Like other devices, nuclear weapons become less reliable over time. If you're going to have them at all (about which ymmv) then they should at least work as intended if called upon. Even if you don't ever expect to use them, they'll only be an effective deterrent if potential adversaries think they'll work as intended if called upon. So on this basis, after the old ones have sat on a shelf (not literally) for a few decades, you'll want to replace them with new ones.
This doesn't particular explain why you'd want more new ones, but part of it may be that over time, the new ones themselves will age, so if you want to have N good ones 30 years from now, you need to buy more than N today.
More nukes
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- After Pie
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Re: More nukes
Except when it's they pays our money and we get no choice.
Re: More nukes
My understanding is that some of the earlier Chinese espionage rings were looking at that technology. From what I think I recall* about the news stories, it was looking at things like wakes (maybe with lidar).monkey wrote: ↑Tue Mar 23, 2021 5:55 pmCould you detect them indirectly? I assume that they leave a wake which might be detectable on the surface, and they must put out a fair bit of heat and maybe other waste. (I have no idea, just thinking out loud)shpalman wrote: ↑Tue Mar 23, 2021 10:02 amAircraft can use magnetic anomaly detectors but since the magnetic field falls off as 1/r^3 the submarine needs to be close to the surface and the aircraft needs to be flying relatively low over where it is.Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑Mon Mar 22, 2021 10:41 pm
Hmmm. Sea-bed mapping is still done with boats rather than remote sensing. I don't think seawater is enormously penetrable to the kind of laser thingies the space machines use.
For instance, this article suggests that even with aircraft-mounted lidar systems there's a limit of about 3x the Secchi depth (how far underwater you can see something), which is typically about 10m. I think submarines can be quite a lot deeper than that. https://www.hydro-international.com/con ... te-imagery
I expect a physicist could clarify if that's a limit of present technology or physical possibility, because the military could have some extra awesome secret tech of course.
Otherwise I suspect even if you got an AI to spot them from hi-res imagery when they surface every few weeks, the data would have too low temporal resolution to be much use.
I'd also assume that once someone works out how to detect a sub, they will also work out how to avoid that method of detection - e.g. for my ideas, they can go slow, or hang about in bits of sea where the temperature fluctuates a lot.
*yes, that certain.
Have you considered stupidity as an explanation