US Debt

[Ominous Gamer]

Nothing can be said with absolute certainty,

Says the guy that 2 replies back claimed we could take out all of China's nukes and that we know where they were all located.

[Loki]

Do you expect a disclaimer on each post?

[Ominous Gamer]

Not at all, but honest debate would be a good start. You have a long history of exaggeration in your posting.

[CitizenCain]

Not at all, but honest debate would be a good start. You have a long history of exaggeration in your posting.

Honestly, if you don't know or aren't willing to accept that "all" does not mean the same thing as "literally every single one" you have serious problems with understanding language/communicating, and aren't capable of a grown-up "discussion," let alone an "honest debate."

Besides, what the fuck can you bring to an "honest debate" about nuclear first strike capabilities? About as much as my cat, so it's pretty clear you have no interest in an "honest debate" on the subject and are just looking rub out your hardon by attacking Loki with what are painfully hypocritical accusations as it is. No one likes a pervert; so go whack off in private (or get your girl to provide that function for you) instead of doing it in public on here.

FWIW, Loki's absolutely correct about China's nuclear capability. Their current arsenal of nuclear weapons is based on old Soviet designs, which among other problems, take a few hours to fuel and arm (and cannot be sustained in a long-term "hot standby" state), compared to ours, which are always "hot" and can start their flight, literally at the flip of an electrical circuit. They also lack any mobile launchers (their ICBMs are far too bulky to fit on a mobile launcher or sub), and we know where all their stationary nukes are. And even in the unlikely event that they somehow managed to keep one hidden or safe from our nukes, there's always our anti-missile "shield" technologies that give us a substantial chance of knocking any of their ICBMs out of the sky before they reach our airspace, so that possibility is a wash, at worst (for us).

So no, China doesn't have any practical retaliatory nuclear capability against the US. Due to the issues their missiles have with taking hours to fuel and arm, it's questionable if they could even pull off a first strike - our spy satellites would clue us in and give us a chance to strike before they could get theirs in the air.

So, there's your "honest" assessment of Chinese nuclear capabilities. No thanks is necessary, just keep your masturbatory activities to yourself in the future.

[Loki]

Not only that, but due to poor terrain and the range of their missiles, China could only keep their nukes in something like 0.01% of their territory. Nuke that 0.01%, and there's no conceivable place from which to launch a nuke. I'll try to dig up the article about the US having first strike against China and quite possibly Russia (though it's a few years old, and I don't know how new Russian subs might prevent this).

Edit: Found it: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j...L4pJ4Pj0_SXpXQ

[Aimless]

Does China even want to pretend to have first strike capability? the only people who want to do that are those who benefit from the American obsession with nuclear weapons

[Loki]

The point is that China doesn't have second strike capability vis-a-vis the US, which means the US has first strike against China.

[wiggin]

Uh... my understanding is that the Dong Feng 31 and its variants are based on mobile launchers, of which they have a few dozen. The DF-31 has a solid propellant system, so it doesn't have the 'hours to fuel and arm' issue you mention.

They also have a nascent SSBN capability from their Type 94 submarines and the new JL-2 SLBMs.

You're probably thinking of the old DF-5s which are liquid fueled and much more susceptible to a counterforce strike, even in a hardened silo.


I won't argue that China would come out on top in a nuclear war with the US - they only have at most a few dozen missiles capable of hitting the US from mobile locations with little to no warning (maybe 40-50 tops, with only a few MIRVs per warhead at most). Meanwhile, we have a cool 500-odd warheads sitting on Minuteman ICBMs, another 500 or so air-launched weapons, and over 1000 warheads on our SSBMs... all with the range to hit China. That's not to mention our tactical nukes, of which we have a few hundred air-delivered B61s and about 100 Tomahawks.

So, bottom line? China wouldn't want to start a nuclear war with us because given their relatively small number of missiles that can survive a counterforce strike and hit our cities, they would come out on the wrong side of the deal. But I find it unlikely that we would be able to carry out an effective counterforce strike without some impressively good intelligence, meaning we'd probably have a few dozen loose ICBMs/SLBMs to deal with. While I am in general a proponent of ballistic missile defense, I don't have adequate faith in our currently operational systems to hope that a salvo of, say, 40 warheads could be defeated by our deployed systems. While our naval variant is supposed to be pretty decent right now (based on AEGIS and the SM-3), its coverage is limited by ship deployment, and it hasn't been very robustly tested with ICBMs (most of the testing has been done with simulated short range BMs), which doesn't give me much confidence. Our land-based systems are a complete disaster right now and couldn't possibly fend off a Chinese second strike.

And, Minx: The American "obsession" with nuclear weapons kept Europe safe for 45 years, all at the expense of the US taxpayer.

[Loki]

A) That piece was written in 2006. I don't know how much the situation changed since then.
B) Do we not know where those submarines are? I've been told by someone much more informed on the topic than myself that we do, but this isn't my area of research.

