Largest American-made passenger vehicle that still fits in a regular lane width. You could use a short schoolbus or something, like a SWAT team, but they're less comfortable :)
Also more conspicuous. Suburbans are common enough that nobody would think twice about seeing 3 on the road in close proximity. Three short schoolbuses would be weird.
I think one of the coolest missiles is the sprint missile, turns 90 degrees goes fast af and glows orange almost immediately
Another tangent the kill vehicles which I'm not sure if they still use
Payload delivery is interesting (the multiple cones in the head separate and spin on re-entry)
And finally last tangent, a study on the effects of clouds/air particles hitting the faces of hypersonic glide vehicles, I remember a picture it looked like a #2 pencil tip but it was partially ablated
edit: I found that image I was thinking of sorry it's on X was just on Google Images
On that tangent I think the sub fired ones that ride a bubble of air to the surface, pop out and then once they start falling towards the water kick on are pretty neat. I think these are Trident SLBM rockets
The fun thing about watching a Sprint video for the first time is that you just assume it must be sped up. Eventually you realize that no, it really does accelerate that quickly.
Fun fact: when I drove out to see what was left of the launch complex, probably 20 years ago now, I was surprised to find a guy mowing the lawn and the lights still on! I assumed this was for some ABM treaty reasons. Wondering if it's still kept in that state.
ICBM interceptors have an insurmountable economic problem when facing a peer adversary. They cost as much as an ICBM does, so immediately you need to spend as much on defense as they spend on offense. Then consider that your interceptors might miss, and defend a limited area while the enemy's ICBMs can target anywhere, and you need to spend quite a bit more than they do. Add in MIRVs and suddenly you need to spend an order of magnitude more money to defend. If they want to, they can always outmatch your defenses.
Yes, but non-peer threats like North Korea are a growing concern.
I've seen powerpoint slides about GMD / Aegis / THAAD and press releases about successful tests. I'd imagine that's the threat profile they hope to cover and I imagine they have less internet hype than SPRINT simply because the good videos are all still classified.
GMD is meant to counter threats like North Korea. There aren’t enough interceptors to stop a strike even from China, but more than enough to stop an attack by NK.
You are out of date. North Korea currently deploys enough warheads to exhaust the current GMD system.
The problem is that adding another warhead (MRV or MIRV) is much much cheaper than building a whole new interceptor (and adding a decoy is cheaper still). The Hwangsung-17 almost certainly has MIRV capability (the Hwangsung-15 can put a single nuclear weapon anywhere in the United States, the only reason to go bigger is to MIRV it). The North Koreans put 12 of them in a recent parade, so that's at least 36 warheads, plus however many Hwangsung-15's they built. And unless you are doing boost phase interception (like the ABL, which was ultimately canceled do to being too vulnerable) it will just always be easier to put 3 warheads on a missile than you can build three new interceptors (technically, given the way GMD works, you ought to build 12 new interceptors- the plan with GMD is to launch four interceptors per target, so our current 44 interceptors provides protection against 11 targets total). The defenders are breaking windows with guineas, which just isn't sustainable unless you have an absolutely enormous economic advantage over the adversary. And even then North Korea has already built enough to overmatch the existing US missile defense systems. At 4 warheads per Hwangsung-17, the ones in the parade alone exhaust the GMD system even if they fire 1 interceptor per target instead of 4. Which I suspect was why the North Koreans paraded exactly that many missile launchers in 2023.
This basic bit of economics is why Richard Nixon signed the ABM Treaty in the first place. Idiots who thought that no one would ever be as smart as they were pulled the US out, and the result has been the utter destruction of most of our arms control treaties for negative benefit.
Maybe a few years ago. Recent estimates for NK is ~40 fissile material for warheads and similar number of icbms, which incidentally is around how many gmd interceptors US has. Ideally need >1 interceptor for each incoming, so matter of NK dud rates.
The economic problem isn't nearly as insurmountable as postulated: A GBI interceptor is ~$70M. A Sentinel ICBM is ~$140M. An NGI interceptor is ~$100M. So already, we see that the interceptors are cheaper than an ICBM (though admittedly about the same order of magnitude). Standard Missile-3 is $10M-$28M (depending on version)
But the cost of the missiles themselves are not the only problem: you have to pay for all the apparatus around the missiles. That's the silos, the command and control, etc. ICBMs demand silos that can survive near missiles from nuclear warheads. The launch control centers need the same survivability. Truth be told, we can't build more. We're refurbishing all of the Minuteman missile silos for Sentinel. You need these to survive to the end of the world, so that you can make sure they people who ended yours also have theirs ended. You also need not just survivability, but assured control. An ICBM launching is the start of a nuclear war. We need to make sure that it doesn't start by accident. The net result is that the Sentinel program is $141B for 659 missiles in 400 silos).
Contra wise, an interceptor needs protection from the elements and maybe special forces attack. By the time the end of the world has come, they have all launched. So the silos are comparatively cheap. The launch control center is cheap. If a missile is launched by accident, it's just money (and a reduced amount of potential defense). It's not the end of the world.
GBI and NGI are National Missile Defense systems. The defended area is limited, but to say that is to underrate how much area is defended. It's all of North America. SM-3 Blk-IIA has a defended footprint equal to half the US (as in, a ship just outside SF Bay can defend out to Nebraska; a ship at Hampton Roads can also defend out to the other side of Nebraska) [0]. NGI even is designed for multiple kill vehicles. Which is to say, it kills multiple MIRVs.
But the problem is that the cost curve is actually the reverse of what you assume: if the warhead can't always get through, and you have to choose where your warheads land, and you don't know which ones won't get through, you have to assume that the defender might just decided that the target you really want dead, is the target they really want to protect. So if the US has 40 interceptors, and can shoot down an estimated 22 warheads with them, I have to paste the Pentagon with 23 warheads to make sure that it's dead. So the other 22 targets that were going to get hit, no longer can get warheads allocated to them. This applies to every other target the Russians want to kill. So suddenly, they don't have 1700 targets to hit with 1700 warheads, they have 74 targets. It will really suck to live in those 74 targets, but the other 1600 some places on the target list are going to be better off. And to hit another target, the Russians would need to add another 24 warheads to their ICBM force. But to force the Russians back to distributing those warheads among the 74 targets, the US would have to kill an average of another 1/3 of a warhead. Recall back that the SM-3 Blk IIA is ~$28M, while a Sentinel ICBM is ~$240M per deployed missile.
