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Again I'll plead out that this is going off an a tangent of a tanget of a tangent from my original argument- that the US is now a hyperpower in conventional terms, far beyond what it had before. We're now talking about the history of nuclear weapons deterrance during the Cold War. I only ever touched on these subjects for the sake of completeness, and I don't claim to be an expert.
It seems to me you're arguing for a basically binary view of nuclear deterrance, correct? That is, either a nation has enough nukes to deter, or it does not. A mere 300 warheads would deter all of NATO, and any more than that is simply a waste of money. That does seem to be the strategy chosen by China during the Cold War, and I suppose it worked well enough for them, but the US and USSR continued to build more and more warheads- was that just a complete waste in your thinking?
Indeed, China no longer seems to pursue that strategy. Instead, they seem to be rapidly expanding their nuclear arsenal, which seems to indicate that they do not feel safe with just a minimal deterrance- perhaps that was only driven by their 20th century poverty? The only nations that seem to rely on an absolutely minimal nuclear deterrance are the very small, poor nations like North Korea, Pakistan, and China in the 1960s. To me, that sounds like what the kids call "cope" rather than an actual strategy.
But all of this talk of the 20th century is rapidly growing out of date. Back then, we couldn't hope to hit an ICBM in flight at all, or perhaps only by detonating a counter-nuke in our own airspace. The 80s had vague plans of doing space-based missile defense, but this never worked out. Then in the 2000s we had a vague chance to hit with interceptors, but as you said it would take perhaps 1000 interceptors to hit just a few interceptors.
Nowadays? And in the near future? The math seems different. Interceptors are accurate enough that it's approaching 1 per warhead, especially with Multiple Kill Vehicle technology. MIRVs might not be super expensive, but they're not cheap either- I genuinely have no idea whether it's easier to build an interceptor or a nuclear warhead at this point. And if Golden Dome succeeds- and I see no reason why it can't!- then the calculus completely shifts, to where one orbital interceptor can take out an entire ICBM full of warheads before it has time to launch or separate.
But really, all of that is tangentiai to the real question- just how much power does the US have to influence world events with hard power right now? And the answer is, a lot. It can topple basically any government, anywhere, in a matter of weeks. In the 20th century, that would have met massive blowback from the USSR. In the early 21st century, it would have meant an endless slog against insurgents armed by Iran. Now? China seems powerless to do anything. They can't even make good propaganda like the USSR could. They could, at best, defend themselves in an all-out nuclear war like you're talking about. For anything else? The US can do what it wants.
I was not planning to write such a long comment when I initially entered this discussion, but here we go I guess.
I'm not arguing for the opinion that it's binary, even NK's relatively paltry stack of nukes is enough to meaningfully affect geopolitics. I'm arguing that there are serious diminishing returns to increasing your stockpile of nukes after a certain threshold is crossed, whereas the costs scale relatively linearly. And in response to your question about whether the US and USSR's Cold War stockpiling was excessive and wasteful, my answer would be yes_chad.jpg. I do recommend the book Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 if you want a look into the arbitrary and downright instinctual fashion in which these decisions were made, in which "[l]ogic and fiscal accountability were subordinated to uncertainty, fear, interservice rivalries, pork-barrel politics, and an ultimately futile attempt to maintain the upper hand in the face of unimaginable destruction." There were many points in which these decisions were outright made on gut feel.
Yes, if your enemy begins producing interceptors, that changes the calculus and you will need to produce more if you want to be able to maintain that deterrent effect. It's not your arsenal vs. their arsenal for the most part, especially since even if you have perfect information on the locations of all their nuclear sites and have orders of magnitude more nukes than they do there is no way to stop a power with satellites from seeing all these hundreds of ICBMs getting launched and second-striking before their ability to do so is removed forever. It's more your arsenal vs. their interceptors, and that arms race is one that's heavily biased towards offence.
And you know. I guess France isn't a thing. They have maintained approx 290 warheads ever since 1992 under a minimal-deterrence strategy, and throughout this period France was not a "very small, poor nation".
I hate to ask, but what is your source for the idea that it's "approaching 1 per warhead"? And which MKV project are you referring to: the one that was carried out in 2008 and then discontinued due to restructuring, or the one that was revitalised in 2015 and then discontinued again in 2019, both of which we certainly do not have enough data on in order to assert a ratio of 1:1?
