This is the seventh in a series. The first one can be found at http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2012/07/50-years-of-science-part-1.html. Part 2 can be found in the August 2012 section of this blog. Parts 3 and 4 can be found in the September 2012 section. Parts 5 and 6 can be found in the March 2016 section. I take the Isaac Asimov book "The Intelligent Man's Guide to the Physical Sciences" as my baseline for the state of science as it was when he wrote the book (1959 - 1960). More than 50 years have now passed but I am going to stick with the original title anyhow even though it is now slightly inaccurate. In these posts I am reviewing what he reported and examining what has changed since. For this post I am starting with the chapter Asimov titled "The Layers of the Planet" and then moving to "The Ocean" and finishing with "The Ice Caps". These three chapters finish his "The Earth" section.
Asimov starts with the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755. The actual quake was followed by a "tidal wave", what we now call a Tsunami. But at the time Asimov was writing the connection between earthquakes and Tsunamis was poorly understood. Recent history has given us the giant Tsunamis following giant earthquakes in Indonesia and Japan. The Indonesian event was an especial wakeup call because the Tsunami crossed thousands of miles of ocean to wreck devastation on far flung coastlines.
Prior to the Indonesia event computer models of Tsunamis had been developed but they were pretty primitive. They have since been substantially improved. But the biggest change is seen with respect to warning systems. An urgent need was finally recognized and acted on to develop international warning systems. There is now at least the beginnings of a network covering the Pacific and Indian oceans.
The earthquake and Tsunami that struck Japan is now remembered (at least outside Japan) mostly for the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The fact that billions of dollars worth of damage was sustained and tens of thousands of lives were lost in the part of the disaster that did not involve the nuclear plants is now pretty much forgotten.
And on a side note, there was a large earthquake off the coast of Washington State in 1700. We even know the day it happened. How? Because it spawned a Tsunami that traveled several thousand miles across the Pacific ocean and was still large enough to cause a noteworthy amount of damage when it struck Japan. So the Japanese made a record of it down to the exact date and time it came ashore. And this record was recently matched back to the earthquake off the Washington coast. Now back to Asimov.
The Lisbon earthquake kicked off the serious study of earthquakes in the western world. (The Chinese and Japanese, among others, had already been studying the subject for millennia.) The seismograph, then an assortment of pens, springs, and weights, was developed in 1855. Only modest improvements had been introduced in time for Asimov's book. Currently, seismographs are constructed from the same kinds of electronic components used in computers and cell phones.
The new designs are ruggeder, more accurate, and have a larger "dynamic range". The old designs used to peg out during a large close earthquake. This meant that only devices located a goodly distance away and, therefore, only able to record a weak and distorted signal, could provide data on the strongest part of the earthquake. The newer devices are able to make accurate and detailed readings of even the largest earthquakes even if they are close to the epicenter.
In 1890, Asimov writes, Milne determined that some of the waves from an earthquake traveled through the earth. This allowed earthquakes to be used as a diagnostic to study the inside of the earth. The earthquake is like a flashbulb going off. Various recording stations around the world act like photocells. A large amount of analysis allows some of the characteristics of the earth the signal travels through to be determined.
Earthquakes literally shake the earth. These waves radiate out and are hopefully captured by a seismometer. And the actual situation is more complex than you would think. Two kinds of waves are emitted: surface waves and body waves. The body waves are subdivided into P- primary waves and S - secondary waves. I am going to skip the details and just note that geologists could tell them apart and use the different characteristics of each to tease out information about the rock the wave passed through. Asimov goes into some detail on this but here's the main discovery.
The earth has layers. There is a thin layer called the crust. That's the only part we can directly observe. It is only a few tens of miles thick. The center of the earth contains the core. This is mostly Iron. The in between part is the mantle. Fifty years ago little was known beyond the sizes of the surface, mantle, and core. Today thousands of seismometers are deployed. They are more accurate and we now have access to unbelievable amounts of computing power. So we know a lot more detail.
The inner part of the core is solid. Iron can hold a magnetic field and that's where the magnetic field of the earth comes from. The solid inner core is surrounded by a relatively thin liquid outer core. This allows a certain amount of independence between the rotation of the inner core and that of the rest of the earth. The mantle has two layers, the inner mantle and the outer mantle. Within each component (the mantle is liquid but just barely) are cells of rotating material. This allows warmer and cooler material to move around. There is a certain amount of radioactivity throughout all of the mantle and the core. This radioactivity produces heat and this heat has to go somewhere. That's what drives the movement of material. And this movement of material and need to get rid of the excess heat is what drives volcanism and ocean floor spreading. Note: Ocean floor spreading and Plate Tectonics were unknown at the time of the book.
At the time the book was written the major earthquake zones had been mapped out (Asimov supplies a nice map) and earthquakes were associated by proximity with mountain building. But the connection was a mystery. Plate Tectonics, which was developed in the decade after the book was published, solved the problem. The continents were composed of relatively light materials that floated over the mantle material. Ocean floor material was substantially denser (English translation: heavier). And the cell structure created upwellings where fresh material is brought to the top and downwellings where the opposite happened. On top of upwellings were spreading centers, areas where new crust was created. This new crust pushed the older crust toward trenches, which sat on top of downwelling zones.
The upwelling brings up hot mantle material which cools off as it radiates heat through the crust and from there through the atmosphere and into space. The now cool material is eventually returned to depth when it gets to a downwelling area. So that completes the process of getting rid of the heat generated by radioactive decay. Meanwhile continents float on top of the mantle material and are pushed around. This results in collisions. Denser ocean floor material dives below the continental material at a "subduction zone". The process isn't perfect. In particular water and other chemicals are squeezed out of the rock as it dives down under the edge of the continent. This material rises through cracks and channels in the crust and ends up emerging from volcanos like Mt. St. Helens.
And not all rock is the same. In other words, the chemical composition of the material that was squeezed out differs from place to place. So lava spewed by different volcanos behaves differently. The kind of lava that comes up at Mt. St. Helens tends to make volcanoes explode. The kind of lava that comes up under Mt. Etna in Italy or Mt. Kilauea in Hawaii tends to put on a spectacular display but not blow up. The study of the chemistry of lava was just beginning at the time the book was written.
At the time of the book there was a lot of talk about the "Moho". This was a seismic feature that looked interesting and appeared to be shallow enough that it could possibly be reached by drilling a very deep well. After Asimov's book was published this was attempted but the attempt was unsuccessful. Now scientists find the Moho less interesting and not much attention is paid to it these days.
To his credit Asimov mentions Wegner. He was a German geologist who pioneered the idea of "continental drift" which eventually morphed into Plate Tectonics. Asimov mentions that his ideas had been discredited. They were later revived because more information became available. The ocean floors were mapped using SONAR. This led to the discovery of the midatlantic ridge, a line of underwater volcanoes running roughly down the center of the Atlantic ocean. And a series of magnetic bands were discovered that indicated that new ocean floor material was spreading out from each side of the ridge. This seafloor spreading provided the mechanism that drove continental drift.
