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A God Damned Separate Thread For Your Argument About Global Thermonuclear War
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more than one thing can escalate tensions
russia can't do anything to us as the conventional military forces are currently balanced, it's definitely going to be a struggle to get smaller countries to disarm, but we'd already done that with our adventures in the middle east and southeast asia
we don't have the budget to spend on military like we used to and tackle climate change, disband the arsenal, throw the money into climate change and nuclear defenses
russia can kvetch about it all they want to but if we don't have weapons doing a first strike from behind a nuclear shield is no longer a concern
really weird to me we keep going back to this when the US has made an example of this with like 5+ countries in the last two decades
the power of economic sanctions and gains in missile defense shifts the balance of power
unilaterally disarming when you also have a shiny new missile defense system is significantly different from showing your throat to your enemy
You know most missile defense systems are kinda shoddy at best right? Unilateral disarmament while a nut bag is only refraining from doing a nuclear Holocaust because he knows he’s target number two of he hits target number one is just fuckin dumb.
pretty sure disarmament will take more than a couple weeks
move in that direction, hammer out the problems with the defense system, i was under the impression it was further away too, but some of what i've read since this conflict started indicates we're a lot closer to solving that problem than i thought
worst case scenario we end up with only half what we'd need to end the world several times over
..nukes.
And probably doesn't work against nukes fired from close range. Plan tank all the nukes will not work.
nah, they bonk them out of the sky
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-Based_Midcourse_Defense
this isn't all the way there yet, but it's close enough that it's part of what escalated current tensions with russia, scared the shit out of them when we started putting these on the west coast
getting it from 97% to 100% while massively de-escalating our armaments isn't an unreasonable or unachievable goal, aside from the politics involved
russia's military is not our peer, that much is clear anymore, and somebody needs to start acting like the adults in the room
even if it doesn't work perfectly and we lose a city or two in the gambit that's better than global annihilation
we need to stop letting fear and selfishness dictate our policy
too many of the problems we used to shove elsewhere have already come home, this will too eventually
whether it's going past the point of no return with russia, or us losing control of our arsenal in the future, nothing good lies on this path
Again, none of this makes a lick of sense.
If the US disarms, that doesn't change the calculus for Russia except in that they can expect to not get nuked to oblivion should they hit the US with nukes. That actually increases the benefits of an aggressive foreign policy for Russia. Now you can push harder and threaten nukes if the US tried to push you back. Sure the US can beat you conventionally but they can't stop you from nuking them to hell and back when they try. And while you might both lose, the US in this case would lose way harder. This gives you even more leeway to continue to push the limits of what you can get away with.
Also it seems like you are still trying to parrot this "NATO aggression" line even after the Russians invaded Ukraine and it's kinda fucked up.
no, i'm saying the massive power imbalance wouldn't exist if russia didn't build up that force to fight with us
i'm consistently anti-imperialist, and anti-authoritarian, you can fuck off with any assertions that i have any sympathies for the modern russian government, or the ussr for the most part
third arrow exists for a reason
A single ICBM releases eight or more warheads that have to be killed. Not counting decoys. You would need upwards of 100,000 of the things. Also even if you succeed they can just...fire again?
why are you moving the goalposts?
i've already conceded that nuclear weapons make sense for most lesser powers in the short term, i'm only speaking to whether maintaining our own arsenal continues to be rational
so you're saying that we can nullify a nuclear strike for less than 1/5 of what we currently spend on nuclear warheads if my napkin math isn't fucked here (based on the $75mm cost per interceptor and 100k figure there)
not seeing a problem, and seems like we could probably find budget to protect some of those other countries under that umbrella too
Assuming it works, which spoiler it probably wouldn't. Also costs will scale up trying to deploy that many. And then they just fire again.
Or fire when you have 10,000 of them. Because doctrine is to assume any missile defense is a prelude to a first strike from behind said missile defense.
A nuclear deterrent is exactly that.
What massive power imbalance? And how would NATO disarming lead to Russia standing down when all their recent actions show that they view all neighbouring countries not under the umbrella of massive military power like NATO are there to be beaten into submission? Russia does not need the US to build up their forces. They only need the desire to impose their will on others and they've more then demonstrated their desire to do that at this point.