This doesn't even get into how the interceptors force the ICBM MIRVs to become less accurate, or hypersonic boost glide vehicles being limited to 1 per launcher, or the fact that we can track HGVs for the entire route, and decoys don't work for them.
Putin claims to have low-flying hypersonic missiles, the Oreshnik, they would be extremely difficult to detect and nearly impossible to intercept. The hypersonic part has been verified - I haven't seen any confirmations of its low-flying capability (meaning it can maneuver around terrain).
Of course, he claims that it can't be stopped, but he is making that claim in the midst of imperfect intelligence of his opponent. And it's Putin we're talking about, he'd claim Russia has flying pigs if he thought were advantageous to.
All ballistic missiles are hypersonic (except very short-range ones), when people talk about "hypersonic missiles" they mean ones that have a hypersonic glide phase during which they can manoeuvre enough to evade interception.
Putin is wrong. Even Ted Postol, who has been (falsely, I think!) accused of all sorts of loyalties in the Syrian missile drama, has said that the Oreshnik is a normal intermediate range ballistic missile (variant of the RS-26) and not a low flying hypersonic missile.
He also rejected the claim that inert warheads can do the damage that Putin claimed. Which is obvious, since the warheads cannot have more kinetic energy than the total energy of the rocket fuel minus drag.
Hypersonic, yes. All IRBMs have hypersonic warheads on reentry.
There's an excellent publicly released video made about an older test. It has some of the clearest footage of the actual reentries and impacts, and is also worth watching for the sheer 90s vibe of the production.
> In light of the one that failed in November 2023,
That's concerning. If we rely on MAD for survival, we shouldn't signal weakness or unpreparedness with our nuclear arsenal.
Nukes are such a double-edged sword. If nuclear proliferation continues, I wonder if the MAD doctrine will even work. All it would take is one suicidal despot or slip up to destroy the world.
The fragile world hypothesis as an answer to the Fermi Paradox seems uncomfortably likely to me. (A "fragile universe" where the first aliens to initiate vacuum collapse to restart the universe also seems plausible.)
> That's extremely concerning. If we rely on MAD for survival, we should never signal weakness or unpreparedness with our nuclear arsenal.
Not as much as you would think. Ballistic missiles are not the most reliable things in the world, you expect some degree of failures, especially at longer ranges. When Iran launched its massive ballistic missile barrage at Israel last year, I saw estimates that as many as half failed, either during boost phase or during the midcourse phase. And while that isn't great, it's not entirely unexpected. American ICBMs are expected to be more reliable than that, but we're probably talking about 70-80% in realistic conditions (My source is the "Iran and Israel's Missile War" episode of the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, where Dr. Lewis makes those statements. A quick google didn't give a written source). The reason this doesn't matter overly much is because the US (and other nuclear powers) have a lot of missiles. Even if your missiles have 50% reliability, if you just make twice as many missiles as you need there isn't really an issue. You still want your missiles as reliable as possible, of course, and you want your tests to be especially reliable for signaling purposes. But a failed test every now and then is not going to fundamentally alter the risk calculus.
MAD is needed if two sides have an offensive first strike doctrine. USSR did not have one. China has an unclear one.
NATO has an offensive one.
After reading the official statements of nuclear use, with the US having "sink an airship carrier and find out", I thought: Are we the baddies? Rules as written, NATO is not interested in the survival of the human race, but in winning every war.
Just because some nuclear armed countries pinky swear they won't strike first doesn't mean MAD is suddenly not needed...
Even if every known nuclear weapon in the world was decommissioned it'd likely still be needed, in today's dollars the Manhattan project was $30 billion. And you gotta assume modern technology and knowledge would make it quite a bit cheaper.
It says that Russia may use nuclear weapons in the event
of “aggression against the Russian Federation and/or the
Republic of Belarus…with the use of conventional weapons,
creating a critical threat to their sovereignty and/or
territorial integrity.”
Of course, they don't define what "critical threat" means. Ukraine has occupied Kursk for half a year now. Is that... a threat? A critical one?
> Are we the baddies? Rules as written, NATO is not interested in the survival of the human race, but in winning every war.
Russia seems to have an unclear one as well. They've certainly implied the use of tactical warheads as an option with the Russo-Ukraine war should it reach a certain point.
As for if we're the baddies... don't touch the boats. shrugs
Depends on the nato country, but most only use if attacked, which makes perfect sense as these where times where the most dangerous country was the udssr for them.
If you where a nato country you had the problem that by the time reinforcment from the usa could arrive, the udssr could potentially be in control of most if not all of europe.
While the udssr didn't really had that concern, as they had more than enough room to retreat, reform and defend.
In such a scenario it's very easy for the udssr to have a no first strike policy when there was simply no way for any european country to invade them, while smaller countries would have had a real concern that they either use their weapons to the full effect or have no chance to do so.
IMHO there is also the substantial benefit that the udssr now knew that any attack meant that they would trigger a war without winners, e.g. they couldn't fight and then retreat to safe bases deep in their territory
Is survival of the human race worth it if some of the "baddies" get into power? USSR was not a great place to live. There is a lot about China I don't like. (there is also a lot about the US I don't like, but in theory at least I have some voice in changing it unlike the other two)
From a game theory perspective for Europe the best policy is to agree to destroy all of humanity before accepting Russian control of Europe. Then the Russians can decide whether they still want to try and the US can decide between being collateral damage or helping Europe.
Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your perspective, Europe is too divided and too civilised to make that threat and probably at this point not strong enough from a military perspective to execute on it.
> Then the Russians can decide whether they still want to try and the US can decide between being collateral damage or helping Europe.
You left out one option in the the US's decision space: a surprise attack against Europe. I don't think the UK & France combined have enough nuclear warheads to cause an Extinction Level Event without US assistance. But still, if they think the destruction of human civilization is the correct position to take, might be best if we help extirpate them while they aren't sufficiently armed.
Yes. That's the future of what MAD between the West and USSR used to be. Promise to destroy the earth if one of the others decides to occupy your continent.
1) When there are lots of actors. As the number of potential threats go up, the probability that someone will act "irrationally" goes up combinatorially. This is why monopolies always act to benefit themselves, oligopolies usually act in their own interest, but competitive markets always have some defector that triggers a price war.
2) When one of the actors is dead anyway. MAD relies on total annihilation being a negative consequence. If total annihilation is what's going to happen to you anyway, you have no incentive not to launch the missiles.
