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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   26388 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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What are people's guesses for when the first nuclear weapon (since WWII) will be fired?

Could it happen before 2030? Before 2040? In our lifetimes? And between which actors, and in what context? And how would the likelihood of this change depending on political changes like upcoming elections (both in the US and elsewhere?) This isn't necessarily referring to a MAD scenario or global nuclear war, simply any non-test use of such weapons by a state or group for military purposes.

I'm far from an expert on geopolitics but my sense is that these are the regions where this is likeliest to happen:

1/ The Middle East

Since the start of the Israel/Gaza war, US and global efforts have been overwhelmingly focused on convincing Israel to abandon military action. Whether or not you agree with that, it's hard to imagine that Hamas/Hezbollah/The Houthis/Iran will look at this and feel anything but emboldened to continue attacking Israel in the near future (as is already happening with Hezbollah in the north). An extreme hypothetical scenario is one where Iran and its proxies continue making war on Israel while Western nations distance themselves more and more, refusing diplomatic support and eventually imposing economic sanctions including prohibitions on the sale of weapons. Backed into a corner and beginning to face existential threats, Israel launches one or more tactical nuclear strikes to change the situation on the battlefield.

With the Democrats increasingly hostile to Israel and in favour of conciliatory action towards Iran, and Donald Trump's likely intention to maintain his prior administration's forceful foreign policy in the region, I think this is the one situation where the choice of next US president will have the largest impact on whether we see nuclear weapons get used. I'm going to make the prediction that there's a 50% chance Israel launches a nuke in some capacity by 2030 if Biden is elected later this year Since posting, people have pointed out that tactical nukes aren't especially useful for, so instead I'll predict there's a 50% chance they launch a nuke by 2040.

2/ Ukraine

This is another obvious candidate for where we might see nukes used. This is something that has been talked about since 2022 although obviously nothing like this has come to pass. With greater resources and numbers of soldiers, it's hard to imagine Putin feeling the need to escalate the situation in such a manner, unless the West starts deploying their troops such that the course of the war radically changes.

This is another situation where the choice of next US president will play a crucial role, although it's less obvious IMO what effect this choice will have. Biden has been rhetorically and financially supportive of Ukraine, but has been cautious of engaging the US more deeply in the war, only recently permitting Ukraine to strike inside Russia using US weapons. Trump's friendly attitude towards Putin is well known, as is his skepticism towards foreign intervention, but he's also unpredictable and belligerent. I've seen the point made here that he may take the idea of the US "losing" in Ukraine as an affront to his pride and consequently decide to escalate.

3/ China and Taiwan

This feels less likely than the previous two examples, mostly because there's no active conflict in the region yet so there are still several further stages of escalation that would need to be crossed before nuclear weapons become worth considering for anyone involved. The US also seems to be taking steps to reduce their dependence on Taiwan. On the other hand, the US is interested in countering Chinese influence for reasons that go beyond the situation with Taiwain, and if China starts making SK and Japan worried enough to think about establishing their own nuclear programs, the US might start to find its credibility in the region tested.

4/ Pakistan and India

I unfortunately know almost nothing about the situation here, besides the fact that these are two nuclear armed neighboring states with a pretty unfriendly history, which felt like a good enough reason to add them to this discussion.

I actually do not think that the Middle East is a big danger because a lot of the countries there are actually at least somewhat rational and clear-eyed about fallout afterward (pardon the pun). Ukraine is unlikely because the kind of tactical nukes Russia has been talking about are most effective against massed battlefield formations, of which none really exist. Pakistan and India are unlikely because neither actually wants the other dead, they "merely" hate each other. There's no win condition.

Personally China and Taiwan seems the largest threat to me. The US does not have a no-first-strike policy and I could envision the US dropping a nuke on a Chinese fleet, coastal city, or military base if they first suffered significant battlefield losses. As an additional factor, plausible mass Chinese hacking of US communications might distort the information landscape and cause a premature and make a knee-jerk, low-information response by a trigger-happy president more likely. On the other end, but less likely, the Chinese are demonstrably irrational about bringing Taiwan into the flock (dropping the issue would very obviously be much more in their national interest) due to some ideological prison they've constructed for themselves. Taiwan I would argue is NOT a core Chinese interest, but they treat it like one, and so might be more likely to defend it as if it were their own sovereign territory, causing a massive miscalculation in escalation.

North Korea is an ongoing concern almost for the reverse of the above: NK is irrationally paranoid of being invaded or wiped out, and has low communication resiliency and transparency, making an overreaction to some unpredictable provocation more likely than you'd expect.

Basically, the ingredients for a nuke are simply: significant irrationality, massive disparity in understanding mutual goals, possibility of low availability of information in a crisis, possibility of incorrect information in a crisis, and chain of command issues.

My bet is never, but I place a 20% chance of a nuke within 30 years.

Israel launches one or more tactical nuclear strikes to change the situation on the battlefield.

Unless a nuclear war is already in progress, there is no such thing as a "tactical nuke". Using a nuke has massive strategic implications and so-called "tactical nuke" is just a low yield strategic nuke.

