More nukes

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secret squirrel
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Re: More nukes

Post by secret squirrel » Sun Mar 21, 2021 8:05 am

Millennie Al wrote:
Sun Mar 21, 2021 3:05 am
secret squirrel wrote:
Fri Mar 19, 2021 6:55 am
So what's the point of giant arsenals and hypothetical missile defense systems?
To convince your well-equipped enemy that if they try a first strike then, even with the best spycraft and very large number of missiles targetting your missiles, you'll still have enough of yours left to destroy them. Mutually Assured Destruction.
From slightly above your quoted bit:
The argument here is that for deterrence you only need a fairly modest number of missiles on nuclear subs

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Re: More nukes

Post by Millennie Al » Mon Mar 22, 2021 2:45 am

secret squirrel wrote:
Sun Mar 21, 2021 8:05 am
Millennie Al wrote:
Sun Mar 21, 2021 3:05 am
secret squirrel wrote:
Fri Mar 19, 2021 6:55 am
So what's the point of giant arsenals and hypothetical missile defense systems?
To convince your well-equipped enemy that if they try a first strike then, even with the best spycraft and very large number of missiles targetting your missiles, you'll still have enough of yours left to destroy them. Mutually Assured Destruction.
From slightly above your quoted bit:
The argument here is that for deterrence you only need a fairly modest number of missiles on nuclear subs
Yes, but the critical word is "convince". Your enemy may believe that their spies and agents can locate and disable the subs even if that's not true. It's harder for them to believe that they can disable a larger number of easier targets.

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Re: More nukes

Post by Trinucleus » Mon Mar 22, 2021 5:05 pm

Millennie Al wrote:
Mon Mar 22, 2021 2:45 am
secret squirrel wrote:
Sun Mar 21, 2021 8:05 am
Millennie Al wrote:
Sun Mar 21, 2021 3:05 am


To convince your well-equipped enemy that if they try a first strike then, even with the best spycraft and very large number of missiles targetting your missiles, you'll still have enough of yours left to destroy them. Mutually Assured Destruction.
From slightly above your quoted bit:
The argument here is that for deterrence you only need a fairly modest number of missiles on nuclear subs
Yes, but the critical word is "convince". Your enemy may believe that their spies and agents can locate and disable the subs even if that's not true. It's harder for them to believe that they can disable a larger number of easier targets.
If they're that clever maybe they'd realise that 'striking the enemy ' would end human life on the planet

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Re: More nukes

Post by Little waster » Mon Mar 22, 2021 6:40 pm

Trinucleus wrote:
Mon Mar 22, 2021 5:05 pm
Millennie Al wrote:
Mon Mar 22, 2021 2:45 am
secret squirrel wrote:
Sun Mar 21, 2021 8:05 am

From slightly above your quoted bit:
Yes, but the critical word is "convince". Your enemy may believe that their spies and agents can locate and disable the subs even if that's not true. It's harder for them to believe that they can disable a larger number of easier targets.
If they're that clever maybe they'd realise that 'striking the enemy ' would end human life on the planet
I've always assumed the point of a sub-based second strike capability was that once a sub leaves port not even the UK government would know exactly where it was and then it can just lurk under a convenient pit of sea ice popping up occasionally to see if Radio 4 was still on the air until its tour was up.

No amount of invisible ink and fake moustaches is going to help you there.
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Re: More nukes

Post by Trinucleus » Mon Mar 22, 2021 8:59 pm

I wonder how far we are from being able to spot Submarines from satellites. Presumably that will make the whole deterrence arguement slightly tricky

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Re: More nukes

Post by Bird on a Fire » Mon Mar 22, 2021 10:41 pm

Trinucleus wrote:
Mon Mar 22, 2021 8:59 pm
I wonder how far we are from being able to spot Submarines from satellites. Presumably that will make the whole deterrence arguement slightly tricky
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.
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Re: More nukes

Post by Millennie Al » Tue Mar 23, 2021 2:41 am

Little waster wrote:
Mon Mar 22, 2021 6:40 pm
I've always assumed the point of a sub-based second strike capability was that once a sub leaves port not even the UK government would know exactly where it was and then it can just lurk under a convenient pit of sea ice popping up occasionally to see if Radio 4 was still on the air until its tour was up.

No amount of invisible ink and fake moustaches is going to help you there.
The onboard saboteur will suffice. That would be someone who knows that millions of lives depend on them sabotaging the sub's retaliatory capabilities, so they'll be pretty strongly motivated to succeed.

