This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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?
Bolded for emphasis. He very clearly is not talking about people who are directly attacking Israel, but about a deliberate attack on people who see themselves as uninvolved third parties.
Likewise here. Your understanding is that the author was describing a scenario in which the Vatican has invaded Israel?
If they've allowed your country to be murdered, they weren't much of an ally, were they?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
What's your estimate of the Israeli nuclear arsenal? I can't see a reason they wouldn't build as many as possible. Ditto for the subs they bought; why presume they aren't all nuclear-armed? Presumably they have torpedo tubes? cruise missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads can be launched from torpedo tubes, can't they?
Why would the Israelis not have a plan to use nukes? What's the point of having them if they aren't interested in using them?
I'd agree it's almost certainly propaganda, and of questionable connection to the Israelis actually in charge. No one who matters is terribly interested in clearing up the ambiguities, so it's hard to know.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
LOL what makes you say that?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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:
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
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!'
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link