Arms Control Wonk

There are a variety of different approaches to counter the ABM and ragged second strike scenario, China is investing in several.

* Just build more nukes. Adding more warheads, especially ground-launched ones, is cheaper than adding more interceptors to the ABM shield, so it's always a losing game. Thankfully, no one seems to be pursuing this route, since that is massively destabilizing.

* Make it harder to take out all of your missiles in a first strike. Your link is an excellent example of this. Building additional silos is even cheaper than building additional missiles, and then you can play a shell game where you don't know which silo houses a missile and which does not so you have to strike at them all. There are other basing options available, like road-mobile launchers, which China and Russia have both invested in, though this is easier with shorter range ballistic missiles. And of course there are ballistic missile submarines, which give most survivable second-strike capability, but are much more expensive to operate.

* Use a delivery system that is harder to intercept, which I mentioned before. China has tested using both hypersonic glide vehicles and fractional orbital bombardment, in fact both at the same time (https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1213655/a-fractional-orbital-bombardment-system-with-a-hypersonic-glide-vehicle/ ).

It's a hobby. I read a lot and I have enough formal education to digest primary sources (mostly; my highest qualification is auditing a neutronics course while in grad school).

If you too would like to know way more about nuclear weapons than is useful in civilian life, I'd recommend reading:

Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb

The nuclear weapons FAQ, authored by Carey Sublette, a hobbyist researcher who is extraordinarily dedicated to understanding nuclear weapons from declassified documents and physical principles: https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html

Anne C. Fitzpatrick's dissertation Igniting the Light Elements: The Los Alamos Thermonuclear Weapon Project, 1942-1952: https://www.osti.gov/biblio/10596

The Arms Control Wonk blog/podcast: https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/

Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein's blog Restricted Data: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/

The nuclear weapons subreddit, particularly posts on it authored by Alex Wellerstein, Carey Sublette, and a few others whose names currently escape me: https://old.reddit.com/r/nuclearweapons/

Chuck Hansen's book "U.S Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History" (out of print, sadly; will have to pay $$$ or find a scanned pirate copy) and his massive book/PDF "The Swords of Armageddon" available for purchase here: http://www.uscoldwar.com/

There's been good discussion on some episodes of the Arms Control Wonk podcast[1] about how bad the South Koreans are at this, although I unfortunately can't remember on which episodes.

Things like military installations being obvious from aerial imagery because it's the only areas where someone incompetent at using the Photoshop clone tool has copied a bunch of trees around.

Other examples are "secret" missile silos being discovered because a bunch of buildings are seen in the exact size / configuration as other known military sites. The South Koreans having re-used the plans and architectural drawings.

They said that in some cases the most plausible explanation for some sites still being secret is to save face. Nobody wants to own up to how much of an open secret they are due to opsec failures over the years, even though everyone, and certainly the North Koreans, know exactly where they are and what they're for.

1. https://www.armscontrolwonk.com

> suffering from the same insanity

It isn't exactly clear what this means, but when I read it I thought, "we all seem to be suddenly hysterical about nuclear war."

I listened to the most recent episode of the Arms Control Wonk podcast[1] last night. In this episode, Dr. Jeffrey Lewis observed that yes, paid media and social media is hysterical about nuclear war right now, but also, that the underlying emotional anxiety that fuels this sort of coverage/discussion is the natural result of nuclear deterrence.

It's supposed to feel tremendously frightening. He noted that the word itself, "deter," comes from a latin word that also gave us "terror." The tremendous anxiety that we all feel is totally appropriate given the threat. It feels like insanity, yes, but it actually shows that the system of deterrence, as terrible as it is, is still working.

1. https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/

The US nuclear weapons program had to do something similar in the 2000's with a material known as Fogbank. This is used in the W76 warhead as an interstage material, and they needed more of it to keep the weapons in operational state.

Unfortunately, they'd forgotten the manufacturing process, decommissioned the plant that made it, and the people that knew how to do it weren't around any more. They figured it out, but it doesn't necessarily look easy to do (nor does the material seem easy at all to make in the first place).

https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/201814/fogbank/

p20 here says more: https://www.lanl.gov/science/weapons_journal/wj_pubs/17nwj2_09.pdf

Edit: I somehow missed this other thread in this story, despite a search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26334367

I don't know what to tell you. You clearly haven't studied International Affairs, or at least read the scholarly literature. Even some cursory research through Wikipedia citations will bring this up. But in any case, here are some freebies: https://armscontrolcenter.org/why-tactical-nuclear-weapons-are-anything-but-usable/ https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/403540/brodies-weakest-book/

If you have a real interest in this area, a subscription to Foreign Affairs would be useful. Especially during the 20th century that's where all these arguments were hashed out. Tactical nukes were already being publicly debated in the 1950s. You may be able to access many older articles, from Foreign Affairs and others, through a free JSTOR account.