And THAADs? They travel at Mach 8 and have an effective range of around 124 miles. They were not intended to intercept ICBMs and have never been tested against them, which would comprise much of the relevant warheads in such a scenario. At most, THAADs have successfully intercepted IRBMs, which travel at relatively slow speeds. ICBMs often reach up to speeds of Mach 25 in its terminal phase and become more difficult to intercept as a result (any terminal-phase interceptor will have to contend with that). Interception by slower missiles is not strictly impossible, but the odds of success would likely not be high. Meanwhile, the kill rates of GMDs are far lower than 100%.
You appear to treat everything from China with the utmost suspicion as propaganda and everything from the US with the utmost bullishness, based on an unshakeable idea that everything will turn out roses for the US in the end. This is, ironically enough, a very late Qing Dynasty-like attitude. I don't think China's military technology is on par with the US yet, but one thing I will say is that they understand national humiliation intimately and see it as a distinct possibility even now, and you don't. Yet.
I have read about this before, and there's been a lot of work done assessing the feasibility of comprehensive nuclear defence from a cost perspective. Here is an example of such a study, attempting to estimate how much the defender would need to spend relative to the offender to reach an overall system efficiency of 90%. A lot of assumptions are made, but even if you go with a very high individual interceptor kill rate of 90% with perfect decoy discrimination, the asymmetry in cost is staggering. And this analysis even excludes the cost of space and ground-based sensors needed by the defender!
"A hypothetical scenario is analyzed in which the United States has a functioning BMD technology and enough interceptors to distribute them in a two-layer defense with the overall system efficiency of 90%, as targeted by U.S. war planners. It is assumed that the attacker has enough missiles to deliver a range between 500 and 6000 warheads to the continental United States. Results show that in the most optimistic case for the defender, with a very high individual interceptor kill effectiveness of 90% and with perfect decoy discrimination capability, the United States would need to spend on average 8 times more than the attacker, for a total cost between $60 billion and $500 billion. With a more realistic individual interceptor effectiveness of 50% and if the system is unable to discriminate against decoys, the United States would need to spend on average 70 times more, for a total cost between $430 billion and $5.3 trillion."
Note that even with this overall system efficiency of 90%, anywhere "between 50 and 600 warheads would still be expected to leak through the defence layers and reach the United States, causing massive destruction and long-term humanitarian consequences."
Say it with me: There is no possibility of comprehensive missile defence in the near future.
I could write a whole thing, but really just read this, which explicitly addresses Golden Dome and why the Israel defence against Iran cannot be used as any kind of nuclear-war analogue. I will just quote portions of relevant sections:
"Any defense interceptors based in orbit will continually move with respect to the Earth, requiring that many platforms be deployed to have one near a missile launch site at all times. For example, about 1600 interceptors would be required in orbit to ensure that just one would be in position to engage a single solid-fuel ICBM launched from Russia, China, North Korea or Iran. Taking multiple shots against multiple ICBMs launched from the same area on Earth would increase proportionately the number of on-orbit interceptors needed. Because the cost-exchange ratio strongly favors the offense, even a less capable adversary could overwhelm the system by building more missiles. Space-based lasers would be vulnerable to preemptive attack and would suffer from limits on beam strength, control, and propagation of laser light through the atmosphere— limits that caused the United States to abandon efforts to develop an airborne laser for missile defense, which is much less technically challenging than a space-based laser. These factors led the 2012 National Academies’ review to conclude that "boost-phase missile defense whether kinetic or directed energy, and whether based on land, sea, air, or in space—is not practical or feasible” and to recommend that “the Department of Defense should not invest any more money or resources in systems for boost-phase missile defense.”"
"Indeed, a report by the American Physical Society released in March, which included a review of the effectiveness of missile defenses in countering the 2024 Iranian missile attacks, stated that “creating a reliable and effective defense against even the small number of relatively unsophisticated nuclear-armed ICBMs that we considered remains a daunting challenge. The difficulties are numerous, ranging from the unresolved countermeasures problem for midcourse warhead-intercept to the severe reach vs. time problem of boost-phase missile intercept.” It concluded that “our analysis of published work has led us to conclude that few of the main challenges involved in developing and deploying a reliable and effective ballistic missile defense have been solved, and that many of the hard problems we have identified are likely to remain unsolved during, and probably beyond, the 15-year time horizon we considered.”"
