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Subject: U.S.A and Russia's Nuclear Capability
frenk    2/3/2005 1:39:48 AM
if this two nations gets angry to each other and goes to nuclear war...which we hope wouldnt happen...who has the capability of winning the the nuclear war? frenk
 
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   RE:we could exchange with China   2/11/2005 10:10:01 PM
Gixx, people like you scare me. Alot. There's no point trying to argue, rationally, the implications of a quote "limited" nuclear exchange; anyone with half an ounce of sense can understand the impossibility of one side claiming a "victory" in such a scenario (My nation is less utterly and completely annihlated than yours, and though I myself am a charred ruin somewhere in the cratered Cheyenne mountains, I therefore call this a Victory!). How do you win a nuclear war? You don't fight it. This was the "guiding light" of SAC for 40 years; the objective was always deterent, NOT first-strike, last-strike capability. We never pursued something like "Dead Hand" and were initially VERY wary of sea-launched boomers because people smarter than yourself realized the futility that was playing nuclear war with the deluded belief that it was winnable. Considering your vs. China scenario: You say that we would be struck by "at worst" 2-10 warheads (2-10 million dead, thank god this is the "at worst" scenario). You then go on to suggest that it would be appropriate to lash back with TEN TIMES the force? Forget that this is anything but "measured and proportional," the language of choice when drafting nuclear policy. Are the lives of Chinese civilians (20-100 million of them), who would have absolutely zilch to do with a nuclear attack on the US, so insignifigant in your confused world view as to somehow allow for such an event to be called victorious by any God fearing man? The moral key in traditional conflict has always been, for every bad guy I kill (civilian or soldier), I'm saving ten, fifty, or even a hundred friendlies. The WHOLE problem with nuclear war is that that argument is out the window; it by nature escalates to its sum-total; until either both sides are spent, or one is spent and the other decides enough is enough. Theirs no saving of lives; its a one time, kill as many as I can while he kills as many as he can, pointless trip into madness.
 
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gixxxerking    RE:we could exchange with China   2/12/2005 12:15:27 AM
It would be appropriate to strike first once we realise the inevitability of conflict IMO. If you take a look at recent doctrine, the use of nuclear weapons is not such an impossibilty. And in an exchange where the loss of life was in the 10 million range that would be light casualties compared to WW II 60 million killed. And the conflict ends much faster. Not that I want to ever see such a war. I just dont share the same fear of it.
 
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elcid    Victory can be achieved through nuclear war. Especially with China   2/12/2005 1:03:12 PM
The following statistical analysis was done after days of work by someone you know on this board. He emailed it to me last night: He "essentially confirmed your top of the head statistics" in that it would require, using the most optimistic assumptions, about 640 warheads to engage the 32 "firing units" of the four PRC ICBM launch brigades "if we knew the location of all the exit ports and access tunnels, which we probably could not." He concluded that the combination of the downwind effects of this much firepower on the USA combined with the unacceptably high risk of failure rendered the concept "too difficult for any politician to accept." I am not happy about this, by the way. It was MY position that we could, at need, defang this particular force, and I was disabused of the notion by a technical analyst for a US intelligence agency in 2004. It is not the first or only unpeasant reality about nuclear warfare, merely another one. Get used to it. If this is what our technical experts think, our policy will be based on it, even if they are wrong. And I do not think they are wrong. Someone you know just spent three days doing it, and he concluded that even multiple rounds per target, which I borrowed from DJim's proposal on another thread, would do the job. [Multiple meaning more than two. The statistical point of diminishing returns is four: above that you buy not 1% more effect.]
 
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elcid    Chinese SLBM(s) [NOT]   2/12/2005 1:12:34 PM
There is, at this time, and in the past, NO PRC SLBM capability. No SLBM was ever fielded, although two generations were developed and tested. China may have built two SSBNs of the Xia class - it is rumored one was lost long ago - but it appears that the second one never was completed because the missile system was so lousy. Even after the missile finally flew, China never bought a set for the one Xia. Even after the Xia was rebuilt in the 1990s - it is quite now and the best equipped of the older SSNs and fitted for a newer generation of SLBMs - it never got a set of missiles. China is BUILDING a "type 094" SSBN - in fact two of them - but the first of these has only launched, not completed. It is not yet clear if China will EVER build four 094s, and estimates it will build "4 to 8" may yet prove as wrong as the SAME estimates were about Xia. It is also not clear what PRC SSBN doctrine is or may become? But I suspect it may be radically different than any other - for unique Chinese reasons. They do not trust ANYONE with that much power! And they want to use the SSBNs politically in a crisis, so they do NOT spend their time on patrol in peacetime. It is indeed possible China is looking ahead to a time its ICBMs are no longer survivable. But that time is not yet, there is only one theoretical SSBN, and she has never made a deterrant patrol, having no weapons to patrol with.
 
