From Cuban crisis: "First, Perry writes, the Soviet ships approaching the blockade imposed by the US had submarine escorts that were armed with nuclear torpedoes. Because of the difficulty with communications, Moscow had authorized the submarine commanders to fire without further authorization. When an American destroyer tried to force a submarine to surface, both its captain and the political officer decided to fire a nuclear torpedo at the destroyer. A nuclear confrontation was avoided only because Vasili Arkhipov, the overall commander of the fleet, was also present on the submarine. He countermanded the order to launch, thereby preventing what might have started a nuclear war."
Another one of these 'almost nuclear' stories. There's only so many times humanity can roll the dice and come out clean. Scary stuff.
Even if the submarine had fired a conventional torpedo, that probably would have escalated very quickly.
In "The Fog Of War", McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense at the time tells a story of a meeting between him, Castro, and the man who was commander of the Warsaw treaty troops at the time (I forgot his name, though, sorry). The US apparently knew there were missiles on Cuba, but thought there were no warheads, yet. At this meeting (~1992-ish, I think), the Russian tells McNamara there were indeed enough warheads on Cuba at the time to destroy all major cities on the east coast of the US. So McNamara asks Castro if he knew of that and if he would have advised the Soviets to use the nuclear weapons on Cuba to retaliate against a US attack. Castro, apparently knew of the warheads and had urged the Soviets to use them in case of an attack, knowing full well that Cuba would have been destroyed completely. (At least that is how I remember McNamara telling the story, and assuming, of course, McNamara remembers the incident correctly and is telling the story accurately.)
A nuclear torpedo to take out a destroyer? Seems like the proverbial swatting a fly with a sledgehammer? And what of the submarine? Torpedos are fairly close-range weapons, at least in those days. Would it have survived the blast?
A lot of weapons were nuclear (air to air missiles and anti-ICBM weapons are other examples) not because they necessarily needed the explosive power, but to make up for inaccuracy. Guidance in the 50s and 60s isn't what it's like today. When your weapon is likely to miss by several hundred feet, you can resign yourself to missing a lot of shots, or you can stick a nuclear warhead on it and take out the target anyway.
> A lot of weapons were nuclear ... to make up for inaccuracy
In fact, I've read that that's the real reason for even the large strategic nuclear weapons: The accuracy of missiles launched from thousands of miles away is (or was) dreadful, but if you used strategic nukes, you still could take out the targets: The Kremlin, the naval base, etc.
I've even read that modern 'smart' weapons (the article discussed Perry's work on them and their accuracy) could make nuclear weapons obsolete.
That was definitely a large part of it. Another part was the desire to maximize what you got out of a particular shot: if you have one bomb per missile, then you want each missile to pack maximum punch. Improving accuracy and the development of MIRVs both contributed to less powerful bombs becoming more desirable.
I'm not sure about precision conventional weapons making nuclear weapons obsolete. I can see it for some cases. Destroying a missile silo can probably be done with a large normal bomb delivered with sufficient accuracy. Destroying an airfield would require a lot of bombs, impractical if you're delivering them on ICBMs. And destroying a well built underground command post probably requires nukes.
Worse, sometimes cities really might be targeted deliberately, at least as a deterrent. A war limited to military targets might be seen as acceptable, while having cities destroyed could make it unacceptable, so there's incentive to threaten retaliation against cities in the event of an attack. No amount of precision lets conventional weapons substitute for nukes there. (Note that MIRV and better accuracy does still push for smaller weapons, as many smaller weapons detonated over an area is more efficient at destroying things than a single large weapon.)
A good book discussing the drivers (and some of the technology involved) of increasing ICBM/SLBM accuracy is "Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance".
There's a lot of human ingenuity applied in deciding when and how to blow things up. Munition can be timed, or use some sort of proximity sensing, etc.
Even artillery grenades, hurled out in great numbers, have such technology (and have had since WWII); for a nuclear torpedo, even a radar-operated fuze or at least a magnetic sensor would make sense.
While there isn't much public information about the Type 53-58 (the Soviet torpedo in question), it was probably a straight-runner with a range of 11nm - 13nm. It was also intended for area effect, not direct impact. Considering these parameters, it was probably fused to trigger the warhead at the end of its run, i.e. when the engine ran out of fuel. It may have had a timer or "run to detonation" feature instead, but as I said public information is scant.
Yes, nm is a common abbreviation for nautical miles in cases where they're used. And thankfully it is unusual to encounter a situation where you can't tell which one was intended.
I may be wrong here, but a surface detonation is unlikely to damage a submarine that is deep underwater. That is the reason why a fleet of nuclear submarines are the best nuclear deterrent: hard to take out since they can be anywhere undersea, mobile and ready to counterattack at a moments notice.
> hard to take out since they can be anywhere undersea, mobile and ready to counterattack at a moments notice.
When I was working in that stuff, the usual point about the SSBNs (the US long range missile firing submarines) was that they were darned difficult to find. Also, it was standard to assume that they moved in some variation on Brownian motion so that, even if did get some data on their location, it was not very useful for extrapolation.
So, a major point about the design and operation of the SSBNs was that they be darned difficult to find -- via passive sonar, magnetic anomaly detection, active sonar, or anything else. Also, a big deployment of search resources that might be more able to find an SSBN would be regarded as provocative.
Then there was the point: If the Soviets did find a US SSBN, now what? If they track it for very long, then that is provocative. If they don't track it, then they will soon lose it again. If they sink it, then there are all the other US SSBNs ready to fire back.
So, the Soviets would have to find AND sink ALL the US SSBNs at the same time. Finding all of the SSBNs at the same time without being provocative was regarded as essentially impossible.
So, maybe somehow there could be a nuke war but limited to sea. Then could pick off each SSBN as it was found one at a time. Then how long would the SSBNs last? Once I was asked to answer that! So, I derived some math, wrote some software, submitted my results, and the next day my wife and I went for a vacation in Shenandoah! Later my work was sold to a leading US intel group. I could tell you which one, but then I'd have to ...!
Ah, the math wasn't either artificial intelligence or machine learning!
OT: Can you send me a link to your 1999 Elsevier article? The old thread is locked due to age but the topic is very relevant to me...