The distinction is that of goal, not necessarily of the inherent properties of the nuke. A tactical nuke has the paradigm of being a normal battlefield bomb, just bigger and more effective. A strategic nuke has the paradigm of wiping out an entire city, base, or resource. They both can serve both purposes but yield often does differ significantly when explicitly designed as one particular category of nuke.

If breaking the nuclear taboo isn't a strategic decision, nothing is.

The only thing Israel would gain from using a nuke over conventional weapons is the strategic value: A sign that they're willing to use nuclear weapons and a threat that the next move would be to cause massive casualties at the attacker's home front.

Words have multiple meanings and are hard. You're correct broadly. But specifically in a nuclear weapons context, a "strategic" nuke means something very different, and almost always has. The tactical-strategic distinction is partially a historical artifact because in the 50s and 60s and even sometimes later, there were indeed people who wanted to use tactical nukes in a tactical way notably distinct from strategic ones.

The classic way of thinking about it is: Is a conflict in that state of "regular" war? Or has it reached "total" war? If regular war: maybe use a tactical bomb if conditions are right (they often aren't, plus the taboo on top). If total war: maybe use a strategic nuke.

Size of nuke is a conceivable axis of escalation for a conflict, so many non-proliferation people specifically agree with you that even the mere existence of smaller bombs makes an exchange more likely, where the initiator might want to "send a message" but not actually commit to the wholesale destruction and death a nuclear bomb usually might entail.

We don't know much about Israel's arsenal, so it's hard to say how they have configured their bomb yields. Most presume that the bulk are in the lower range, but some reports say they at least have a couple large enough to have a significant EMP effect -- very high altitude burst for this purpose is a notable but less-discussed use of nukes.

All of these are incredibly unlikely.

Tactical nukes are overrated. Modern militaries are very good at delivering weapons to precise locations. Doing so via a single nuke vs. an artillery barrage is not worth the cost.

Strategic weapons are a different story. At least they have a use case. But if the Cold War wasn’t existential enough to see a launch, I don’t see any of the listed situations going further. If NATO marched on Moscow, sure, which is why that will never happen.

Modern militaries are very good at delivering weapons to precise locations.

Jamming in Ukraine now sees less than 10% of some precision guided munitions reaching their target. The less impacted can hope for only 2/3s being jammed.

Interesting.

But I’m talking more about dumb munitions. The kind you’d use in volume to level a building or deny a road. By WWII, with the integration of mobile radio, those kind of fire missions became much more reliable. Add the trove of map and navigation data, and I think you can deliver a few hundred shells to cover an area pretty consistently.

My impression is that, if you need to flatten a town, you can do it fairly efficiently with conventional weapons. Replacing a few hours’ bombardment with a single weapon wouldn’t be worth it. Unless it needs to be instantaneous, as with a strategic deterrent, I expect Russia to keep the genie in the bottle.

The single most likely(still not particularly likely) scenario for a nuclear weapon use is Iran openly testing nukes, and that setting off a middle east nuclear proliferation cycle which ends in Saudi Arabia using one as a show of force in some brushfire conflict they screwed up by having too many jet fighters and not enough recons.

The taboo against using nuclear weapons is strong enough that I think their next use by a state might be a demonstration strike with plenty of advanced warning in an isolated area to intimidate an adversary into submission e.g. by Russia in Ukraine. Another possibility is as the last act of a collapsing regime or nation if e.g. South Korean troops close in on Pyongyang, Arab armies overrun Tel Aviv, or revolutionaries in Iran are breaking down the Ayatollah's doors, but I imagine that in most scenarios people are smart enough not to force the issue and to give the leadership a way out.

Now if we're limiting this to nukes fired in anger in an all-out war there could be a tit-for-tat scenario that goes like this: China hits an aircraft carrier with an anti-ship missile carrying a nuclear warhead, the President calls the Politburo and says "we are going to retaliate, either you offer up a comparable sacrificial lamb or you all die," China chickens out and allows a bunch of ships or a major military base to be nuked, a ceasefire is signed, and everyone sits down to contemplate their life choices.

Meanwhile, non-state actors are a wild card and in the long run I'm sure someone will get their hands on a bomb and use it, but I don't know if the odds of that occurring in this century are particularly high. Terrorists aiming for a high body count these days would probably go for biological weapons or diseases like smallpox if they could, given how much less conspicuous and more effective they are at actually killing people.

or revolutionaries in Iran are breaking down the Ayatollah's doors

I'd like to register my extreme doubts about Khamenei ever going hot with nukes. For posterity for future aliens reading the internet archives.

The most likely two scenarios are a runaway proliferation scenario in the Middle East occurring in tandem or immediately following US regime collapse(not likely) and a Taiwan war that goes stalemate(also not likely; a Taiwan war would functionally be over in a matter of days after beginning).

I'm going to make the prediction that there's a 50% chance Israel launches a nuke in some capacity by 2030 if Biden is elected later this year.

See, this is exactly the sort of case I was just talking about with @cjet79 - obviously your comment should be upvoted for overall quality, but the one sentence above would tempt me to just drop the whole thing unless I had time to qualify the upvote with written disagreement.

