could go and pontificate about how much better and more moral the PCC is than any other government on the face of the earth, they are in the worst possible spot right now.
It's less of a 'will they topple the revolutionary government in Cuba?' and more of a 'will they do it before or after they topple the revolutionary government in Nicaragua?'.
The funniest part of DPRK is how we got bombed with propaganda about how the "supreme leader" was a madman that shouldn't be allowed to have nukes because he would immediately use them and then suddenly the propaganda stopped as soon as there was evidence that they had actual nukes. I suspect the same thing would have happened with Iran if they had gotten them.
Panamá is doing "fine" because they actually own their fucking canal. If the US had its way and reestablished the Canal Zone, the rest of the country would collapse in on itself.
Which is exactly what they want to do with the Venezuelan oil.
Today, the Panama Canal is owned and operated by the government of Panama.
> The US first built Panama, and then built the canal.
We can concede that the US played the most significant role in the construction of the canal and applying pressure for Panamanian secession from Colombia, but Panama’s national identify predates the United States.
I love the USA too, but please chill with the rhetoric.
Right. I'm not disputing that the canal is, in fact, owned by Panama today. Nor am I suggesting the US should take it back even though I think it was pretty stupid to give it away.
For the longest time I thought they'd gone too far, but now we're the clowns putting on a show.
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