There are fundamental physical and logistical limitations to missile defence, and without engaging with these severe issues any highly optimistic predictions about China running out of options to hurt the US is basically fanfiction.
What makes you think China is at all interested in playing World Police like the U.S. and USSR?
I suspect this is perhaps the biggest disagreement between us. Where are you from, out of curiousity? I admit that I'm American, so you might say I'm biased, but I also understand the American culture of openness. The flaws in our system are widely publicised, and criticized, and used as propaganda by political opponents... all the while engineers work quitely behind the scenes to make them better. The result is that they get a lot of negative publicity, but work better than expected when they actually see combat. And they are intended to be used, not just put on display in a parade to deter invasions or stomp repress our own people. The more closed-off countries like Russia, Iran, and to some extent China, do the opposite- they take every opportunity to hype up their latest military hardware, while keeping its problems secret. When it finally gets tested in real war, it always seems to perform worse than what was promised. It's a pattern that we saw again, and again, and again throughout the cold war, and repeated again just this week, as American air power effortlessly dismantled Iranian/Russian air defense systems and shot down their missiles.
Which is to say- when American defense contractors say that, say, all recent tests of GBMD against ICBMs were successful, with an estimated 97% chance to kill when using multiple interceptors, or that Aegis can track missiles of all ranges, including ICBM, and relay that tracking to other systems like THAAD I tend to believe them. If you don't believe them, that's fine, but it does seem like China believes that their only hope is to massively increase their arsenal to overcome missile defense by raw numbers.
"A hypothetical scenario is analyzed in which the United States has a functioning BMD technology and enough interceptors to distribute them in a two-layer defense with the overall system efficiency of 90%, as targeted by U.S. war planners. It is assumed that the attacker has enough missiles to deliver a range between 500 and 6000 warheads to the continental United States. Results show that in the most optimistic case for the defender, with a very high individual interceptor kill effectiveness of 90% and with perfect decoy discrimination capability, the United States would need to spend on average 8 times more than the attacker, for a total cost between $60 billion and $500 billion. With a more realistic individual interceptor effectiveness of 50% and if the system is unable to discriminate against decoys, the United States would need to spend on average 70 times more, for a total cost between $430 billion and $5.3 trillion."
That's not quite what I was asking- I wanted to know, how much does it cost to produce a nuclear warhead? Is there even a number? I suspect that even China finds it difficult to mass-produce nuclear warheads.
But it doesn't matter. This is an old argument, going back to the 80s and hotly debated during the 2000s. I'm well aware that, until now, the price of nuclear weapons was much lower than the cost of any potential defense. But we will see if that changes. For now, the US can easily afford to spend enough for interceptors to protect against North Korea, and we've already handled the threat of Iran. So the only real threat left is the absolute worst case- an all out nuclear exchange with China and Russia firing literally all of their nukes against the US.
And yes, obviously that's bad. Obviously we must do everything we can to avoid such a terrible scenario.
But look at the numbers being quoted there. Based on the 90% effectiveness that we're currently seeing in tests, the worst case would be $500 billion. It's a large number, but it's not an impossible one. That's about 1/2 of 1 year of US military spending! Even the largest number of $5.3 trillion is roughly the scale of what they plan to spend, all together, on the F35 fighter. The US just has a lot of money to throw around on military hardware.
And again... let's just see how future tech develops which can alter that calculus. The Multiple Kill Vehicle program is, as far as I can tell, still being worked on. The Golden Dome plan is to put interceptors in orbit, destroying ICBMs before they can launch MIRVs, which drastically changes the cost balance. You shouldn't assume that technology will remain forever stuck in the 1980s! (unless, of course, you're Russia, in which case I guess it will...)
Well, that was my original point really. The US now stands in a position to dominate the world militarily, and I don't see how China is able to stop that at all. For every single country where they've invested money in business contracts to build soft power, the US can simply topple their government at any time it wishes. I'm not saying it should do this... but it could.
I'm going to be honest, this conversation has been quite bizarre. You're just stating the same few points over and over again even after they get addressed and outright citing things that contradict your points.
