superman iv was by and large a terrible film, but i’ve always liked this scene - even if the real general assembly reaction would be the farthest thing from applause
North Korea has now tested what appears to be a two-stage, solid-fueled ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear weapon to more than 1,000 km, probably much more. I would have thought that would garner some attention.
North Korea’s new ballistic missile, which the US calls the KN-11, is a technically submarine-launched ballistic missile. But there is nothing to stop North Korea from deploying it as land-based ballistic missile as well.
more @ Arms Control Wonk
making a list, checking it twice
text reads:I had not seen this message from President Obama. Very moving. Photo by @nobu_akiyama. pic.twitter.com/Pg4Nt23Puo
— Jeffrey Lewis (@ArmsControlWonk)August 28, 2016
We have known the agony of war.
Let us now find the courge, together,
to spread peace, and pursue a
world without nuclear weapons.
-Barack Obama
Joshua Pollack, editor of the U.S.-based Nonproliferation Review, said claiming to have mastered SLBM technology is as much about prestige as a military breakthrough, a status enjoyed only by six countries including the United States, Russia and China. “I think it’s meant foremost as a demonstration of sheer technical capability and a demand for status and respect,” Pollack said. South Korea believes the North has a fleet of more than 70 ageing, limited-range submarines - a mix of Chinese, Russian and locally made boats. Acquiring a fleet of submarines large and quiet enough and with a longer range would be a next step for the North, experts said. “They keep conducting nuclear tests and SLBMs together which means they are showing they can arm SLBMs with miniaturised nuclear warheads,” said Moon Keun-sik, a retired South Korean navy officer and an expert in submarine warfare.
At the end of this month 70 years will have passed since the publication of a magazine story hailed as one of the greatest pieces of journalism ever written. Headlined simply Hiroshima, the 30,000-word article by John Hersey had a massive impact, revealing the full horror of nuclear weapons to the post-war generation, as Caroline Raphael describes.
The policy would also reduce costs by gutting the rationale for retaining the large arsenal of land-based strategic missiles in silos across the Midwest and the tactical nuclear weapons deployed in Europe. Those missiles are mainly for first-use; they are a risky option for second-use because they are highly vulnerable to enemy attack. Eliminating these weapons entirely would be the best option.
Phasing out land-based missiles and shifting to a reliance on submarines and bombers would save about $100 billion over the next three decades. The elimination of smaller, tactical nuclear weapons would save billions more. President Obama could begin the phaseout of land-based missiles before he left office by instructing the Department of Defense to remove 550 weapons from the operationally deployed category and transfer them to long-term storage, thereby reducing the operationally deployed inventory to about 1,000 strategic warheads. These missiles are surplus weapons no longer needed for deterrence.
Nuclear test Plumbbob Whitney, 1957. An electrical discharge caused by the ionization of air is visible in this Rapatronic camera photo.
Late 50’s Convair proposal for “The Big Stick”, a Supersonic Low Altitude Missile (SLAM) driven by a nuclear reactor-powered ramjet. The missile could loiter in flight for long periods before dashing at Mach 3 to the targets, delivering multiple atomic bombs. It also would leave a stream of nuclear fallout from its reactor in its wake. SLAM development was cancelled in 1964.
one of worst weapons ever conceived; it reads like a supervillain’s wish list:
The SLAM as proposed would carry a payload of many nuclear weapons to be dropped on multiple targets, making the cruise missile into an unmanned bomber. After delivering all its warheads, the missile could then spend weeks flying over populated areas at low altitudes, causing tremendous ground damage with its shock wave. When it finally lost enough power to fly, and crash-landed, the engine would have a good chance of spewing deadly radiation for months to come.
Doves fly around the monument during a memorial ceremony to mark the atomic bombing anniversary at the Peace Memorial Park in Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 2016. The Japanese city of Nagasaki on August 9 marked 71 years since its destruction by a US atomic bomb, with its mayor lauding a visit by US President Barack Obama to Hiroshima earlier this year.
Once again it’s August 6th, the anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic raid, and nuclear policy has a higher profile in the national discourse this time around than in many recent years, election cycle or no.
above: false alert at NORAD from WarGames (1983)
I grew up during the 1980s, at the tail end of the Cold War, and I still have surprisingly vivid memories of the collective relief as world events proceeded at a rapid pace, at least to a child’s eye: Glasnost, strategic arms reduction talks, German reunification, and finally the fall of the Soviet Union. I’m not sure precisely when I saw WarGames, but the film’s depiction of mutual assured destruction being an idiotic, immoral gambit was probably the first time I had seen the balance of terror framed by a critical eye (I was definitely too young to have seen The Day After when it first aired).
above: one of the rare official DoD depictions of nuclear attack, First Strike (1979)
I haven’t gone back to dig up sources on this, but to my recollection, in the early 90s there seemed to be a sense that the superpower suicide pact hanging overhead for decades could be consigned to the rearview mirror, and our mistakes needn’t haunt us further (an existential “peace dividend” I suppose). In many ways, such hopes did become reality: tensions eased, hair-trigger alerts were discontinued, some warheads were dismantled.