And you can claim to be whatever but your entire tangent so far about escalating tensions seems to be implying that people trying to avoid getting Ukrained is what is causing Russia to be belligerent.
TBH I think that would be a path to bankrupting Russia, because maintaining ICBMs is horrifically expensive, or ending up in proliferation of loose nukes or Russia even collapsing and having 20,000 strategic nukes floating about
I think the risk was assessed over "will Russia decide to end human life" vs the more practical "do we want more nukes in the world, since the number has slowly been going down"
decaying empire seeking relevance is causing russia's belligerence
but they wouldn't have 20x as many aircraft and all those other assets if they hadn't been preparing to fight us for 3/4 of a century
well that's kinda the problem we have now so maybe massively drawing down our armaments while continuing to deploy defenses would help relieve tension
This has long been one of the arguments against Star Wars (the Reagan era thing, not the movies). One of the big answers to any kind of missile defence system is to simply build more missiles. Quantity has a quality of it's own and all that.
Though that also went from the other side as well (ie - it made the US more belligerent) This is in fact a large part of the story of Watchmen.
Maybe read the bolded again. Drawing down isn't going to relieve tensions because once an actual missile shield is up we can draw back up, it's not like the tech goes away.
Their military would still be scaled to the size of their imperialist ambitions. In fact, they might be better tailored to that role. They'd still have the military to at least try and invade their neighbours and they'd still have nukes. The US threat is not why they have the forces to stomp on, say, Georgia.
you really want to make bets on the odds of an internal nuclear exchange happening in the US in the next century? you have a lot more confidence in the stability of this country than i do and I'd like to know where it's coming from
from down here in florida, we haven't really done anything to shore up the issues with our election infrastructure
part of the reason i think we need to disarm is that the collapse of any empire is inevitable, and we're showing a lot of cracks in our foundation rn
if we very publicly disarm, and share our defense tech, it would kick the can down the road at least
maybe we can revisit nuclear holocaust after improving society somewhat, idk
your argument would make more sense in a world in which we haven't been gradually installing an effective nuclear defense system for over a decade
Dude the deployed capacity if it works as advertised would stop 4 (four) warheads. That's it. Also one of the tests was a miss after the target didn't go on it's pre-planned trajectory, not exactly a stellar demonstration of targeting capacity. It's for NK doing something stupid and that's about it. And even that was getting Russia making noises about doing something. They aren't going to sit around while we build tens of thousands of the things.
And that limited development has already caused more nuclear weapon development in China and Russia.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50927648
it's an open question whether these things actually you know, work, but the ABM program is the stated reason for their existence.
so share the tech as part of a disarmament treaty
i'm not talking about flipping a light switch here, all i'm saying is that we're getting a lot closer to great powers fighting than people thought was possible with MAD
the kinetic defense and economic impact of sanctions have both developed to the point that it wouldn't hurt to reevaluate where we're at, current policy hasn't really lead to a great place, not stoked to be even closer to midnight than we were when i was a kid
MAD weapons exist to act as a wall that keeps your nation from being taken apart by other nations. As long as that is a thing that can happen, nations seek out new walls.
Yeah Nuclear Winter was always a sort of speculative thing. Air burst nukes don't necessarily raise massive amounts of dust, although the smoke from massive unfought fires might have some impact?
Hard to really say but I've seen figures that say an entire global thermonuclear war would put about as much dust and debris in the atmosphere as a larger volcanic eruption (granted, not localized) and might cause a measurable dip in global temperature but not like a years-long winter or speculative worst case.
Sure, but then someone will invent sport utility robots, and we will have to find another way to solve the problem once and for all.
Even at the peak of the global arsenal the whole "all life ten times over" thing was badly overblown, we probably wouldn't have driven ourselves to extinction and definitely wouldn't have triggered a mass extinction outside of large terrestrial fauna. The planet is *really* big and the arsenal peaked well below a major asteroid impact.
The arsenals now aren't just smaller, but made of lower yield weapons. The multi-megaton beasts of the mid-20th Century are gone. Not just the species but some level of civilization and possibly even industrial civilization would likely survive.
https://acoup.blog/2022/03/11/collections-nuclear-deterrence-101/
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