US Strategic Nuclear Policy -- Part 2

[@berniebernie8515]

"Si vis pacem para bellum" Ein alter lateinischer Spruch mit einer immensen "Message".

[@JoseFernandez-qt8hm]

Bismarck, the chancellor not the ship, said, “Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.”

[@twstf8905]

There are still "Nike" missile silos on the ridgeline behind my house. There used to be shifts of civilian employee and military personnel going to and from every day but the system has become so automated recently I believe there's only ever a small handful of security guards nowadays and maybe a few soldiers who keep the toilets flushing and the trash can to the curb every week.

[@James1toknow]

Very good in-depth and very informative. We really did luck out and owe a lot to the people that kept us from nuclear war.

[@biswajitbhattavharjya2115]

I accepted your all Nuclear Strategic policy.

[@reptilicus975]

yes, it puts a very clear light on what happened during the cold war, and pieces together bits of the puzzle that I had been missing. Double snaps!

[@SSCFPA]

Excellent series, one small error though, Jupiter missiles were never based in the UK, however Thor IRBM's were, from 1958-63. They were operated under a 'dual key' arrangement between the UK and US. Operated by RAF squadrons with UK personnel along with USAF officers.

[@RemoteViewr1]

I learnt a lot. I would suggest that as time moves past this 60 year old inner thinkers discussion, the environmental damage of the fallout from a single bomb would be excruciating to the world as a whole. War games in Europe at the main invasion highway between USSR and Germany, the Fulda gap in the 1970 and 1970 were ominous. Whichever side that began to lose conventional war, red or blue, inevitably began to use small tactical nukes, then the other side, then larger tactical nukes, etc. It just turned into nuclear war. My best sense of it is precisely that. It escalates until we are all dead. Unmentioned in these siop plans were the plans to nuke countries we didn't want to see become the dominant powers in the aftermath. They would be destroyed as well. Think hard on that. They will simply kill everyone. Nukes are pure madness. Turns out bioterrorism, covid, Sars, is more gentle on the real estate.

[@PaulvonOberstein]

Nukes have prevented a third world war that would have made WWII look like a friendly picnic. Nukes are why we have enjoyed relative peace between the great powers since 1945. Without nukes, a major great power war would be raging right now in Europe. >Whichever side that began to lose conventional war, red or blue, inevitably began to use small tactical nukes, then the other side, then larger tactical nukes, etc. That was not the NATO strategy during the Cold War. The idea was NATO would retaliate to Soviet conventional invasion with nuclear use -- thus deterring the Soviets from engaging in any war against NATO, nuclear or conventional. And it worked; peace in Europe was sustained purely based on Soviet fear of NATO's nuclear weapons.

[@Code3forever]

I would like to think the people of the Soviet Union who lived through WWiI, did not want to see war again, just as Americans didn't. I am not too sure how much influence the people had in what Khrushchev would do but I do remember the Cuban Missile Crisis as I was about 12 and the impact it had on me since we lived in a targeted city, LA. Had we gone to war, I believe 1962 would have been the end of man's existence and civilization.

[@festusbojangles7027]

doubt it. everything would be back to normal in a year or 2

[@bayhorse01]

Excellent series.

[@WormholeJim]

One conclusion to draw from the MAD arrangement is, that it is more likely you can manage to keep your infrastructure intact from the retaliation strike, than from the first-strike. It then follows, this likelyhood increases with your abiltity to choose the when, and the added potential for a focussed preparation for coping with a retaliationstrike. All it takes is a sufficiently sized landmass on which to move your infrastructure around, and a political will/vision that can carry the preparations through on this vast scale.

[@tvjdabarkad]

JIM, search END OF THE WORLD 7 SECRETS

[@WormholeJim]

Thanks for recommend, @Teen PhD But I got conspiracy-theories stacked from floor to ceiling already so I don't think I'll be able to squeeze it in there. Meanwhile, though, there's plenty of ill-will at large, right in the open, to be dealt with as swiftly as possible. Albeight this not being an outward battle against an outside foe.

[@michaelnixson9099]

Good tactic leaving cities intact. They can always be brought to heal by siege warfare. Strangle a cities food and power and the rest is just a matter of time. Breakouts aren’t very organised when starvation has a hold.

[@MEReif]

Thanks 😊

[@MNMALBOSH]

37:24 Caption: "Checkpoint Charlie" Image shown is Brandenburg Gate. smh

[@BareSphereMass]

31:33 "Minuteman 1 flew on the 63rd of December 1961" 🤣🤣🤣

[@blip1]

Michael Wheeler is one of those people I wish was available to let me sit and listen to him talk about everything he knows.

[@fuffoon]

If you like this subject let me recommend a science fiction book by James Morrow. It's called This is the Way the World Ends and is quite a wonderful book. It places man on trial for the destruction of humanity in a black comedy but is very profound and really inspires further though on the whole subject. It is one of my favorite books (that makes me an eccentric probably). James Morrow is a very good writer.

[@Ghanda31]

nice

[@fuffoon]

The pundits talking about the Russians and their motivations and how they viewed nuclear weapons and warfare differently are completely opposite what the old soviet generals have been saying since the end of the cold war and diminished secrecy. I have seen a dozen interviewes of ex-soviet generals and high commander who state that the idea of nuclear war was unacceptable and they had no desire to strike out of the same fear of MAD as we.

