What has the INF treaty got to do with modern day NATO vs Russia nuclear parity?
Wasn't the SS-20 Saber a response to NATO planning to use shitty & inaccurate Honest John salvos on Warsaw Pact tanks streaming across the Fulda Gap? Wouldn't a B-2 dropping a bunch of conventional CBU-105s kill more tanks than the theater ballistic missiles/nuclear artillery NATO had back in the cold war?
Is this related to Russia's Status 6 "doomsday" torpedo? Is this so the US can make intermediate-range missiles with nuclear torpedo warheads to defend the coast? Like a SOSUS & Pershing/Sea Lance hybrid system?
INF had nothing to do with Sea or Air launched missiles, if the US wanted to make an long range nuclear torpedo there's nothing stopping them.
My take is that it's not europe focused at all and Russia really want something they can use against China. NATO don't really need ground launched nukes any more as their air superiority is so overwhelming.
Angel Ortiz
>your missile fly too far >no no Mr. Burger here proofs >LIES I am pullin out
Typical pissing contest between 2 non-white nations.
Nicholas Jones
>Is this related to Russia's Status 6 "doomsday" torpedo? Those torps doesn't change the mutual annihilation balance, they can tsunami our cities all they want, we can still glass theirs.
It only demonstrates they were genuinely worried about our ABM capabilties. This, however, does upset the nuclear balance by making plausible a first strike with a fair chance to strongly blunt their riposte.
Stepping out of the treaty is indeed an answer to the year-long disregard of said treaty by russian force, firstly in the kaliningrad enclave. "Usable" nukes are a very big no-no and, as unpleasant a prospect it is, calling the russians out for it was the less shitty course of action.
Joseph Myers
I'm taking about a land-based ballistic missile with a nuclear torpedo to render the Kanyon torpedo ineffective.
I see the Russian deployment and the claims of its capabilities as a signal that Russia fears that the US could decapitate its nuclear forces without Russia being able to strike back. They have various reasons to think their ICBMs and SLBMs can be shot down en-masse. About a decade or so ago, people would talk about US ballistic missile defense like AEGIS BMD or GBI as this thing that was meant to sow doubt and make Russia add extra warheads to certain targets, basically the bare minimum is two warheads to account for duds but something like AEGIS Ashore or the GBI/Exoatmospheric kill vehicle would mean adding extra re-entry vehicles to high-value targets forcing them to use more and more of their 2k warhead limit.
The INF treaty was about removing the Soviets ability to range targets in Western Europe with cheap land based missiles while preserving the American advantage in sea and air power. It accomplished this quite well until the US decided to pull out.
>Anti-torpedo nuclear tipped IRBM No.
Austin Perry
>Russia ignores INF treaty >It accomplished this quite well
I think today Russia genuinely thinks US laser ABM and other factors put them at risk of completely losing second-strike capability. They deliberately fake-leaked and put out in state media this talk of salted cobalt warheads. Basically even a slight chance of a high-yield cobalt torpedo creating a tsunami (doubt.png) or beaching on a US coastal area and kicking up cobalt muck over the CONUS would deter a nation with Orbital Supremacy.
I think that this fear that the US has Orbital Supremacy has a lot to do with fake "UFO" leaks by the US based around the tic-tac ATFLIR videos by the To The Stars group. Tom Delonge as the front man behind a bunch of CIA agents saying "we want the truth about aliens from ourselves": youtube.com/watch?v=tf1uLwUTDA0
The separate incidents where the aircraft are holding at 25k makes it look like an obvious test where they were talked on by NAS controllers as part of a test. It's very much a possibility that Russia sees this as a veiled threat of an impossible-drive hypersonic stealth drone. The more recent sightings like the Chilean Navy helo tape could only be seen on BHOT/WHOT and was invisible to radar and optically cloaked and was releasing some sort of gas.
