Post a Reply
Back to the Forum
A couple of points, bit rambley.
The codes in question would have been just one of several "locks", and realistically would have been among the easiest to bypass; it would certainly not have been the case that entering 00000000 would enable a launch officer to launch one of the missiles.
Currently the majority of nuclear weapons cannot be deployed in minutes, or rather the number of minutes it would take to deploy them is in the 30+ range. Most are by default untargeted, or have default flight/targeting instructions that would result in the missile's destruction.
Virtually everyone who works with nuclear weapons (certainly in the West) knows what to do to disable the weapon (to the point that the physics package is basically useless) either by setting off the self destruct package (explosive and/or EMP) or manually (eg. pull circuit board X half way out and snap). Preventing the small-scale enemy sabotage or destruction of our nuclear weapons (particularly our first strike capability) has for quite a while been a secondary concern to ensuring that *we* can destroy individual weapons as expediently and assuredly as possible. Relatedly, very few people who work with them know what needs doing to deploy one.
That's not to say that the article isn't bad, but unless there's much more to it (the article was very vague in places), it's probably not *really* bad -- just rather bad (and *really* dumb).
During the cold war one of the single biggest dangers arose out of the US and USSR completely failing to understand each others nuclear warfighting strategies, which essentially boiled down to the Russians thinking that a very limited tactical exchange would be inevitable in a US/USSR war but that there would be no escalation to a full strategic exchange, and the Americans taking exactly the opposite position -- that small tactical exchanges between US and USSR wouldn't happen because escalation would be inevitable; net result the USSR would flatten the NATO bases in West Germany with high yield nukes ahead of it's squillion tanks, and the US would immediately fling hundreds of 300kT+ warheads towards the USSR. Compounding the problem was the fact that Russian tactical weapons had vastly higher yeilds than US tactical weapons (with Soviet Bears delivering 250kT ALCMs or 200-400kT bombs (along of course with 5MT+ strategic bombs), compared to the yanks who maxed out tactically with 200kT Tomahawks, and who's B61's went below half a kiloton.
The yanks currently have ~10,000 weapons of which about half can be delivered, the Rusians about 20,000, of which about a third can be delivered. We've got about 200 (all SLBM), China ~400, France ~350, Israel ~1-200, India ~50-60, Pakistan ~25-50. Russian weapons generally have significantly higher yield than American ones. China's notable in having pretty much the only deployable multi-megaton LRBMs and ICBMs.
I tend not to worry about being nuked by the US, China, Russia, etc.
There are plenty of other things to worry about
The codes in question would have been just one of several "locks", and realistically would have been among the easiest to bypass; it would certainly not have been the case that entering 00000000 would enable a launch officer to launch one of the missiles.
Currently the majority of nuclear weapons cannot be deployed in minutes, or rather the number of minutes it would take to deploy them is in the 30+ range. Most are by default untargeted, or have default flight/targeting instructions that would result in the missile's destruction.
Virtually everyone who works with nuclear weapons (certainly in the West) knows what to do to disable the weapon (to the point that the physics package is basically useless) either by setting off the self destruct package (explosive and/or EMP) or manually (eg. pull circuit board X half way out and snap). Preventing the small-scale enemy sabotage or destruction of our nuclear weapons (particularly our first strike capability) has for quite a while been a secondary concern to ensuring that *we* can destroy individual weapons as expediently and assuredly as possible. Relatedly, very few people who work with them know what needs doing to deploy one.
That's not to say that the article isn't bad, but unless there's much more to it (the article was very vague in places), it's probably not *really* bad -- just rather bad (and *really* dumb).
During the cold war one of the single biggest dangers arose out of the US and USSR completely failing to understand each others nuclear warfighting strategies, which essentially boiled down to the Russians thinking that a very limited tactical exchange would be inevitable in a US/USSR war but that there would be no escalation to a full strategic exchange, and the Americans taking exactly the opposite position -- that small tactical exchanges between US and USSR wouldn't happen because escalation would be inevitable; net result the USSR would flatten the NATO bases in West Germany with high yield nukes ahead of it's squillion tanks, and the US would immediately fling hundreds of 300kT+ warheads towards the USSR. Compounding the problem was the fact that Russian tactical weapons had vastly higher yeilds than US tactical weapons (with Soviet Bears delivering 250kT ALCMs or 200-400kT bombs (along of course with 5MT+ strategic bombs), compared to the yanks who maxed out tactically with 200kT Tomahawks, and who's B61's went below half a kiloton.
The yanks currently have ~10,000 weapons of which about half can be delivered, the Rusians about 20,000, of which about a third can be delivered. We've got about 200 (all SLBM), China ~400, France ~350, Israel ~1-200, India ~50-60, Pakistan ~25-50. Russian weapons generally have significantly higher yield than American ones. China's notable in having pretty much the only deployable multi-megaton LRBMs and ICBMs.
I tend not to worry about being nuked by the US, China, Russia, etc.
There are plenty of other things to worry about
Posted: 18:10 May 28 2004 