Asimov also mentions a theory of Darwin (astronomer son of the more famous Charles Darwin). He posited that the moon was somehow carved out of the earth. At the time of writing this idea too was out of favor. But it does contain a grain of truth, at least according to the current thinking on lunar formation. Current thinking is that a mars sized body made a glancing collision with earth. This threw a lot of material into orbit around the earth. This material, consisting in large part of earth crustal material, eventually coalesced into the moon. All the heavy minerals like Iron ended up with the earth. Only light materials ended up with the moon. This solves a puzzle that Asimov makes note of. The puzzle was why the composition of the moon looked very similar to the composition of the earth's crust.
Asimov makes note of a then controversy over whether the earth was ever completely molten. Modern thinking is that it was completely molten at some point in its early life. This controversy has been replaced by a contemporary debate about the origin of the water that makes up our oceans. I am not going to go into it but, trust me, the debate between the supporters of various theories is quite lively.
An early theory for why we have mountains is that the earth was shrinking because it was cooling. This resulted in a raisin effect. This theory is now discredited. Plate Tectonics works better and we now know the earth is not cooling. But as part of the discussion of this subject Asimov does go into radioactivity as a source of heat. At the time there was not enough known about this sort of thing to go from speculation to solid theory. At the same time the beginnings of the mantle circulation idea I discussed above were just receiving serious consideration. And there wasn't enough known about this sort of thing at the time to sort out the good ideas from the bad.
On to "The Ocean". At the time of writing earth's oceans (or, as Asimov correctly notes, ocean - they are all interconnected) were the only known ones in the solar system. This is still technically true. But it is strongly suspected that one or more of the moons that orbit the outer planets has a liquid ocean underneath its icy surface. No ocean has been definitively observed but a lot of very solid evidence points toward their existence. There is so much evidence that the discussion has moved on to the possibility that life might be possible there.
Asimov reels off some interesting statistics then notes "[a]lmost certainly the first forms of life originated . . ." in the oceans. This statement is still true. He then goes on to say "[e]ven today astronomers know more about the surface of the moon than geologists know about the surface of the earth under the oceans". This statement is now debatable but it's a close call. We now know a lot more about the ocean floor than we did then. But we also know a lot more about the surface of the moon. Consider this.
A jumbo jet crashed into the ocean somewhere off the coast of Australia a couple of years ago. If it had crashed on the surface of the moon we would know exactly where it crashed by now. But we don't know where on the ocean floor it is after spending more than a year looking very hard for it. All we have is a small amount of debris that has washed ashore thousands of miles from where it no doubt went down to show that it has not just disappeared into thin air.
Asimov credits the founding of modern oceanography to Maury. He then goes on to say that "the ocean currents have been thoroughly mapped." That was an exaggeration. The general outline of the major surface currents was known. But we now know that there are currents at every level of the ocean and almost nothing was known about these subsurface currents at that time. We also know that ocean currents are quite dynamic. They can speed up, slow down, change direction, perhaps stop altogether for a time. None of that was really understood back then. Scientists consider the modern study of ocean currents "early times". They think they still have way more to learn than what they know now. Scientists back then saw some hints of what was to come but only hints.
Asimov singles out temperature differences as the driver of ocean currents. Certainly temperature differences are a major factor. But wind patterns, tidal effects, Coriolis effects, and several other effects, also play a role. At that time the surface of what there was to learn in this area had not even been scratched. It has now been scratched but that's about it. The tremendous difficulty involved in working under the pressure and visibility conditions present in the oceans mean studying anything about them is a very slow and very expensive process.
Asimov associates the start of serious study of the deep ocean floor with an 1850 effort by Maury to develop a chart for use in laying the first telegraph cable to cross the Atlantic. The project took 15 years and the suffered many delays and setbacks along the way. In the 1870's the ship Challenger set out to do a more complete survey of all the oceans. But the only tool they had for measuring depth was a long cable with a big heavy weight on its end. The ocean is several miles deep in many places. It was a slow and difficult process to pay out and reel back in that much cable.
SONAR and its predecessors were introduced in the early twentieth century. By mid-century rough SONAR based maps of the entire ocean floor were available. But they were very rough and little was known other than depth information. Asimov notes that if you start counting from the foot of the mountain deep in the ocean then the highest mountains on earth are in Hawaii. (The solar system record is currently held by a mountain on Mars.) SONAR mapping of ocean floor has also indicated that some land features extend far into the ocean. He cites the Hudson river as an example of this. We now know that the theory that some ocean bottom features are "gouged out by turbulent flows of soil-laden water" is the correct one.
Very little was then known about the bottom of the ocean. Drilling devices had been lowered to the ocean floor and used to pull up "cores" of earth that could be studied. But this had only been done in a few places. More cores have since been pulled up but coverage is still extremely sparse.
Other investigations have turned up "great smokers" on the bottom of the ocean. These are places where hot spots (think volcanic processes) suck cold water into porous rock. The water flushes through and picks up all kinds of chemicals. This water, often discolored to the point where it looks like smoke, is then flushed out through chimneys. This process can take place in water that is quite deep. So it was shocking to discover "tube worms", crabs, and other creatures living so far away from sunshine. Some people now think life on earth may have originated in these extreme conditions.
Asimov observes that by 1872 scientists had determined that life permeated the depths of the oceans. (The earlier idea was that it was confined to within a few hundred feet of the surface.) We have still not filled the details of this picture out. We also know more about the strange (to us) metabolism of these creatures. But they are hard to capture and hard to study. As Asimov observes, these creatures "are so adapted . . . that they are unable to rise out of their trench".
He then mentions the giant squid. Scientists have since found many larger than average squids but have yet to find a truly giant one. He then moves on to "living fossils". He was talking about the coelacanth. For some time it was thought to be extinct. Then a fisherman caught one in 1938. At the time of writing only a few other examples were known. Now we know that it is relatively common. It just lives in deep water where no one normally drops a hook.
Asimov wraps the chapter up with a section on deep diving. 300 feet was then thought to be the limit for a diver wearing some kind of soft suit. Modern equipment and procedures allow people go deeper but only a few hundred feet deeper. By the time the book was written various deep diving submarines had been developed. This effort culminated in the Trieste, which was capable of (and did) going to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the ocean. At the time of the book only a few deep dives had been done.
Deep dives are now more common but still relatively rare. James Cameron, the director of the movie "Titanic", built a one man vessel that allowed him to dive to the bottom of the Challenger Deep. Someone has developed a hard shell diving suit that is capable of diving to great depths but not all the way to the bottom of the Challenger Deep. But any deep dive is still extremely expensive. The current state of the art is robot submarines that are capable of diving to the ocean floor in all but a few particularly deep places. Not having to carry all the equipment necessary to keep people alive cuts the cost somewhat but they are still very expensive to build and operate.
On to "The Ice Caps". Asimov starts the chapter with a review of efforts to reach the north pole. It was finally reached by Perry in 1909. Now a trip back is much less of a big deal. The nuclear submarine Nautilus reached the pole in the '60s by going under the polar ice pack. The whole area under the ice has now been charted by the US, the Russians, and probably others. One reason behind this activity is that there may be oil there. The Prudhoe Bay field that feeds that Alaska pipeline in on the north coast of Alaska. Thinking there might also be oil a little farther north is not an unreasonable thought.