As to on topic discussion - wouldn't you only need to take out the comms? Then the fellow subs wouldn't know anything was amiss.
Taking down several redundant, military grade links doesn't sound easy, but finding every sub in the ocean seems much harder.
Maybe there is a watchdog / normal coded communication/expected updates, so it would have to be more of a MITM thing. Even in the worst case, it would leave a limited window of time to act. Not to mention the submarine would likely be forced to try and hail "ground control" which would make DF + geo much easier...
You do seem to have a distaste for the term machine learning.
It is applied math, anybody who claims otherwise could not be more wrong. It is applied probability theory and computer science with lot more focus on algorithms than is expected of a statistician, and yes without a fetish for asymptotic normality. Usually, but not always, with a stronger focus on prediction accuracy rather than on accuracy of parameter estimates. In that sense its closer to (non-parametric) decision theory than to run of the mill stats.
Yup. I got all that from Leo Breiman, not his earlier work as an "academic probabilist" but his later work in classification and regression trees (CART), random forests, etc.
Yup, if look carefully, in many common cases can do well on prediction accuracy even when parameter accuracy is not so good. E.g., can even do well on prediction accuracy when parameter accuracy is zilch, e.g., some, but not all, cases of over fitting.
You are right about the applied math: Machine learning has a lot that is good and new, however the good is mostly not new and the new, not very good. E.g., I watched a Prof Ng lecture on the gradient descent unconstrained minimization involved in their fitting, and it seemed that either their minimization problem is awfully easy or Prof Ng didn't know much about the applied math of such minimization going way back.
So, machine learning stole a lot from some now quite classic applied math, assigned some new names, e.g., learning and another anthropomorphic name they dreamed up for iteration step size, and claimed something new. That's called academic theft, plagiarism, or some such, right?
Then there's the hype. So, just from machine learning, the pop culture press is extrapolating to the Terminator movies. Absurd.
Then, bigger, there's the implicit assumption, if only from just playing with the words, that the main path to smarter machines is machine learning. Well, if the effort is limited to Breiman's piecewise linear curve fitting, that path is absurdly limited. Much better for making machines smarter, i.e., do more, work better, is just to start with lots of now classic pure/applied math, get out a clean sheet of paper, and derive what need for the problem at hand. As much as I like Breiman, both his early work and his last work, there're oceans more good work in applied math that is nothing like Breiman's last work, e.g., with high irony, his earlier work!
Uh, here's another case where it looks like a machine has learned -- stochastic optimal control. In some cases, it can look darned smart. Another place -- game theory, to be more specific, the von Neumann-Morgenstern work. Then the Nash generalization.
But such things are far from the current machine learning.
As I have mentioned several times to you start with vapnik. That's where modern ml begins. Brieman is great but he got a few things wrong, for example he thought boosting and bagging are fundamentally the same, that is they are just variance minimization methods. In fact boosting us what gives random forest its power. BTW less well known trick, use random rotation not just random selection of features or datapoints. Their's lot more to ml than decision trees. One of its fundamental framework is convergence of empirical processes, which is essentially glivenko cantelli on steroids. Vapnik and Chervonenkis provided the first modern breakthrough result but a lot has happened since then.
I would say screw the hype just read what it is. I think your disdain for the name 'machine learning' is getting in your way.
I strongly disagree with your allegation of academic dishonesty though. Optimization has been a fundamental part of ml from the very start and with a strong overlap in the community. I am sure nemirovskii will ring a bell. In any case how can ml steal from applied math when it is applied math. The lingo differs here and there: estimating parameters become learning parameters etc.
Andrew NGO's course is not for you. Go directly to the books and then conference and journal papers.
Focus varies but info theory, stats, signal processing, approximation theory are pretty much the same thing, so are their open problems.
Btw you could not be more wrong about stochastic optimal control or repeated games being far from current ml. Oh and another major major tool in ml is geometry of function spaces. You are reading the wrong sources, probably the populist ones. Get to the real stuff given what i know of your taste in math i think you will enjoy it.
"glivenko cantelli on steroids", good. Sounds like they actually did something.
Yes, I'm torqued by the new learning labels on old bottles of pure/applied math, but that is not in my way.
> The lingo differs here and there: estimating parameters become learning parameters etc.
Rubs my fur the wrong way.
If they have some stuff beyond
borrowing from Breiman, okay.
What's "in my way" now is my startup: I've got the math derived and typed into TeX and the 80,000 lines of typing for the code, with the code running, intended for production, and in alpha test, so just for now I no longer have any pressing math problems to solve.
But, in time, I may return to my math and tweak it a little to try to get some variance reduction. Maybe some of the better machine learning literature would help, or maybe I'll just derive it myself again.
Function space geometry is about where much of my core math is.
Happy to hear back from you. I am actually gladdened that your anomaly detection work is getting some interest on HN lately. Hope something comes out of it. I am now slowly coming to the conclusion that pushing better methods on an existing stack would be really hard. Too much friction, too much politics. Perhaps the way is to create your own better cloud of servers, but that's really big league stuff. Not sure I have the stomach for that.
Curious if you have given any thought to the choice of the metric space where you define your statistics. That might play an important role from what I have seen. There might be an interesting manifold story there.
Big spoilsports are non-stationarities and even bigger are those fat tails. If only everything had a moment generating function.
I see that you have been pointed to Abu-Mostafa he is definitely a good source. Not that Andrew Ng is unaware of the stuff, far from it, he is fighting a different battle: to make parts of ML a commodity.
If you have time then you can browse the proceedings of COLT (conference on learning theory) and ICML.
> or maybe I'll just derive it myself again.
You almost always have to derive it yourself anyway even after you have seen the derivation by somebody else.
Thanks. I looked a few minutes at two of his lectures. I'll keep the URL and watch his lectures during dinners.
Lucky he got out of Egypt before they strung him up! Such good people is what US immigration has for some decades now tried to be about. Maybe we will get back to it.
"Muslim"? I don't care if he is Zoroastrian either. Or worships some sun god. I don't care about his religion. I do care if he wants to blow up buildings. Somehow I doubt if he does.