The October 7th attack on Israel was shocking, but it was nothing compared to the 50-years-before-October-7th war. We believe Israel had already had tested their first nuke a decade before that point (to this day, Israel won't confirm or deny having nukes, so take foreign intelligence guesses with a grain of salt), but they still met an attack over a hundred times larger with conventional weapons alone. It's possible that Iran will build up a much more massive conventional army for next time, to really back Israel into a corner, but that's not going to happen by 2030. 5% would be a high estimate, much less 50%.

I don't think future attempts at Oct 7th style attacks by themselves will test the viability of Israel as a state. My point was that the lesson that nations like Iran will (correctly IMO) draw from this is that such an attack gets Israel diplomatically isolated and threatened with sanctions for trying to respond, while its supposed main ally actively sabotages its attempts to achieve its war aims (see Biden delaying the initial Gaza invasion, and then the whole circus about refusing to allow a Rafah invasion for months) and even gives permission for further attacks against Israel. I don't think a war with Hezbollah tomorrow will lead to Israel getting destroyed, but Iran can keep refunding and re-arming them, Israel will find it increasingly hard to recover from war losses over the coming decades as the west and the US continues to abandon them under Democrat administrations while further embracing Iran.

Russia could "test" a small nuclear weapon in a way that it is considered a threat and not a test, especially if the "test" takes place close to its western border.

3/ China and Taiwan

This feels less likely than the previous two examples, mostly because there's no active conflict in the region yet so there are still several further stages of escalation that would need to be crossed before nuclear weapons become worth considering for anyone involved. The US also seems to be taking steps to reduce their dependence on Taiwan. On the other hand, the US is interested in countering Chinese influence for reasons that go beyond the situation with Taiwain, and if China starts making SK and Japan worried enough to think about establishing their own nuclear programs, the US might start to find its credibility in the region tested.

Reasons I'm shit-scared* about this one:

  1. The PRC probably has some sort of attack (not sure if it's invasion, bombardment, or general blockade) being prepared for 2024-5 if the US election is enough of a shitstorm - their plan to integrate Taiwan peacefully died a horrible screaming death when Xi Jinping did an "I am altering the deal" on Hong Kong, the US military is old but being modernised, and the shitstorm was obvious several years in advance and isn't necessarily going to recur afterward. As more direct evidence, the head of ASIS (Australia's equivalent of the CIA - note that Australia shares intel with the USA in the Five Eyes) said that "a linear path" leads to "great-power conflict" and he hopes leaders make decisions to take us off that path.
  2. If the ROW doesn't come in to defend Taiwan, the First Island Chain is broken - rather than being confined to the South China Sea and East China Sea (by sea mines in the various narrow straits in Indonesia/Malaysia/the Philippines/Taiwan/Japan), the PLAN gets to operate in the blue-water Pacific because of the ports on Taiwan's east coast. This is an existential threat to Japan and South Korea because their population densities are so high they require food imports to avoid mass starvation, so if Taiwan falls both of them will almost certainly withdraw from the NPT and acquire nuclear weapons in order to deter the PRC from blockading them in event of conflict (and thus allow them to have foreign policies that aren't dictated by the PRC by that threat). Also, if the PRC doesn't stop with Taiwan (and they likely won't; they've already started claiming the Ryukyu Islands) and WWIII happens anyway, it's going to be harder with Taiwan in PRC hands. As such, I give a high chance (about 80%) that the ROW does in fact come in, because nuclear proliferation sucks and if nuclear war's inevitable anyway we should have it on the best terms possible.
  3. I find it highly unlikely (about 10%) that a conventional conflict over Taiwan (with the USA in play) wouldn't go nuclear. The problem is that the PRC's nuclear deterrent is fairly fragile - the sea leg is strongly hampered by the aforementioned First Island Chain, the air leg doesn't have the range to reach the USA or Europe, and in event of conflict there would be enemy nukes quite close to almost all of China (the Bay of Bengal and India proper, Taiwan itself and the uncontested waters east of it, and South Korea, plus the bombers the USA would be heavily using anyway are nuclear-capable) so they'd get at most like 10 minutes of warning before their land leg was neutralised by the siloes being nuked (which the USA can do, because it's got a lot more nukes than the PRC does). This means the PLA would have to be on a hair-trigger in order for their deterrent to do anything, and the coalition would be strongly tempted to also be on a hair-trigger in order to perform such an alpha strike (and minimise the death toll) in event of an intercepted launch order or launches starting. Hair-triggers are bad, because they go off accidentally - see the Duluth bear and Vasily Arkhipov incidents for examples of the sort of things I'm thinking about. The chance of nuclear war per day is only like 1-2% (it would be less, but nobody would have launch-detection satellites because PLA doctrine for WWIII for decades has been to start out with massive ASAT use and that means Kessler syndrome wipes out all of LEO, and while there are backups they're not as reliable), but that adds up very fast.

It's a long way from assured, but the spectre of imminent WWIII hangs over the globe once more.

*Well, I'm not especially scared for my own life, because I took action to ensure I only die if we have total state failure - I live in Bendigo and have 20L of water in my bathroom cabinet. But I'm scared for other people's sake, and I'd have less creature comforts.

PRC's nuclear deterrent is fairly fragile

Fragile by nuclear superpower standards yes but not by anyone else's! They have many mobile ground-based launchers. It'll be an absolute pain to find them and target them quickly enough. The siloes are there to soak up inbound missiles away from Chinese population centres, not so much for second strike.