As Asimov notes, the original impetus for polar expeditions was to search for a northwest passage. After a lot of failure such a passage was presumed to be a myth. Its former mythical state is now, as they say, "greatly exaggerated". Global warming has caused the polar ice pack to shrink so much in the late summer that in most years pretty much any ocean going ship can transit from the Atlantic to the Pacific or, if they prefer, the Pacific to the Atlantic, with little difficulty.
Asimov's starts his discussion of the Antarctic with another list of explorers. The task of getting to the south pole was tougher because Antarctica is much larger. And there is a continent under the ice so you can't just submarine your way to it. The south pole was finally reached in 1911 by Amundson. The '20s saw the creation of the first Antarctic research stations. The amount of scientific research conducted on the continent jumped considerably during the International Geophysical Year (actually an 18 month period) that ended in December of 1958. Many countries made a big push to mount scientific expeditions to Antarctica during the IGY.
This burst of activity was quickly followed up by treaties to de-militarize (no standing armies allowed) and de-politicize (no country could make territorial claims) Antarctica permanently. Since then a number of countries including the US operate year round scientific facilities on the continent. They mostly beetle away doing science. But every once in a while people start paying attention when someone gets seriously sick during the Antarctic winter and a tricky evacuation must be performed.
But serious science is done there. A giant particle detector has been created by taking clever advantage of the fact that the Antarctic ice is more than a mile thick and very clear in a number of places. The Russians recently drilled a hole through miles of ice down to a lake that is still liquid to see what a body of water that was so cold for so long and so isolated for so long contained in terms of life forms. Those are just two scientific endeavors that come easily to mind. There are many more.
Asimov notes that 86% of all ice in the world is in Antarctica and another 10% is in Greenland. All the glaciers that are more accessible combine to total only 4%. But those more accessible 4% were the fodder for the science of glaciology. It was kicked off in Switzerland in the 1820s. Glaciers are like rivers. They can move rocks. They just do it slowly, at a glacial pace, one might say. Debris left by a melting glacier is distinctive. So once geologists started looking around they found it in many unexpected places. By the 1850's the study of this glacial debris led to the discovery of the ice ages. At various times in roughly the last hundred thousand years large parts of the earth have been covered by glaciers.
The repeated advance and retreat of the various ice ages has drastically changed the topology of the land in many places. In my area there are many valley features that run north to south. This is the result of glaciers scouring out deep trenches as they initially grew south then eventually retreated north. Asimov pegged the last glacial retreat as having happened between 8,000 and 12,000 years ago. You can select among a variety of dates for the end of the last ice age. It just depends on what is important to you. The maximum extent of glaciation was 22,000 years ago. By 13,000 years ago the glaciers were definitely in retreat. But there was still a lot of ice around 7,000 years ago. So pick whatever date you like best.
When the last ice age ended is important for many reasons. But one of them has to do with figuring out when humans got to the Americas. There is still serious disagreement as to when this happened. There is general agreement that they came from Asia and the presumption is that they crossed from eastern Siberia into Alaska and then moved south. But there is a big argument as to whether they took an inland route or a coastal route. Neither was an option 22,000 years ago when the ice age was at its maximum. But possible routes depend on details about when ice retreated from certain specific places. And that's tricky to determine. And there's another problem.
As Asimov points out glaciers took a lot of water out of circulation. That means that oceans were a lot lower than they are now. At one time sea level was 440 feet lower than it is now. So what level was it at when humans were crossing to America? It depends on when they crossed but it was definitely lower then. Why is this important? If they went along the coast and if the water level was say 50 feet lower then most of the traces of this migration are now under water. Scientists have gone looking for these traces. But as I noted above it's hard to search under the sea. They haven't found much of anything so far.
Back to Asimov. He notes that coal was found in Norway and signs of coal have been found in Antarctica. What's going on? He opines that there have been times when the weather was so warm that there was no ice anywhere on earth so maybe that's what was going on. Plate Tectonics lets us figure out what was going on with far more certainty than Asimov could muster. Continents move around. This means that what might now be at the pole could have been at the equator at some time in the past. And that's part of what's going on. Continents have also been broken up and jammed together at various times. At one time all the current continents were part of a single super-continent and it was oriented so that there were good growing conditions everywhere. Lots of plants plus a lot of geology gives you coal.
The "forcings" that began and ended ice ages were not really understood at the time the book was written. One component of this is called Milankovich cycles and Asimov discusses them. The angle between the earth's orbit and the axis of rotation is currently 22 degrees. That tilt results in our seasons. In the Summer the tilt causes the northern hemisphere to get more sun and the southern to get less. In the winter the situation is reversed. Various astronomical processes change this angle. The evolution of this angle is determined by the Milankovitch cycle. If the cycle forces the rotation axis to be straight up and down things work differently and the weather works differently. At the time of the book Milankovich cycles were known about but they didn't seem up to be strong enough to explain long term patterns by themselves. How the effects they do cause can be multiplied is better understood now. And we know about the movement of continents and that helps too. But there is still some "forcings" mystery left.
Asimov then explains a trick still in common use. You study the ratio of Oxygen-16 to Oxygen-18. Urey figured out how to translate this information into ocean temperature in 1950. Asimov published a graph of average ocean temperature for the last hundred million years based on this technique. The ocean used to be a lot warmer, the graph indicates. Asimov credits the cooling of the oceans over time that the graph displays as the reason the dinosaurs went extinct. We now know that they actually went extinct pretty much all at once when a large meteorite hit the Yucatán area of Mexico 65 million years ago.
Asimov also describe the greenhouse effect. Again it was well known in the '50s that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide would result in increases in air temperature. He even calculates that a doubling of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would raise temperatures by three degrees. Asimov uses Fahrenheit for our convenience. The Celsius equivalent that scientists use is 1.65 degrees. Conversely, the 2 degree Celsius change scientists talk about with respect to global warming is 3.6 Fahrenheit degrees.
And for all those "global warming was invented in the '80s" types, Asimov says that a drop of 3 1/2 degrees would bring on an ice age and an increase of 3 1/2 degrees would melt all the ice in Greenland and Antarctica. The 2 degrees Celsius that scientists now talk about is almost exactly the same as the 3 1/2 degrees Fahrenheit Asimov talked about in 1960. In actual fact the basic science behind global warming goes back to the '50s and has changed little since. What has changed is the political climate. Then no one cared. Now powerful forces want us to believe that global warming is some kind of hoax cooked up in the '80s for obscure nefarious reasons. Want more evidence that the science behind global warming dates back to the '50s?
If you melted all the water in Antarctica and Greenland, Asimov tells us, the oceans would raise by 200 feet. We are now arguing about a sea level rise of a few feet in the next 50-100 years if global warming goes the way scientists think it will. And in spite of the fact that this sounds like no big deal it would actually be devastating for reasons too complicated to go into. Almost all people live on or near coasts. And if a sea level rise of a few feet does not sound scary enough just think about the 200 foot sea level rise (not my number, Asimov's) that would be caused if we melted all the ice in Greenland and Antarctica. Scientists don't think it would all melt. Well, not in the next hundred years. But what if they are wrong?