And if you think the mutually assured destruction strategy is stupid, it's worth considering that it was advocated by, and possibly even invented by, John von Neumann

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Re: More nukes

Post by secret squirrel » Tue Mar 23, 2021 5:37 am

Millennie Al wrote:
Tue Mar 23, 2021 2:41 am
And if you think the mutually assured destruction strategy is stupid, it's worth considering that it was advocated by, and possibly even invented by, John von Neumann
The mutually assured destruction strategy is stupid. Pursuing it has put humanity on the brink of annihilation, and it is only by good fortune that we have avoided it in mere the handful of decades since nuclear weapons were invented. In case you think von Neumann was smart, further than mutually assured destruction, he wanted to initiate a first-strike. He was an anti-communist fanatic.

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Re: More nukes

Post by Woodchopper » Tue Mar 23, 2021 7:22 am

We are talking about the period when game theory was at its height. A strategy that is smart within the game can appear stupid when viewed from the outside.

It’s striking that some of the nuclear scientists like Einstein, Fermi or Oppenheimer realised the implications of what had been created, whereas von Neumann didn’t appear to have that insight.

von Neumann was prodigiously intelligent, but he wasn’t wise. He invented game theory and published theories of poker. But apparently he was a poor player. Perhaps his incredible intelligence didn’t extend to understanding how and why people behave.

But still, at least von Neumann wasn’t as bonkers as Teller.

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Re: More nukes

Post by shpalman » Tue Mar 23, 2021 10:02 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Mon Mar 22, 2021 10:41 pm
Trinucleus wrote:
Mon Mar 22, 2021 8:59 pm
I wonder how far we are from being able to spot Submarines from satellites. Presumably that will make the whole deterrence arguement slightly tricky
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.
Aircraft 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.
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Re: More nukes

Post by Woodchopper » Tue Mar 23, 2021 10:28 am

shpalman wrote:
Tue Mar 23, 2021 10:02 am
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Mon Mar 22, 2021 10:41 pm
Trinucleus wrote:
Mon Mar 22, 2021 8:59 pm
I wonder how far we are from being able to spot Submarines from satellites. Presumably that will make the whole deterrence arguement slightly tricky
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.
Aircraft 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.
The future technology that could possibly make submarine detection much easier would be large numbers of cheap autonomous undersea drones. They could be used as platforms for sensors and weapons, and with good enough AI could identify then destroy an enemy submarine without the need to communicate with the chain of command back home. As long as they were numerous enough countermeasures couldn't get them all.

Probably not feasible to cover all the oceans, but they could be stationed near bases to identify submarines that were going on patrol or in chokepoints such as the Denmark Strait.

But so far such a swarm of hunter killer drones is still in the future. Though there is a lot of research on the technology that would be needed to build them.

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Re: More nukes

Post by Little waster » Tue Mar 23, 2021 4:44 pm

In unrelated news British Army to be cut by 10,000 troops.

I assume those extra 68 nuclear missiles have enhanced capabilities so they are also able to check the ID of civilians in occupied countries, distribute food parcels, shoot a suicide bomber in a crowd, dig out earthquake victims, hold a Central European bridge against an armoured column, vaccinate children, bayonet charge some teenage conscripts and wear funny hats on the Queen's birthday.

Otherwise it would be a bit silly to spunks tens of billions away on augmenting a weapons system to counter some infinitesimally unlikely chain of events at the expense of the 99.9999% of things, you know, our armed forces actually have to do regularly.
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Re: More nukes

Post by tom p » Tue Mar 23, 2021 5:25 pm

Millennie Al wrote:
Tue Mar 23, 2021 2:41 am
Little waster wrote:
Mon Mar 22, 2021 6:40 pm
I've always assumed the point of a sub-based second strike capability was that once a sub leaves port not even the UK government would know exactly where it was and then it can just lurk under a convenient pit of sea ice popping up occasionally to see if Radio 4 was still on the air until its tour was up.

No amount of invisible ink and fake moustaches is going to help you there.
The onboard saboteur will suffice. That would be someone who knows that millions of lives depend on them sabotaging the sub's retaliatory capabilities, so they'll be pretty strongly motivated to succeed.

And if you think the mutually assured destruction strategy is stupid, it's worth considering that it was advocated by, and possibly even invented by, John von Neumann
I can't tell - are you trying to argue from authority, or insulting von Neumann?