Looking at his videos, my first cut, crude guess is that he is looking at modern generalizations of old discriminate analysis. Yup, that can be important. Maybe it could be important for, say, one of my old interests, anomaly detection, say, as a doable alternative to Neyman-Pearson where often in practice we don't have nearly enough data. Maybe his interest is in medical diagnosis which, IIRC, was some of Breiman's interest.
But, first cut, it looks like, again, the criterion will be, does the model fit the data well? That is, we have little or nothing to recommend the model except that it fits the data well. But, then, in the case of his lectures, it looks like maybe he is making progress to also knowing that the model will predict well. I'm looking forward to how he does that.
In contrast, if that is important, in my work in anomaly detection, discussed here on HN often enough, I found false alarm rate from some derivations in applied probability with no model fitting at all. Okay, I don't care if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.
From a glance, it looks like he is addressing what is meant by learning -- terrific! Not just throwing words around! Then he seems to be addressing when such learning is feasible, etc. Sounds good; I've wondered some about something like that.
But my interest now in what he is doing is a bit limited since the core math in my startup seems to be quite different.
> it looks like maybe he is making progress to also knowing that the model will predict well. I'm looking forward to how he does that.
Yes that's exactly it. By way of Vapnik and Chervonenkis' result (essentially an uniform law of large numbers) one upper bounds the expected accuracy (over the unknown distribution) of a classifier in terms of the training error and another quantity that depends on the class of hypothesis that one is using. One can give bounds even when one is using an infinite class, for example all linear functions in the feature space, or some Hilbert space of functions.
This was one of _the_ major early break through result. Its often quoted in the context of ML but it really is a result in probability theory. Since it bounds the most pessimistic situation possible, they are quite bad (although achievable).
It also brought about a paradigm change in the mindset. Since the optimal classifier is just the thresholded conditional density, early approaches had focused mostly on estimating this conditional density. But that's an impossible task. V&C showed even if you do not have enough data to learn the density, you may have more than enough for good prediction accuracy. Don't learn the conditional density, just learn the discriminating function directly by optimizing its expected loss.
People have moved to different tools to bound expected prediction accuracy. You get a lot more reasonable bounds, say with the PAC-Bayesian theorem.
Key thing is that these are distribution independent, non-asymptotic and also dimensionality independent.
Russians tested a 4.8 Kiloton T-5 nuclear torpedo in 1957. They used three decommissioned submarines as targets. The weapon was detonated at 20 meters below surface and sank two of the three submarines at a distance of 6.5 miles. As previously mentioned nuclear torpedoes of the era relied on blast damage rather than precision. The shock wave could easily break the hull of any vessel, be it underwater or on the surface.
Can a submarine that is deep underwater launch torpedoes? I didn't think so.
OTOH, a nuke doesn't need to yield several megatons. First devices were about 20 kilotons and it's possible to create smaller ones. I'm sure I've seen some video of 1 kiloton bomb. Also, intuitively, it doesn't seem that it would destroy a sub a few miles away looking at Baker test:
Movies. On second thought, there was some submarine against submarine battle in Red October... most other submarine wartime movies were from WWII, always shooting at boats and at periscope level to aim.
Very good point. When I used to work in that stuff, it was assumed that once know where a sub was, it was easy to kill it -- just pop off a nuke and let the resulting pressure wave in the water crush the hull of the sub.
Sounds like the Soviet nuke torpedo was a very low yield nuke -- if the sub would survive, then the explosion would not have been big enough to have been a trigger of full nuke war like, say, a 10 megaton nuke over a major city.
> Torpedo on the submarine was a T-5 and if the submarine was within 6-10 miles of the blast it would have ripped the submarine apart.
Do you have any additional info on this? A quick wikipedia search turned up a little bit of info[0], but suggests the targets destroyed were 6.5 miles from the submarine that launched the torpedo and presumably that the launching submarine was not destroyed:
On 10 October 1957, in another test at Novaya Zemlya, S-144, a Whiskey class submarine, launched a T-5. The test weapon, code named Korall, detonated with a force of 4.8 kilotonnes twenty meters under the surface of the bay sending a huge plume of highly radioactive water high into the air. Three decommissioned submarines were used as targets at a distance of 6.5 miles. Both S-20 and S-34 sank completely, and S-19 was critically damaged.
I'm not sure how you came to those conclusions. A live fire test of a nuclear torpedo prototype seems ... more than a little unlikely. What you have here is the description of a test just like any of the American tests: a bare warhead is detonated under certain conditions, with perhaps targets nearby to determine the effects. Meaning that the targets were 6.5 miles from the warhead. And no "launching submarine" was involved, since only the warhead was tested not the end to end weapons system (which is an extraordinarily unusual occurrence with nuclear weapons systems and has only been done a handful of times in history).
> A live fire test of a nuclear torpedo prototype seems ... more than a little unlikely. What you have here is the description of a test just like any of the American tests: a bare warhead is detonated under certain conditions, with perhaps targets nearby to determine the effects. Meaning that the targets were 6.5 miles from the warhead. And no "launching submarine" was involved,
I was just going off what I quoted from wikipedia, which does specifically say that a submarine launched a T-5. Beyond that I can't speak to the accuracy of the wikipedia article.
The Soviets were pretty keen on live fire tests - their very first test of a staged thermonuclear device was air dropped. Air drop tests were fairly common, AFAIK the only people who have done a live launch of a nuke on a missile were the Chinese.
The Soviets tested an R-13 SLBM with a live warhead in 1961. A Polaris SLBM with a live warhead was tested by the US in 1962 as part of Operation Dominic. I don't think either country did a live test of an ICBM though.
The US tested a live Polaris in 1962. They were responsible enough to cook it off at 11,000 ft, a real combat launch would likely have been detonated closer to the ground.
I have no solid evidence to help you, but my intuition says this is believable. Pressure waves can travel a long ways in dense media, and it's the interface between media of different densities, such as water of the ocean and the air inside a submarine, where the most devastating effects are felt. Jelly-fish swimming next to a submarine might not feel a thing even while the submariners inside the submarine are being smashed to bits.
Prior to WWII, that intuition led navies to greatly overestimate the lethal range of their depth charges. Once in combat, they discovered that they were way off, close to an order-of-magnitude in some cases.