He also gets into what is called the carbon cycle. Over geologic time periods there are processes that pull carbon dioxide out of the air and turn it into rock. There are also ways to turn the rock back into carbon dioxide gas in the air. So they can save us by getting carbon dioxide levels back to where they need to be, right? The problem is that these processes take tens of thousands of years. We don't have that long to wait.
Pretty much everything a scientist would need in order to put together a presentation on global warming is found in this chapter of Asimov's book. And that presentation based solely on data from Asimov would differ from one based on the latest data in only minor ways. The main thrust and general conclusions would be identical. And Asimov's book was written more than fifty years ago.
The next post in the series will be based on material from his "The Atmosphere" section.
Saturday, August 27, 2016
Sunday, August 14, 2016
MAD History
The "MAD" in the title is an acronym. It stands for Mutual Assured Destruction. It was popularized in the '60s when nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy were important subjects of discussion and people were expected to have an informed opinion on them. By the time the '60s came to an end the subject had, for the most part, faded to the background. Reagan revived it for a time in the '80s but not at the level of intensity of previous times. It has since faded to almost complete invisibility. "What? Is that still a thing?" is the extent of most people's recent thinking on the subject. And then Trump came along. It is one of dozens of subjects he has treated irresponsibly. It has become apparent to me that a refresher on the subject is now in order.
Nuclear Physicists of the late '30s were the first to theorize that "nuclear reactions" could produce fantastic amounts of energy. Why? Because of Einstein's famous "E equals M C squared" equation. Colloquially translated it says you can turn a tiny amount of matter into a whole lot of energy. The reverse is also true. You can change a whole lot of energy into a tiny amount of matter. But no one wants to do that. Anyhow, they noticed that if they smashed atoms sometimes a small amount of mass (the scientific term for matter) went missing. The mass was transformed into energy, a lot of energy. And a lot of energy getting released quickly is an explosion.
This set off the race to create the atomic or "A" bomb. Richard Rhodes has written an excellent book, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", that goes into the effort necessary to do this in great detail. (He also wrote a very good follow up, "Dark Sun", about the Hydrogen bomb.) It was a race because the Germans were trying to do the same thing. Details on their efforts can be found in the excellent "Heisenberg's War" by Thomas Powers. Spoiler: the first effort succeeded while the second one failed.
The U.S dropped two A bombs on Japan. Each released roughly 10 kilotons of energy. How much is that? The biggest conventional World War II bomb was the "block buster", so called because it was powerful enough to level a city block. It contained 10,000 pounds (or 5 tons) of high explosive. So the bombs dropped on Japan were roughly 2,000 times as powerful. Each one leveled a city.
The Russians developed a similar bomb only a few years later. An extensive and successful spying effort was only partly responsible. This led to the race to develop the "H" (for Hydrogen) bomb. The original A bombs (there were several designs) were "fission" bombs. You hit the nucleus of a Uranium atom with a neutron and it broke into pieces (a fission process). The pieces weighed slightly less than the original atom so energy was released. Smashing two Hydrogen atoms together (a fusion process) could, in the right circumstances, produce a single Helium atom. And it weighed less than the two Hydrogen atoms that went into its creation. And it turned out that the amount of energy released by this single "fusion" reaction was a lot more than the its equivalent fission reaction. So an H bomb could be a lot more powerful.
H bombs are rated in megatons, millions of tons of energy, not thousands. One A bomb could wipe out a small city like Hiroshima. An H bomb could wipe out the biggest of cities, say New York, and also take out a big chunk of the surrounding countryside. But it turns out that there is a point of diminishing returns. H bombs are so powerful that they literally blow the top off of our roughly 100 mile thick atmosphere. This creates a funnel and as it gets bigger more and more of the bomb's energy gets funneled out into space. Anything bigger than about 10 megatons just throws more energy into space without flattening more of the countryside. And this is just the first example of the topsy turvey logic that routinely surfaces when talking about nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy.
The A bomb that the US dropped on Nagasaki was the last A bomb the US possessed at the time. Fortunately Japan sued for surrender a couple of days later so it didn't matter. And at the time there didn't seem to be any rush to make more. That changed when the Russians exploded their A bomb. All of a sudden it seemed important to have lots of them on hand. And it was important not just to be able to make them but also to be able to deliver them to whatever presumably Russian target we chose to select.
By this time Japan was an ally and Russia was the enemy. When the US dropped its two A bombs on Japan we had been at war with them for several years and had achieved total air superiority. So we could just fly our B-29 bombers wherever we wanted to and drop the bombs wherever we wanted to. But Russia had an extensive and sophisticated military that had a powerful and sophisticated air defense system that would need to be overcome should we wish to "nuke" them.
This caused the US to spend a lot of money and, among other things, develop the B-52 bomber. The first one was built in the late '50s and the last one, the B-52H, was built midway through the '60s. Even so it was not considered a sure thing. An entertaining way to learn something of what would be involved is to take a look at the classic Stanley Kubrick movie "Dr. Strangelove: or how I learned to love the bomb".
There was another thing going on. The SAC (Strategic Air Command) initiative that included the B-52 was a US Air Force show. And that left the other services, especially the US Navy, out. The Navy's response was to develop the guided missile submarine, commonly referred to as a "boomer". This was barely possible to pull off in the '60s but a decade or so later the Navy deployed the Ohio class submarine and its associated Trident missile. This missile carrying submarine became the second leg of what was eventually called "the nuclear triad". (The bombers constituted the first leg.)
The Russians put a small satellite called Sputnik into orbit around the earth in '57. This was scary because it was thought that any missile powerful enough to put a satellite in orbit, even a small one, was powerful enough to hurdle a nuke thousands of miles. It could be made into an ICBM, an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile. At the time there was no defense against ICBMs. So a bunch of rockets were built and put into "silos" in the '60s. This was the third leg of the nuclear triad.
It would have made sense for this to be an Army project as this would give each of the three major services its own leg. But in a deft political maneuver the Air Force retained control of the missiles. So the final score was: Air Force - 2; Navy - 1, and Army - 0. This caused the Army out of a sense of desperation to develop a miniaturized A bomb that could be fired from a big gun, an artillery field piece. This was styled a "tactical nuclear weapons system" and was thought by some people to be suitable for use on the battlefield. Does this sound crazy or what?
Well, I did warn you about topsy turvey thinking. And that brings me back to MAD. A justification can be made for the US use of nukes in World War II. I think it is a legitimate justification but I don't want to go into this in the depth necessary to justify my position now. And what became slowly apparent in the decades following World War II was that nuclear weapons were just too horrible in the amount of death and destruction they produced to actually be used. There were serious and prolonged discussions about using them in the Korean War. But the very same President who authorized their use in World War II, Harry Truman, also decided to not use them in Korea. There were some times when things were going really bad for the US in that war but he decided "no" anyhow.
By the time Vietnam came along there was a strong consensus that they should not be used there. And remember this is the same '60s that saw the B-52 program wrapping up, the US ICBM system built and deployed and the development and early deployment of missile carrying submarines. So it was not as if there wasn't a lot of talking and thinking going on about nukes. And there was a hell of a lot of money being spent on them by the military at the time. The military's thinking goes strongly along the lines of "if you have it - use it". But the '60s was also the time that the concept of MAD became completely accepted. So what's the MAD concept and why did it cause the military to eventually be okay with not using nukes?
