shiv wrote:
Rudradev wrote:
In fact, the more we rely on smaller kiloton weapons or conventional methods to achieve our goals in a war, the more vulnerable our strike capacity becomes to chinese megaton weapons! .
Rudradev - could you justify this commonly held view with a few examples of why this is correct. To my knowledge your assertion is not totally correct. It has its plus points but cannot be considered as wholly true. Poster rien had come up with a scenario that agrees with your view - but was unable to go beyond bland statements of dogma and explain the objections raised.
Shiv,
I believe my post was quite soundly reasoned without needing to rely on any dogmatic adherences. Nonetheless, I think there are two main points of disagreement here.
The first, if I read you correctly, is that you contend that a capacity to inflict massive civilian casualties alone is sufficient to establish deterrence. I think this is unrealistic.
"Deterrence" itself is a concept that is hard to measure, let alone give "examples" to justify, because it is only manifest recursively by conjecture, and relies on a circular definition. Two mutually hostile nuclear powers can be said to have "deterred" each other merely by absence of a level of conflict that leads to a nuclear exchange between them, but when proxy wars, below-the-threshold incursions and aggressive proliferation persist, it's obvious that the deterrence is not comprehensive. If your enemy is still able to hurt you by taking calculated risks, it is because you haven't established a high enough capacity to inflict costs as to make his risks incalculable.
The one example of the use of nuclear weapons having actually ended a war decisively, occurred in a special context where one side (the US) possessed them and the other did not... 100% asymmetry. What we hear about Hiroshima and Nagasaki today, is dominated by the horrors inflicted upon their civilian populations; and yet, was that really what induced the Japanese to surrender? From the battle of Okinawa onwards, the Japanese were drilling women, children, the aged and the handicapped to fight to the last soul in preparation for an invasion of the home islands. In that situation you could arguably have expected more "civilian" casualties than Fat Man and Little Boy achieved.
What the Japanese government could not countenance was the extent to which their means of production could be erased in a single strike.
From
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bom ... d_Nagasaki
At the time of its bombing, Hiroshima was a city of some industrial and military significance. A number of military camps were located nearby, including the headquarters of the Fifth Division and Field Marshal Shunroku Hata's 2nd General Army Headquarters, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan. Hiroshima was a minor supply and logistics base for the Japanese military. The city was a communications center, a storage point, and an assembly area for troops... The city of Nagasaki had been one of the largest sea ports in southern Japan and was of great wartime importance because of its wide-ranging industrial activity, including the production of ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials.
When your hubs of transportation and sites of materiel storage can be scoured off the earth with such ease, what are you, as a government, going to fight the enemy with... even despite your willingness to sacrifice every available civilian as a combatant?
Today we say we have "deterrence" against the Chinese with our kiloton weapons that can kill hundreds of thousands of their civilians in airbursts. But as I said, the definition is circular and self-referential. The Chinese were not deterred from invading Korea against a nuclear-armed antagonist in the 1950s. We knew about the Chinese nuclear capacity in 1967, but fought them to a standstill at Nathu La. It didn't deter us from taking a calculated risk of military escalation in 1967, or in 1975 when Sikkim was consolidated (and we were still far behind the Chinese in deploying a nuclear arsenal). Pakistan has employed nuclear blackmail as an umbrella for terrorism against us (a nuclear power) for nearly two decades.
I might compare our present "deterrence" to a 150-kilo gentleman who eats butter chicken and paneer parathas at every meal, has a family history of T2DM, smokes a pack a day, but takes one 100-metre walk to the post office once a week. He might say that, because he hasn't yet had a heart attack, that 100-metre walk once a week is all the exercise he needs. But if you were selling him life insurance, how low would you price the premium?
Ultimately, if it comes down to a set of compulsions whereby nuclear conflict with the Chinese is imminent, I don't believe that our being able to kill some lakhs of their civilians will deter them; not when they have the capacity to kill as many if not more of our civilians, *plus* minimize our capacity to inflict likewise damage on them by taking out our strategic assets, infrastructure, and means of production. This capacity on their part multiplies the danger posed by their ability merely to cause massive civilian death in nuclear strikes. It deprives us of the ability to triage and rebuild in the aftermath of their strikes, let alone respond in kind to any further strikes they might conduct.