Of course, they might not have expected to survive the blast - a lot of people (e.g. bomber crews) expected their trips to be one way.
Also, from what I recall from One Minute to Midnight the conditions on that sub had been absolutely awful for quite a lot time (in particular, no cooling) so they might not have been thinking particularly rationally.
Having flashbacks of 2001: Space Odyssey.. At first the apes postured with intimidation tactics, then one finally took the leap and started using the weapon. It's quite terrifying to consider just how natural and statistically probable it is for nukes to be used again.
What concerns me the most about nuclear weapons is that the technical barriers to building them are getting lower all the time. They're currently within reach of despotic states of below average scientific capacity. All that's required is the will to defy the world (e.g. North Korea). Given how North Korea and Iraq have been treated lately, what despot wouldn't pursue nuclear weapons if he thought he could succeed in building them fast enough to avoid being invaded?
In the future, the barrier will be even lower. Nuclear weapons will likely fall within reach of motivated and capable terrorist movements such as ISIL, although I'd be more worried about organizations that haven't carved out territory that's easy to attack. Once that happens, things could get very ugly. There is no such thing as MAD with a distributed terrorist organization.
Missile defense systems offer no real answers. They don't work against state of the art missiles (such as Russia has), nor do they work against smuggled bombs or bombs built within the borders of their target nation. The kind of surveillance that would be required to adequately secure a nation against such weapons is the stuff Orwell never even dreamed of. It would require utterly pervasive, invasive, and constant surveillance.
a) Is it a single use nuclear device or mass use? US-Russia-China will be a mass use scenario and thats a game ender.
a1) What is the current chance of an accidental or sabotage internal use by any major country?
b) What is the response to a someone like North Korea using a nuclear weapon?
c) The probability of something occurring between either Pakistan-India or North Korea-South Korea in the next 20 years exceeds 50%. The Shia-Sunni thing could be a problem area too.
d) Offshore rebalancing in the Middle East right now may be a study in removing nuclear-capable states deemed hostile. Any sort of region controlled by Islamist warlords can't build any sort of functional modern industry. The initial shock at capabilities was through looting, which ends when the source of lootable goods ends.
e) A big expansion of public surveillance is already well on its way. Sensors get smaller, cheaper, probably expanding exponentially. You can kind of look at what MZ (formally Machine Zone) is publicizing as an example of live knowledge of an urban area. Vehicle delivery of anything illicit will become very difficult. I've mentioned before, it is possible there will be little to no private vehicle ownership within urban cores in the future.
f) The barrier to entry for civilization ending nuclear will continue to remain high enough. The move away from nuclear to renewables will make it pretty explicit when a smaller country is trying to develop nuclear weapons. The most dangerous point of "idiot" proliferation was when the Soviet Union fell.
g) The chemical and biological stuff is a big future concern with regards to production becoming easier.
The most urgent thing is to solve the US-Russia-China issue. Based on the policy makers operating behind the scenes I expect relations will keep degrading.
In some respects, as a democracy it is the citizen's fault for ignoring the problem. On the other hand there is total opacity of the strategic policies being implemented, so if they are even debated both sides are debating talking points which actually have zero basis on why certain decisions are being made.
I think this is a test for our species here on planet earth before we level up on technology. We have to be able to have a certain level of self-control or we're going to destroy ourselves and go back to the stone age if we can't handle the power that comes with advanced technology. So far, we've been able to avoid nuclear annihilation, so there's some hope.
The ability to destroy outpaces the ability to create and preserve. Destruction is inevitable.
When the ability of the rogue group or individual can slaughter millions, pervasive monitoring may be the only path avoiding extinction, without giving up on technological advancement.
These are two hypotheses,despite my strong libertarian leanings, that I find difficult to reject.
Sousveillance seems to be happy medium: it's more secure than surveillance since the work is crowdsourced and there are no privileged actors (i.e. the watchers) that are free of surveillance. It's less prone to abuse of power because everyone is being watched, and everyone is doing the watching, so abuses will quickly come to light.
Security, privacy, freedom: choose two. I'd gladly sacrifice privacy for the others, as long as everyone else does the same.
If you don't have territory, it's hard to build enrichment facilities. That is a step that is unlikely to get much easier in the near future. Controlling enriched material seems easier than preventing people from building bombs once they have it.
Centrifuge enrichment facilities are large, but comparable to a data center or a WalMart Supercenter. Power consumption is reasonable for the building size. It's not like the old days of gaseous diffusion, where buildings were over a mile long and required gigawatts of power. Nor does a centrifuge facility have to be built that big, if you're willing to wait longer for product.
Someone could put an enrichment facility in an industrial park and it wouldn't attract attention.
The best deposits contain about 20% U3O8. Uranium is about 1% U-235. You need about 50kg to make the Hiroshima bomb. Depending on the efficiency of your enrichment process, it doesn't sound like terribly much ore.
Still, it could be done. I remember reading The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy - tldr; Islamic terrorists stumble onto an Israeli atomic bomb, kidnap a former East German nuclear engineer, build a machine shop in a cave, and rework the bomb into a thermonuclear fusion device. It seemed generally plausible - the science and engineering to produce a nuclear bomb is not exactly unknown, the biggest problem appears to be getting ahold of the right materials.
I watch the movie again once each few months. The movie has only a fission bomb. I have to suspect that building a successful, small fusion bomb would need quite a lot of computer simulation and also testing. The testing can't be hidden.
But a fission bomb could be plenty nasty.
You are correct: If can steal, say, a sufficient fissionable material, then might be able to do the rest without anyone noticing.
My understanding is that usually for a Pu bomb, have to compress the material like the US did with Fat Man. That compression is not easy to do. IIRC, there are some much more clever ways to do the compression, but, again, they would likely require a lot of computing and testing. That is, I'm not sure Pu would work in a gun barrel bomb.
I just know this stuff at the level of the two Richard Rhodes books and a few Wikipedia articles. I've never seen any classified material on bomb design.
It won't; it will predetonate, producing a "fizzle yield". With plutonium, the nuclear reaction starts so fast that the big problem is getting the critical assembly fully assembled before it blows itself apart.
With enriched uranium, the reaction starts so slowly that the gun bomb will work. That's why nuclear proliferation people are much more worried about enriched uranium than plutonium.