It is associated with one word: deterrence. "If both sides have them then neither side will use them." But there have been many examples of "them" where both sides had them and used them. Just to cite one example, both sides had and used airplanes in World War I. So what was different about nukes? To explain, I need to discuss "first strike" and "second strike".
Say you have a missile in a silo. What and why is a silo? In this case it is a heavily fortified hole in the ground. The idea is that if the bad guys don't whap the silo directly on the head and don't also hit it really hard the rocket in the silo will still work just fine when the dust settles. So what's the best way to take a silo and the missile it contains out? A nuke, of course. If you can explode a nuke close to the silo it will wreck enough destruction to take the missile out. This is an example of a first strike. If you strike first (and especially if you take them by surprise) and if you can take out enough of their stuff then they don't have enough left to launch an effective second strike (a strike that is launched after your first strike).
At this point in the discussion it appears that the best military strategy is to strike first. And that's a good way to make World War III happen. It didn't take long to figure this out. So what's the counter? Again, there is a single word: survivability. If enough of your stuff survives a first strike to give you the ability to make a powerful second strike then a first strike all of a sudden becomes a bad idea.
Hardened missile silos are a part of this. If you do it right then the bad guys must be able to very accurately target their bombs and the bombs must get through. With bombers it meant putting up a powerful air defense to guard against enemy bombers was a good idea. The US put together NORAD and the DEW line (what they actually are is not that important so I am going to skip that). The Russians did the same thing. Stealth did not exist at that time. So if you say launched a first strike bomber attack you were gambling that you could surprise the other side. If you didn't they could just launch everything too. There would be nothing left on the ground when your bombers got to their bases. You were also gambling that your bombers could somehow make it through in great enough numbers to deliver a knockout punch. You were never 100% sure it would work so a first strike was always a risk.
With missiles it took one missile to take out another missile so the math did not work out. MIRV (I'll get to what it is later) came later. Submarines were basically impossible to find but at the time they were hard to communicate with and, for various reasons, not that accurate. And both sides built and deployed a lot of gear. Even if you got say 80% of it there was so much left. And having three legs of the triad meant if you figured out how to deal with two of the legs the third leg was enough. You had to take out all three legs at the same time or it wouldn't work.
And that brings us to MAD. If both sides are pretty sure that the other side can do serious damage even after a first strike then we have a "mutually assured destruction" scenario. In that scenario it is obviously best all around if no one starts anything. And that's what happened. No nuclear weapon has been used in anger since August of 1945.
But it is important to understand that this situation is fragile. It depends on MAD. So let's look at how to un-mutual things. The first thing is to improve the likelihood of the nuke getting through. You "stealth" the airplane. This is hard to do. But hard really only means expensive. The better you can make your offensive capability the better the other guys have to make their defensive capability. The basic idea of the B-52 was "fly high". But the Russians shot down a U-2 spy plane successfully in 1960 and U-2s fly a lot higher than B-52s. And RADAR has gotten better. And there are other tricks. They too are expensive but there are ways to detect stealth planes.
How about missiles? Well, there's MIRV. MIRV stands for Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles. If you put 10 nukes on one missile then you can take out 10 silos with one missile, if they are accurate. If you have the same number of missiles and silos as the other guy you can use 10% of your missiles to take out all of his missiles. That leaves 90% of your missiles to use to wipe out his cities. MIRV technology was extremely destabilizing. The only argument for it was "if we don't do it they will do it and we will be in trouble". Unfortunately, these kinds of arguments frequently carry the day.
One piece of good news is that battlefield nukes were quietly retired. No reason was ever given but it was good thing. But battlefield nukes are the basis for "suitcase" nukes. The scenario is that a bad guy carries a nuke across the border in a suitcase and gets by customs. He then sets it up in a city, gets out of dodge and a short time later, boom -- no city. Fortunately, so far this scenario has remained an entirely fictional one. And just how big and how heavy a suitcase nuke would have to be is deeply classified so we don't know how practical it actually is. Both the Russians and the US claim they have dismantled all their tactical nukes. So maybe we really don't have anything to worry about here.
Submarines used to not be able to determine their position very accurately. And missiles were even less capable of accurately guiding themselves. But we now have GPS. If a GPS receiver can be fit into an iPhone it can certainly be fit into a submarine and a missile. So the whole accuracy problem has been completely fixed when it comes to submarines and missiles. And that too is a destabilizing development.
And the nuclear artillery shell has been replaced by the cruise missile. Early cruise missiles were explicitly designed to carry nuclear weapons. And cruise missiles are very good at defeating air defense systems. The US did a deal with Russia and there are now no more nuclear cruise missiles being deployed. The development and deployment of nuclear cruise missiles is definitely a destabilizing development because they are so hard to detect or stop.
Both the US and Russia spent a number of decades growing their nuclear arsenals. This was shorthanded to the Arms Race. And fortunately both sides at some point decided "this is stupid". Both sides were spending fantastic amounts of money in the pursuit of security and it wasn't working. Things came to a head under the Reagan Administration. Reagan proposed something called the Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI, but usually referred to by its unofficial nickname: Star Wars. Every cockamamie idea anyone had come up with for how to build a nuclear shield that would actually defend effectively against a nuclear attack was trotted out.
Experts looked at each and every one. They quickly found holes in all of them. Either the technique would never work or there was a cheap and simple fix that would render the technique ineffective. But in the short run these arguments were ignored. Instead billions of dollars had to be poured into the ideas. And, as had been predicted each and every idea flamed out, often spectacularly. The US spent many billions of dollars. This in turn caused the Russians to spend many billions of dollars. Neither side made any progress. Fortunately, this laid the ground work for some great arms reduction initiatives late in Reagan's second term. It also ended up spelling the death knell for the idea of trying to beat the MAD system. Until Trump came along pretty much everyone decided that the prudent course was to leave everything alone.
That is except for one thing. How about getting rid of nukes? The obvious place to start was to begin reducing the size of the arsenals. The early going was easy. Both sides had way more nukes than they needed so it was easy to get an agreement to scale things back. And that agreement worked well so we have since seen a number of agreements for scaling things back even more. Continue the process long enough and you get to zero. And a large number of people think zero is a good number. Their argument is simple. If there are no nukes then there are no nukes and it is impossible for something horrible to go wrong. And as far as it goes it's a good argument.
But if we have no nukes what happens of someone gets a few nukes? Then you have real problems. There are a number of current nuclear powers. It is not hard for them to save away the know how. And that means that they could go from no nukes to some nukes pretty quickly. And numbered among these are Pakistan and North Korea. Neither of these countries are known for their stability and their commitment to rationality. A world where only North Korea has nukes is a truly scary place.
But getting the whole "nuclear deterrent" thing to work only depends on having a few nukes, say a couple of hundred. That is more than enough. So how about setting a target of say 200-400? That makes perfect sense to me. But there are practical problems.