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elcid    RE:we could exchange with China   2/12/2005 1:17:30 PM
One wonders why you say "myth" (Gix)? Put another way, if nuclear weapons exist, in some theoretical sense they CAN be used. But IF strategic nuclear weapons ARE used, no one will win the war. This is a consensus opinion. The Russians have the most realistic nuclear doctrine - and USAF translated it all into English - so I suggest you read it. The Russians began with your premise, that one COULD win a nuclear war if one attacked FIRST, and destroyed enemy NW. They ended up concluding that you would not like the result, however you configured your attack. They are right.
 
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elcid    or one is spent and the other decides enough is enough   2/12/2005 1:23:52 PM
Actually, the post by the "unnamed poster" is quite well done - except for this: the "pointless trip into madness" probably does not allow for one side, much less both, to "decinde enough is enough." There is every prospect that, days or weeks after you thought it was over, another SSBN fires another salvo, and you have hundreds more nuclear nightmares. It does not appear that communications systems or command systems will survive in a functional sense. US planning, at least, is driven by the assumption we "must" give orders in a few minutes (well under 10) or the orders will never get anywhere. It is probable there is no way to turn it off, until both sides have utterly expended their weapons. And it is also probable at some point third parties will join the frey.
 
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elcid    casualties and casulties   2/12/2005 1:31:01 PM
When you talk about nuclear war casualties, you need to know a few things: 1) Immediate deaths are only a fraction of eventual deaths from the nuclear weapons. The death toll from Hiroshima eventually about doubled the immediate death toll. 2) War deaths do NOT include later deaths NOT related to the weapons direct effects. A nuclear war will, at a minimum, disrupt the world economy, and cause massive starvation in much of the planet. A war on any large scale will also disrupt the climate, and might cause almost everyone to die. 3) The few times national leaders, including those of the USSR, the USA and China, have contemplated authorizing nuclear warfare, in all generations they have elected, instead, not to do so. It was the casualties that were the motivator, no matter the political price, including loss of face, political defeat, even loss of power (see Nikita K).
 
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gixxxerking    RE:casualties and casulties   2/12/2005 2:55:53 PM
Unfortunately elcid I'm inclined to agree that COMPLETELY destroying Chinas ability to return fire is not likely. But I do believe its possible to seriously degrade it. And in an exchange we, The United States, would win. Victory being defines as still having a functional government, 75% of population surviving, Ability to continue to wage war, Able to still influence world and regional events, able to protect from invasion and Economic recovery within 5 to 10 years.
 
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elcid    RE:casualties and casulties   2/13/2005 6:23:02 AM
You still do not get it Gix. In 2004 I proposed we prepair, as a contingency plan, a preemptive nuclear first strike on China's ICBM, to be used in certain circumstances. [It isn't that I don't like China. My wife is Chinese. But if China were about to use its ICBMs on anyone, I wanted to be able to take them out, as a policy option.] I was told that the fact we cannot take them all out means we WILL NOT attack. NO president is going to lose LA and call it "victory." [And LA is the city China says it will hit, if it gets only one. One reason is that it can hit LA, and not those farther East.] So the first thing wrong with your reasoning is that the certainty we lose cities means we won't attack in the first place. Second, if we lost 25% of our population to war, we would lose much more to starvation in the following few months. The world economy will not continue to function during a nuclear exchange. The world ecology will not continue to function properly after a significant nuclear exchange. Forget Dr Carl Sagan - read USAF stuff. Sagan exaggerated so he could discourage nuclear warfare. But the principle is valid - it just takes more than a few dozen weapons to make it happen. There are other things too. Do you know what the WORST effect of a nuclear weapon potentially is? Fire. Firestorm. Do you know how far a firestorm can go? There is no limit. It goes until there is no more fuel. You might have one start at Tampa and end at Cincinnati, burning a swath miles wide all along its path. Igniting paper two miles distant, creating an artificial cyclone whose winds are destructive of mere buildings and humans. There is no known way to fight such fires, much less several or many at one time. You simply have no clue what you are talking about. Read the official Effects of Nuclear Weapons.
 
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elcid    A calculation of an attempt to disarm PRC ICBMs (by Roman)   2/13/2005 6:25:59 AM
Actually, your guess was remarkebly good. To get a 99% kill for 128 tunnel entrances/exits (for 32 launchers), you would need to fire 526 warheads with a failure rate of 10% (more if the failure rate is really 1/6). But since you do not know what tunnels will be hit and which ones and you cannot fire fractional warheads and do not have time to conduct damage assessment, you would actually have to fire 640 warheads (5 warheads per tunnel entrance/exit in quick succession). This is getting into unrealisticly high numbers by now - the radiation fallout in the U.S. would be substantial + it would cause a nuclear winter followed by massive global warming - all very unpleasant. Besides, you can only hit tunnel entrances/exits that you know about. Essentially, my calculations agree with your assessment that the destruction of the Chinese ICBM capacity is for all practical intents and purposes impossible.
 
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