As of 2022 they've been installing JL-3s on their submarine arm, they can hit the US from home waters. Now Chinese subs are generally thought to be awful but I wouldn't want to be an American attack sub in the East China Sea. The Chinese have littered it with fixed underwater sensors, just like the US has festooned other parts of the Pacific with similar.

Chinese boomers can camp in the Bohai Sea and dare any foreign submarine to hunt them there.

acquire nuclear weapons in order to deter the PRC from blockading them in event of conflict

Does this work? Suppose you're South Korean president and you've got a few dozen recently-acquired A-bombs attached to short-range missiles. Are you going to demand that China refrain from sinking ships or you'll fire nukes at... what? The Chinese fleet? A Chinese airbase?

They could fire nukes back in greater number. Could you credibly threaten to go to strategic and start hitting Chinese cities, at which point your country would likely be razed? Only annexation by North Korea would make such a threat seem credible. It'd make more sense for South Korean leaders to accept some kind of satellite-relationship like Korea has usually had, Finlandization. Japan is a different story, they're relatively bigger and less exposed with more historical antipathy. Japan seems harder to subjugate.

As of 2022 they've been installing JL-3s on their submarine arm, they can hit the US from home waters.

Interesting.

Could you credibly threaten to go to strategic and start hitting Chinese cities, at which point your country would likely be razed?

Yes, this is what I meant. A general blockade of South Korea is an attempt to kill like 80% of its population via starvation; in that event there is no remaining Chinese capacity to deter SK from literally anything (starvation's a really-ugly way to go, so death by PLA nuke is arguably a mercy), so "we take you down with us in revenge" is fully credible (unlike the existing US nuclear umbrella, since a blockade of SK won't kill 80% of Americans). Of course, there's still the standard Chicken dynamic to deal with where the craziest has leverage, but that's true of literally all relations between unfriendly nuclear powers; the blockade's mostly irrelevant there. What SK nukes do is take it from "PRC has an unstoppable trump card short of nukes" to "normal nuclear brinkmanship".

if Taiwan falls both of them will almost certainly withdraw from the NPT and acquire nuclear weapons in order to deter the PRC from blockading them in event of conflict (and thus allow them to have foreign policies that aren't dictated by the PRC by that threat)

But wouldn't the South Koreans come to some kind of negotiated deal with China before it got to that point? If they see that the Chinese blockade won't be broken quickly enough to avoid hunger and malnutrition, wouldn't they come to terms? Maybe there'd be some phoney federal agreement with North Korea that looks good on paper but does nothing IRL, maybe they have to share technology with China and give up some air or naval bases.

That seems like a much better deal than a nuclear war or starvation.

One might equally say "wouldn't the Chinese back off the blockade before it got to that point? That seems like a much better deal than having their capital nuked."

Nuclear brinkmanship, as I said, is a game of Chicken. Risk-aversion cuts both ways.

Just to chime in here- Japan(and also Saudi Arabia, which seems relevant to a different scenario) has well defined plans to acquire nuclear weapons on short notice. If China looks to be winning in Taiwan Japan can likely conduct a nuclear test before China knows it’s actually working on them.

Do you have any sources that elaborate on Japan's plans and how much of that is validated vs speculation?

If I've understood you correctly you think that there's a 1-2% daily chance of nuclear exchange conditional on ROW joining a war between Taiwan and the PRC? Given an 80% chance of the ROW joining the war, this should work out to about 50-70% chance of a nuclear exchange by D-100 of a war. Not sure what your odds of the war breaking out at all in the next 5 years or so would be (presumably pretty high).

If I've understood you correctly you think that there's a 1-2% daily chance of nuclear exchange conditional on ROW joining a war between Taiwan and the PRC?

Yes. Maybe lower if Russia joins the war on the PRC's side, as the Russian deterrent is far less fragile in a number of ways (10x as many nukes, closer proximity to North America/Europe for the air leg (remember that the Arctic Ocean's only about five times the area of the Caribbean Sea, and is narrow in the direction connecting Russia to Canada), well-situated ports for the sea leg).

Not sure what your odds of the war breaking out at all in the next 5 years or so would be (presumably pretty high).

If I had to toss out a number I'd say 70%, but I'm a lot less confident in that than in the conditionals; I don't have direct access to the kind of intelligence reports on the internal memos of the CPC and PLA that I'd need to nail it down.

What are people's guesses for when the first nuclear weapon (since WWII) will be fired?

None of the above. The most likely nuclear weapon use is- and remains- a loose nuke scenario in which a nuclear weapon is stolen from a nuclear power, and used by a second or even third party.

Ultimately, nuclear weapons are very, very expensive, both in the development sense and the utilization sense, and revealed preference by all the major nuclear powers is a preference to endure non-existential attacks and even lose wars rather than use them, even when the threat of counter-use isn't present. As a weapon system, their primary use is in existential defense against invasion, and as the only actors with the ability to existentially threaten by invasion are states, there's very little actual interest in using.

The actors who get around the cost-aversion are those actors who don't care about surviving as a state.

revealed preference by all the major nuclear powers is a preference to endure non-existential attacks and even lose wars rather than use them, even when the threat of counter-use isn't present.