Remember the whole "each service needs its toy" thing I laid out above. It's still true. A lot of military types, both the uniform types and the bureaucratic types, measure their worth by the size of their budget. A lot of waste and fraud in the military sector can be traced to efforts to get one budget or another increased to the same size as the ego of the man (or rarely woman) in charge. And lots of these people are very skilled political infighters.
Let's look at the Navy because I have the numbers handy for them. Their current boomer is the Ohio class submarine. Originally it carried 24 trident missiles in 24 launch tubes. And each of them was MIRVed so that it had 10 warheads. (BTW, the fact that the warhead count is 10 is widely known but top secret anyhow.) So each Ohio class submarine had 240 nukes onboard. And, if we assume a fleet of 10, that's a total of 2,400 nukes in the fleet. That's a lot of nukes and it represents only one of three legs of the US nuclear triad.
Now let's look at the limits set by the most recent nuclear treaty, the "New START" (START - STrategic Arms Reduction Treaty - always assume an acronym unless proven otherwise) treaty. The US (Russia must adhere to the same limits) is allowed a total of 700 deployed ICBMs (missiles in silos), SLBMs (Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles - Tridents), and heavy bombers (B-52s or the newer B-1s and B-2s). These can include a total of 1,550 warheads. The US is also allowed a total of 800 "deployed and non-deployed" launchers. If we have all 700 allowed deployed launchers then an additional 100 non-deployed, i.e. down for maintenance and upgrades, etc., launchers would be allowed. If we have fewer deployed launchers we can have more non-deployed launchers.
But according to the math above Ohio class submarines account for 240 of 700 (34%) allowed launchers and 2,400 of 1,550 (160%) warheads. Oops! It turns out that the US has down-rated the submarines from 24 to 16 launch tubes. So we have 160 missiles and 1,600 warheads. (I presume that the Tridents have been down rated from 10 warheads to some lesser number. But its all classified so I don't know what the number is.)
And in this topsey turvery world the US and Russia agree to do what would otherwise be really stupid things. They routinely do certain things in certain ways so that the other side can verify what they are doing by using spy satellites. That's how the Russians know that 8 launch tubes are disabled. I have no idea how they know how much the MIRV count has been reduced on the missiles. In a normal world each country would go to great lengths to hide what they were up to.
But wait. There's more. The Ohio class submarines have been around a while. Well, not as long as the B-52's but still. Anyhow, that means that the Navy has plans for a replacement. God knows what each new submarine will cost. The Navy plan is for 12 boats, each of which will have 16 launch tubes. That's 192 missiles or 27% of the total allowed number. The MIRV factor is classified so I don't know what the total warhead count will be for whatever missile is eventually used. This all fits (just barely) under the current limits. (Remember the Air Force is fighting for each and every bomber and missile it can and the Army is still feeling seriously left out.)
But how many boats and how many missiles per boat we need and what MIRV factor should we expect if everything has to fit under a 400 warhead cap. Trust me. The Navy was not happy to be told it had to plug up 8 of each Ohio class boat's launch tubes after they had paid a whole lot of money to have put there in the first place? I am not familiar with how it went with the Air Force. But I'm sure they had to swallow a bunch of down sizing to get to where we are now.
The Navy wants to put its new boat into service in 2034. Is it going to make sense to build 12 of them then? Probably not. And it is always a good idea to ask for more than you want to start with. Then when your "ask" is cut back you end up with what you expected all along. But every cut to the limits on our nuclear arsenal from here on will meet with fierce resistance from our military, the civilians that manage them, and the contractors that work for them. They all want a newer fatter ox not some skinnied down shadow of the old version.
I have just covered just the most important points and I have purposely not gone into any kind of depth. There is also a lot of nuance I have avoided in the interests of brevity. Millennials can be forgiven for having not spent a lot of time learning about and thinking about this sort of thing. By the time they came along things had been pretty much settled. But anyone who aspires to become President of the United States should know all this and hopefully a lot more. They should also have spent some time thinking about it.
Donald Trump is old enough to have been through the '60s when MAD and nuclear retaliation and first strike and second strike and deterrence were all subjects that the public had (or at least should have) spent a considerable mount of time thinking about. I certainly did. And I am confident Hillary Clinton did. But if Mr. Trump has even the least bit of knowledge or insight into these issues it is totally missing from his public comments.
Nuclear Physicists of the late '30s were the first to theorize that "nuclear reactions" could produce fantastic amounts of energy. Why? Because of Einstein's famous "E equals M C squared" equation. Colloquially translated it says you can turn a tiny amount of matter into a whole lot of energy. The reverse is also true. You can change a whole lot of energy into a tiny amount of matter. But no one wants to do that. Anyhow, they noticed that if they smashed atoms sometimes a small amount of mass (the scientific term for matter) went missing. The mass was transformed into energy, a lot of energy. And a lot of energy getting released quickly is an explosion.
This set off the race to create the atomic or "A" bomb. Richard Rhodes has written an excellent book, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", that goes into the effort necessary to do this in great detail. (He also wrote a very good follow up, "Dark Sun", about the Hydrogen bomb.) It was a race because the Germans were trying to do the same thing. Details on their efforts can be found in the excellent "Heisenberg's War" by Thomas Powers. Spoiler: the first effort succeeded while the second one failed.
The U.S dropped two A bombs on Japan. Each released roughly 10 kilotons of energy. How much is that? The biggest conventional World War II bomb was the "block buster", so called because it was powerful enough to level a city block. It contained 10,000 pounds (or 5 tons) of high explosive. So the bombs dropped on Japan were roughly 2,000 times as powerful. Each one leveled a city.
The Russians developed a similar bomb only a few years later. An extensive and successful spying effort was only partly responsible. This led to the race to develop the "H" (for Hydrogen) bomb. The original A bombs (there were several designs) were "fission" bombs. You hit the nucleus of a Uranium atom with a neutron and it broke into pieces (a fission process). The pieces weighed slightly less than the original atom so energy was released. Smashing two Hydrogen atoms together (a fusion process) could, in the right circumstances, produce a single Helium atom. And it weighed less than the two Hydrogen atoms that went into its creation. And it turned out that the amount of energy released by this single "fusion" reaction was a lot more than the its equivalent fission reaction. So an H bomb could be a lot more powerful.
H bombs are rated in megatons, millions of tons of energy, not thousands. One A bomb could wipe out a small city like Hiroshima. An H bomb could wipe out the biggest of cities, say New York, and also take out a big chunk of the surrounding countryside. But it turns out that there is a point of diminishing returns. H bombs are so powerful that they literally blow the top off of our roughly 100 mile thick atmosphere. This creates a funnel and as it gets bigger more and more of the bomb's energy gets funneled out into space. Anything bigger than about 10 megatons just throws more energy into space without flattening more of the countryside. And this is just the first example of the topsy turvey logic that routinely surfaces when talking about nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy.
The A bomb that the US dropped on Nagasaki was the last A bomb the US possessed at the time. Fortunately Japan sued for surrender a couple of days later so it didn't matter. And at the time there didn't seem to be any rush to make more. That changed when the Russians exploded their A bomb. All of a sudden it seemed important to have lots of them on hand. And it was important not just to be able to make them but also to be able to deliver them to whatever presumably Russian target we chose to select.