3) When the responsible party for a launch can't be identified. If you launch but your other enemy gets blamed for it, you've killed two birds with one stone.
Note that the U.S. government has very strong doctrines in place to avert each of these conditions. Nuclear non-proliferation, strong sanctions or military action on countries that are developing nuclear weapons, and nuclear secrecy are all to avert #1. American reliance on soft-power and us keeping dictators in power even when we don't like them are to avert #2. U.S. intelligence agencies are to avert #3.
Despite all this, all three of these conditions are fraying. I'm not all that optimistic that we'll avert nuclear armageddon. The game theorists at RAND corporation knew what they were doing, though.
> Nukes are such a double-edged sword. If nuclear proliferation continues, I wonder if the MAD doctrine will even work.
Now that the USA has thrown up a giant middle finger to Europe & NATO, it sure seems like more countries are going to have to make their own nuclear weapons. No one is coming to help you Poland; that's the new American stance. So everyone start proliferating!
It absolutely makes the situation much much much harder to manage. Now, and in a longer term as nations go through their own fits & tantrums over time. As, we see, happens.
England And France have long had nuclear bombs of their own. Other countries have made them. Iran and Israel officially don't have them, but everyone knows that at minimum they can have them in months if they want them (and they may have them). It is a big engineering task, but not something impossible for nearly any country if they really want to (but in general it costs more than they are worth and so isn't worth it)
Even today, the vast majority of your military spending should be in something else. Precision targeted small explosives generally get the job you need done much better that destroy the whole earth.
Not really. There are a lot of hints that anyone who used nukes will be wiped off the earth if they ever use them. Nukes are useful to North Korea to show they can make them - that is bragging rights, not generally not useful in war.
We (UK) long gave up our nuclear sovereignty, we've relied entirely upon warheads we rent from the US since the 90s, since 1970 if you consider our Polaris subs and WE177 bombs to have been the same deal - we claimed to have autonomy over the warheads, but it's questionable; Blue Steel was the last, true, british nuclear weapon - and even that used a modified W28 warhead, but they were at least 'home built'.
> We (UK) long gave up our nuclear sovereignty, we've relied entirely upon warheads we rent from the US since the 90s, since 1970 if you consider our Polaris subs and WE177 bombs to have been the same deal - we claimed to have autonomy over the warheads, but it's questionable.
I think you got it backwards - the warheads are still British-made, they're stuck on top of US missiles.
Everyone "knows this", but officially they do not admit to having them. Thus it is possible (very unlikely, but possible) that they don't have them. Nobody who we have reason to believe know and tell the truth are talking, though some who have might know reason to lie have given various numbers.
Agreed that making the bomb is relatively affordable. And yes the UK and France are well equipped. UK alas has been as dodgy faithless unreliable player in the world as Trump, but perhaps maybe France would step up when the tanks roll & defend your nation, but how many nations want to leave their existential existence relying upon a single other nation?
I agree with your gist that this ain't a massive economic burden (although my gods, trying to get from ancient Minuteman to Sentinel in the US has been a far-harder-than-it-should-be travail). But that's not the point.
The point is proliferation. For not-that-much-less-than a century, the world has agreed that these horrific terrible incredible weapons are too dangerous, are something we should encourage nations to not build, to not need. Because there have been perceived responsible respectable decent powers of the world who have pledged to defend the free world against enemies and incursions. Who are vested in world stability, who see that afraid nations building the bomb for themselves creates a risk that some day those bombs aren't under control, are used by bad players. Conservatism towards the bomb has been an agreed praxis everywhere.
And the DJT America has just slid up behind anti&proliferation and slit it's throat and left the bleeding out body of an incredibly sane-making de-risking world-stabilizing force. By being an absolute grade-A weak skinned petty douche.
After world war 2, the US has never used anywhere near our real might. The cries that we are the terror here seems irredeemably false, propaganda at best.
I find it gross as hell, but the "switchblade" drones we have favored have basically no collateral damage. And Biden stopped the drone warfare almost entirely.
It's unclear to me what the complaint really is. I don't see it.
Might be the birth defects from Agent Orange, the running children with napalm stuck to them, the tens of thousands of bomblets across several SE Asian contries, selling drugs to US citizens to fund weapons sales to groups destabilising other governments, . . .
There's an entire laundry list of legit complaints about post WWII US actions.
Made up weapons of mass destruction, ... it keeps on going.
You can shrug all that off, sure, but there's certainly justification for others to see the US as a source of terror.
Will France nuke Russia to retaliate for Russia nuking Poland? If I were a Pole, I'd be very hesitant to rely on that. (The US too, even before the current administration, but at least I'd know the US could trash the Russian military by conventional means.)
It's not the same France, but 1938 France, along with England came to the Munich Agreement with Italy and Germany to let Germany annex part of Czechoslovakia, despite France and Czechoslovakia having a mutual assistance pact.
Ukraine's Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances doesn't seem to have gotten them much in the way of territorial integrity either.
If I were bordering Russia or any other state that seems interested in expanding its borders, I'd be concerned that international agreements might not deter such expansion and wonder what could be done. Obtaining the means for MAD seems reasonable, although the costs are high and perhaps unjustifiable.
We've been showing a concerning amount of weakness lately. The government is in total chaos, we have navy planes and helicopters falling out of the sky, a navy aircraft carrier even managed to plow into another ship, inflation is out of control, we've got mystery drones in the sky, we're incapable of manufacturing and are almost totally dependent on china who also hacks the shit out of us, over half the population reads below a 6th grade level and our nation's science literacy is even worse, we can't get our own Astronauts off the ISS, and the population is suffering under record levels of household debt and homelessness.
I expect to start seeing a lot more articles giving "signals of strength" to try and offset the many signs of weakness and failure which have been painting a target on us.
If you feel like you sleep too peacefully, try the book “Nuclear War” by Annie Jacobsen. It presents a very well-researched and plausible account of how nuclear war could unfold.
I found it to be a poorly researched and implausible bit of hysteria. It's a sophomoric reddit post.
The entire thing hedges on
1. US launching only a handful of mid course interceptors and they all fail, Aegis/SM-3, the most mature ABM system is not even mentioned. If I were the US DOD I would keep an Arleigh-Burke parked outside of North Korea at all times.
2. A North Korean submarine makes it to the coast of California without being tailed and isn't immediately destroyed by a sub after the initial salvo.
