Only one use -- to annihilate entire populations

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ICBMs are a horrid reality. All nuclear weapons are a horrid reality.

But they are only half of that reality.

Without our strategic arsenal of nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union would not have hesitated for one instant in attempting to subject all the world with their Godless communism.

And now, regrettably, that strategic arsenal is still a necessity, lest rogue states seek to take advantage of our lack.

And the term strategic is just that, strategy supersedes tactics and enters into the realm of the political. Which is why the use of those weapons rests with the civilian placed in charge of all the military.

Regards,

Mik
 
Mik, I think you are correct that ICBMs are a sad necessity. I have mixed feelings about protests at such facilities. On one hand, they seem misguided. On the other hand, they are a prophetic voice that reminds us that we shouldn’t become too comfortable with nukes.
 
shudder

I pray God that no one ever becomes comfortable with the thought of nukes…much less some of that other stuff out there.

In the Army we had to learn about all the different chemical agents and the way’s that they worked…some of that stuff…:bigyikes:

And just how easy it is to deliver and how little it would take to kill/maim thousands…

God protects us more than we realize.

Mik
 
Tx soldier is right. Chemical and biological warfare is scarier. I had a lot of training in this, as well as nukes, and I’d rather take my chance with nukes. But remember, all these weapons are defensive weapons for us. They keep the enemy honest. Now, in the hands of an irresponsible state, such as Iran, all bets are off. Roanoker
 
Folks should read the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

They periodically publish the U.S. inventory of nukes. Although I’ve not seen their inventory of Soviet nukes.

Anyway, the notion that all nukes are so-called “city busters” is a residue of the 1950’s.

Nuclear weapons engineering got a lot better, and guidance systems got a lot more precise.

So, there are some with yields down in the 20 ton level. Not megaton (million of tons of TNT equivalent) , but ton. They are useful as cratering charges … to make a highway impassable, for example. [They predrill holes 50 feet deep and when the time comes, a small team puts a back pack nuke down in the hole and set it off, making a small crater and preventing passage by tanks] [This is done at a “choke point” where invading tanks can’t bypass the crater.]

Or. to crunch a deep diving submarine with a double hull made of titanium. A convention ASW torpedo won’t do the job. But a small nuke will.

Or to stop one of those new Soviet “rocket” torpedoes that go 500 mph. [They generate an air bubble from the nose, and the reduced friction allows the torpedo’s rocket engine to push the torpedo at incredible speed.]

And … there is a body of thought that “Atomic Annie”, a 280mm cannon effectively stopped the Korean War. It was fired near Las Vegas, in public with all the news media present. [The reviewing stand is still there.] Eisenhower personally and privately threatened to use it in Korea. Then the US Air Force dropped small conventional fragmentation bombs on the Chinese troops in North Korea, who were camped out in the open. The attacks demonstrated how vulnerable the Chinese and North Korean troops were. Then shipping orders for a bunch of the “Atomic Annies” were transmitted in the clear; the cannon were headed for South Korea.

Before the cannon got there, the North Koreans declared a cease fire.

The Korean War never actually ended. We are still working under the original 1953 cease fire. BUT, the full fledged fighting stopped.

So, small nukes can be useful.
 
What exactly determines whether a nation is a responsible nation in regards to nuclear weapons? And can’t that responsibility change from “one of” to questionable pretty quickly? I’m asking this in light of the turmoil happening in Pakistan. And I doubt if the Pakistans would want to disarm themselves now.

What bothers me the most, however, is how we have let go our brilliantly US-educated PHD’s and help the foreign countries develop such weapons, regardless of whether we determined that these countries would be responsible or not. And now we’re paying the price, mostly in fear.
 
While I agree that a nuclear arsenal is still necessary, a fundamental part of the non-proliferation treaty was the promise of the nuclear powers to work toward disarmament. Some progress has been made, but I think the number of nuclear weapons could still be reduced. If the big nuclear powers won’t live up to their side of the non-proliferation treaty, that makes it less likely that non-nuclear powers will choose to remain non-nuclear.
 
Sir_Knight said:
As odd as it main sound, MUTUAL assured destruction is a good thing because the ALTERNATIVE is even WORSE.
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Prior to adoption of Robert S. McNamara’s idea of Mutually Assured Destruction, the operative strategic policy was victory. Meaning that if war broke out between the Soviet Union and the United States, we would pulverize them so fast that the Soviets wouldn’t be able to do any damage to the United States.