By this time Japan was an ally and Russia was the enemy. When the US dropped its two A bombs on Japan we had been at war with them for several years and had achieved total air superiority. So we could just fly our B-29 bombers wherever we wanted to and drop the bombs wherever we wanted to. But Russia had an extensive and sophisticated military that had a powerful and sophisticated air defense system that would need to be overcome should we wish to "nuke" them.
This caused the US to spend a lot of money and, among other things, develop the B-52 bomber. The first one was built in the late '50s and the last one, the B-52H, was built midway through the '60s. Even so it was not considered a sure thing. An entertaining way to learn something of what would be involved is to take a look at the classic Stanley Kubrick movie "Dr. Strangelove: or how I learned to love the bomb".
There was another thing going on. The SAC (Strategic Air Command) initiative that included the B-52 was a US Air Force show. And that left the other services, especially the US Navy, out. The Navy's response was to develop the guided missile submarine, commonly referred to as a "boomer". This was barely possible to pull off in the '60s but a decade or so later the Navy deployed the Ohio class submarine and its associated Trident missile. This missile carrying submarine became the second leg of what was eventually called "the nuclear triad". (The bombers constituted the first leg.)
The Russians put a small satellite called Sputnik into orbit around the earth in '57. This was scary because it was thought that any missile powerful enough to put a satellite in orbit, even a small one, was powerful enough to hurdle a nuke thousands of miles. It could be made into an ICBM, an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile. At the time there was no defense against ICBMs. So a bunch of rockets were built and put into "silos" in the '60s. This was the third leg of the nuclear triad.
It would have made sense for this to be an Army project as this would give each of the three major services its own leg. But in a deft political maneuver the Air Force retained control of the missiles. So the final score was: Air Force - 2; Navy - 1, and Army - 0. This caused the Army out of a sense of desperation to develop a miniaturized A bomb that could be fired from a big gun, an artillery field piece. This was styled a "tactical nuclear weapons system" and was thought by some people to be suitable for use on the battlefield. Does this sound crazy or what?
Well, I did warn you about topsy turvey thinking. And that brings me back to MAD. A justification can be made for the US use of nukes in World War II. I think it is a legitimate justification but I don't want to go into this in the depth necessary to justify my position now. And what became slowly apparent in the decades following World War II was that nuclear weapons were just too horrible in the amount of death and destruction they produced to actually be used. There were serious and prolonged discussions about using them in the Korean War. But the very same President who authorized their use in World War II, Harry Truman, also decided to not use them in Korea. There were some times when things were going really bad for the US in that war but he decided "no" anyhow.
By the time Vietnam came along there was a strong consensus that they should not be used there. And remember this is the same '60s that saw the B-52 program wrapping up, the US ICBM system built and deployed and the development and early deployment of missile carrying submarines. So it was not as if there wasn't a lot of talking and thinking going on about nukes. And there was a hell of a lot of money being spent on them by the military at the time. The military's thinking goes strongly along the lines of "if you have it - use it". But the '60s was also the time that the concept of MAD became completely accepted. So what's the MAD concept and why did it cause the military to eventually be okay with not using nukes?
It is associated with one word: deterrence. "If both sides have them then neither side will use them." But there have been many examples of "them" where both sides had them and used them. Just to cite one example, both sides had and used airplanes in World War I. So what was different about nukes? To explain, I need to discuss "first strike" and "second strike".
Say you have a missile in a silo. What and why is a silo? In this case it is a heavily fortified hole in the ground. The idea is that if the bad guys don't whap the silo directly on the head and don't also hit it really hard the rocket in the silo will still work just fine when the dust settles. So what's the best way to take a silo and the missile it contains out? A nuke, of course. If you can explode a nuke close to the silo it will wreck enough destruction to take the missile out. This is an example of a first strike. If you strike first (and especially if you take them by surprise) and if you can take out enough of their stuff then they don't have enough left to launch an effective second strike (a strike that is launched after your first strike).
At this point in the discussion it appears that the best military strategy is to strike first. And that's a good way to make World War III happen. It didn't take long to figure this out. So what's the counter? Again, there is a single word: survivability. If enough of your stuff survives a first strike to give you the ability to make a powerful second strike then a first strike all of a sudden becomes a bad idea.
Hardened missile silos are a part of this. If you do it right then the bad guys must be able to very accurately target their bombs and the bombs must get through. With bombers it meant putting up a powerful air defense to guard against enemy bombers was a good idea. The US put together NORAD and the DEW line (what they actually are is not that important so I am going to skip that). The Russians did the same thing. Stealth did not exist at that time. So if you say launched a first strike bomber attack you were gambling that you could surprise the other side. If you didn't they could just launch everything too. There would be nothing left on the ground when your bombers got to their bases. You were also gambling that your bombers could somehow make it through in great enough numbers to deliver a knockout punch. You were never 100% sure it would work so a first strike was always a risk.
With missiles it took one missile to take out another missile so the math did not work out. MIRV (I'll get to what it is later) came later. Submarines were basically impossible to find but at the time they were hard to communicate with and, for various reasons, not that accurate. And both sides built and deployed a lot of gear. Even if you got say 80% of it there was so much left. And having three legs of the triad meant if you figured out how to deal with two of the legs the third leg was enough. You had to take out all three legs at the same time or it wouldn't work.
And that brings us to MAD. If both sides are pretty sure that the other side can do serious damage even after a first strike then we have a "mutually assured destruction" scenario. In that scenario it is obviously best all around if no one starts anything. And that's what happened. No nuclear weapon has been used in anger since August of 1945.
But it is important to understand that this situation is fragile. It depends on MAD. So let's look at how to un-mutual things. The first thing is to improve the likelihood of the nuke getting through. You "stealth" the airplane. This is hard to do. But hard really only means expensive. The better you can make your offensive capability the better the other guys have to make their defensive capability. The basic idea of the B-52 was "fly high". But the Russians shot down a U-2 spy plane successfully in 1960 and U-2s fly a lot higher than B-52s. And RADAR has gotten better. And there are other tricks. They too are expensive but there are ways to detect stealth planes.
How about missiles? Well, there's MIRV. MIRV stands for Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles. If you put 10 nukes on one missile then you can take out 10 silos with one missile, if they are accurate. If you have the same number of missiles and silos as the other guy you can use 10% of your missiles to take out all of his missiles. That leaves 90% of your missiles to use to wipe out his cities. MIRV technology was extremely destabilizing. The only argument for it was "if we don't do it they will do it and we will be in trouble". Unfortunately, these kinds of arguments frequently carry the day.
One piece of good news is that battlefield nukes were quietly retired. No reason was ever given but it was good thing. But battlefield nukes are the basis for "suitcase" nukes. The scenario is that a bad guy carries a nuke across the border in a suitcase and gets by customs. He then sets it up in a city, gets out of dodge and a short time later, boom -- no city. Fortunately, so far this scenario has remained an entirely fictional one. And just how big and how heavy a suitcase nuke would have to be is deeply classified so we don't know how practical it actually is. Both the Russians and the US claim they have dismantled all their tactical nukes. So maybe we really don't have anything to worry about here.