3. Russia keeps their phone on silent while nuclear war breaks out
It also has a gigantic pile of obvious errors about how the operational principles and communication chains differ for solid fuel rockets compared to liquid fuel rockets in launching and observing countries. You don't even need to go through coercive diplomacy papers or arms control books for this stuff, there are detailed primers for it on the likes of Globalsecurity.
The past 80 years have been the most peaceful in history. Nukes work to bring peace.
The problem is that you trade the virtual certainty of periodic destructive wars for a small but non-zero chance of an utterly apocalyptic war. The big question I don't see people asking is, what probability makes this tradeoff worthwhile? One in a hundred per year? One in a thousand? One in a million? Based on what I know about how these systems work, and the history of near misses, I suspect the probability is closer to one in a hundred than one in a million.
Regardless of whether limited exchanges are possible (and how the views on their relative impossibility differ across the relevant bodies), there's a very clear downside to being the weaker party in an lopsided distribution of arsenals, as has famously been exhibited twice already.
> The past 80 years have been the most peaceful in history.
This reminds me of that mlk bit about the white liberal who "prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice"
We may be at peace, but not in terms that will hold when our grasp on power slips. Half the world wants us dead, and who can blame them? We've destroyed the world to enrich ourselves. We're not lady liberty, we're tony soprano.
The DoD is likely the most evil institution in all of history. Perhaps tied with the political parties that are its flipside. When you factor in global warming, it's undeniable.
I think that's fine, have seen this published publicly before. A major part of the test is the operational testing, so the crews who actually do the test fire treat it exactly like they would in the field, and are isolated from the more test side of things. This includes the maintenance crews from the field who work on that particular missile. Sometimes the Airborne Launch Control System aircraft is involved, but infrequently afaik.
The test side in parallel treats it like a normal-ish space launch with countdown, tracking, telemetry, etc and the ability to destruct if it goes off course. None of that is possible with an unmodified weapon.
I am not aware of tests ever being a part of broader war game type simulations as that is probably too hair-trigger for the Russians, etc.
> the crews who actually do the test fire treat it exactly like they would in the field, and are isolated from the more test side of thing
Is anyone kept blind about it being a test? Like, does the crew wake up in the morning knowing "we're gonna launch a fake nuke today", or are they drinking their morning coffee like any other day in the bunker and suddenly the glaxon starts glaxoning?
Not at all, as keep in mind they pack up a (random) operational ICBM and crew from Wyoming, South Dakota or wherever and transport it to Vandenberg SFB in California to test launch it from there.
Similar to what gedy described, when the UK operated Thor missiles, periodically crews and missiles were flown to Vandenberg for test launches. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Emily>
Seems like this would help enemies of the US, now they know the capabilities, they can observe and likely use telemetry against it, and than take active measures to combat it.
"The ICBM test and evaluation program helps validate the reliability the nuclear umbrella our allies and partners rely on, eliminating the need to obtain their own nuclear weapons to counter potential adversaries."
I'd want to be standing outside the error bounds, plus 5 miles.
I think that it's important we know these systems work. There's some freaking amazing technology built into them back when I was a kid. If even 50% of them actually work, we're way ahead of everyone else.
I'd be surprised if anything in Russia works at a rate of more than 1%.
This is an old gem dating back to the MX system, which was actually much newer than the Minuteman III system at the time. [0]
MX was deactivated in 2005 per SALT II. [1]
They moved the enhanced RVs from MX over to Minuteman. [2]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a1acYZ93yc
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-118_Peacekeeper#Retirement...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LGM-30_Minuteman&...
How they move them is also fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safeguards_Transporter
More info on the Transporter. They tested it using rockets fire another transport truck at it.
https://www.twz.com/37156/new-nuke-transporting-tractor-trai...
https://www.twz.com/14253/the-us-moves-nukes-in-booby-trappe...
> typically escorted by three dark colored Chevrolet Suburbans
Why the fetish for this particular vehicle, even when anonymity is at a premium?
Largest American-made passenger vehicle that still fits in a regular lane width. You could use a short schoolbus or something, like a SWAT team, but they're less comfortable :)
Also more conspicuous. Suburbans are common enough that nobody would think twice about seeing 3 on the road in close proximity. Three short schoolbuses would be weird.
Three black suburbans in a row are definitely very conspicuous.
Even bigger than my Yukon Denali XL by .5 inches despite having the identical frame.
Lot lizards will have a bad day if they proposition that truck!
(on the topic of defense vs. offense above)
I think one of the coolest missiles is the sprint missile, turns 90 degrees goes fast af and glows orange almost immediately
Another tangent the kill vehicles which I'm not sure if they still use
Payload delivery is interesting (the multiple cones in the head separate and spin on re-entry)
And finally last tangent, a study on the effects of clouds/air particles hitting the faces of hypersonic glide vehicles, I remember a picture it looked like a #2 pencil tip but it was partially ablated
edit: I found that image I was thinking of sorry it's on X was just on Google Images
https://x.com/masao_dahlgren/status/1488632918465470467
(Reentry vehicle nosetip after flying through rain at Mach 10)
Especially notable is the Sprint accelerated at 100g! That's Mach 10 in < 4s.
The British Swingfire missile does this too, hence the name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swingfire
I think Russia has one too (missile that can turn 90 deg), a big one that comes out of the ground
edit: probably not that big of a deal to be able to do that but it looks cool
On that tangent I think the sub fired ones that ride a bubble of air to the surface, pop out and then once they start falling towards the water kick on are pretty neat. I think these are Trident SLBM rockets
Some Russian missiles have even been seen turning 180 degrees!
Onyx coastal defense
The fun thing about watching a Sprint video for the first time is that you just assume it must be sped up. Eventually you realize that no, it really does accelerate that quickly.
It’s absolutely breathtaking and unreal to watch it go woooosh. I mean what a marvel of engineering.
Soviet/Russian ICBM interceptor looks cool too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8W1L6TDG7w
Oh yeah the anti-ship ones turn 90 degrees, probably what I was thinking of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QOPZd49W5I
Submarine Brahmos also does this apparently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA3M75ry_S0
Sprint is long out of service.
Fun fact: when I drove out to see what was left of the launch complex, probably 20 years ago now, I was surprised to find a guy mowing the lawn and the lights still on! I assumed this was for some ABM treaty reasons. Wondering if it's still kept in that state.
Sprint never went into service. An Army Colonel I am friends with got to watch the final experimental launch at White Sands.