By the way, his middle name … the “S” stands for Strange. Robert Strange McNamara.

The problem was that McNamara didn’t want to pay the money to achieve that capability. He didn’t like Curtis LeMay and he didn’t like that the Strategic Air Command alone was getting 40% of the entire military budget.

MAD was cheaper. Meaning that we allow ourselves to become vulnerable.

He overlooked things like asymmetric warfare and the efforts of the Soviet Union to achieve what they called “correlation of forces” … bringing whatever was needed to advance international Communism. Different tactics in different countries.

McNamara also had his own peculiar set of blinders … he denied the existence, for example, of the Ho Chi Minh Trail … and demanded that he be given proof positive. So, at great cost, the SOG fellows went in and brought back “home movies” that they took. He thought that he could personally WILL certain results to happen. So when nuclear bombers F-105D Thuds ] were unable to hit very tiny targets, he demanded that they mount special camera pods and be followed by special camera planes, so that he could personally watch each individual bomb fall. No joke. I built the special photo lab for the “Combat Document” photo pods. He had calculated exactly how much bombing it would take to defeat North Vietnam. [uhhh … yeah, well, he missed that too.]

He believed in “commonality” which led to the TFX debacle … in fact, he terminated a lot of excellent programs [as for example, breaking up the tooling for the SR-71 Blackbird] to force feed his pet projects, which turned out mostly to be disasters. The TFX kind of “segued” into the F-111, which the front line Air Force troops dubbed “the swing wing Edsel”. He also gave us the M-16 Jamomatic.

And he brought micro-management to new heights (or depths). If it only took one strike to destroy a target, he wanted seven. So the rubble bounced and dozens of planes were unnecessarily shot down.

I could go on and on.

Read more here:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McNamara
 
Heh…

McNamara…proof that too all too often people had in common sense to receive advanced degrees and positions.

Mik
 
The photo in that article looks like an old photo of a Minuteman 1 or II missile with Point Sal in the background. It’s true that a large nuke could be used to target populations. But MIRV’ed reentry vehicles carry smaller nukes more likely directed to military, not civilian targets.

And even with a large single warhead nuke, the target need not be civilian. Decades ago, Whiteman AFB in Misouri was a Minuteman base, and oversaw 150 missiles scattered across the Missouri countryside in hardned silos. If an enemy wanted to target even one of those silos, it would have taken nearly a direct hit with a 1 megaton warhead to ensure its destruction. And there weren’t a lot of civilians in the line of fire.
 
I might add that as weird as the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction sounds, it seems to me less morally problematic than the policy of President Eisenhower which preceded it–known as Massive Retaliation. By that policy, any attack by the USSR on any European ally would be met with massive retaliation by our fleet of B-52’s against the Soviet homeland. (We didn’t have ICBM’s). Targeting would certainly have been against city centers, as the targeting at that time was not precise enough to go for just military targets.
 
JimG said:
I might add that as weird as the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction sounds, it seems to me less morally problematic than the policy of President Eisenhower which preceded it–known as Massive Retaliation. By that policy, any attack by the USSR on any European ally would be met with massive retaliation by our fleet of B-52’s against the Soviet homeland. (We didn’t have ICBM’s). Targeting would certainly have been against city centers, as the targeting at that time was not precise enough to go for just military targets.
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Actually, at the time, we had about 1,800 B-47’s AND the 700 B-52’s. [They actually took off at seven-second intervals! With several on the runway at one time. It was something to see!!] And the Navy had nukes on aircraft carriers. [And the Air Force also eventually got lighter nukes that fit onto fighters and light bombers. And the Army got tactical nukes on missiles and artillery pieces.] The idea was that we would have so thoroughly pulverized the Soviets, and done it so quickly, that there would have been nothing left. And they knew it. That’s how the deterrence was set up.

ICBM’s came later. What was available then was very limited. Mostly liquid-fueled Atlas missiles. [Which are still in use for launching satellites … but retrofitted with a Soviet rocket engine!!]