They're fighter-sized so what stops them from being fitted with a laser or some sort of ABM projectile? The reports put the drones as accelerating in 6-degrees as fast as mach 100+ and coming to an instant standstill. This could be a hoax, just like Russia's Kanyon UUV looks like it could be a hoax (due to Russia's lack of pocket money) but it seems like Russia does fear that there could be an extremely powerful ABM platform the US has up their sleeve.
Brody Russell
>It only demonstrates they were genuinely worried about our ABM capabilties
This. It comes down to Russia's concern about ABM systems that are magically appearing along its borders in Eastern Europe.
The US have a clear advantage there and they decided to capitalize on this advantage by pulling out of the ABM treaty under Bush Jr. to develop these further.
The torpedo and the hypersonic stuff are ways that Russia wants to bring back parity in the nuclear balance.
I'm talking about a system to counter the Status-6 torpedo. As far as I know only aircraft carriers are fitted with anti-torpedo torpedoes that hit-to-kill. I'm talking about a sub-bomb or torpedo with a nuclear warhead, launched from a ballistic missile, parachute-retarded to land within a radius where it could destroy the Kanyon.
If the Kanyon is travelling at 100+ knots an ASW helicopter or Poseidon won't be able to stop it with a torpedo. The only counter I can think of is an underwater nuclear weapon. This thing would obviously cavitating like crazy and making enough noise to get a decent fix on its general location/speed/heading from underwater microphones. The US would want an ability to hit it at high speed - hence an IRBM. Sure they might sink an unlucky cruise liner but that would be a good trade off against irradiating the entire US, right?
The only other system, seeing as minuteman warheads have their targets pre-programmed into them, is Trident which would have a much higher minimum range, need to align its azimuth and get to shallow depth and its launch would be picked up by Russian satellites or even OTOH and use 12 warheads on one UUV, doesn't seem practical.
Aaron Hernandez
It will try but doing it is going to be near impossible.
Obama already committed the US to pending $1 trillion on its nuclear modernization, finding additional funds is going to be difficult. Once funded and built the weapons then have to be based. The INF basing issue was a near thing in the 80s, back when the Soviet threat was clear and NATO was much more unified. Any basing now is going to be an even more difficult challenging and very well could fail.
Thomas Stewart
What I want to know is why the hell does Russia act like the US basically holds them over a barrel when it comes to their entire second strike capability?
Am I supposed to believe the doomsday UUV and hypersonic glide vehicle threats is simply to do with AEGIS, THAAD and maybe a limited ABM laser deployment near their borders that might destroy a few of their ICBMs in boost phase?
It really looks to me like Russia thinks the US could schwack their entire nuclear arsenal in a sneak attack. What is it that they think could launch a synchronized strike on their road mobile ICBMs? Do they really think the US could take out every Russian SSBN under the ice using US Navy attack subs?
They're genuinely acting like they fear this but I don't think it's AEGIS plinking their silo launched missiles as they launch, a bunch of B-2s flying right over Russia searching for Topols or US attack subs tailing their boomers under the ice.
I think they suspect some black project hijinks to telegraph this much low-confidence in their nuclear weapons.
Angel King
>having greater than zero missiles in service that violate the treaty >nonono Russia was still abiding the treaty
Jaxon Hernandez
hi ivan
Jackson Martinez
The best counter is a strong deterrent. Active defenses are not a good solution.
Using nuclear armed ballistic missiles to destroy underwater targets was studied in the 70s and 80s with regard to using high megaton yield weapons to try to get SSBNs as they were leaving port. The finding was it was not practical. That was the best case situation, using ~10Mt yield weapons to destroy a SSBN that could carry well over 100 warheads, in an anti-Status-6 system you would be aiming at a single warhead and would not risk using anything as large as 10Mt.
The cost of deploying a detection net, maintaining it, developing counter-counter-measures, developing and deploying interceptors, and all the other costs of defending is always higher then the marginal cost to simply add another incoming warhead. Active defenses have always only been cost-effective against accidental or small scale launches and always will.