In 2016, the United States of America and the Russian Federation still have, respectively, approximately 4,500 nuclear warheads in their stockpiles, of which around 1,500 are deployed for use by the spears of the each nation’s nuclear trident at any given time: strategic bombers, submarines, and ballistic missiles.
above: the US nuclear stockpile from the Federation of American Scientists
Nuclear weapons, as this blog’s own tagging betrays, are never very far from my mind. Some of the preoccupation stems from the bomb being a creature of physics and physicists - atomic bombs have been compared to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein before, and they remain the foremost example of how the societal consequences of science need just as much consideration as the practical applications. Even the looming debate over general artificial intelligence has echoes, and we can’t assume that a future equivalent of the Szilard Petition would receive the appropriate amount of attention from policymakers.
Most of my attention though, just springs from the weapons still being here.
above: SKYKING message over the USAF HFGCS, July 23rd, 2016
A few weeks ago I recorded an
in-the-clear shortwave radio broadcast from the US Air Force; these Emergency
Action Messages have somewhat of a misnomer in that they occur several times a
day, routine calls to strategic bombers and the TACAMO doomsday planes standing
by to coordinate the apocalypse. The bombers have long since ceased holding at
fail-safe points, but there are still shows of force such as last week’s POLAR
ROAR exercise which sent B-52s directly towards Russian airspace, and the
Russian Air Force still probes US and allied air space with their strategic
bombers occasionally.
above: B-52H flight path during POLAR ROAR, August 1st, 2016
The conclusion of Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety speaks to our atomic perception filter better than I can:
Right now thousands of missiles are hidden away, literally out of sight, topped with warheads and ready to go, awaiting the right electrical signal. They are a collective death wish, barely suppressed. Every one of them is an accident waiting to happen, a potential act of mass murder. They are out there, waiting, soulless and mechanical, sustained by our denial— and they work.
Command and Control, in general, is an
excellent compilation of the tremendous effort it took to make nuclear weapons
“safe”, and even with said effort, there were numerous close calls (did you
know we almost nuked North Carolina by accident? Now ya do!), false
alarms (in one case, Carter’s national security advisor was told at 3AM the US
had thirty minutes to live),
and a deployed no-shit fail-deadly system in
the vein of Dr. Strangelove’s doomsday machine. It’s appreciated every so
often, but we were goddamn lucky to make it through the Cold War, and
neglecting to fully account for its legacy leaves the essential framework in
place to lurch right back into the trench.
above: depiction of a Minuteman III launch by Northrop Grumman, 2008
I don’t think anyone reading this needs convincing that Donald Trump would be a horrific commander-in-chief in the best of circumstances, and a threat to civilization at worst. That said, I am grateful the issue has resurfaced in a way that I hope allows a President Clinton and Congress to seriously re-examine the long-standing status quo. Addressing any of the below would be a fair start:
In an ideal future, nuclear disarmament would be a viable goal, but I’ve an exceedingly low expectation of seeing a warhead-less world in my lifetime.
“HERE IS THE FORCE THAT WILL DESTROY YOU” – On the 70th anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, let’s reminisce with a reminiscence from the first anniversary, when the horror was still fresh in the cultural memory. The United Press article (no byline) in the Sweetwater Reporter strives to describe the apocalyptic event: “It hit the center of the city. And the city vanished in a multi-colored cloud of boiling smoke twisting and writhing into the skies like a monster arising from the lifeless body of its prey.”
As with his predecessors, Trump’s power over the life and death of entire nations would be practically unbounded. Today, the nuclear deluge he could command would consist of thousands of weapons, each 10 or 20 times more deadly than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Nearly 2,000 U.S. strategic nuclear weapons aimed primarily at Russia and China (at a ratio of roughly 2 to 1), with additional dozens aimed at each of several other nations—North Korea, Iran and Syria—would be at a President Trump’s disposal from his first minutes in office. The city of Moscow alone lies in the bore sights of more than 100 U.S. nuclear warheads.
There are no restraints that can prevent a willful president from unleashing this hell.
My advice to any future president would be to drop launch under attack as a mainstay of U.S. nuclear policy. Some systems might still be capable of launching quickly, but I would design the nuclear force around the assumption that the president plans to “ride out” a nuclear attack. This means having enough weapons at sea to do the job and relegating any land-based nuclear weapons to the role of warhead “sink,” drawing fire away from cities. The Obama administration has made some steps in this direction, instructing the military to plan for more realistic contingencies — but it has still elected to retain launch under attack as an option.
I am not much of a fan of launch under attack, and have said as much to policymakers in Washington, but I’ve long been resigned to no one listening to me. Defense experts have a fetish about giving the president options, and they are simply loath to abandon this one, no matter how unrealistic. It is U.S. policy now and for the foreseeable future. In fact, Washington has gone to great lengths to design its nuclear forces, as well as its command and control system, around the ability of the president to determine the fate of hundreds of millions of people in a matter of minutes. The upcoming deliberations about nuclear modernization, which will probably cost a trillion dollars over the next 30 years or so, will proceed on the same assumption. If we’re going to design the entire system in this way, to emphasize the speed and decisiveness of a single person, we should probably also pick that person carefully.
kreuzaderny