The reason I gave Israel as the likeliest to launch a nuclear weapon is that for them any given war is far likelier to be existential, and there aren't many ways they can lose militarily that don't involve them getting destroyed as a nation. This isn't a suggestion that they would directly attack Iran, more that they would do something like launch a tactical strike in Lebanon as a show of force and to take out a large part of Hezbollah's capabilities.

I would bet almost anything that Israel's few nukes are targeted at the capital cities of their allies.

Why in the world would you think that?

Most likely because prominent Israelis and Jewish intellectuals keep saying so when discussing Israeli nuclear strategy.

I just read that whole article, nowhere does it say that israel has nuclear weapons targeted at its allies' cities.

No, it just has a couple people arguing that it would be a good idea and that they should totally do it. Maybe they reflect the views of the Israeli leadership, maybe they don't. It's only a couple years since we've gotten around to admitting that Israel even has nukes, and I certainly would not expect them to announce that they target "allied" capitols as a matter of policy when they won't admit the weapons even exist.

David Perlmutter In 2002, the Los Angeles Times published an opinion piece by Louisiana State University professor David Perlmutter.

Israel has been building nuclear weapons for 30 years. The Jews understand what passive and powerless acceptance of doom has meant for them in the past, and they have ensured against it. Masada was not an example to follow—it hurt the Romans not a whit, but Samson in Gaza? What would serve the Jew-hating world better in repayment for thousands of years of massacres but a Nuclear Winter. Or invite all those tut-tutting European statesmen and peace activists to join us in the ovens? For the first time in history, a people facing extermination while the world either cackles or looks away—unlike the Armenians, Tibetans, World War II European Jews or Rwandans—have the power to destroy the world. The ultimate justice?[32]

In his 2012 book How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III, the American Jewish author Ron Rosenbaum described this opinion piece as "goes so far as to justify a Samson Option approach".[33] In that book, Rosenbaum also opined that in the "aftermath of a second Holocaust", Israel could "bring down the pillars of the world (attack Moscow and European capitals for instance)" as well as the "holy places of Islam." and that the "abandonment of proportionality is the essence" of the Samson Option.[dubious – discuss][34]

Martin van Creveld In 2003, a military historian, Martin van Creveld, thought that the Second Intifada then in progress threatened Israel's existence.[35] Van Creveld was quoted in David Hirst's The Gun and the Olive Branch (2003) as saying:

We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force. Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: 'Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.' I consider it all hopeless at this point. We shall have to try to prevent things from coming to that, if at all possible. Our armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.[36]

Maybe these two are entirely unrepresentative. Seems pretty on-brand for the Israelis to me, but your mileage may vary.

Perlmutter isn't even Israeli. Creveld is, but as far as I can tell hasn't been in government, even in an advisory capacity. He's just some guy.

Like I said, I read the whole wikipedia page. I understand that as saying "we'll retaliate against anyone who attacks us, even european countries", not "we'll retaliate by nuking even the people who supported us." How would the latter make sense at all? What could there possibly be to gain by nuking your own allies?

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I think that is a wildly weird and optimistic (for lack of a better word) piece of pro-Israeli propaganda there. I suppose if you're a mid tier Israeli professor or author who is trying to make a splash and maybe strike a little fear into the hearts of your enemies; it doesn't hurt from a game theory perspective to claim you have all of this capability to lash out wildly. But Israel is tiny and would be completely destroyed by any retaliation whatsoever nuclear or not, so hardly an actual plan for them to ever use...

Israeli is also a small area to cover with countermeasures that could take out missiles in boost phase. They do have subs, but they aren't exactly stealth tech nuclear boomers deep in the Indian ocean...just a dozen diesel electrics only one of which is really a modern missile sub.

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LOL what makes you say that?

I think Israel’s plan Z for Hezbollah is just ‘go full Gaza with disregard for civilian casualties in southern Lebanon, get Maronite collaborators to ethnically cleanse the Shiites from the survivors afterwards’. Nukes are for Iran.

I think if they had their backs against the wall they'd be more likely to take out Tehran. Tactical strikes against Hezbollah wouldn't make enough difference, nor send the final message that they'd want to send before being destroyed.

I doubt Israel's chances of survival will increase if they start lobbing nukes at Arab states. If anything, this might trigger a full-scale invasion of Israel by the whole Arab League to prevent them from detonating another one.

The point of strategic nukes is not to get advantage in the situations where you use them. The point is to decrease the probability that it comes to that point, to ensure that the need for their use remains counterfactual.

A general policy of "when faced with an existential threat, such as an invasion, we will nuke cities of the aggressor" will do fuck-all to stop an invasion. However, if you credibly pre-commit to following through on it, the chances that you get invaded in the first place will be much smaller because most countries do not consider the glassing of their cities an acceptable price for waging war.

Also, you can not invade to stop a country from using nukes. The time scales for launching nukes are in the minutes, the time scales for invasion are on the order of days.

But if the alternative is “Israel no longer exists, Jews get exiled again to face pogroms and potentially genocide,” the nuclear option is much more on the table and the consequences of it seem much less important.

