Expert predictions on nuclear war and nuclear proliferation, 1975-1976. Wee bit pessimistic in retrospect.
Names for the different parts of multi-megaton nuclear mushroom clouds.
In order to deter adversaries, a nuclear-armed power must deploy an invulnerable second-strike force; its leadership must display the willingness to use that force under certain well-defined circumstances; and it must make believers out of the prospective foes it hopes to deter, convincing them that its capability is real, and it has the resolve to use it. But new technology is empowering navies to peer underneath the sea, finding deep-running submarines more effectively than ever before. This calls into question the invulnerability of nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines, the most invulnerable retaliatory asset there is.
The Navy initially attempted to decontaminate many of the surviving ships from the Baker test. But nothing short of taking them down to bare metal worked, and the Navy crews were unprepared to deal with decontamination on such a large scale. Many were exposed to high levels of radiation. The radiological safety officer for Operation Crossroads, Army doctor Colonel Stafford Warren, lobbied hard to abandon the effort, and finally convinced the head of the task force, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations Admiral William H. P. Blandy, by showing him an x-ray of a fish from the lagoon–an x-ray taken using only the radiation coming from plutonium in the fish itself.
No radical transformation of the Alliance nuclear posture in numbers or deployment is required under current circumstances, as NATO or western nuclear weapons states do not intend to engage in a nuclear arms race with Russia or any other potential adversary. The modernisation process of the airborne Dual Capable Aircraft component should however be actively pursued by all Allies concerned, to continue to convey NATO’s resolve to maintain a credible deterrent. The B-61 nuclear bombs carried by these aircraft are not tactical weapons, as they serve a strategic purpose: deterring a major conventional or nuclear war.
sure would be nice if we could continue disarmament instead of lurching towards cold war 2, but here we are
Always/Never: The Quest for Safety, Control & Survivability is a first-person documentary film about the use, control, detonation safety, and survivability of US nuclear weapons with an emphasis on the contributions of the DOE/NNSA nuclear weapon laboratories from 1945 to 1991. The historical interaction between technology, military operations, and national policy has never before been told in this detail.
The relative lack of open-source nuclear weapons effects models is a result of both overzealous classification policies and neglect. A project in the early 2000s to produce an updated edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons reached an advanced stage only to be cancelled. Other recent texts on the subject such as Charles Bridgman’s Introduction to the Physics of Nuclear Weapons Effects and John Northrup’s Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from DSWA’s Effects Manual One (EM-1), are subject to the Arms Export Control Act. Nor are recent software tools for modeling nuclear weapons effects available to the public. While there are good reasons to limit the circulation of certain nuclear weapons effects models—EMP models, for instance, really require input data that can be used to divine non-trivial things about nuclear weapons design that might pose a proliferation risk—the relative inaccessibility of information about what nuclear bombs do is limits the quality of public discourse.
As President, Eisenhower remained mute on Hiroshima. He oversaw a rapid expansion of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, which grew from around twelve hundred warheads when he took office, in 1953, to more than twenty-two thousand when he left, in 1961—from the equivalent of five thousand Hiroshima bombs to the equivalent of more than a million at its height. Eisenhower, in other words, is an unlikely hero for opponents of nuclear weapons. After he left the Presidency, however, he made more critical statements on the bombings. In “Mandate for Change,” published in 1963, he wrote that, during the alleged meeting with Stimson, he had “been conscious of a feeling of depression,” and claimed that he had told the Secretary of War that “the dropping of the bomb was completely unnecessary.” In an interview with Newsweek from later that year, Eisenhower stated bluntly that “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
Behind the ominous warnings is growing concern in the People’s Liberation army that China’s relatively small nuclear arsenal (estimated at 260 warheads compared with 7,000 each for the US and Russia), made up mostly of land-based missiles, is increasingly vulnerable to a devastating first strike, by either nuclear or conventional weapons.
Missile defence is not their only worry. They are anxious about a new hypersonic glide missile being developed under the US Prompt Global Strike programme, aimed at getting a precision-guided missile to targets anywhere in the world within an hour.
China is developing a similar missile but officials in Beijing fear that the Chinese nuclear arsenal is so small it could be almost completely wiped out without notice, with the few missiles launched in reprisal being destroyed in mid-air by US missile defences.
Without that capability to respond with a “second strike”, China would have no meaningful deterrent at all. The government of President Xi Jinping insists the country has no plans to abandon its “no first use” principle but military officials argue US weapon developments give it no choice but to upgrade and expand its arsenal in order to maintain a credible deterrent.
There seems to have been some discussion of moving to a “launch on warning” policy, to fire Chinese weapons before incoming missiles land and destroy them. That appears to be a minority view, however.
The dominant approach is to stick with the current deterrent posture, which relies on hitting back in a devastating manner once China has been attacked. The core aim is to have a second strike capacity that is “survivable” and “penetrative”. Submarines, on patrol in the ocean depths, fulfil [sic] the first requirement, they say.
What does this exercise tell us? Two things, in my mind. One, this 1956 target list is pretty nuts, especially given the high-yield characteristics of the US nuclear stockpile in 1956. This strikes me as going a bit beyond mere deterrence, the consequence of letting military planners have just a little bit too much freedom in determining what absolutely had to have a nuclear weapon placed on it.
The second is to reiterate how amazing it is that this got declassified in the first place. When I had heard about it originally, I was pretty surprised. The US government usually considered target information to be pretty classified, even when it is kind of obvious (we target Russian nuclear missile silos? You don’t say…). The reason, of course, is that if you can go very closely over a target list, you can “debug” the mind of the nuclear strategist who made it — what they thought was important, what they knew, and what they would do about their knowledge. Though times have changed a lot since 1956, a lot of those assumptions are probably still at least partially valid today, so they tend to keep that sort of thing under wraps.
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