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I see it less in terms of "winning" the nuclear war, and more in terms of "which side has more freedom of action?" Having more nukes (as well as more ways of delivering them) buys the US considerablly more freedom of action. China is forced to evaluate everything as an all-or-nothing war for survival; the US has considerably more flexibility.
Notably, during the Korean war when we were actively fighting with China, we still didn't dare attack China directly for fear of triggering a nuclear war. Similarly, during the Vietnam War, they were able to supply North Vietnam freely with weapons and support- the US had to go out of its way to avoid hurting China or the USSR. That no longer seems to be the case- as long as we're not actually attacking China directly, the US seems to have considerable freedom of action to do what it wants. We can stop their investments in South America, stop their oil purchases from Iran, ban their tech companies, and even topple governments that they were on friendly terms with. Even if we were to go invade North Korea tomorrow, what do you think China would do about it?
And that's just for now. Despite their considerable advances in many fields of technology, China still lags behind the US in aerospace tech. The Hongqi-19 has never been tested in combat, and does not seem to be particularly more advanced than THAAD. If the US continues to invest in ground based defense like THAAD, plus gets a working space defense working through Golden Dome... China rapidly runs out of options to hurt the US. But I suppose they can just scale up mass production of nukes, like the USSR did in the 80s... how did that work out for them.
I seriously doubt this is the case, and I don't actually think this dynamic shows up in geopoliticking. If MAD is being deployed and the costs of a first strike are far too high on either side, then the "freedom of action" argument clearly fails. You're basically dooming yourself and your people (and many other countries) either way, with a not-insignificant chance of your own death; at the levels of destruction we're talking about here, it's kind of moot. Seriously, I doubt anybody is evaluating this with the geopolitical logic of "Well, 85% of my country is dead and large swaths of it will not be able to be livable for a good long while and there's possibly a nuclear winter going on, but 99.9% of your population is dead! Checkmate."
Even if China fired none of its nukes, which isn't likely, launching 3,700 nukes in their totality to totally decimate the country blows back on the US immediately and in a big way.
Again, the sheer number of nukes does not actually allow you more freedom of action. It's basically threatening an intense no-win scenario where outcomes on every side are so horrific it's unlikely any country would want to escalate to it.
It has, at least on paper, several advantages over THAAD; being not only capable of longer range but higher altitudes and a superior radar system. And Pakistan has announced plans to acquire the HQ-19, so I guess we'll see how it fares in an in-practice scenario. Suffice to say I don't think THAAD is a particularly convincing or central point for your argument about US overwhelming military dominance.
I would argue that it shows up quite frequently, and in fact was at the heart of Cold-war decision making. The acoup article on it was good. Having more nukes, more delivery systems, and also more defense systems, allows us to push the "red lines" forward to control borderline territories. Having fewer, and using them only as a last-ditch resort, means that countries struggle to project force outside their boundaries, as China does today. It's not about evaluating the number of dead, it's about the chance of starting such a war. The USSR in contrast was able to invade prague and dominate eastern Europe, secure that the US would never risk war over some distant city. But now, the calculus is on the opposite foot- there's no way the PRC would risk nuclear war to protect Tehran, or even Pyongyang.
That seems like a rather fear-mongering article, essentially taking all of China's claims at face-value despite a complete lack of tests, while assuming that the US can't do anything in response (eg, using satellites to increase tracking range instead of relying solely on THAAD). It's probably written to encourage more spending on missile defense. But yes, I do agree that THAAD isn't a huge central point for this discussion, it's just one of many weapons systems where the US now enjoys a considerable advantage that it never had before.
