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What are you reading?
- Thread starter Recovering LSO
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On the topic of nuclear conflict, the New York Times has published a number of articles this year. A selection (all of these should be accessible as gift articles even to non-subscribers):
The Secret Pentagon War Game That Offers a Stark Warning for Our Times
Opinion | Nuclear War: The Rising Risk, and How We Stop It
Opinion | America Is Updating Its Nuclear Weapons. The Price: $1.7 Trillion.
Opinion | The President’s Sole Authority Over Nuclear Weapons Is Dangerous
Opinion | What One Russian Satellite Tells Us About the Future of Nuclear Warfare
The Secret Pentagon War Game That Offers a Stark Warning for Our Times
Opinion | Nuclear War: The Rising Risk, and How We Stop It
Opinion | America Is Updating Its Nuclear Weapons. The Price: $1.7 Trillion.
Opinion | The President’s Sole Authority Over Nuclear Weapons Is Dangerous
Opinion | What One Russian Satellite Tells Us About the Future of Nuclear Warfare
The subject needs a a broad conversation in the US political arena. It is disappointing that Americans understand little of our doctrine, the technical mechanisms at work, and the role of POTUS, SECDEF and other uniformed leaders. In many instances, the scenarios Ms. Jacobsen writes come across as Tom-Clancy-ish but its easy to make the connection as to how flaws in the US and Russian system can grow quickly to unchecked nuclear escalation and the needless destruction of humanity. The whole system seems designed around rational actors. in the case the author describes, an irrational North Korea - that the world has vastly underestimated (or mistaken for having a rational view of the world) is the root cause of our Mutually Assured Destruction. Launch On Warning seems just bad. Added to this there is no recall of a missle, and a missile past the boost phase is impossible to intercept. My guess is most Americans believe the US is protected from attack when in fact the capability to intercept an incoming missile or warhead is impossible.
To whit, I think most US Citizens would disagree with the concepts of:
The concept of Launch On Warning - an artificial time clock to respond that requires fallible humans to make decisions of enormous consequence before being informed of all available information
The concept of overwhelming response - in an effort to reestablish deterrence
POTUS having the sole launch/release authority
The role of The Secret Service in moving POTUS violently to a 'secure location' even if that means making POTUS unavailable to communicate with world leaders to tone down the situation.
I'm sure scenarios are played out again and again at the War College level. Are there scenarios where the just move is top absorb an attack and await analysis and dialog before responding? Also the EMP effects of an orbital burst weapon are equally unnerving just on its own.
Honestly it's an eye opening book.
AIRMMCPORET
Plan “A” Retired
There really aren't any good alternatives to 'Launch on Warning' and the President having sole launch authority in many cases. While they are far from ideal they are the 'least bad' option when faced with a possible large-scale nuclear conflict.
That is incorrect, almost all operational missile defense systems intercept missiles past the boost phase from Patriots to THAAD and Ground Based Interceptors. It is not impossible to intercept incoming missiles or warheads and it has been done many times, particularly in the last few years. It is not easy though and it is very expensive, with each individual interceptor usually costing $ millions. The quandary is that the longer the range of the threat usually increases the difficulty of intercept that translates into increased cost, and that is the reason we have only a limited number of GBI's that are capable of intercepting ICBM's.
This is a decent, simple and accurate overview of how the intercept of a longer-range missile, in this case an ICBM warhead intercepted by a GBI, would work. All parts of the Ground-based Missile Defense (GMD) system depicted are operational. As I mentioned though every piece of that intercept system very expensive though, with some parts costing $ billions.
I just read all the NYT articles to which you provided links.
Of these, the one quoted above strongly resonated with me.
The "war game" Proud Prophet was executed by actual people, not through opinion or speculation, but by actual action take during the exercise. It's results should be sobering to any intelligent being.
I remember being scolded by my teacher in 1966. As an 11 year old, I clearly saw the lunacy of hiding under our desks during a Nuc drill, because if we were struck, the school and surrounding neighborhoods would be obliterated. I suggested that with an attack warning, we should be sent home to be with our families while we could.
Our moralistic society of the time truly believed that Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) would prevent other morally based societies from launching "the big one."
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, we had access to Soviet plans and other antecedent information that was unavailable prior to that evet,
One plan I found quite interesting was that the Soviets were well along in building underground "residences" for top party members, who would wait out 20 yrs to be able to rise victorious over whatever wasteland was left after nuclear hell broke loose.
This was quite a shock to the MAD proponents.
The day man first split of the atom he also opened Pandoras box, which can never be closed.
Today's generations need to hold clear, open and frank discussions with us "old folk" who remember living daily under the threat of nuclear war.
Seeing my father, staring at the radio, listening to the news of Russian missiles in Cuba and our now infamous response; to which he stated "We're taking a few days off from work and school to be together... just in case."