Now the second point, I think, is self-evident. If we accept that it is not sufficient deterrence to be able to cause civilian deaths but that we must actually be able to take out their strategic assets, infrastructure and means of production... then as we've established, we need to be able to impose maximum overpressure. We need very high-yield weapons to carry out groundstrikes against their hardpoints and replace those with craters.
So then it becomes as simple as doing the maths. Let's say that a particular Chinese hardpoint will need a 1 MT direct hit to take out. We can send in one 1 MT warhead plus 9 dummies, calculating that the likelihood of their ABM systems at the objective intercepting the warhead is 10%. On the other hand, we would have to score five direct hits (more difficult) with 5 200kt warheads to achieve the same objective. In addition, that increases the likelihood of ABM interception by 40%... and if even one of our 200kt warheads is intercepted, we don't achieve the objective. To arrive at the same degree of insurance against interception we need to send in 45 dummies along with our 5 200kt warheads. Now factor in the possibility of a proportion of our delivery systems failing, either at launch or in terms of guidance or propulsion or in landing outside the CEP... a lot more redundancy needs to be built in. So we're talking about a number of warheads and delivery systems that's up to an order of magnitude greater, to achieve the same number of objectives. These have to be stored and maintained in far larger facilities that are proportionately more difficult to conceal and protect against enemy strikes. They have to be transported and readied at greater expense and a greater cost in time, and of course the probability of error increases as the number of variables at every stage.
This is what I was trying to convey in brief when, in my previous post, I gave the example of the Chinese need for a W88 warhead... compact, easy to handle and store and get ready for use, less vulnerable to the megabooms of adversaries. And therefore a far more secure deterrent than what they had before.
Ultimately no megaboom is guaranteed to take out any leadership or any deep bunkers or any hidden/mobile weapons and what we are left with is a massive civilian death scenario. And if the megaton bombs are wasted on rural/uninhabited places in the hope of taking out enemy weapons and bunkers suspected to be there - even that civilian death scenario does not occur
This is true, nothing is guaranteed. But the calculus of deterrence certainly changes if that capacity is there. I am not saying we should eschew the civilian targets in favour of *only* hitting deep bunkers and hidden weapons... the kiloton devices are, and remain a critical part of our deterrence posture. An asymmetry in megaton weapons, however, means that we're getting the short end of deterrence by a wide margin.
I believe you have to look at actual numbers of targets needed to take out an enemy's underground C & C and to take out his weapon launching capability - neither of which are guaranteed to be in the middle of his best cities. And if you are using up your megabooms on that, what guarantee is there that the enemy's second strike capability will be removed? (This of course is the old US vs USSR argument made in the US against first strike at a time when the US had thousands of weapons and the USSR hundreds). Are you wiling to use up 200 of your weapons trying to take out bunkers and missiles and decoys while the enemy manages to retain five weapons and take out five of your cities? My question is a serious one that requires some thought - beyond the level that I have seen being put into this issue by and large on this thread.
That isn't the point. If we only have fifty weapons to take out the enemy's cities, but the enemy has fifty weapons to take out our cities plus 200 megabooms to take out our weapons, C&C and industrial-logistical capacity for triage/recovery/reconstruction...the deterrence equation is drastically skewed in his favour. He can not only take out our cities, but he can use his megabooms in counter-strategic strikes, with a given probability of success in reducing (if not eliminating) our capacity to take out his cities.
He isn't guaranteed to eliminate our second strike capacity, but in a numbers game (which is what deterrence boils down to) he clearly wins over an adversary with no chance whatever of neutralizing his strategic assets.
If we also had 200 megabooms to reduce the probability of his retaining a second strike capacity, deterrence becomes more balanced.
Since you mention it... a capacity to conduct strikes on the "B Country" (non-urban, relatively unpopulated areas) is actually another point of asymmetry between ourselves and the Chinese. If the Chinese use megaton weapons on groundstrikes against our B-Country, it adds to their capacity for devastation, because groundstrikes (not airbursts) are what cause fallout by discharging large quantities of radioactive earth into the atmosphere. Besides, the "B-Country" is crtically important because it is where the resources will come from to rebuild the "A-Country" of the cities, and provide relief to the survivors of nuclear strikes on those cities.