Don’t forget that the world had just come out of WW2. The destruction was phenomenal. 100 million people dead. Europe was on the verge of starvation. Prior to WW2, the USSR was actively working to destabilize every country in the world. Russia had conquered all the adjoining countries to create the USSR. And everyone knew it. We allied with the Soviets for “convenience” during WW2. After WW2, the Soviets began taking over all the Eastern European countries and threatened Italy and France and other countries. And then cut Berlin off from the West … which led to the Berlin Airlift.

The United States had virtually unilaterally disarmed; the Soviets did not.

And then Stalin authorized North Korea to invade South Korea. France got their butts kicked in IndoChina.

It was a difficult time with threats everywhere. There were Soviet spies everywhere with access to all our secrets. Research the Cambridge Five, for example. Philby, Burgess, McClain, Blunt, Cairncross. We were being continuously undermined. Heck, the head of MI-6 actually worked for the Soviets!

We were not about to take any more stuff from the Soviets than we had to. So we authorized the Strategic Air Command to protect the West from a major war started by the Soviets.

[There is much more, but in the interest of space, I had to do some editing.]

At the same time, the U.S. developed a huge Air Defense Command. With thousands of interceptor planes [mostly the F-102, and one of the interceptor pilots was … Lt. George W. Bush] but also older models such as the F-94 and the F-89 and the F-86D. And missiles … Nike Ajax, Nike Hercules, and Bomarc. Early on there were antiaircraft guns as well. They were guided by the SAGE system … a network of huge blockhouses that contained the largest most integrated system of computers ever seen … with synthetic / digitized displays showing every plane. Every radar position could show every plane in the U.S. and over the oceans. And the folks on the elevated platforms could shoot down any plane with the touch of a light pen.

There were radar stations up at the Arctic Circle [The DEW Line], the mid-Canada line and the Pine Tree line. And there were the Texas Towers in the Atlantic and EC-121 radar picket planes all over.

It would be 50 years before the FAA came up with radar/computer integration as sophisticated.

As the years went by, the F-102’s were replaced by F-101 and F-106’s and then later by F-4’s and later by F-15’s. They were supposed to get the F-12 … which was a fighter version of the SR-71 … no joke. You can see the prototype at the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB. As time went by, obsolescent aspects were replaced by more advanced technology.

There was BMEWS and the Nike Zeus. And the SAGE system was replaced by BUIC and others. There were backup systems and backups for the backups. Every exercise assumed that the primary systems would be destroyed right away, so the combat would be conducted by the backup systems.

There were the MOL and Dynamic Soaring space systems.

Robert Strange McNamara went on a cost reduction kick; he hated the kind of waste he saw at the end of WW2 … all those weapons that never got used. So he cancelled numerous systems in favor of pet projects that never worked. He got rid of the anti-ballistic missile system {one was actually installed and operational] and he got rid of the space systems.

And he cancelled the idea of superiority in favor of MAD. The idea that we would not win, but would agree to a stalemate. Which led to the Soviets realizing that THEY could win after all. They invented “asymmetric” warfare. By attacking the West where ever it was most vulnerable with whatever strategies and tactics worked. So they used proxies … that way the Soviets had “deniability”. And they had HUGE networks of embedded spies. [Research “venona” … just search “venona” here on CAF].

What finally happened is that we ended up with a President who had a degree in economics and he used economic warfare to destroy the Communist Soviet Union.
 
Al_Masetti said:
Don’t forget that the world had just come out of WW2. The destruction was phenomenal. 100 million people dead. Europe was on the verge of starvation. Prior to WW2, the USSR was actively working to destabilize every country in the world. Russia had conquered all the adjoining countries to create the USSR. And everyone knew it. We allied with the Soviets for “convenience” during WW2. After WW2, the Soviets began taking over all the Eastern European countries and threatened Italy and France and other countries. And then cut Berlin off from the West … which led to the Berlin Airlift.

The United States had virtually unilaterally disarmed; the Soviets did not.
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Yes, it was a pretty scary era. People forget that the Stalin really did intend for the world to be communist. The USSR, unable to wage war directly against the US, began proxy wars throughout the globe.

Yet, even in the early decades of the century, after the Russian Revolution, many western intellectuals and academics had a fascination with and admiration for big Joe Stalin, making trips to the USSR and returning singing his praises, much as they do today with Fidel.

Some of this curious fascination by the American left comes out in a book I am currently reading–“The Forgotten Man” a history of the great depression by Amity Shlaes.