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I think the changing climate is going to push geo-political tensions extremely hard as livable and unlivable region boundaries move around, shoving people along.
I am reading The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells right now. Very doomsday-ish, in order to nudge folks off of top dead center. It was written in 2019, before the last 2 years of freakishly hot sea surface temperatures while at the same time the wheels seem to be coming off the carbon neutral bus.
North Korea strikes me as a very rational actor. They like to give the impression of being irrational in order to scare everybody, but that is a highly intelligent family and regime. You don't hold power for three generations by being irrational, IMO. Also, they backed down from Trump's threats, which showed rational thinking.
Two incidences I've read about were one that happened very late in the 1970s or early 1980s in the U.S. at a nuclear tracking area where everyone thought a full-scale Soviet missile launch attack had occurred. Turned out it was a tape of a simulation of such that was playing and they had forgotten about. They reasoned good thing the President wasn't observing right then.
The other was an incident in the 1980s with the Soviet nuclear missile satellite detection system. The guy in charge saw it was alerting of a sudden American missile launch. Then it alerted another missile launch, then another and went into full-on alarm mode, alerting of a full-scale nuclear attack from the United States. However, the number of missiles being launched was still too few to be a full-scale surprise attack. In such an event, the U.S. would launch with hundreds of missiles at least. The man also had heard Reagan's talk about the issue and did not think Reagan was the kind to do such a thing.
With the system alerting of a full-scale attack, he had to get on the phone to the higher ups and tell them if it was real or fake. If he said it was real, it would go up to the Politburo to decide what to do. So without knowing for sure if it was real or fake, he said it was a false alarm. Turns out of course that is what it was. Sunlight was reflecting off of clouds into the lenses of one of the satellites to the system and made it think it was witnessing a missile launch🫡
For those interesed, here are a couple links to detail information on these false attack warnings:
nsarchive.gwu.edu
False Warnings of Soviet Missile Attacks Put U.S. Forces on Alert in 1979-1980 | National Security Archive
Washington D.C., March 16, 2020 - During the Cold War, false alarms of missile attacks were closely held matters although news of them inevitably leaked. Today the National Security Archive revisits the false alerts of the Jimmy Carter administration when on four occasions warning screens showed...
nsarchive.gwu.edu
Almost done with Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations. Very, very good.
Discovered this at a used-books place and read it right through during the family Christmas trip. First book I’ve read that digs into the development of the Shuttle from a flight test point of view. Gives enough of the inter-agency politics for context, particularly between NASA, NRO, and the Air Force, and why they drove a lot of the Shuttle’s design specs. Also the first book I’ve read that gets into the legacy of the USAF MOL program and its cadre that became the core of the Shuttle astronauts - something like six of the first eight flights had MOL guys as pilot, commander, or both, including Bob Crippen, and they also used a lot of their experience from MOL in helping to design the Shuttle. Includes some cool stuff like how the T-38 chase team had to train for six months to figure out how to join on the orbiter as it made its approach, as they had a 30-second window to join up or they’d miss it altogether, and at one point got an SR-71 to fly the profile for a rehearsal.
Summary: great book about the Shuttle for airplane nerds.
Summary: great book about the Shuttle for airplane nerds.
Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the Astronauts Who Flew Her
An interesting tidbit on the Shuttle is experts knew NASA was greatly overestimating the Shuttle's proposed capabilities, that it would never be able to maintain the launch cadence they were claiming it would have. The Soviets were deeply concerned about the Shuttle and came to the same conclusion, that the claimed launch cadence wouldn't be doable, and therefore the Americans were lying about the Shuttle's "true" purpose, which was obviously military, likely to do things like snatch Soviet satellites out of orbit.
Many also argue the Shuttle was unfairly maligned in the claims that it was unsafe. A common claim is how the Saturn V never failed. But the Saturn V did almost fail in one of its launches, and they managed to save it by the skin of its teeth. Also, the Saturn V was only launched 13 times. The Space Shuttle was launched 134 times, and the two disasters, Challenger and Columbia, were both more management failures, not so much engineering failures---with a better management culture, the Shuttle might have retired with a perfect safety record.
Very cool, just got the audible version. While I was roaming about Hawaii Island last week, mostly shooting photography of the ongoing eruption of Kilauea, I did wander into a super cool old school mom & pop bookstore in Hilo - something I hadn't done in a while. It reminded me of all the contrasts and differences between that experience and going on Amazon. Going through the stacks, you find interesting things that you'd never search for on Amazon, or that their algorithm might offer. For example, I found an 840 page tome on the Bee Gees, and a whole section of books about raising (and mostly eating) goats. Made me realize that I should find more bookstores to hang out in.