ICBM interceptors have an insurmountable economic problem when facing a peer adversary. They cost as much as an ICBM does, so immediately you need to spend as much on defense as they spend on offense. Then consider that your interceptors might miss, and defend a limited area while the enemy's ICBMs can target anywhere, and you need to spend quite a bit more than they do. Add in MIRVs and suddenly you need to spend an order of magnitude more money to defend. If they want to, they can always outmatch your defenses.
Yes, but non-peer threats like North Korea are a growing concern.
I've seen powerpoint slides about GMD / Aegis / THAAD and press releases about successful tests. I'd imagine that's the threat profile they hope to cover and I imagine they have less internet hype than SPRINT simply because the good videos are all still classified.
GMD is meant to counter threats like North Korea. There aren’t enough interceptors to stop a strike even from China, but more than enough to stop an attack by NK.
You are out of date. North Korea currently deploys enough warheads to exhaust the current GMD system.
The problem is that adding another warhead (MRV or MIRV) is much much cheaper than building a whole new interceptor (and adding a decoy is cheaper still). The Hwangsung-17 almost certainly has MIRV capability (the Hwangsung-15 can put a single nuclear weapon anywhere in the United States, the only reason to go bigger is to MIRV it). The North Koreans put 12 of them in a recent parade, so that's at least 36 warheads, plus however many Hwangsung-15's they built. And unless you are doing boost phase interception (like the ABL, which was ultimately canceled do to being too vulnerable) it will just always be easier to put 3 warheads on a missile than you can build three new interceptors (technically, given the way GMD works, you ought to build 12 new interceptors- the plan with GMD is to launch four interceptors per target, so our current 44 interceptors provides protection against 11 targets total). The defenders are breaking windows with guineas, which just isn't sustainable unless you have an absolutely enormous economic advantage over the adversary. And even then North Korea has already built enough to overmatch the existing US missile defense systems. At 4 warheads per Hwangsung-17, the ones in the parade alone exhaust the GMD system even if they fire 1 interceptor per target instead of 4. Which I suspect was why the North Koreans paraded exactly that many missile launchers in 2023.
This basic bit of economics is why Richard Nixon signed the ABM Treaty in the first place. Idiots who thought that no one would ever be as smart as they were pulled the US out, and the result has been the utter destruction of most of our arms control treaties for negative benefit.
>more than enough to stop an attack by NK.
Maybe a few years ago. Recent estimates for NK is ~40 fissile material for warheads and similar number of icbms, which incidentally is around how many gmd interceptors US has. Ideally need >1 interceptor for each incoming, so matter of NK dud rates.
The economic problem isn't nearly as insurmountable as postulated: A GBI interceptor is ~$70M. A Sentinel ICBM is ~$140M. An NGI interceptor is ~$100M. So already, we see that the interceptors are cheaper than an ICBM (though admittedly about the same order of magnitude). Standard Missile-3 is $10M-$28M (depending on version)
But the cost of the missiles themselves are not the only problem: you have to pay for all the apparatus around the missiles. That's the silos, the command and control, etc. ICBMs demand silos that can survive near missiles from nuclear warheads. The launch control centers need the same survivability. Truth be told, we can't build more. We're refurbishing all of the Minuteman missile silos for Sentinel. You need these to survive to the end of the world, so that you can make sure they people who ended yours also have theirs ended. You also need not just survivability, but assured control. An ICBM launching is the start of a nuclear war. We need to make sure that it doesn't start by accident. The net result is that the Sentinel program is $141B for 659 missiles in 400 silos).
Contra wise, an interceptor needs protection from the elements and maybe special forces attack. By the time the end of the world has come, they have all launched. So the silos are comparatively cheap. The launch control center is cheap. If a missile is launched by accident, it's just money (and a reduced amount of potential defense). It's not the end of the world.
GBI and NGI are National Missile Defense systems. The defended area is limited, but to say that is to underrate how much area is defended. It's all of North America. SM-3 Blk-IIA has a defended footprint equal to half the US (as in, a ship just outside SF Bay can defend out to Nebraska; a ship at Hampton Roads can also defend out to the other side of Nebraska) [0]. NGI even is designed for multiple kill vehicles. Which is to say, it kills multiple MIRVs.
But the problem is that the cost curve is actually the reverse of what you assume: if the warhead can't always get through, and you have to choose where your warheads land, and you don't know which ones won't get through, you have to assume that the defender might just decided that the target you really want dead, is the target they really want to protect. So if the US has 40 interceptors, and can shoot down an estimated 22 warheads with them, I have to paste the Pentagon with 23 warheads to make sure that it's dead. So the other 22 targets that were going to get hit, no longer can get warheads allocated to them. This applies to every other target the Russians want to kill. So suddenly, they don't have 1700 targets to hit with 1700 warheads, they have 74 targets. It will really suck to live in those 74 targets, but the other 1600 some places on the target list are going to be better off. And to hit another target, the Russians would need to add another 24 warheads to their ICBM force. But to force the Russians back to distributing those warheads among the 74 targets, the US would have to kill an average of another 1/3 of a warhead. Recall back that the SM-3 Blk IIA is ~$28M, while a Sentinel ICBM is ~$240M per deployed missile.
This doesn't even get into how the interceptors force the ICBM MIRVs to become less accurate, or hypersonic boost glide vehicles being limited to 1 per launcher, or the fact that we can track HGVs for the entire route, and decoys don't work for them.
0: https://breakingdefense.com/2015/07/aegis-ashore-navy-needs-... image near the bottom shows footprint of IIA
Can offensive ICBMs turn 90 degrees in air?
Zero need for them to do that.
Still, apparently they can turn sharply, this looks like 40':
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuverable_reentry_vehicle
The "Flight test of the Advanced Maneuverable Reentry Vehicle in early 1980" photo at the bottom. That was a while ago.
Why is that relevant?
Sprint was in service for one day before Congress voted to decommission the site.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_R._Mickelsen_Safeguard...
Putin claims to have low-flying hypersonic missiles, the Oreshnik, they would be extremely difficult to detect and nearly impossible to intercept. The hypersonic part has been verified - I haven't seen any confirmations of its low-flying capability (meaning it can maneuver around terrain).
Of course, he claims that it can't be stopped, but he is making that claim in the midst of imperfect intelligence of his opponent. And it's Putin we're talking about, he'd claim Russia has flying pigs if he thought were advantageous to.
Oreshnik is a ballistic missile. It was originally mistaken for an ICBM. Hypersonic, yes (as are ICBMs from the 1960s). Low altitude, no.