I really want to address this reasoning because it's at the core of your argument (I'll move on to other parts of your comment after this has been addressed, because it's by far the bit I take most issue with). I agree that there is, as your article states, an art of "making the best use of the limited area of freedom of action left us by the deterrent effect of the existence of nuclear weapons". But the idea that deterrence can only be achieved by amassing as large an arsenal as possible is not sound, and was the very second-strike capacity which I think I addressed in my previous comments. The following Cold War argument in the article is as such: "Thus the absurd-sounding conclusion to fairly solid chain of logic: to avoid the use of nuclear weapons, you have to build so many nuclear weapons that it is impossible for a nuclear-armed opponent to destroy them all in a first strike, ensuring your second-strike lands. You build extra missiles for the purpose of not having to fire them."
This logic only holds assuming perfect information is present, but it rarely is. In practice, it is virtually impossible to detect and destroy literally every bomber and submarine in a fairly large geographical area, and second-strikes are pretty much all but guaranteed for a country with any sizeable nuclear arsenal. Once your opponent is able to diversify their holdings via the nuclear triad in any significant capacity it would not be very easy to actually eliminate your opponent's second strike capability wholesale. After your nuclear arsenal grows to a certain level, you do not in practice have to engage in this extremely costly contest in which a greater and greater proportion of public funding goes towards maintaining a nuclear arsenal of gradually increasing size.
It's partially for this very reason that there were several reforms to the planning process that came with a realisation that a bloated stockpile was not necessarily an effective deterrent (and came with steep fiscal costs) that led to the decline in such massive additions, and gradual disarmament. Hell, even McNamara himself noted the diminishing returns inherent in keeping a huge stockpile of reserves. "The point to be noted from this table is that 400 one megaton warheads delivered on Soviet cities, so as to maximize fatalities, would destroy 40 percent of the urban population and nearly 30 percent of the population of the entire nation... If the number of delivered warheads were doubled, to 800, the proportion of the total population destroyed would be increased by only about ten percentage points, and the industrial capacity destroyed by only three percentage points... This is so because we would have to bring under attack smaller and smaller cities, each requiring one delivered warhead. In fact, when we go beyond about 850 delivered warheads, we are attacking cities of less than 20,000 population."
McNamara argued that deterrence was achieved when 25% of the Soviet population could be threatened by their nuclear arsenal. According to that threshold, this study estimates that 51 warheads would deter Russia, 368 would deter China, 300 would deter all of the NATO member countries, 124 the US, and 11 Canada. Meanwhile, at the height of the Cold War the US held like 30,000 warheads. Cold War decision-making isn't something to emulate; it was excessive and inefficient by any reasonable standard, including their own.
Except: "This article tests a core argument of the nuclear competition school regarding the effect of the nuclear balance on the initiation of nuclear crises. With original data on strategic nuclear balance, my statistical analysis shows that having a superior nuclear arsenal than another nuclear-armed opponent does not lead to a reduced likelihood of nuclear crisis initiated by the opponent. These core findings hold after conducting a series of robustness tests with various measures of the balance of nuclear forces."
You'll have to forgive if I'm writing all of this quickly and without as much effort as I should- it's just that a lot of people have been responding to me and I'm doing my best to keep up, even though all of this quickly gets into deep rabbit holes, like that 200 page report on nuclear planning that you linked me.
But that's true of anyone, I suppose. Trump doesn't have all day to sit around reading academic papers, and neither did Kennedy or McNamara or any other world leader. We all act in a combination of rational thought and political biases.
Notably, Kennedy and McNamara were in power during the 1960s, a time of considerable fear and backlash against nuclear weapons. As such, they were highly motivated to find reasons to decrease the nuclear arsenal, even while being stepping up the conventional war in Vietnam. This led, in part, to several defeats for the west- the loss in Vietnam, the occupation of Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring, and an assertion of Soviet control in Finland. That's a marked change from the 1950s, when the US had a large lead in Nuclear power, and was much less afraid to throw it around.
That second paper you linked seems to be based on the number of "crises" that occur, and draws heavily on the example of Pakistan and India with Pakistan being the weaker power yet instigating crises. I'm not sure I agree we can generalize from that- Pakistan is just an aggressive, unhinged country. But sure, maybe they're correct that having more nukes won't decrease conflicts- I'd still prefer to be on the side with more rather than fewer nukes, if such an event occurred.