Conventional weapons are destructive enough, not to mention chemical and bio agents. What concerns me is the most is the last part of your comment.
>The kind of surveillance that would be required to adequately secure a nation against such weapons is the stuff Orwell never even dreamed of. It would require utterly pervasive, invasive, and constant surveillance.
1. AFAIK mass surveillance is not very effective in preventing bad actors (e.g. terrorist communicating via sms) yet it is promoted so much we are ready to accept that reasoning right away.
2. It is a symptomatic treatment, however we can go much further in prevention and deescalation to swing those actors a better way. I don't think certain people are born evil.
No, they really aren't. Israel has been peppered with hundreds of rockets on the time frame of days or weeks, and at the national scale, they were basically an inconvenience. One nuke, by contrast, can take out an entire city. North Korea currently has at best the capacity to really badly hurt South Korea before they were rendered militarily ineffective, and even then, for all the death and destruction they could cause, most of Seoul would still be there afterwards. If they have nukes, though, most of Seoul could be destroyed in one fell swoop. Or most of anything they can reach, which also includes an awful lot of China.
It turns out that if you plot the destructive radius of even very large nuclear bombs, many cities are actually substantially larger than just one. But, still, between fallout concerns and the fact that there is now a total hole in your city's infrastructure, one nuke is still probably enough to kill an entire city, if not necessarily every person in it. There aren't any conventional weapons we can say that about.
There also aren't any chemical weapons we can say that about. Their effects are very mean and very nasty and very hideous, but they're also a great deal more limited than the common conception of them. For instance, one of the characteristics that makes mustard gas appealing is that it's heavier than air, which means that it tends to collect in below-ground-level fortifications, forcing the enemy out. This same characteristic renders it useless for destroying a city.
As for biological weapons, well, we do tend to speak of them in the same breath as nuclear weapons. However, their big problem is that it's difficult to create a really effective one that is also guaranteed not to kill the user. You've basically got the choice of things like smallpox, which are effective and contagious but you won't be able to stop hitting you (if nothing else, your enemy may well consider medieval warfare a source of inspiration and just start dropping infected bodies on you), or you have things like anthrax which are effective, but being not particularly contagious means that it's actually quite difficult to get them into people at scale.
To my knowledge rockets fired at Israel are very basic, while Israel has the Iron Dome in place, thus it is a bit of cherry picking. Conventional bombs can surely destroy cities. Nevertheless, an argument can be made nuclear bombs are more cost effective, I don't know about that.
Chemical weapons are certainly WMDs and very potent, as seen in the Syria attacks.
There are many ways you can hurt your enemy, depending on one's goals. E.g. as far as I remember the central element of Mr. Robot is an attack on world economy, which might cause more disruption and suffering than killing civilians.
Reflecting back on history, we don't even have many nuclear incidents. On the other hand it shows if we are serious about hurting others we will find a way.
Also, just for thoughts, if we leave the western centric pov, every other nation could be concerned with the west having nuclear capabilities while they are denied.
> To my knowledge rockets fired at Israel are very basic, while Israel has the Iron Dome in place, thus it is a bit of cherry picking.
My understanding is that most of the rockets fired at Israel are not loaded with explosives, and that most of the damage comes from whatever fuel is left when they impact.
despite some recent high profile terrorist act in Europe or the numerous shootings in the US which are used to push this agenda.
While just the other day, people on this very same site were freaking out because they clicked a button that populated their search history with some questionable items.
Despite three major armed conflicts fought between nuclear powers by proxy, none thankfully have resulted in nuclear war. Deterrence works. What doesn't work, and a flaw that is growing exponentially with nuclear proliferation is failures in design, command and control. The incredible and incredibly frightening book "Command and Control" (see link at bottom), highlights several near catastrophic misses in the US nuclear arsenal. Now multiply by all nuclear states, the risks of accident are terrifying. The world would do well to open source safeguards so that even rogue states (eg. North Korea) can benefit from control and process that mitigate risk of unintended nuclear detonation.
Dude, human factors like personality and mood quickly render safeguards moot, within the atmosphere of a despotic dictatorship.
Open source any amount of safety protocals, and pray that they get used, and you'll acquaint yourself with disappointment.
People who concoct nuclear programs are toying with suicide, and their level of interest in safety can be understood by their decision to weaponize such a thing to begin with.
Meanwhile, cap such a program with a lone psychotic emperor, prone to fits of cruel and unusual punishment, and see what he does on a bad day, as his body ages, and he grows crankier with every waking morning. Now surround him with an echo-chamber of eager-to-please, hawkish, testosterone-fueled military upstarts.
Quite the opposite. Firstly, despotic regimes are by their nature control driven, one common characteristic of which is an inability to act without central directives from leadership. Iraq is a classic case. Despotic regimes persist for the purposes of preserving and enriching the despot, where even the intent to use nuclear arms in an age of deterrence is extremely counter-productive to that goal. North Korea, Russia and other nations demonstrate the futility of preventing proliferation. But there has been some success in educating fledgling nuclear states on safeguards (reportedly Pakistan). If you can't eliminate it, mitigate it as best you can and manage the risks.
I am dubious. Mostly, because preserving and enriching a despot means catering to their whims.
A despot's pet nuclear project is likely to have an authentic red button (provided in any variety of interfaces, telephone, mechanical lock and key, fingerprint authenticated, whatever). If one imagines themselves as a despot, the ego almost demands it.
Between the despot, The Button, and the operational weapons, there are many layers of human factors. Maybe the red button is a placebo, and the underlings, being less suicidal than their singular leader, would never permit the button to perform its dreaded task, but is that assured?
one common characteristic of which is an inability to act without central directives from leadership
Yes, very paralizing when there's a shortage of central directives. Not so much when the leadership is happy to show his initiative. What did you think of the innovation of executing high officials using a cannon?
I'm no fan of Trump and I think its thankfully unlikely he'll be the US President. But if he is President there is this quote from Trump that suggests he has more self-awareness and emotional intelligence than his carefully crafted persona suggests.
"When I'm wounded, I go after people hard and I try to unwound myself."
If failed Presidents have had one thing in common its a failure to recognize their own limitations and failings before or after-the-fact. Again, no fan of the guy, but I think the scare-mongering is overblown.