Submarines used to not be able to determine their position very accurately. And missiles were even less capable of accurately guiding themselves. But we now have GPS. If a GPS receiver can be fit into an iPhone it can certainly be fit into a submarine and a missile. So the whole accuracy problem has been completely fixed when it comes to submarines and missiles. And that too is a destabilizing development.
And the nuclear artillery shell has been replaced by the cruise missile. Early cruise missiles were explicitly designed to carry nuclear weapons. And cruise missiles are very good at defeating air defense systems. The US did a deal with Russia and there are now no more nuclear cruise missiles being deployed. The development and deployment of nuclear cruise missiles is definitely a destabilizing development because they are so hard to detect or stop.
Both the US and Russia spent a number of decades growing their nuclear arsenals. This was shorthanded to the Arms Race. And fortunately both sides at some point decided "this is stupid". Both sides were spending fantastic amounts of money in the pursuit of security and it wasn't working. Things came to a head under the Reagan Administration. Reagan proposed something called the Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI, but usually referred to by its unofficial nickname: Star Wars. Every cockamamie idea anyone had come up with for how to build a nuclear shield that would actually defend effectively against a nuclear attack was trotted out.
Experts looked at each and every one. They quickly found holes in all of them. Either the technique would never work or there was a cheap and simple fix that would render the technique ineffective. But in the short run these arguments were ignored. Instead billions of dollars had to be poured into the ideas. And, as had been predicted each and every idea flamed out, often spectacularly. The US spent many billions of dollars. This in turn caused the Russians to spend many billions of dollars. Neither side made any progress. Fortunately, this laid the ground work for some great arms reduction initiatives late in Reagan's second term. It also ended up spelling the death knell for the idea of trying to beat the MAD system. Until Trump came along pretty much everyone decided that the prudent course was to leave everything alone.
That is except for one thing. How about getting rid of nukes? The obvious place to start was to begin reducing the size of the arsenals. The early going was easy. Both sides had way more nukes than they needed so it was easy to get an agreement to scale things back. And that agreement worked well so we have since seen a number of agreements for scaling things back even more. Continue the process long enough and you get to zero. And a large number of people think zero is a good number. Their argument is simple. If there are no nukes then there are no nukes and it is impossible for something horrible to go wrong. And as far as it goes it's a good argument.
But if we have no nukes what happens of someone gets a few nukes? Then you have real problems. There are a number of current nuclear powers. It is not hard for them to save away the know how. And that means that they could go from no nukes to some nukes pretty quickly. And numbered among these are Pakistan and North Korea. Neither of these countries are known for their stability and their commitment to rationality. A world where only North Korea has nukes is a truly scary place.
But getting the whole "nuclear deterrent" thing to work only depends on having a few nukes, say a couple of hundred. That is more than enough. So how about setting a target of say 200-400? That makes perfect sense to me. But there are practical problems.
Remember the whole "each service needs its toy" thing I laid out above. It's still true. A lot of military types, both the uniform types and the bureaucratic types, measure their worth by the size of their budget. A lot of waste and fraud in the military sector can be traced to efforts to get one budget or another increased to the same size as the ego of the man (or rarely woman) in charge. And lots of these people are very skilled political infighters.
Let's look at the Navy because I have the numbers handy for them. Their current boomer is the Ohio class submarine. Originally it carried 24 trident missiles in 24 launch tubes. And each of them was MIRVed so that it had 10 warheads. (BTW, the fact that the warhead count is 10 is widely known but top secret anyhow.) So each Ohio class submarine had 240 nukes onboard. And, if we assume a fleet of 10, that's a total of 2,400 nukes in the fleet. That's a lot of nukes and it represents only one of three legs of the US nuclear triad.
Now let's look at the limits set by the most recent nuclear treaty, the "New START" (START - STrategic Arms Reduction Treaty - always assume an acronym unless proven otherwise) treaty. The US (Russia must adhere to the same limits) is allowed a total of 700 deployed ICBMs (missiles in silos), SLBMs (Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles - Tridents), and heavy bombers (B-52s or the newer B-1s and B-2s). These can include a total of 1,550 warheads. The US is also allowed a total of 800 "deployed and non-deployed" launchers. If we have all 700 allowed deployed launchers then an additional 100 non-deployed, i.e. down for maintenance and upgrades, etc., launchers would be allowed. If we have fewer deployed launchers we can have more non-deployed launchers.
But according to the math above Ohio class submarines account for 240 of 700 (34%) allowed launchers and 2,400 of 1,550 (160%) warheads. Oops! It turns out that the US has down-rated the submarines from 24 to 16 launch tubes. So we have 160 missiles and 1,600 warheads. (I presume that the Tridents have been down rated from 10 warheads to some lesser number. But its all classified so I don't know what the number is.)
And in this topsey turvery world the US and Russia agree to do what would otherwise be really stupid things. They routinely do certain things in certain ways so that the other side can verify what they are doing by using spy satellites. That's how the Russians know that 8 launch tubes are disabled. I have no idea how they know how much the MIRV count has been reduced on the missiles. In a normal world each country would go to great lengths to hide what they were up to.
But wait. There's more. The Ohio class submarines have been around a while. Well, not as long as the B-52's but still. Anyhow, that means that the Navy has plans for a replacement. God knows what each new submarine will cost. The Navy plan is for 12 boats, each of which will have 16 launch tubes. That's 192 missiles or 27% of the total allowed number. The MIRV factor is classified so I don't know what the total warhead count will be for whatever missile is eventually used. This all fits (just barely) under the current limits. (Remember the Air Force is fighting for each and every bomber and missile it can and the Army is still feeling seriously left out.)
But how many boats and how many missiles per boat we need and what MIRV factor should we expect if everything has to fit under a 400 warhead cap. Trust me. The Navy was not happy to be told it had to plug up 8 of each Ohio class boat's launch tubes after they had paid a whole lot of money to have put there in the first place? I am not familiar with how it went with the Air Force. But I'm sure they had to swallow a bunch of down sizing to get to where we are now.
The Navy wants to put its new boat into service in 2034. Is it going to make sense to build 12 of them then? Probably not. And it is always a good idea to ask for more than you want to start with. Then when your "ask" is cut back you end up with what you expected all along. But every cut to the limits on our nuclear arsenal from here on will meet with fierce resistance from our military, the civilians that manage them, and the contractors that work for them. They all want a newer fatter ox not some skinnied down shadow of the old version.
I have just covered just the most important points and I have purposely not gone into any kind of depth. There is also a lot of nuance I have avoided in the interests of brevity. Millennials can be forgiven for having not spent a lot of time learning about and thinking about this sort of thing. By the time they came along things had been pretty much settled. But anyone who aspires to become President of the United States should know all this and hopefully a lot more. They should also have spent some time thinking about it.
Donald Trump is old enough to have been through the '60s when MAD and nuclear retaliation and first strike and second strike and deterrence were all subjects that the public had (or at least should have) spent a considerable mount of time thinking about. I certainly did. And I am confident Hillary Clinton did. But if Mr. Trump has even the least bit of knowledge or insight into these issues it is totally missing from his public comments.
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