Jason Turner
fuck off euro-cuck
Jackson Brooks
But Russia is clearly telegraphing they don't think MAD is in effect. They are acting like they fear the US could destroy their entire deployed nuclear capability in one fell swoop and really desperately reaching to warn the US not to dare try.
The Kanyon system (the doomsday capabilities of which I think are exaggerated and more to do with the fact it's an intercontinental underwater nuclear deterrent that can't be stopped with lasers or ABM missiles) and HGV payloads are an attempt to say "We can at least destroy a few of your cities if you try and sneak attack us".
More and more in recent years, I see genuine fear that Russia fears a scenario where the US disables their nuclear weapons and beats them in a conventional war - conventional parity with Russia vs US is blatantly in the favor of US/NATO and Russia themselves, I believe Putin even, have said they can't stand up to the United States in a conventional war, hence their reliant on using nukes to deter a conventional war. Whereas China uses its sheer manpower to deter conventional invasion. It wouldn't be feasible for the US to invade the mainland of China but it could absolutely win a conventional, no-nukes war against Russia which is sparsely populated and overly-reliant on nuclear weapons.
Gabriel Martin
What Russia is telegraphing is that they can beat US ABM defenses, not a fundamental breakdown in deterrence.
Russia has always feared a combination of US counterforce and ABM systems because they have always feared that the US will strike first. The Status-6 deployment is not a fundamental readjustment of their posture nor a sign they think their missile force is irreverent, its just another anti-ABM system to reinforce deterrence. What is going to be more important to Russia is the ability to redeploy INF range systems to increase force numbers and range targets in Europe.
Owen Bailey
You didn't explain why large yield warheads like 10MT were not practical.
From what I understand, nuclear warheads used on the surface or underwater behave differently to a warhead detonated on/over land. I might be completely wrong but I have heard that the blast waves travel further for the yield at sea, I think this might be surface/shallow waters and something to do with no terrain to reflect the blast wave. I've seen the videos of bullets being stopped by a few feet of water so I might have this completely ass-backwards.
Do you mean not practical as they don't ensure destruction of SSBNs leaving port? Was this not a CEP issue related to the guidance systems of the 70s/80s? Or was it that the sea-spray fallout was too gnarly for civilian areas?
Cameron Wilson
nothing. no one will use nukes against another country that also has nukes/allied with a nuclear capable country. it's a dick measuring contest.
Adrian Jenkins
But they surely understand that the US has a much lower tolerance for 'acceptable casualties' in a nuclear war to risk a first strike?
The current deployment of nuclear weapons is capped at 2k warheads right? Both sides 'double-up' as a bare minimum so that re-entry vehicles fire two warheads at every target to account for duds. My info might be outdated but US Minuteman bases are Warren, Minot and Malmstrom containing about 300-400 single RV weapons. A first-strike by Russia would involve about 800 warheads to decapitate the US silos and maybe a few hundred more warheads to decapitate B-52 ALCM and US SSBN bases while keeping the thousand or so left in reserve, including boomers under the ice threatening to glass US cities and force a surrender right?
I'm assuming a US first strike on Russia would be similar except the complication of the road-mobile Topols, there's no declared hypersonic stealth nuclear bomber to seek out those Topols which makes it seem unlikely that they'd be able to strike them before being detected.
This whole scenario seems so sketchy that I can't see why MAD is off-balance unless Russia is factoring in Black Projects.
Ethan Morris
Mostly due to issues with fusing and slowing down the warhead. If you airburst the warhead most of the energy gets reflected off the water, so what you want is to "lay down" the warhead on the water. This means slowing down the warhead, which requires fuel, and every kg of fuel on a missile means a kg less of nuke. Furthermore you need a fuckhuge warhead because both due aiming sincerity and the fact subs can go deep, if you can detonate the nuke deep underwater you can use a smaller warhead due to physics but that only really works for anti-sub torpedoes and the like. What this all means is that you are using a heavy ICBM that could carry 10 warheads aimed at all sorts of targets to carry a single warhead aimed at a single target.