I think you're being too charitable in your reading of that statement; that wasn't Trump acknowledging that he overreacts in an attempt to heal self-traumatization, but (in context) him justifying his behavior by saying that his actions are always in response to others' (unprovoked) attacks.
If you like, it seems a classic example of narcissistic rage: Trump invests so much psychological effort in maintaining his self-image, in the face of what appears to have been a childhood lacking normal parental social support, that any attempt to undermine that image is to him an existential threat that demands immediate and overwhelming aggression in response, until the targeted individual responds by agreeing to accept and thus reinforce what is a grandiose illusion.
Really, we haven't seen someone like this anywhere near the White House since late-stage Nixon (when Kissinger had firm control of the reins -- and, allegedly, had standing orders for military, DoD and State to ignore any orders from the President himself, particularly those regarding the nuclear codes). It's virtually impossible to predict his actions, because he's driven by an immediate need to assuage his sense of victimization.
I don't think the issue is whether Trump/Clinton will initiate a nuclear confrontation directly. The question is whether either of them have the qualities it takes to stand down if/when the US is attacked by an insignificant foe, rather than retaliating against someone with nukes.
Frankly, I don't think they are any different in that regard. Neither would be willing to accept the responsibility of being impeached/etc in order to avoid a larger confrontation. Second term Obama on the other hand probably would, I think he has changed in that regard. I say that because he seems to be doing a fine job of realizing that we can't solve the Syrian problem with more guns/bombs. See Libya, etc...
This is a review of the book "My Journey at the Nuclear Brink", by William Perry, US Secretary of Defense in the the Clinton administration. The reviewer is Jerry Brown, Governor of California.
Agreed. It actually forced me out three paragraphs in. I do now realise how ineffectual, grating even, fawning deference to authority has become, to me at least.
I don't understand this sentiment at all. It seems like Perry's advice is most rational and reasonable and seems to be ignored by most of the Establishment and the general Public.
I'm all against hero worship, but giving credit where credit is due - to a man who has lived through WW2 right up to the end of the cold war, seems reasonable.
You misunderstand. My beef is not with Perry. It's with the author's writing style. I'm not going to forgive poor writing because I happen to agree with the writer. Its not what he is saying, its how its being said.
Meh. Writing isn't his day job, and it's really not all that badly written. There are many brilliant people out there who aren't brilliant writers, who are worth listening to none the less.
No no! "Perry does not use his memoir to score points or settle grudges. He does not sensationalize."
Someone defines sensationalise differently to me and the dictionary.
I agree that the nuclear threat may be bigger today than in cold war times. More nations now have nuclear weapons and the possibility that one will be used one day is > 0.
When I grew up in Germany in the 80s, there was a real sense that nuclear war could start any time. Unfortunately, we haven't used the short widow of opportunity after the cold war to get rid of all nuclear weapons. Now I wonder what, if anything, can happen to convince us as a species to get rid of them.
I'm conflicted on this. On one hand, the amount of damage we'd suffer is a lot lower now that the average weapon might be a few hundred kilotons and dropped precisely on a military base rather than a 20-30 megaton weapon tossed roughly in the direction of a city center. On the other hand, the fact that there would be so much less collateral damage (but still a ton) could make people much more willing to use them.
I think the changes you cited (less damage due to high precision use of low yield weapons) make it on balance more likely they'll be used.
The real barrier to nuke use is gaining entry to the club. U235 enrichment, Pu239 synthesis, implosion, initiators, etc. In contrast, the entry barrier to precision delivery is small and diminishing.
If you're new in town (IN, PK, NK), your noob inefficient, unoptimized weapons can be really effective if precisely delivered. And it doesn't necessarily mean ballistic delivery. Moves the "unthinkable" threshold downward. It's worrisome.
Suppose some little country wants to start working with U and Pu. So, they set up a building, get it some utilities, surround it with some security, and then go shopping for a long list of lab supplies and equipment.
Then, likely, presto, bingo, the intel agencies of the more advanced countries will notice what is going on inside the building just from what is on the purchase orders going outside the building. Then have some drones and/or satellites fly over the building with some neutron or gamma ray detectors or some such. Then have a little chat with the leaders of that little country.
I'm not sure it would be easy to hide such activities now.
And if they do get some fissionable materials, then they would have to test a bomb, and can't hide that.
I have to believe that the "more likely to use them" is offset (I hope entirely) by the taboo of deciding to do so. If deciding to use a nuclear weapon is an open invitation for retaliation in kind, then you would expect the established players in the nuclear power game to shut it down with extreme prejudice for exactly that reason.
A smaller opening volley doesn't feel like any increased incentive to initiate said volley.
It's assured destruction. The degree and ferocity of the conventional military response to any state which opens with a small scale nuclear attack would be unlike any wars to date.
You do it and you'll get to watch the US, China and Russia briefly join forces and annihilate your infrastructure with extreme prejudice - with options to use their arsenals if anyone suspects you'll try to while this is happening.
I didn't understand the last paragraph. What you said makes sense, and the fact that countries like IN, PK, NK don't have access to tactical/precision nuclear armaments makes it less likely that they will use them, doesn't it? Because setting off a megaton device is clearly a sign for the commencement of nuclear war and certain MAD.
And sorry, I see I wasn't clear about the precision delivery aspect.
While newer members of the nuclear club may not have the greatest in precision delivery, that capability is almost completely a matter of electronic technology. Which means it's getting easier and cheaper in the same way that our cheap smartphones eclipse yesterday's mega$ supercomputers. I'm sure IN is already there, probably PK as well. NK, not so much. Yet.
That in turn makes unoptimized weapons with only say, 5kT yield very useful. Such "tiny" yields diminish the horror factor associated with using nukes. 5kT is way more "imaginable" - it's only 250 truckloads of TNT (single big rig load of 40,000 lbs).
In short, precision delivery makes low yield (cheap) bombs useful. That diminishes the restraint underpinning MAD.
PK is working on developing small tactical nukes to use against massed Indian armor, following...wait for it...NATO tactical first-use doctrine in the 1980s in Europe.