All ballistic missiles are hypersonic (except very short-range ones), when people talk about "hypersonic missiles" they mean ones that have a hypersonic glide phase during which they can manoeuvre enough to evade interception.
Putin is wrong. Even Ted Postol, who has been (falsely, I think!) accused of all sorts of loyalties in the Syrian missile drama, has said that the Oreshnik is a normal intermediate range ballistic missile (variant of the RS-26) and not a low flying hypersonic missile.
He also rejected the claim that inert warheads can do the damage that Putin claimed. Which is obvious, since the warheads cannot have more kinetic energy than the total energy of the rocket fuel minus drag.
Hypersonic, yes. All IRBMs have hypersonic warheads on reentry.
There's an excellent publicly released video made about an older test. It has some of the clearest footage of the actual reentries and impacts, and is also worth watching for the sheer 90s vibe of the production.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDL_pIPScSI
Hopefully they manage to not-fire / re-hire the folks that maintain the actual weapon systems:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43076137
In light of the one that failed in November 2023, I'm glad this one worked.
That's why there is a Nuclear Triad, giving multiple ways to deploy them in case one method fails.
> In light of the one that failed in November 2023,
That's concerning. If we rely on MAD for survival, we shouldn't signal weakness or unpreparedness with our nuclear arsenal.
Nukes are such a double-edged sword. If nuclear proliferation continues, I wonder if the MAD doctrine will even work. All it would take is one suicidal despot or slip up to destroy the world.
The fragile world hypothesis as an answer to the Fermi Paradox seems uncomfortably likely to me. (A "fragile universe" where the first aliens to initiate vacuum collapse to restart the universe also seems plausible.)
> That's extremely concerning. If we rely on MAD for survival, we should never signal weakness or unpreparedness with our nuclear arsenal.
Not as much as you would think. Ballistic missiles are not the most reliable things in the world, you expect some degree of failures, especially at longer ranges. When Iran launched its massive ballistic missile barrage at Israel last year, I saw estimates that as many as half failed, either during boost phase or during the midcourse phase. And while that isn't great, it's not entirely unexpected. American ICBMs are expected to be more reliable than that, but we're probably talking about 70-80% in realistic conditions (My source is the "Iran and Israel's Missile War" episode of the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, where Dr. Lewis makes those statements. A quick google didn't give a written source). The reason this doesn't matter overly much is because the US (and other nuclear powers) have a lot of missiles. Even if your missiles have 50% reliability, if you just make twice as many missiles as you need there isn't really an issue. You still want your missiles as reliable as possible, of course, and you want your tests to be especially reliable for signaling purposes. But a failed test every now and then is not going to fundamentally alter the risk calculus.
MAD is needed if two sides have an offensive first strike doctrine. USSR did not have one. China has an unclear one.
NATO has an offensive one.
After reading the official statements of nuclear use, with the US having "sink an airship carrier and find out", I thought: Are we the baddies? Rules as written, NATO is not interested in the survival of the human race, but in winning every war.
Just because some nuclear armed countries pinky swear they won't strike first doesn't mean MAD is suddenly not needed...
Even if every known nuclear weapon in the world was decommissioned it'd likely still be needed, in today's dollars the Manhattan project was $30 billion. And you gotta assume modern technology and knowledge would make it quite a bit cheaper.
I'm not sure any public statements on nuclear doctrine should be taken literally.
Like the latest one from Russia (Dec. 2024) which pretty much amounts to "whenever the fuck we feel like it?"https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2024-12/news/russia-revises-...
Of course, they don't define what "critical threat" means. Ukraine has occupied Kursk for half a year now. Is that... a threat? A critical one?> Are we the baddies? Rules as written, NATO is not interested in the survival of the human race, but in winning every war.
Russia seems to have an unclear one as well. They've certainly implied the use of tactical warheads as an option with the Russo-Ukraine war should it reach a certain point.
As for if we're the baddies... don't touch the boats. shrugs
Depends on the nato country, but most only use if attacked, which makes perfect sense as these where times where the most dangerous country was the udssr for them.
If you where a nato country you had the problem that by the time reinforcment from the usa could arrive, the udssr could potentially be in control of most if not all of europe.
While the udssr didn't really had that concern, as they had more than enough room to retreat, reform and defend.
In such a scenario it's very easy for the udssr to have a no first strike policy when there was simply no way for any european country to invade them, while smaller countries would have had a real concern that they either use their weapons to the full effect or have no chance to do so.
IMHO there is also the substantial benefit that the udssr now knew that any attack meant that they would trigger a war without winners, e.g. they couldn't fight and then retreat to safe bases deep in their territory
NATO's policy makes sense, the winners of the last war are always the good guys, so even if you have to be bad to win it, history will absolve you.
MAD helps make sure they keep that doctrine, and make sure they're not lying about it.
Is survival of the human race worth it if some of the "baddies" get into power? USSR was not a great place to live. There is a lot about China I don't like. (there is also a lot about the US I don't like, but in theory at least I have some voice in changing it unlike the other two)
I think nuclear winter is probably worse than the soviets, yes?? the USSR eventually fell. you can't really recover from enough nukes.
From a game theory perspective for Europe the best policy is to agree to destroy all of humanity before accepting Russian control of Europe. Then the Russians can decide whether they still want to try and the US can decide between being collateral damage or helping Europe.
Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your perspective, Europe is too divided and too civilised to make that threat and probably at this point not strong enough from a military perspective to execute on it.
> Then the Russians can decide whether they still want to try and the US can decide between being collateral damage or helping Europe.
You left out one option in the the US's decision space: a surprise attack against Europe. I don't think the UK & France combined have enough nuclear warheads to cause an Extinction Level Event without US assistance. But still, if they think the destruction of human civilization is the correct position to take, might be best if we help extirpate them while they aren't sufficiently armed.
Are you being sarcastic or do you seriously believe nuking the entire earth would be better than living in China??
Yes, 100%.
In a nuclear world you need to believe this (and your rivals need to know you 100% believe) or you won't survive to the next round of the game.
Yes. That's the future of what MAD between the West and USSR used to be. Promise to destroy the earth if one of the others decides to occupy your continent.
I think that is a question that everyone needs to ask themselves.
“The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.”
That’s not a choice to be made by superpower heads of state, but by individual people.
The US may well be in the end stage of democracy, and sliding into fascism. I'm starting to have second thoughts on cheering for them.