In any case, it was Eisenhower’s intent, as you noted, to assure the USSR that any move against U.S. European allies would result in their total destruction. From a moral standpoint, the threat might be questionable. But it worked because it was credible; SAC made it so.

The Soviets might have been spared the trouble in any case, since Europe now seems intent on its own destruction through demographics.
 
JimG said:
Yes, it was a pretty scary era. People forget that the Stalin really did intend for the world to be communist. The USSR, unable to wage war directly against the US, began proxy wars throughout the globe.

Yet, even in the early decades of the century, after the Russian Revolution, many western intellectuals and academics had a fascination with and admiration for big Joe Stalin, making trips to the USSR and returning singing his praises, much as they do today with Fidel.

Some of this curious fascination by the American left comes out in a book I am currently reading–“The Forgotten Man” a history of the great depression by Amity Shlaes.

In any case, it was Eisenhower’s intent, as you noted, to assure the USSR that any move against U.S. European allies would result in their total destruction. From a moral standpoint, the threat might be questionable. But it worked because it was credible; SAC made it so.

The Soviets might have been spared the trouble in any case, since Europe now seems intent on its own destruction through demographics.
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I was watching BookTV … Jonah Goldberg was on … talking about his new book “Liberal Fascism”. Although I have not yet read the book, his description of the early Communist supporters … the Western academics and their admiration / adoration of Uncle Joe Stalin … was amazing. You might be able to find the lecture on www.booktv.org and scroll around. They are constantly improving the site and older lectures appear frequently.
 
JimG said:
Yes, it was a pretty scary era. People forget that the Stalin really did intend for the world to be communist. The USSR, unable to wage war directly against the US, began proxy wars throughout the globe.

Yet, even in the early decades of the century, after the Russian Revolution, many western intellectuals and academics had a fascination with and admiration for big Joe Stalin, making trips to the USSR and returning singing his praises, much as they do today with Fidel.

Some of this curious fascination by the American left comes out in a book I am currently reading–“The Forgotten Man” a history of the great depression by Amity Shlaes.

In any case, it was Eisenhower’s intent, as you noted, to assure the USSR that any move against U.S. European allies would result in their total destruction. From a moral standpoint, the threat might be questionable. But it worked because it was credible; SAC made it so.

The Soviets might have been spared the trouble in any case, since Europe now seems intent on its own destruction through demographics.
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I got to thinking there I go again ] about what you wrote.

And just “by coincidence”, what emerged to the top of my reading pile of books was a 1964 best-seller [many millions of copies sold] by John A. Stormer: “None Dare Call It Treason”.

In the hindsight of history … the 1995 declassification of the Venona files, etc etc, … Stormer’s 1964 book is so absolutely accurate, it’s amazing.

Stormer goes into all of the Communist plotting and planning to undo the United States. Asymmetric warfare at its best.

It’s a surprisingly easy read … well written. Well documented.

Stormer has a bunch of more recent books which I intend to purchase and read also.

Stormer’s books are not the most current, but what makes them especially interesting is that we can validate his statement by what has actually taken place in time interval since he wrote them.

Some folks might be put off by some of his assertions or suggestions, but … again … they are substantially validated by history.

Well worth checking out.
 
Since all the nuclear weapons ever used have been used by the US and since half of the nuclear weapons used were used unnecessarily, there is no reason to believe that anyone will use nuclear weapons responsibly. There is actually no valid reason to keep nuclear weapons. Get rid of all of them. Unilaterally. Set the standard and let the rest follow.

Matthew
 
drafdog said:
Since all the nuclear weapons ever used have been used by the US and since half of the nuclear weapons used were used unnecessarily, there is no reason to believe that anyone will use nuclear weapons responsibly. There is actually no valid reason to keep nuclear weapons. Get rid of all of them. Unilaterally. Set the standard and let the rest follow.

Matthew
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Heh…you show remarkable faith or naivety.

First, how do you figure that half of the nukes used were unnecessary? On what facts (available at the time to those in power) do you base your assumption?

Second, your call for unilateral disarmament shows the same Utopian failure of rationality that brought us the Kellogg-Briand pact that “outlawed” war in the late 1920s…we all know how well that worked out. As did the unilateral decision by Czechoslovakia’s erstwhile allies to cede Czech territory to Nazi demands in the hope of keeping peace.

In an ideal world…but not in the one we live in.

Mik
 
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