In the cold war, nukes were tough to aim and essentially non-interceptable (as well as a strong chance that they might not fire at all). That led to a focus on aiming for cities, and looking for deterrance. But again, technology has changed. Most nukes would not target cities any more, but military targets and especially known missile silos or airfields. So the number of civilian losses would be much lower, and the number of second-strike weapons fired also much lower. The US could potentially decimate China's nuclear arsenal with a surprise first-strike, then shoot down most of the remaining ones fired via interceptors, and the few that get through probably hitting isolated military targets rather than major cities. That's not something I want to see but, if I was China's military, it would have me terrified. Even the vague threat of such a scenario should be enough to make them take notice. Note that, unlike China, the US has never pledged no-first-use, it's always been assumed that it can use nukes whenever necessary.
So I'm trying to strike a balance here. I'm of course not trying to say that the US is now immune from nuclear weapons, or anything like that. But the balance of power has changed there, in a way much more favorable to the US than it has since the 1950s, and we should be aware of that fact.
I do not believe the assessment that McNamara said such things simply in order to justify decreasing the nuclear arsenal is at all justified. That reasoning is entirely ad hoc; you've basically swapped it out for your own ideas about the dynamics of nuclear warfare and geopolitics - and it's an idea that would have to contend with the fact that McNamara advocated for the development of MIRVs at the time and presided over an era where the US nuclear stockpile grew further in total.
I'm officially confused. Please ctrl+f this entire full text of the paper and search for the keywords "india", "pakistan". They appear only in the title of a single citation within the reference list. I'm not sure what your definition of "draws heavily" is, but I don't consider that to be "drawing heavily" on the example of India and Pakistan.
Unless the US has developed a genie that grants wishes, there is no perfect intelligence which enables you to comprehensively target all missile locations a country has, there is no perfect stealth that enables these missiles to reach target before they notice and shoot back (China has many satellites and could easily notice hundreds of launched ICBMs), and there is no interceptor that allows for any kind of comprehensive defence - which is partially why I said that THAAD is not a convincing argument for "overwhelming military dominance", even assuming it is leaps and bounds superior to the Hongqi-19, an assumption I would not feel comfortable making. Nuclear warfare is in its nature inherently biased in favour of offence, and as it stands there is zero possibility of anywhere close to a comprehensive missile defence of the United States except in the minds of capeshit-prone Amerikaposters.
The fundamental problem is that you can produce missiles far faster and cheaper than interceptors. Interceptors are far more costly and difficult to make, scaling their production up is more difficult than just scaling up production of warheads, and unless their reliability is 100% you need way more interceptors than warheads. At the moment the US missile defense systems are designed and sized for limited attacks from "rogue states" like North Korea, not for the massive arsenals of peer competitors like Russia and China. That's before you get to the topic of MIRVs and other countermeasures, which basically guarantee your city is getting hit out of sheer volume, redundancy and some deception (note China has MIRVs).
You seem to think of producing more of these interceptors as a trivial task, but unfortunately it's not. Nuclear engagement is inherently asymmetric. Even if say the US builds 1000 more interceptor systems, an adversary realistically only needs a few hundred extra MIRVs to have a reasonable chance of multiple hitting their targets. And hilariously the interceptors are much more expensive and hard to make. They are cutting edge technology, while a hydrogen bomb is 50s tech and MIRVs are 70s. The second that there's an escalation of hostilities, China is going to be pumping missiles out en masse. It's already doing so in record time in response to the US' attempt to strengthen its defence system, and it's doing so with a much smaller amount of its budget allocated to defence compared to the US - and that's not even getting into how China's production pipelines are more efficient and scalable than the US. The second you build more interceptors, China will have built an order of magnitude more nukes.
I do not think the US could even potentially scrape past a missile exchange with a major nuclear power with minimal losses. Your hypothetical in practice looks more like a dozen warheads detonating over every major city in the US.
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.
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