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Re: More nukes

Post by monkey » Tue Mar 23, 2021 5:55 pm

shpalman wrote:
Tue Mar 23, 2021 10:02 am
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Mon Mar 22, 2021 10:41 pm
Trinucleus wrote:
Mon Mar 22, 2021 8:59 pm
I wonder how far we are from being able to spot Submarines from satellites. Presumably that will make the whole deterrence arguement slightly tricky
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.
Aircraft 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.
Could 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)

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.

But I don't think anyone is that good at detection - a British and a French sub bumped into each other just 12 years ago. That wouldn't have happened if they knew where each other was.

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Re: More nukes

Post by Millennie Al » Wed Mar 24, 2021 4:23 am

tom p wrote:
Tue Mar 23, 2021 5:25 pm
Millennie Al wrote:
Tue Mar 23, 2021 2:41 am
And if you think the mutually assured destruction strategy is stupid, it's worth considering that it was advocated by, and possibly even invented by, John von Neumann
I can't tell - are you trying to argue from authority, or insulting von Neumann?
Neither. I am attempting to prevent people thinking that the policy was merely something invented by stupid politicians which can be easily dismissed. von Neumann was clearly very clever, though he did fall for Pascal's Wager in the end.

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Re: More nukes

Post by Boustrophedon » Wed Mar 24, 2021 8:14 am

Woodchopper wrote:
Tue Mar 23, 2021 7:22 am

But still, at least von Neumann wasn’t as bonkers as Teller.
That's a very low bar to get over.
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Re: More nukes

Post by TopBadger » Wed Mar 24, 2021 2:54 pm

Little waster wrote:
Tue Mar 23, 2021 4:44 pm
In unrelated news British Army to be cut by 10,000 troops.

I assume those extra 68 nuclear missiles have enhanced capabilities so they are also able to check the ID of civilians in occupied countries, distribute food parcels, shoot a suicide bomber in a crowd, dig out earthquake victims, hold a Central European bridge against an armoured column, vaccinate children, bayonet charge some teenage conscripts and wear funny hats on the Queen's birthday.

Otherwise it would be a bit silly to spunks tens of billions away on augmenting a weapons system to counter some infinitesimally unlikely chain of events at the expense of the 99.9999% of things, you know, our armed forces actually have to do regularly.
Wow... will be able to fit the entire regular Army into Old Trafford. Remember that only about 1/3 of that number are Combat, the other 2/3rd are combat service support (comms, engineering, logistics), and of the combat arms not all troops are fit 100% of the time. You'd likely be able to fit the actual available fighting force inside Craven Cottage.
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Re: More nukes

Post by tom p » Wed Mar 24, 2021 4:32 pm

TopBadger wrote:
Wed Mar 24, 2021 2:54 pm
Little waster wrote:
Tue Mar 23, 2021 4:44 pm
In unrelated news British Army to be cut by 10,000 troops.

I assume those extra 68 nuclear missiles have enhanced capabilities so they are also able to check the ID of civilians in occupied countries, distribute food parcels, shoot a suicide bomber in a crowd, dig out earthquake victims, hold a Central European bridge against an armoured column, vaccinate children, bayonet charge some teenage conscripts and wear funny hats on the Queen's birthday.

Otherwise it would be a bit silly to spunks tens of billions away on augmenting a weapons system to counter some infinitesimally unlikely chain of events at the expense of the 99.9999% of things, you know, our armed forces actually have to do regularly.
Wow... will be able to fit the entire regular Army into Old Trafford. Remember that only about 1/3 of that number are Combat, the other 2/3rd are combat service support (comms, engineering, logistics), and of the combat arms not all troops are fit 100% of the time. You'd likely be able to fit the actual available fighting force inside Craven Cottage.
Maybe in the New Den, which is, historically, a more apt venue for a fighting force

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Re: More nukes

Post by Little waster » Wed Mar 24, 2021 4:44 pm

TopBadger wrote:
Wed Mar 24, 2021 2:54 pm
Little waster wrote:
Tue Mar 23, 2021 4:44 pm
In unrelated news British Army to be cut by 10,000 troops.

I assume those extra 68 nuclear missiles have enhanced capabilities so they are also able to check the ID of civilians in occupied countries, distribute food parcels, shoot a suicide bomber in a crowd, dig out earthquake victims, hold a Central European bridge against an armoured column, vaccinate children, bayonet charge some teenage conscripts and wear funny hats on the Queen's birthday.