We already possess a great asymmetry with the Chinese in terms of our "B Country", because their infrastructure is far better developed. They are able to ferry relief supplies from the countryside to the city, and relocate city survivors to the country with far greater efficiency than we can.
If we (with only kiloton weapons) are limited to hitting their cities, and leave their B-Country untouched... while they hit our cities as well as B-Country sites with groundstrikes that also elicit fallout... it's quite easy to see why we will have the worst of a nuclear exchange by far.
For example - even assuming that Paki generals do not care about huge numbers of dead - exactly how do you believe they can retain their power and privileges when they emerge from their bunkers 15 days after a war and find Islamabad/Rawalpindi, Lahore, Karachi and ten other cities reeling with several million dead and injured who are just beginning to show the signs of radiation sickness 2 weeks after the initial devastation? It is easier to say that one can ignore dead and dying people from the viewpoint of a person who has no idea what the sight of dead and dying does to people. A 1 MT bomb on a deep bunker in the hills does not have half the effect of a 10 kt bomb in the middle of your city.
There were enormous numbers of dead and dying people at Dresden, Tokyo, Stalingrad and Kigali whose suffering had nothing to do with nuclear strikes. Their suffering was not sufficient to precipitate the collapse of the regimes prosecuting the wars concerned.
It does not matter how many dead people you or I, as individuals, may have seen. War brings suffering on a scale people are not used to in peacetime. This may go up by several orders of magnitude for being a nuclear war, but ultimately in the context of any war that is more than a "limited war", where civilians see the frontlines extending to their very front doors, I don't know if we can rely on the shock and horror alone to effect a "regime change". War also changes the mindset of people in terms of social behaviours and attitudes to nation and ideology in ways that aren't predictable by the templates of peacetime. You may be right about the Paki generals emerging from their bunkers etc. but I wouldn't want to gamble our security on that possibility.
Finally, in terms of "half the effect", that is quite an inexact assertion you are making. The "effect" being sought by dropping a 1MT bomb on a deep bunker is not the same as that pursued by a 10kt bomb in the middle of a city. Each has its uses. That 1MT bomb could reduce or eliminate the potential of retaliation, and multiply the suffering of the survivors in that city exponentially, depending on how and where it is used.
Just a couple of data-points regarding the effects of nukes on cities, however, notwithstanding your fine analysis of the Rawalpindi bomb which I have no issue with.
From this series of essays by a professional who used the bomb computer published on Fourmilab as a standard tool of his trade:
http://homepage.mac.com/msb/163x/faqs/n ... e_101.html
http://homepage.mac.com/msb/163x/faqs/n ... e_102.html
http://homepage.mac.com/msb/163x/faqs/n ... e_103.html
Initiate a 1 megaton device over the center of London and 95 percent of the cities assets and 80 percent of the population will survive (this means that, proportionally speaking, Londoners will be better off after a nuclear attack than they were before it took place. This was the basis of at least one Get Rich Quick scheme proposed in The Business).
If we're talking about deterring the Chinese, I'd say Shanghai or Beijing are closer to London than Rawalpindi in terms of the destructive power needed to take them down. So forget about 10kT... even 1 MT, according to this source, isn't nearly enough.
To give a feel for the sort of numbers that we're talking about, the British calculated that they needed 32 warheads to give Moscow a terminal dose of instant sunrise.
Assuming he means 32 of the standard W76 warheads that the British deploy on their Trident subs, that's 100 kT each. So, 3.2 MT to assure the comprehensive destruction of Moscow alone.
How many 25 kT warheads would we have to bring to bear, to achieve that? How easy will it be to store and protect them from Chinese megaboom first-strikes? How long will it take to ready them for use, transport them on infrastructure that has already been devastated by Chinese megabooms? Will we have that long?
You don't crash your car (or you crash it in a particular way) because someone else has done it before and so you know, and you are basing your behavior on documented past experience.