The odds that a nuclear weapon was used in combat in Yemen and it didn't make the mainstream news are so remote as to be laughable. This video is likely just a large conventional explosive misinterpreted as nuclear by people who think that "mushroom cloud" must mean "nuclear."
Another sign that this is BS is the fact that "bunker buster" and "neutron bomb" make no sense together. A neutron bomb is designed to decrease the explosive force while increasing the amount of radiation produced, with the idea that tank crews are easier to kill through radiation (which tank hulls don't protect against very well) than through blast (which tank hulls are great at protecting against). But radiation is a bad weapon against underground targets, where each foot of soil acts as shielding to reduce the amount of radiation by a factor of something like three. To destroy bunkers, you want blast, not radiation.
A mushroom cloud is an artifact of air convection produced by any sufficiently large blast. Peculiar to nuclear weapons is a bright initial flash of light (actually two flashes, but they're close enough together to be very hard to distinguish by eye). If this video depicted a nuclear initiation, such a flash would appear around 0:15, but none does.
Plus, how about terrorist groups or religiously/ otherwise extremist/ crazy governments? They might not even make rational considerations like these if they get hold of a nuke.
I grew up in Canada in the 80s and I remember being very afraid of the possibility of a nuclear war simply because it seemed like it was always about to happen. One thing could go wrong and suddenly we'd be in a nuclear war.
I think that's why "The Day After" scared so many of my friends (and myself). It just seemed like a horror film that could happen.
I always thought Canada would be a safer place in case of a nuclear exchange. I wonder whether there are any Canadian cities which are targeted by Russian nukes at all.
A counterpoint to consider while you're holding those black and white crayons: Germany started two world wars in the last century alone. Nuclear weapons are arguably acting to prevent a third.
And without nukes, that war probably would have devastated Germany yet again.
The argument that nuclear weapons have prevented large-scale wars seems to be sound. The years since 1945 have been remarkably peaceful.
My worry, though, is that it's hard to estimate the risk they add. If nukes prevent massive conventional wars and there's a zero chance of nuclear war, then hell yes, nukes are great, all praise Einstein and Fermi and Teller and Ulam. On the other hand, if nukes prevent massive conventional wars and there's a 0.5% chance per year of an all-out global thermonuclear war, then no way, we just bought a couple of hundred years of peace followed by the end of civilization.
The data from the 71 years that nuclear weapons have been around is consistent with both possibilities.... Actually, I'd argue it's more consistent with the second, given how close the world has come to global thermonuclear war on several occasions in that time.
True, and to some extent it's like any other form of gambling. The odds may not be that bad -- they may even be in your favor in the long run -- but the game ends the first time you go bust. So it's really, really important to keep that from happening by accident.
Even though the risks are enormous, any world power using nuclear weapons would probably need to be exceedingly irrational. World leaders want to stay in power, and continue to rule over their subjects. I don't see it happening, except by:
1) misunderstanding/miscommunication
2) incompetence
3) desperation
4) particularly bloodthirsty individual
Should we be confident?
#1 was witnessed in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (mokusatsu incident)
#2 Incompetence is pervasive in government (i.e. when the Stratfor leaks came, their internal wiki said of the FBI "good at breaking up used car rings. Confused by anything more complicated." Even corporations with close ties to government disparage the powerful 3-letter agencies without counter argument.)
#3 yet to be seen
#4 I hope it is out of the cards
>any world power using nuclear weapons would probably need to be exceedingly irrational.
Leaders are exceedingly irrational. Stalin and Hitler literally killed millions.
Considering that many generals in the German army considered WWII unwinnable before Hitler started it, WWII may have been one of the world's longest and bloodiest suicide notes.
Combine that with a literal death cult, laced with bizarre fantasies about blood, iron, and the holy homeland, and you can see just how irrational world powers can get.
Japan wasn't much better off. The bombs were a horror, but at least they cauterised imperialism out of the Japanese psyche for at least a few generations - at a huge cost.
The US isn't much better off now. The reasons for war are more religious than personal - the pursuit of profit - but the millions who have died since WWII in US direct and proxy campaigns are no less dead for it.
Russia? China? Let's see.
It's clear that the only reason we've avoided nuclear suicide so far is blind luck - often the blind luck that put a relatively sane individual in a position where they, not presidents, emperors, kings, and politicians, could choose the fate of the world.
Ultimately you can't win at Russian Roulette. You can only not lose - for a limited time.
Why was China not mentioned as a third, major participant in the next arms race?
Why were all the lesser proliferants not mentioned? Isn't it far more likely that somebody on a holy mission buys or steals something they shouldn't have in the near future than a full conflict among the big three later?
> Isn't it far more likely that somebody on a holy mission buys or steals something they shouldn't have in the near future than a full conflict among the big three later?
Perhaps we are too wrapped up in our recent experiences when we say that. IMHO humanity's perspectives tend to be reactive: If the last experience was a terrorist attack, that's what we look for next. If it was a major power confrontation, then that's what we anticipate.
The article was concerned that NATO expanded its membership too much, that is, added too many countries too close to Russia. Presumably the concern here is that Russia will, then, feel more threatened by an attack from NATO.
Uh, gee, guys, that concern seems not to understand maybe the more important role of NATO! Sure, first cut, it appears that the purpose of NATO is to have the European countries ban together better to defend themselves against an attack from Russia. Hmm ....
But maybe a more important reason for NATO is to take all of the military forces in Europe, especially those closest to Russia, and put them under central command and control, with a big role for the US. Why? To stop another case like started WWI -- some terrorist in the long boiling Balkans shot a prince of Austria or some such. That is, the purpose of NATO is to keep a lid on the instabilities of 22 or so countries west of Russia and, thus, avoid war, protect Russia, etc. Sure, this is a joke but only partly.
Or, in history, how often has Russia gone charging to the west trying to take over Sweden, Germany, or France? Or was the real threat Napoleon charging east, Germany charging east, etc.?
Or, we can expect instabilities in Europe. So, we need to keep a lid on that pot. Thus, NATO!
Russia? A good lid on that unstable European pot, e.g., the long boiling Balkans, is very much in Russia's interests.