[@blip1]

fuffoon it is said repeatedly in these videos that U.S. officials didn't believe the Russians wanted a nuclear war

[@KazenoniKakuremi]

48:26 Did you even watch the video?

[@PaulvonOberstein]

The Russian Federation is not the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had a massive conventional war machine which NATO's nuclear weapons were intended to counterbalance. If the Soviets had invaded Western Europe, NATO would have certainly responded by attacking Soviet conventional forces with nuclear weapons. Today, the strategic situation is reversed. NATO has an overwhelming conventional advantage over Russia which the Russians are trying to counterbalance with a significant arsenal of theater nuclear weapons which the Russians would very likely use in response to NATO intervention in Ukraine, which is why NATO is only supporting the Ukrainians indirectly.

[@usaintltrade]

WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION SHOULD NOT BE USED IN WAR

[@festusbojangles7027]

why not

[@blip1]

Is this the actual music they used in this?

[@369NICK963]

well said man... well said.

[@rdc121674]

When we build they build when we stop they build! Eisenhower and later Reagan were the only 2 Presidents who really had a clear grasp of the Soviet Unions global strategic ambitions. Expansion and military superiority were the top initiatives of the Soviet Union

[@PaulvonOberstein]

And this is true today as well. The U.S. has drastically reduced its nuclear arsenal and let its nuclear enterprise decay. Meanwhile both Russia and China have been modernizing and expanding their arsenals. The U.S. is playing catch up.

[@MsJinkerson]

why do Russians build missiles with a lattice between rocket stages

[@HardCase1911]

Stand off distance between stages in earlier missiles and rockets. This interstage area existed in most early missiles just in some cases it was one continuous tube. Basically the lattice work was a way to save weight on less advanced missiles. In newer missiles, silo based,. To save space there is little to no interstage space or it is nested.

[@desertfox2403]

Hey does anyone know of any good books on this?

[@jimwatson842]

There are many, but two that I have are pretty comprehensive: Fred Kaplan’s “The Wizards of Armageddon” (1983) and Daniel Ellsberg’s “The Doomsday Machine” (2017). Ellsberg’s is intriguing because he was a participant in some landmark events (like the 1962 Cuban Crisis). Kaplan’s account is an overall view of the nuclear age from the early ‘40s to the early ‘80s, a very dangerous period of time.

[@jerrywatt6813]

​@Jim Watson yes but Kaplan just can't keep from letting his left wing views spewing forth I like books that deal with the facts from a non partisan point of view the facts should speak for themselves I've read most of his work and for me it's a problem !

[@ingerechtannon2471]

Oh their just bluffing not!

[@ingerechtannon2471]

Gunslinger mentality

[@d3vilz_lair666]

These days Russia now or before was there but only to remind us that it's the OTHER countries e.g. CHINA AND communist North Korea we should worry about

[@vegass04]

I still don't understand how could Soviets execute a surprise massive nuclear attack in the 50s? There were no ICBMs so therefore the only delivery system were intercontinental strategic bombers. And Soviets didn't have too many of those. And even if they did they would be spotted hours before entering the US airspace. So what I'm saying is that there was no danger of our bombers being destroyed on ground, something all US generals feared ever since the Pearl Harbor. Hell, I doubt that they could even reach any of the US cities in the 1950s since our fighter jet interceptors would destroy them over Great Britain, Greenland or even Canada. Now the 1960s were an all together different story. With the ICBMs becoming available, (although not very accurate or reliable), possibility of our bases being destroyed in a first attack scenario were much greater. But even in the 1960s the Soviets didn't have enough ICBMs to destroy all our bomber bases and Minuteman ICBM fields. Soviets achieved nuclear parity somewhere in the mid 1970s. Situation today is a bit different. Russians are so weak economically and have order of magnitude weaker conventional military forces that they decided to develop a first use nuclear strategy called "Escalate to deescalate". In short that means that the Russian military holds the right to use tactical nuclear weapons if they are being destroyed on the battleground. They hope that this use of nuclear weapons against the stronger foe (we all mean to whom that strategy applies to) will shock the enemy so much that he would simply bow down and leave. To tell you the truth that strategy sounded stupid to my little kid, and don't know how anybody in the higher echelons of Russian military and civilian apparatus came up with the idea. Do they really think that the US, for example, would retreat after Russia just killed or injured tens of thousands of US serviceman in 5 minutes? Yeah, great thinking Ivan..But hen again, taking into consideration who our current President is, it wouldn't surprise me if the Orange traitor appologized to Putin and give him Alaska as a gift for making him the President of the United states of America.

[@biswajitbhattavharjya2115]

🫡

[@peternorthrup6274]

These people don't have a clue how foolish they are. That's what should scare people. Unreal.

[@peternorthrup6274]

Anyone with half a brain would realize what a waste of money this is. You want to know why it will never stop? It's just money. Defense employs so many people you can't stop it. It's to big. Fools. All of them.

[@PaulvonOberstein]

You have no idea what you are talking about. Nuclear weapons are only a small fraction of the U.S. defense budget; if it were up to the services, we get rid of all of our nuclear weapons and replace them with shiny high-tech (and very expensive) conventional systems like precision strike conventional ballistic missiles and hypersonic glide vehicles, and more F-35s, and the arms manufacturers would be happy to oblige. Nuclear weapons deter great power war, so if your thesis is correct, the defense industry would hate nuclear weapons because they deter the very thing that would massively increase defense budgets and make arms manufacturers more money.