As I said, you guys want China to be the USSR so badly. Problem is, I don't think it is.
This is not a rate of “1 per warhead”. The 97% chance to kill is based off multiple interceptors, thus we come back to the main problem about defence being much harder than offence. Yes, you can push kill rates to arbitrarily high levels if you use an unbounded number of interceptors against a warhead. It also skyrockets cost. And that figure is also statistically questionable, since it assumes that the failures are independent - if each munition has a kill probability of 56% then four will give you a probability of 97%. But failures could well be correlated, if e.g. they are caused by bad weather. Test successes are also under ideal circumstances and usually don't feature bad weather, conditions of night time, and don't tend to include countermeasures that an opponent would likely utilise.
I do largely believe the current figures coming out are sincere, and they are the basis for why I think comprehensive missile defence is a ridiculous idea. What I don't believe is the massive future promises of “swear guys, we have X and Y and Z in the pipeline, it's going to be amazing”, followed by the American public’s tendency to blow these things out of proportion even more than the government does. You are exceptionally and irrationally bullish on the idea of "orbital interceptor" in spite of the large number of physical obstacles that plague the concept.
It's funny also that you talk about the "American culture of openness" that allows flaws to be dragged into the open and exposed while all the American theorists that are openly stating the in-practice near-impossibility of comprehensive nuclear defence are straight-up being ignored within this very discussion. Culture of openness does not help you get a better or more sober picture of your actual capabilities if you just believe whatever you want in the end and artificially inflate everything American by default.
How's Artemis going, by the way?
Which is pretty much all they need to do, given the inherent asymmetry in nuclear warfare. Why spend so much on fancy R&D in this case when a simple solution suffices?
You lump China in with other such “closed” states while saying that all it does is posture and bluster to make itself look good on the international stage, but that’s explicitly not what they are doing here - this is simply the most efficient, least flashy possible response when your geopolitical rival builds interceptors, and ironically enough here you are criticising them for not spending more time and money on vanity.
And I barely even have a dog in this race! I’m neither Mainland Chinese or American and don’t really have strong identification with one of these world powers (I will admit that China being largely uninterested in being World Police makes me marginally more sympathetic to them, though it ultimately barely matters to me who ends up winning). But this cocksureness on your end is absolute folly and possibly makes me less sympathetic to the U.S.
You took down Maduro and Khamenei. Good job. These are paper dictators, this does not just mean you can fuck about with any country with impunity.
It's in the study evaluating cost. $4m per warhead, in total unit cost of $42m including maintenance costs, launch facilities and other sundry expenses. On the other hand, missile defence systems such as Aegis Ship boast an estimated unit cost of $60m, Aegis Ashore has a unit cost of $258m, and NGI interceptors have unit costs of $487m.
And, as your Wikipedia article notes, GMDs cost $75m each, though that's not directly comparable since I'm not certain that's adjusted for inflation to 2023 dollars like those in the study are, I'm not sure it includes maintenance costs, and so on.
These are significant cost differences.
90% is not the actual cited chance to kill for an individual GMD interceptor, which is what the $500 billion is based off, so you're using the wrong number there. The single shot probability of kill is estimated by your own source at 56%, which puts us much closer to the 70-times-the-offence's cost range.
And the funding figures don't matter so much as the ratio. "8 times the cost/70 times the cost" scales with the amount the other party puts into its offence, I'm not certain that when there's an escalation of hostilities the US can actually outspend China 70 times over to ensure its own defence.
And even if it can 10% will still hit the US.
It's not.
Multi-Object Kill Vehicles were discontinued along with the RKV in 2019.
It doesn't and it's a bad idea. Please refer to previous comment.
This is basically invoking magical science fictional handwavium. If you want your projections of the future to be largely based off wishful thinking about how the US is going to skyrocket and dominate the world, then fine, but I would prefer to base it off something more concrete. "America, fuck yeah" is not an adequate predictive tool.
Since your assertion that it's capable of doing this is partially based on the US' purported ability to scare every other nuclear power into submission with the sheer size of its
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It certainly seems that inasmuch as you have a NATO bloc and an Axis of Resistance bloc, if you compare the Russian air force's performance in Ukraine and the United States/Israel's performance in Iran, you have to come out of it thinking NATO has superior air defense systems.
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