And honestly I expect Israel to get more brutal, not less, as the world turns against them. A lot of the reason that Israel was willing to tolerate Palestinians and the chanting of “death to Israel” followed by rocket attacks is that Americans had their backs and they had access to American weapons. Now, there’s a move to basically treat Israel like South Africa to recognize the state of Palestine (which is less of a state than many American Indian reservations), and to divest and potentially sanction them. This backs them into a scenario in which they can no longer tolerate things that they would have before, and cannot assume that if something happens to them that they’d be allowed to respond. I think that world opinion on Palestine has made the response much more brutal than it would have been otherwise. This is their last chance to destroy the threat, and anything and anyone left is going to be untouchable in the future because the world won’t allow another invasion of “Palestinian” territory. So bomb the shit out of everything and hope you’ve given yourself a long enough head start to get ahead of the blowback.

With proxy wars like Hezbollah or other terrorist organizations, again, they aren’t given the right to invade to root out those things with conventional means, and the sponsors have spent millions to create these groups and arm them and give them intelligence, etc.

Is there a reason why Israel can't nuke the Arab League faster than they prevent them from doing so?

They don't have enough nukes. And if they nuke Cairo or Mecca, they will lose the last of their remaining goodwill.

I always thought, in a certain sense, it's kind of strange that this hasn't happened already. Possible reasons why, as far as I can guess:

  1. Nuclear weapons security worldwide really is that good, including in Russia, Pakistan, etc.
  2. Just too destructive to really be interesting to terrorist groups. How many of them really, truly want to kill tens of thousands at once? Not just the trigger-pullers, but every individual involved in getting the device to a target.
  3. Anyone who might possibly steal one, or be unofficially allowed to take one, is too afraid of retaliatory action to actually do it. Russian ultra-nationalists might not care about personally surviving, but they care if somebody nukes Russia back in retaliation.

Or maybe all of them at once. The idea is very popular in dramatic fiction, but somehow never seems to happen in real life. Or even has any stories leak out about it ever coming anywhere near happening.

How many of them really, truly want to kill tens of thousands at once?

Your classic bomb-throwing anarchist, commie terrorist or car-bombing separatist might shy away from nukes. However, religious extremists are different. I think the reason that 9/11 did not explode a nuke in NYC was not that they wanted to minimize casualties, but that they did not have a viable path to getting a nuke (or getting it into NY).

Perhaps Hamas would not use a nuke against Israel (not that I would bet on it), but the fact that a significant portion of the Gazans support them indicates that there is likely a more radical fringe.

There's also another avenue-

4. The nuclear states basically fedpost-spam the potential supplier and customer networks, so that no one know who wants to buy knows who a possible actual 'legitimate' supplier is and no one who could sell one knows who a 'legitimate' buyer is.

There are absolutely terrorist and extremist groups with high interest in WMDs and WMD-substitutes (we had the Tokyo nerve gas attacks, for one, but the field of bioterrorism is basically just weaponizing natural epidemics). However, the groups that have interest in obtaining nukes are not the same as the groups that have access to nukes, and so all you really need to do is break the chain of commerce between the client (the person who wants the bomb) and the supplier (the smuggler).

This can be done pretty effectively by just stirring doubt and distrust on both sides, especially as both sides are in a psuedo-prisoner's dilemma where both need to be hidden from the eyes of the government authorities to work. A terrorist group / proxy needs to believe they're not being approached by an agent of the government, but runs into the issue that the local government and the local nuclear handlers probably share the same appearance/accent/cultural mannerisms (because a corrupt supplier is part of the government). In reverse, the corrupt supplier needs to believe that not only is their potential contact not a member of the government as well (or an ally of their government), but that the sale won't reveal their otherwise hidden network. Both parties will be 'better off' if they can trust eachother and make the deal, but each also has major payoff incentives to 'defect' and not engage, for fear of revealing themselves.

This is why the more credible loose-nuke risks come in contexts of state collapse (where the state is no longer in a position to monitor/maintain control deterence), widespread corruption (where the ability of the state to monitor is compromised by the state's agents being routinely bribed), but especially black markets (where a standing economic exchange system exists absent, and despite, state efforts). These are the cases where there's more credibility on the suppliers as having access, and more trust on the buyers to getting away with it, and more reason for both to believe the other actor isn't part of the state.

It should be noted that the nerve gas attack in the Tokyo subway was a back up plan. The group’s original plan was to detonate a nuclear device in Tokyo. They had put together a working group of ex-Soviet scientists to build one. They didn’t get that far, but they got a hell of a lot further along than any Islamic terrorist group ever has.

There's only around 12 thousand nukes in existence, almost all in the US and Russia. They are large heavy objects mounted on huge delivery platforms. Not exactly stealable.

Just you wait - if George Clooney and his 10 closest friends set their mind do it, even a multi-ton missile can disappear.

It might be mostly the second, thinking about it for a few seconds. Just what kind of personality type does it take to seriously want to use a nuke in terrorism (is it some sort of extreme misanthrope, someone whose political convictions are second at best to the nihilistic urge of "kill 'em all"?), and how many of that kind of person does it take to pull off a terror-nuke plot?

I could see an extreme eco terrorist thinking detonating a nuclear bomb in, say, Houston to be a net positive.