Using an MRBM for defense ignores some of those problems but introduces others. First off its not an ICBM so it is not counted under treaty limits, assuming you make it correctly. If it can use that extra fuel for deceleration for acceleration instead and could use that extra boost to get to 5500km then it becomes a treaty counted ICBM (arguably, such skirting treaty text is normal and fights over such things is to be expected). However the range gets a lot shorter. While big warheads tend to be relatively clean if you burst two warheads per kill on average (rather low) and are aiming to stop a dozen incoming weapons then you are talking about setting off 240Mt of weapons within ~4000km of your coast. Ground bursts create a ton of radioactivity and salt water is even worse then soil, such a defense would cause extreme environmental effects to the point that it does not scale against larger attacks of 50, 100 or 200 weapons. This means you need to use smaller weapons, but that lowers your Pk which means more interceptors, a more robust C3 system and more uncertainty. There really is no good option for active defense.
Sebastian Parker
>What Russia is telegraphing is that they can beat US ABM defenses
I guess it makes sense then that the missile that violates the treaty is a GLCM.
Parker Foster
If the only thing you had to bitch about was my tsunami hyperbole, then you wasted a good opportunity to shut the fuck up.
What is that thing and where do I buy ten of them?
Nathan Cruz
Current numbers are 1450 per side, plus about another 150 due to bomber counting weirdness.
The thing is that Russia is paranoid. They have and have always had genuine fears that the US is willing to strike first and nothing will convince them otherwise. The fact that they are more vulnerable then the US does play into these fears.
Russia ran out of money completely in the 90s and their force never recovered. While the US has single warhead ICBMs much of the Russian force is still massive heavy ICBMs armed with 10 warheads because that is cheaper then 10 single warhead missiles. Their bomber force is hopelessly outdated and their sub force rarely leaves port. They have even had years were they conducted zero deterrence patrols. In the event of a Russian first strike they could get all the ICBMs, the bombers and between 25% and 75% of the sub force depending on if there was a preceding crisis or not. Such an attack would use up virtually the entire Russian arsenal and leave several hundred warheads on SLBMs, 150 deployed on NATO aircraft in Europe, 210 British and 300 French warheads for a response. Meanwhile a US "bolt from the blue" first strike using less warheads could destroy more of the Russian force on the ground due to its dependence on ICBMs and low SSBN patrol rates and leave it without the extra warheads NATO gives the US. Add in fears of conventional counterforce and ABMs systems and Russian paranoia looks a little more reasonable.
MAD is doing fine. What Russia is doing is making sure that the US understands that it still exists and will continue to exist despite US ABM programs.
Alexander Reed
>What has the INF treaty got to do with modern day NATO vs Russia nuclear parity Nothing, it has everything to do with China thinking they are so clever by stocking up ballistic missiles with regular warheads as a standard weapon against US Supercarriers/The defensive response to this, in addition to the defesnisve response to the Norks getting ICBMs, is ABMs/The Chinese were offered multiple times an in to both the ABM and INF treaties, but they refused, they also refuse to keep a leash on the Norks
Don't get me wrong, after Ghaddafi, the Norks no longer have any reason to treat the word of the West as anything other than garbage but still
But the Norks already had a fairly good deterrent, and all the Chinese had to do was put them under their umbrella, explicitly
Well, the Chinese reached too far, acted too clever, wanting all the privleges of a poor nation and the power of a rich one, and now the Chinese ICBM nuclear deterrent against America is getting neutralized as a side effect of ensuring that the Nork missiles are useless and their nukes are basically reduced to super mines
Even worse, as an additional side effects, Chinese deterrent against JAPAN is getting neutered as well
The entire point of the of these treaties was so that the Cold War didnt' end in fire, and so that the Soviets weren't forced to fight a continental communists civil war from Berlin to Kabul out of fear and paranoia
Its China's fuck up, and now all their strategic progress of proliferating nuclear secrets to different nations to diffuse the warheads is going poof
Benjamin Rodriguez
>double up US Navy warheads have been upgraded to increase their accuracy, to where 100 kiloton yield W76s fall close enough to the intended point that they can destroy hardened targets. So while there may be numerical parity with warheads, the effectiveness of US warheads has increased a great deal.