Otherwise it would be a bit silly to spunks tens of billions away on augmenting a weapons system to counter some infinitesimally unlikely chain of events at the expense of the 99.9999% of things, you know, our armed forces actually have to do regularly.
Wow... will be able to fit the entire regular Army into Old Trafford. Remember that only about 1/3 of that number are Combat, the other 2/3rd are combat service support (comms, engineering, logistics), and of the combat arms not all troops are fit 100% of the time. You'd likely be able to fit the actual available fighting force inside Craven Cottage.
IIRC it gets even worse then that.

On top of that a number of the actual combat-ready troops will always be tied up in various internal security roles, (guarding bases, facilities, palaces etc.), training/being trained, on rotation and so on.

So the actual number of deployable troops at any given point drops further and there is a lower limit of what can be usefully independently deployed, the so called "self-licking ice-cream".

In theory we could plonk 5000* soldiers down in, say, Basra but all 5000 of them would be tied up simply supporting the presence of themselves there. There wouldn't be a single spare soldier to actually do anything useful. You could use those 5000 to back-fill a larger deployment of US troops (and that was the role of the farcically low numbers** contributed by the majority of Bush's Coalition and that's excluding the bulk of the so-called Coalition who sent nothing at all, even the Australians at No. 3 failed to send an effective number of troops) but there can be no pretence that is an viable independent deployment.

So that 10,000 is skimmed straight off the actual operational capacity of the UK Army, what you are left with then is essentially a Self-Defence Force. That might not necessarily be a bad thing but we have to stack that against the Tories loudly trumpeted post-imperial delusions of projecting force East of Suez, even into the South China Sea, and giving the Chinese a damn good thrashing as spouted by chinless fireplace sales-men.




*IIRC that was the lowest deployable limit.

**including such mighty forces as 200 Poles, 55 Tongans, 50 Filipinos, 24 Moldovans and 2 Icelanders!
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Re: More nukes

Post by Trinucleus » Wed Mar 24, 2021 5:02 pm

Looking at the RAF, do we really need expensive fighter aircraft built to carry pilots now that we've got drones that can do the attack from the air thing?

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Re: More nukes

Post by TopBadger » Wed Mar 24, 2021 6:04 pm

Trinucleus wrote:
Wed Mar 24, 2021 5:02 pm
Looking at the RAF, do we really need expensive fighter aircraft built to carry pilots now that we've got drones that can do the attack from the air thing?
Apparently drones don't save that much money over planes.

https://www.economist.com/united-states ... nticipated

The other thing is, how long until enemies work out an ability to steal your drones and turn them back on you?
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Re: More nukes

Post by TopBadger » Wed Mar 24, 2021 6:11 pm

One school of thought I heard ages ago was to essentially scrap the Army and RAF and invest everything in the Navy (which has its own flyers in the form of the Fleet Air Arm and soldiers in the form of the Marines).

On reflection thats something akin to US Marine Corps, which can basically fight small battles on its own.
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Re: More nukes

Post by Millennie Al » Thu Mar 25, 2021 4:27 am

To return to the more nukes issue, I can see two vaguely plausible reasons for increasing the numbers:
  1. Intelligence reports indicate that our subs are getting easier to detect, so we need to do something about it
  2. Politicians realise that the nukes will never actually be used, so they are the ideal project to funnel money into without requiring any auditable results - as the Americans would say, they're ideal for pork

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Re: More nukes

Post by Little waster » Thu Mar 25, 2021 9:27 am

And

Option 3: The Tory cabinet is made up of room temperature IQ mediocrities, raised on a diet of Warlord and Victor, who like to indulge in masturbatory fantasies of the UK being a military Great Power again whose thought processes never progress much beyond "Pew pew pew, bang bang, take that square-head!" while squeezing themselves through their trousers. So therefore 60 more shooty bang-bangs are inherently a good thing without any reference to any actual military, political or economic reality.

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Re: More nukes

Post by Woodchopper » Thu Mar 25, 2021 3:58 pm

Important to note that they haven't actually ordered any more nukes. They've just stated that they may do, and henceforth the UK won't be transparent about how many warheads it has.

At the moment this is pure PR (with the side effect of undermining global non-proliferation measures). It looks like a way to distract the electorate from the armed forces cuts.

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