Spoken like a true Houstonian.

I mean it would wipe out some backtaxes and make Sheila Jackson Lee either be quiet or generate an amusing soundbite about nuclear weapons, what's not to like?

Just what kind of personality type does it take to seriously want to use a nuke in terrorism (is it some sort of extreme misanthrope, someone whose political convictions are second at best to the nihilistic urge of "kill 'em all"?)

I don't think either extreme misanthropy or nihilism are required or even particularly likely characteristics of a terrorist who would want to use nukes. Merely the conviction that life on Earth is just a very short term pit stop, where your behavior during it determines your placement in the eternity of afterlife would be enough to convince a perfectly regular, pro-social, well-adjusted member of society to believe that murdering 5-6 figure number of people is not only justified but obligated.

I think that's a bit too charitable. There have to be thousands (10s of 1000s?) of muslims who would love to nuke the US, and I've heard quite a few bubbas talk about glassing the desert.

You can probably get a large coordinated group of people EITHER smart enough to steal a nuke OR hateful enough to want to use it, not both.

The Bubbas want the US to glass the desert, assuming they aren't just mouthing off. They're not generally interested in setting up a terrorist organization to steal a nuke to re-enact Trinity in the Middle East.

Haven't all the easily-deployed-by-third-parties nuclear weapons been decommissioned? There aren't backpack nukes with 4 digit arming codes written on the side in crayon any more.

The closest thing is probably a Russian Topol, and I don't know how well those are locked down. Can the crew launch a nuke with the truck ignition key? I seriously doubt it.

Haven't all the easily-deployed-by-third-parties nuclear weapons been decommissioned?

All nuclear weapons, once obtained, are easily deployed by third parties.

A nuclear weapon is basically the payload (the bomb) and the delivery system (the missile), but the bomb itself is very easily deployable by third parties. For example, a B61 nuclear bomb, the primary gravity nuclear bomb maintained for NATO purposes, is less than 12 feet long and (~3.53 m) long, and weighs only 700 pounds (320 kg). This could easily fit inside a basic cargo truck or shipping container, especially if you cut off the unnecessary parts of the casing.

First-generation nuclear weapons (like the WW2 era weapons) were bulkier, but even the Little Boy used in Hiroshima was 'only' 9,700 lbs. That's not even a capacity cargo container track.

In short, if you can get the bomb, and get the bomb to a shipping container, you can deploy a nuclear weapon. If you can then get that shipping container contents onto a ship (or even just a boat), you can deploy it to any major port in the world.

There aren't backpack nukes with 4 digit arming codes written on the side in crayon any more.

You don't need the default arming codes to make use of a nuclear weapon. The idea that nuclear weapons become innert without the right code is basically Holywood and security theater.

All an arming code for a nuclear is, is the software password to use the pre-installed software. However, the nuclear weapon is fundamentally an analog device of 'conventional explosive to move catalyst to trigger nuclear chain reaction', and the software doesn't actually do anything past the triggering the conventional explosive point. (Rather, the software is about when the conventional explosive triggers, often by being tied to sensors for airmovement and altitidue that a ground-based device doesn't care about.) The bomb goes boom when the internal trigger explosion is triggered, regardless of what software is used or if any software is used. The 'you need the right password or the bomb goes innert' is really just the conventional-explosive trigger-control software borking itself and needing to be replaced. The bomb itself is still 'fine', the UI panel just isn't working.

Non-state actors, or even state actors who steal another side's bomb, just need to replace the software control system for the initial trigger, and controlled demolitions are an extremely basic technology in the civil engineering sector around the world. There are bomb designs where a jurry-rig trigger software may be less efficient- such as an implosion device that's not quite synchronous- but this isn't 'you don't get an explosion,' but rather 'the explosion is smaller than it could have been, but is still a nuclear explosion.' And land-based devices were always going to be smaller just due to being based on the land rather than airburst.

In short, all the arming code system really means for a loose nuke is that there's a period of time between when a deployable nuke is captured, and when it can be armed and trigger via replacement software. That could be days or weeks... but depending on how the nuke is obtained, it could be days or weeks before the state knows to start looking, or where, by which point a shipping container can possibly be on another continent.

I'm not in a position to know for sure what the setup is on any particular nation's nuclear devices (and of course if I was I sure wouldn't post about it on a public internet forum), but from what I've heard, it's entirely possible to put in place arming codes that are not trivial to circumvent.

Implosion devices depend on extremely precise timing between all of the charges placed around the core. In early devices, this was kept simple by having the whole thing be spherical and all of the wires be exactly the same length connecting the conventional detonators to a single power source. There's no reason that needs to be the case though. Varying the wire lengths, detonator positions, core shape etc introduces complex timing requirements that might only be known by the software, or possibly even encoded into the arming code.

It's also my understanding that modern high-yield devices have more complex detonation chains, requiring mini-accelerators to be turned on, other gasses to be dispensed, etc at just the right time. So it's probably not trivial to get around coding issues like that without being a nuclear engineer yourself. At least, as long as the organization designing it wants to make it so and cares enough to make sure it's actually effective.