>NATO has an offensive one.
Israel, also.
There are three major conditions where MAD fails:
1) When there are lots of actors. As the number of potential threats go up, the probability that someone will act "irrationally" goes up combinatorially. This is why monopolies always act to benefit themselves, oligopolies usually act in their own interest, but competitive markets always have some defector that triggers a price war.
2) When one of the actors is dead anyway. MAD relies on total annihilation being a negative consequence. If total annihilation is what's going to happen to you anyway, you have no incentive not to launch the missiles.
3) When the responsible party for a launch can't be identified. If you launch but your other enemy gets blamed for it, you've killed two birds with one stone.
Note that the U.S. government has very strong doctrines in place to avert each of these conditions. Nuclear non-proliferation, strong sanctions or military action on countries that are developing nuclear weapons, and nuclear secrecy are all to avert #1. American reliance on soft-power and us keeping dictators in power even when we don't like them are to avert #2. U.S. intelligence agencies are to avert #3.
Despite all this, all three of these conditions are fraying. I'm not all that optimistic that we'll avert nuclear armageddon. The game theorists at RAND corporation knew what they were doing, though.
> Nukes are such a double-edged sword. If nuclear proliferation continues, I wonder if the MAD doctrine will even work.
Now that the USA has thrown up a giant middle finger to Europe & NATO, it sure seems like more countries are going to have to make their own nuclear weapons. No one is coming to help you Poland; that's the new American stance. So everyone start proliferating!
It absolutely makes the situation much much much harder to manage. Now, and in a longer term as nations go through their own fits & tantrums over time. As, we see, happens.
England And France have long had nuclear bombs of their own. Other countries have made them. Iran and Israel officially don't have them, but everyone knows that at minimum they can have them in months if they want them (and they may have them). It is a big engineering task, but not something impossible for nearly any country if they really want to (but in general it costs more than they are worth and so isn't worth it)
Even today, the vast majority of your military spending should be in something else. Precision targeted small explosives generally get the job you need done much better that destroy the whole earth.
Not really. There are a lot of hints that anyone who used nukes will be wiped off the earth if they ever use them. Nukes are useful to North Korea to show they can make them - that is bragging rights, not generally not useful in war.
We (UK) long gave up our nuclear sovereignty, we've relied entirely upon warheads we rent from the US since the 90s, since 1970 if you consider our Polaris subs and WE177 bombs to have been the same deal - we claimed to have autonomy over the warheads, but it's questionable; Blue Steel was the last, true, british nuclear weapon - and even that used a modified W28 warhead, but they were at least 'home built'.
> We (UK) long gave up our nuclear sovereignty, we've relied entirely upon warheads we rent from the US since the 90s, since 1970 if you consider our Polaris subs and WE177 bombs to have been the same deal - we claimed to have autonomy over the warheads, but it's questionable.
I think you got it backwards - the warheads are still British-made, they're stuck on top of US missiles.
Israel isn't a potential nuclear state. Everybody knows they have them. They have 90-400 warheads. They also have ICBMs.
Everyone "knows this", but officially they do not admit to having them. Thus it is possible (very unlikely, but possible) that they don't have them. Nobody who we have reason to believe know and tell the truth are talking, though some who have might know reason to lie have given various numbers.
Agreed that making the bomb is relatively affordable. And yes the UK and France are well equipped. UK alas has been as dodgy faithless unreliable player in the world as Trump, but perhaps maybe France would step up when the tanks roll & defend your nation, but how many nations want to leave their existential existence relying upon a single other nation?
I agree with your gist that this ain't a massive economic burden (although my gods, trying to get from ancient Minuteman to Sentinel in the US has been a far-harder-than-it-should-be travail). But that's not the point.
The point is proliferation. For not-that-much-less-than a century, the world has agreed that these horrific terrible incredible weapons are too dangerous, are something we should encourage nations to not build, to not need. Because there have been perceived responsible respectable decent powers of the world who have pledged to defend the free world against enemies and incursions. Who are vested in world stability, who see that afraid nations building the bomb for themselves creates a risk that some day those bombs aren't under control, are used by bad players. Conservatism towards the bomb has been an agreed praxis everywhere.
And the DJT America has just slid up behind anti&proliferation and slit it's throat and left the bleeding out body of an incredibly sane-making de-risking world-stabilizing force. By being an absolute grade-A weak skinned petty douche.
>No one is coming to help you Poland; that's the new American stance.
That's how the rest of the world lives praying that the US doesn't bomb them because they are not "democratic" enough.
After world war 2, the US has never used anywhere near our real might. The cries that we are the terror here seems irredeemably false, propaganda at best.
I find it gross as hell, but the "switchblade" drones we have favored have basically no collateral damage. And Biden stopped the drone warfare almost entirely.
It's unclear to me what the complaint really is. I don't see it.
Might be the birth defects from Agent Orange, the running children with napalm stuck to them, the tens of thousands of bomblets across several SE Asian contries, selling drugs to US citizens to fund weapons sales to groups destabilising other governments, . . .
There's an entire laundry list of legit complaints about post WWII US actions.
Made up weapons of mass destruction, ... it keeps on going.
You can shrug all that off, sure, but there's certainly justification for others to see the US as a source of terror.
>After world war 2, the US has never used anywhere near our real might. The cries that we are the terror here seems irredeemably false
Wait, are you asking to appreciate that the US stopped nuking cities?
France is in Europe and NATO no? They might not have enough nukes to end the world, but they have more than enough to kill 90% of the population.
Will France nuke Russia to retaliate for Russia nuking Poland? If I were a Pole, I'd be very hesitant to rely on that. (The US too, even before the current administration, but at least I'd know the US could trash the Russian military by conventional means.)
It's not the same France, but 1938 France, along with England came to the Munich Agreement with Italy and Germany to let Germany annex part of Czechoslovakia, despite France and Czechoslovakia having a mutual assistance pact.
Ukraine's Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances doesn't seem to have gotten them much in the way of territorial integrity either.
If I were bordering Russia or any other state that seems interested in expanding its borders, I'd be concerned that international agreements might not deter such expansion and wonder what could be done. Obtaining the means for MAD seems reasonable, although the costs are high and perhaps unjustifiable.
Note that the Budapest Memorandum didn’t obligate anybody to defend anybody, just to refrain from attacking.
The UK also has nukes.
> That's concerning. If we rely on MAD for survival, we shouldn't signal weakness or unpreparedness with our nuclear arsenal.