Dylan Harris
I'm not up on my space stuff and more into airshit. You mean laydown like low-level nuclear bomber/attack aircraft dropping parachute-retarded B-61/B-83s right?
If we have reusable rockets that can land on sea platforms aren't these studies obsolete? The SpaceX re-usable launch platforms had a CEP of basically 0. The SOSUS underwater microphones are still in place right? Wouldn't a loud as fuck, large, high-speed torpedo allow the navy to triangulate an accurate fix to get a 'lead' on the Kanyon and basically time the launch into a point at sea for where the Kanyon was going to be and simply detach a stage of the rocket containing the nuclear sub-bomb and descend to the depth ahead of the target and detonate? Maybe a MIRV spread to account for errors?
The assumed launch platform is an Oscar II class. Would it actually be launching from off the coast of West Africa or between the North Pacific and Russia's far east or risk getting close in? From what I've heard Russia doesn't do SSBN patrols off the coast of the US anymore because it just gets detected and stalked by SSNs and would be sunk before it could fire its missiles.
Would Russia have the tech/funds to have a bottom-profiling high speed UUV that navigates the sea floor to mask it acoustically? Would it only be able to do this within 20-30nm of the shore because it would be crushed by the depth of the pacific/atlantic? Would it be capable of zig-zagging to avoid any sorts of measures like a ballistic missile?
You seem to be
Kayden Jones
*You seem to be assuming that Russia believes that MAD is completely in effect - so why the ICUUV/HGV shit? They're showing they think their ICBM/SLBMs are trash and that the US can shoot them out of the sky. Most of the talk about ABM here seems to assume that it's just a system to sow doubt and make Russia expend extra warheads on HVTs but they really are acting like they think the US can plink their ICBMs in midcourse phase.
The US has accelerated ABM lasers and started placing ship and land-based ABM missiles near Russia's borders but that still doesn't ensure a complete neutering of their second strike capability. I think people were completely oblivious to the ATFLIR/Gimbal videos which was a release by the US government claiming to have drones that maneuvered in a ridiculous manner. This was after a 2015 'leak' in an aviation magazine and Russia 'leaked' the Status-6 later that year.
Does anyone seriously think a group of CIA dudes are asking for UFO disclosure? I think it's bullshit. It was 2004/2015 videos after the '15 magazine 'leak' by naval aviators. Think about what an extremely high speed, 6-degrees of movement, optical/radar cloaked drones could do in terms of hunting down road mobile ICBMs and what weapons systems they could carry. The original interview in '15 and youtube.com/watch?v=26vx-EfVD8g shows these were launched from a submarine off San Diego. The pilots are straight-up lying when they say they believe these are ETs. They've been coached on what to say. The entire staff of this "Stars" front group are CIA spooks.
I'm talking about duds where the warhead doesn't detonate. Not CEP issues.
Austin Gomez
the treaty was signed by the Soviet Union and just like Yugoslavia it doesnt exist anymore
The main force behind Russia's wavering is that INF treaty severely limited the amount of nuclear counter force that Russia held with regards to China, as China was not held to it which allowed to develop an IRBM superiority that Russia finds concerning enough. You people need to realise that both the yanks and the snowapes withdrew from this treaty as they are both reasonably spooked by the advantage that this mutual shackling would hand over to the new player on the pitch: China.
Don't you find it oddly convenient that voices in both US and Russia are suddenly more eager than usual to exit this agreement?