'Actually effective' is the load-bearing term here, because the effect of using a nuclear weapon in the current era isn't actually the degree of damage, but the nature. Fat Man and Little Boy were not 'actually effective' nukes by the standards which make extremely precise timing and more complex systems important to effectiveness. Fat Man and Little Boy were small, inefficient, and wasteful. They were also effective politically, which is what matters, and which is what will matter for the effects that a ground-based rather than air-burst nuclear weapon is going for.

The maximum effectiveness of the bomb on a technical efficiency ground (explosiveness per amount of material) is secondary to the scary nuke factor success and the geopolitical implications that would be the target motive. Even nuclear 'fizzle' explosions would be considered historic successes, despite being a tiny fraction of the potential of an 'actually effective' bomb. The value of the nuclear demonstration is the fact that it is nuclear, that the target wasn't able to stop you, and that no one knows if you can do so again.

No one's going to get hit with a 12% technical effectiveness nuclear detonation and go 'ha, those losers couldn't even do the trigger detonations better!'

I think that adding anti-tampering devices to nukes is feasible. If tampering is detected (for example if the internal pressure changes), a nuke could disable itself by selectively firing a few of the explosives, spreading the fissile material over a few meters. Scraping off that material and building a nuke from it is doable but much harder than just replacing some software. (Of course, I would go for a few-kiloton fizzle in the event of tampering.)

The closest thing is actually british subs.

I don't even care if that's true because it's absolutely beautiful, and I regret we missed our chance for nuclear apocalypse started by a tea lady who thought she was unlocking the broom cupboard.

This is one of those things that's really hard to say except that the odds are low.

The naive estimate is that nuclear weapons have been used in only 1 year out of the 80 they have existed. So the odds they are used in the next 12 months is on the order of 1/80, and the mean next use would occur in 22042104.

Let's try to adjust that number a bit.

  1. There are more nuclear powers today than there were in the past

  2. The world is more peaceful than in the past.

These seem to cancel each other out. So I think a 1-2% chance per year is a fair estimate with huge error bars obviously.

We don't really have a framework to know how countries would decide to use nukes. It's only happened once. Looking at the one occurrence, the U.S. nuked Japan because the chance of retaliation was zero and it (probably) saved a couple million lives.

I think the India/Pakistan or Israel/Iran conflicts are unlikely to result in the use of nukes because serious retaliation is certain. The country most likely to nuke another right now is probably Russia. If the Ukraine War starts to go badly for them, they might threaten a limited nuclear attack, knowing that the West would never risk a full exchange. But even then, I think the odds of this occurring are quite low.

The naive estimate is that nuclear weapons have been used in only 1 year out of the 80 they have existed. So the odds they are used in the next 12 months is on the order of 1/80, and the mean next use would occur in 2204.

I think you mean 2104, and I'm not sure it's fair to ignore the fact that two bombs were dropped in 1945 -- 2/80 = 1/40, which... doesn't seem crazy? The attitude towards possible nuclear great-power conflict seems to be markedly more casual than it was in the 80s, at least in some circles -- if this trend continues things get a bit scary.

I think you mean 2104, and I'm not sure it's fair to ignore the fact that two bombs were dropped in 1945 -- 2/80 = 1/40, which... doesn't seem crazy?

I think it's a lot more useful to estimate the risk of a nuclear exchange, regardless of size.

Then the sample set is too small and unrepresentative -- for how many years of those 80 has there been a direct hot-war between two (or more) nuclear capable countries?

The attitude towards possible nuclear great-power conflict seems to be markedly more casual than it was in the 80s,

As a rationalist, I always like to annoy people by pointing out that a full nuclear exchange won't cause human extinction. Nuclear winter is a flawed concept. And some of the weapons will fail. And others will miss. And commanders will defy orders. And radiation isn't that bad. So, like, maybe only tens of millions people die in the first few weeks.

Then I heard people who have actual power talking in a cavalier way about nuclear weapons and I stopped being so smug. It might not be an X-Risk, but it's bad.

Yeah, exactly -- this 'well ackshually we were wrong about how exactly how bad a nuclear exchange would have been in the 60s' almost feels like a coordinated effort to put 'limited use' and various forms of brinksmanship on the table. Which think is mostly still... really quite bad!

The main risk is food supply chain collapse leading to starvation and more instability, but if you live near farmland it's probably not going to be that much of a risk for you.

Nuclear winter is a flawed concept.

Yes. A few years ago I read about the origins of nuclear winter and determined it was entirely fictional. And every time I try to explain that to someone they act like I'm a loon.

Would you be interested in doing a little write up of it here? I’d love to see more information about this.

The Wikipedia article actually does a pretty decent job of summarizing it.

To me, it seems obvious that nuclear winter hypothesizers are fabulists. Predictions of a 20 degree fall in global temperatures are Prima facie ridiculous, being 3 times greater than the fall in temperatures following the Yucatan impact 66 million years ago.

(The Yucatan impact released energy equivalent to about 10,000 times the entire world's nuclear arsenal).

The one time that a nuclear winter prediction was tested was in 1991 during the Kuwait oil fires. This did not, in fact, cause a small scale nuclear winter as predicted.

And of course there is the bias angle. Can you imagine a university researcher publishing a paper "acxtually, nuclear winter won't happen"?

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