Live public demos are a signal of strength, not of weakness. The only way you can know the demo is real is if it fails at least occasionally.
We've been showing a concerning amount of weakness lately. The government is in total chaos, we have navy planes and helicopters falling out of the sky, a navy aircraft carrier even managed to plow into another ship, inflation is out of control, we've got mystery drones in the sky, we're incapable of manufacturing and are almost totally dependent on china who also hacks the shit out of us, over half the population reads below a 6th grade level and our nation's science literacy is even worse, we can't get our own Astronauts off the ISS, and the population is suffering under record levels of household debt and homelessness.
I expect to start seeing a lot more articles giving "signals of strength" to try and offset the many signs of weakness and failure which have been painting a target on us.
If you feel like you sleep too peacefully, try the book “Nuclear War” by Annie Jacobsen. It presents a very well-researched and plausible account of how nuclear war could unfold.
It scared the shit out of me.
I found it to be a poorly researched and implausible bit of hysteria. It's a sophomoric reddit post.
The entire thing hedges on
1. US launching only a handful of mid course interceptors and they all fail, Aegis/SM-3, the most mature ABM system is not even mentioned. If I were the US DOD I would keep an Arleigh-Burke parked outside of North Korea at all times. 2. A North Korean submarine makes it to the coast of California without being tailed and isn't immediately destroyed by a sub after the initial salvo. 3. Russia keeps their phone on silent while nuclear war breaks out
I don't lose sleep over this
It also has a gigantic pile of obvious errors about how the operational principles and communication chains differ for solid fuel rockets compared to liquid fuel rockets in launching and observing countries. You don't even need to go through coercive diplomacy papers or arms control books for this stuff, there are detailed primers for it on the likes of Globalsecurity.
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The past 80 years have been the most peaceful in history. Nukes work to bring peace.
The problem is that you trade the virtual certainty of periodic destructive wars for a small but non-zero chance of an utterly apocalyptic war. The big question I don't see people asking is, what probability makes this tradeoff worthwhile? One in a hundred per year? One in a thousand? One in a million? Based on what I know about how these systems work, and the history of near misses, I suspect the probability is closer to one in a hundred than one in a million.
Regardless of whether limited exchanges are possible (and how the views on their relative impossibility differ across the relevant bodies), there's a very clear downside to being the weaker party in an lopsided distribution of arsenals, as has famously been exhibited twice already.
> The past 80 years have been the most peaceful in history.
This reminds me of that mlk bit about the white liberal who "prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice"
We may be at peace, but not in terms that will hold when our grasp on power slips. Half the world wants us dead, and who can blame them? We've destroyed the world to enrich ourselves. We're not lady liberty, we're tony soprano.
The DoD is likely the most evil institution in all of history. Perhaps tied with the political parties that are its flipside. When you factor in global warming, it's undeniable.
Hey if you want to sell them id like to try them
They've been testing launching these since the 60s, and they are honestly quite reliable given their complexity
Not my post but used to work on these test launches years ago. I can answer some not-classified questions.
This probably veers well into classified territory, but how closely do test launches simulate actual nuclear exchange situations?
I think that's fine, have seen this published publicly before. A major part of the test is the operational testing, so the crews who actually do the test fire treat it exactly like they would in the field, and are isolated from the more test side of things. This includes the maintenance crews from the field who work on that particular missile. Sometimes the Airborne Launch Control System aircraft is involved, but infrequently afaik.
The test side in parallel treats it like a normal-ish space launch with countdown, tracking, telemetry, etc and the ability to destruct if it goes off course. None of that is possible with an unmodified weapon.
I am not aware of tests ever being a part of broader war game type simulations as that is probably too hair-trigger for the Russians, etc.
> as that is probably too hair-trigger for the Russians
See “Able Archer 83” for why realistic testing can be dangerous!
> the crews who actually do the test fire treat it exactly like they would in the field, and are isolated from the more test side of thing
Is anyone kept blind about it being a test? Like, does the crew wake up in the morning knowing "we're gonna launch a fake nuke today", or are they drinking their morning coffee like any other day in the bunker and suddenly the glaxon starts glaxoning?
Not at all, as keep in mind they pack up a (random) operational ICBM and crew from Wyoming, South Dakota or wherever and transport it to Vandenberg SFB in California to test launch it from there.
Similar to what gedy described, when the UK operated Thor missiles, periodically crews and missiles were flown to Vandenberg for test launches. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Emily>
Funny note about that is there is still an old fish and chips place in town there that was opened to cater to the Brits (Alphie's)
And from our internal newsletter: Sysadmin team test showcases readiness to restore files from backups in case of ransomware attack.
No, this is a deterrent device.
Seems like this would help enemies of the US, now they know the capabilities, they can observe and likely use telemetry against it, and than take active measures to combat it.
I have a bad feeling that one of them is going to do a real nuclear test in the next 5 years.
Title was: Minuteman III test launch showcases readiness of U.S. nuclear force's safe, effective deterrent
Gwar certainly is not for everybody But posts like this always takes me back to this gem of a song
""
Bring!
Bring back the bomb
Bring! Bring! Bring!
Bring back the bomb
Bring back the bomb, it's been far too long
Summon the brazen war chariot
Bring back the bomb, what makes it so wrong?
Release the beast, you can't bury it
Who gives a fuck about a nuclear war?
Let bombs explode, 'cause that's what they're for
""
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWPCGoO4620
"The ICBM test and evaluation program helps validate the reliability the nuclear umbrella our allies and partners rely on, eliminating the need to obtain their own nuclear weapons to counter potential adversaries."
Yeah, about that. For how long?
about two more weeks ...
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So, where's the footage from the target area? Someone should have been there with a camera. Just how close was it?
Throwing stuff up into space looks great but so would a bolt of thunder from out of the blue where the missile hit the target.
If we don't see it land, it's not a demonstration.
There's poor quality videos of older tests on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a1acYZ93yc
These inert reentry vehicles are impacting at hypersonic speeds; I wouldn't want to be anywhere near there.
I'd want to be standing outside the error bounds, plus 5 miles.
I think that it's important we know these systems work. There's some freaking amazing technology built into them back when I was a kid. If even 50% of them actually work, we're way ahead of everyone else.
I'd be surprised if anything in Russia works at a rate of more than 1%.
These mostly end up in the Kwajalein Atoll lagoon, and they are quite monitored, lol.
Good old Kwaj...
Russians and Chinese saw it land.