This is IMO one of the most important things that next to nobody pays attention to. People toss around "use a nuke" or "because we have nukes" as though they're like any other conventional weapon. I'd venture to guess that none of those people have been around a large conventional weapon exploding, which pales in comparison to even a small nuclear warhead.
This reminds me of the irony of when the US invaded Iraq, because "Saddam has Weapons of Mass Destruction"[1]... while bragging that the US was going to use the MOAB, the Mother of All Bombs, the largest conventional bomb ever. The US has always had trouble with the internal consistency of it's propaganda :)
[1] Which weren't nuclear, and required a redefinition of the phrase to suit.
I completely agree that the danger now is much more than it was 40 years ago. Having said that, there's plenty of blame to go around for everybody, and I'm not sure there is much to be done about it.
The underlying problem is that technology is making smaller and smaller actors capable of more and more destructive actions. It's not just nukes. It's not inconceivable that one hacker somewhere could take down the U.S. electric grid. That's insane.
We're living in an extremely asymmetric world. Reducing nuclear stockpiles needs to be done. It eliminates the ability to create worldwide nuclear catastrophic damage with a push of a button. But if things got serious between major powers? They'd just build more nukes. You've taken what might have happened in 60 minutes and turned it into a 2-week affair. It's a move in the right direction, but I don't think it fixes anything. It's just better.
I am probably wrong, but my gut tells me the nuke threat may be overblown, at least in terms of a complete, species-ending event for mankind. We're like cockroaches, and I tend to believe some of us would struggle through somehow. I hope we never find out. But as to the larger issue of small groups holding enormous destructive power, I not so optimistic. I could easily see a situation where multiple catastrophic attacks in various sectors occur simultaneously. I am not so sanguine about our chances then. And I don't see any sort of policy change or treaty changing any of that.
> Perry tells us that parity is “old thinking” because nuclear weapons can’t actually be used—the risk of uncontrollable and catastrophic escalation is too high. They are only good for threatening the enemy with nuclear retaliation.
This is an important point, which I believe is not necessarily subscribed to by all those in the military. In particular, I am greatly concerned that the use of tactical nuclear weapons—even very small ones on the scale of just 100t TNT or so—is far more likely to occur than a full scale strategic nuclear exchange, and that this could lead to escalation with tactical nuclear weapons of ever greater size, eventually leading to a far higher probability that strategic weapons are eventually used.
I believe that if you looked at the Top Secret plans produced by the Pentagon and the Russian General Staff you would find many that call for "limited" use of tactical nuclear weapons in response to an overwhelming attack by conventional forces. In addition there are proposals such as the "nuclear bunker buster" that was floated a few years back during the invasion of Afghanistan.
The great problem is that once the use of nuclear weapons of any sort becomes at all normalised, there is no upper limit to their destructive capability. The largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, Tsar Bomba, was a three stage thermonuclear device and had a yield of about 50 Mt TNT, but such a weapon could be easily scaled up simply by adding additional thermonuclear stages. Once nuclear weapons become actively used in any capacity the destructive capability of a nuclear-armed state is limited only by its restraint.
Consider the Allies' strategic bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan in WWII. The goal was to destroy the enemy's ability to make war and to force them to surrender; this involved killing civilians and military personnel, and destroying infrastructure and production capability. Note that killing civilans served to advance the principal goal of winning the war but was not an end in itself. If the war could be won with everything exactly the same except for fewer enemy casualties, I believe any sane commander with ethics remotely similar to my own would take that choice. In other words, inflicting enemy casualties has positive instrumental value but negative intrinsic value. In contrast, Hitler saw killing Jews and other populations as having positive intrinsic value, as a goal worth pursuing in and of itself.
If I had complete authority over a nation's nuclear weapons I would never, under any circumstances, actually use them. In all respects I would act as though I would respond to a nuclear attack in kind without hesitation, but that would be a lie. If I were faced with an overwhelming strategic attack and had the opportunity to respond with an attack of equal magnitude, I would not. Such an act would not change the outcome of my own nation, it would merely inflict the same on my enemy, which since I am not a psycopath has negative utility. At that point the war is already lost, the best one could do is minimise the destruction inflicted on humanity as a whole.
So I believe Perry assertion "nuclear weapons can't actually be used" is literally correct in the logical extreme. The problem is that deterrence requires the appearance of being ready to use them, and that is very difficult to fake. I think this underscores the importance of control mechanisms. Historically such mechanisms were opposed because they might put the weapons out of action when they need to be used, for example the Minuteman ICBM codes were set to all zeroes until 1977 and even today the captain of a British Vanguard-class submarine has the capability to launch without a code being transmitted from headquarters. This lends credence to the idea that these militaries intend to actually use such weapons in the event, not just appear to be prepared to use them. If you wanted to just fake the appearance of being prepared to use them it would be sufficient to plan not to distribute the right codes: the deterrence effect would not be lessened at all as the enemy would never risk you not being able to distribute the correct codes in the event.
>If I had complete authority over a nation's nuclear weapons I would never, under any circumstances, actually use them. In all respects I would act as though I would respond to a nuclear attack in kind without hesitation, but that would be a lie. If I were faced with an overwhelming strategic attack and had the opportunity to respond with an attack of equal magnitude, I would not. Such an act would not change the outcome of my own nation, it would merely inflict the same on my enemy, which since I am not a psycopath has negative utility. At that point the war is already lost, the best one could do is minimise the destruction inflicted on humanity as a whole.
part of me wants to hope that the individuals involved in the creation and deployment of nuclear warheads have actually agreed to silently sabotage them all, rendering them inoperable even if there were an attempt to use them
Have there been nuclear tests where they just pulled a weapon off the proverbial shelf and blew it up without any more preparation than it would get in a real war? I wonder if such a scheme would ever have been detected.
What an uncivil thing to say. Incidentally it is also wrong.
Humans are pretty good at inferring unknown behavior from
known observations. A hypothesis is part of the scientific process and that is what we have here.
As it happens, there is evidence for what would occur[1], and the posters intuition turns out to be mostly correct.
To LionessLover (who's comment is now flagged): I agree that you calling us both stupid didn't make you wrong - it was the evidence from the experiment, and the way the scientific method works that did that.
Another one of these 'almost nuclear' stories. There's only so many times humanity can roll the dice and come out clean. Scary stuff.