[wiggin]

The piece is very outdated; just read it. Type 94s are just starting to come out (2-3 built already), and they're building more. There's no doubt that China will need to improve their skills at running boomers - they need to be extremely silent, and US attack submarines (and other ASW assets) are very, very good at their jobs. But the US hasn't built a new SSBN in nearly 15 years, nor are there any indications they are going to build any more in the foreseeable future. China's capabilities are rapidly improving.

The article was written right at an inflection point - before China had really gotten their SSBN/SLBM capability up and running, not to mention their new mobile solid propellant land ICBMs.... but after Russia was starting to lose their capabilities (I think the article exaggerates their vulnerability, though). Then again, it also was a bit disingenuous. They scoffed at Russia's 'mere' 150 ICBMs, when the current US arsenal only has some 400 ICBM launchers in service (and a bit over 500 warheads). They talked up vaunted US capabilities, when we haven't really designed a new delivery system since the 90s, let alone a new warhead (the newest of those goes back to the 80s I think?). Our arsenal is shrinking, too, and if we're more capable at C4I and detection, that doesn't mean we're somehow top dog indefinitely - in general, US nuclear capabilities are also decreasing, just not as fast as Russia's. Meanwhile, China is rapidly expanding and upgrading their nuclear arsenal and second strike options.

[Nessus]

And, Minx: The American "obsession" with nuclear weapons kept Europe safe for 45 years, all at the expense of the US taxpayer.

While this doesn't warrant an owl picture, the situation wasn't quite that simple.

[wiggin]

Yes, I understand. But by and large the Warsaw Pact had an edge in covnentional weapons in Europe, even with the large numbers of US troops stationed there. If the US hadn't provided a nuclear umbrella for NATO, I have no doubt that more countries in western Europe would have developed their own nuclear weapons programs, at significant cost and greater instability in the region. There simply wasn't any other way to hold potential armies from invading through Fulda Gap.

There's no question that the US developed rather remarkable numbers of strategic nuclear weapons during the Cold War, far more than any other nation outside of the USSR. But I wouldn't term it an 'obsession' any more than the USSR had an obsession. It was a central plank of national security policy, and a major part of the strategy for defending NATO from a potential war with the Soviets. While the number and yields of the weapons produced sometimes seems like overkill, most of the weapons actually had very specific designs, based on detailed wargaming done by the Pentagon. It wasn't some childish obsession with things that go 'boom!', and it was hardly irrelevant to the Western countries that now look askance at US military power.

To address Minx's original question more clearly, yes, China does have a reason to develop its nuclear deterrent. The biggest reason is that it keeps their major strategic competitor (the US) from launching a conventional war over something like Taiwan. I doubt China will try to develop a first strike/counterforce capability any time in the near future, simply because it's incredibly expensive and difficult, especially when the US has such a big lead in such matters. But they are trying to develop a decent second strike capability (e.g. SSBNs, mobile ICBMs with adequate range), with good strategic sense. It's similar to their logic with area denial weaponry for the waters and airfields near the Chinese mainland. They don't really intend to be able to match US military power at any point around the globe in the near future; but they are developing their weapons systems to make it an even match in the local environment of China.

The point is that decisions on nuclear weapons aren't driven by obsessions, they're driven by cold calculation and strategy, whether it's China or the US.

[Nessus]

I'm breaking this down into bits but only for clarity, not point-by-point argumentation.

Yes, I understand. But by and large the Warsaw Pact had an edge in covnentional weapons in Europe, even with the large numbers of US troops stationed there. If the US hadn't provided a nuclear umbrella for NATO, I have no doubt that more countries in western Europe would have developed their own nuclear weapons programs, at significant cost and greater instability in the region. There simply wasn't any other way to hold potential armies from invading through Fulda Gap.

Funnily enough one of the European powers that briefly considered a nuclear weapons programme was Sweden. What does the Swedish muppet say, "bok bok"? Anyway...

There's no question that the US developed rather remarkable numbers of strategic nuclear weapons during the Cold War, far more than any other nation outside of the USSR. But I wouldn't term it an 'obsession' any more than the USSR had an obsession. It was a central plank of national security policy, and a major part of the strategy for defending NATO from a potential war with the Soviets. While the number and yields of the weapons produced sometimes seems like overkill, most of the weapons actually had very specific designs, based on detailed wargaming done by the Pentagon. It wasn't some childish obsession with things that go 'boom!', and it was hardly irrelevant to the Western countries that now look askance at US military power.

As you can probably guess from my rather...Bleak disposition towards humanity, I've read up a little on the Cold War as well (it's not all Nazis and whiskey in my house!), and am familiar at least with the basic gist on both sides. But even starting from the anti-Hitlerian sentiment in the Manhattan project, there was always a component of, hm, emotional motivation in addition to the strategical thinking. Of course it isn't as juvenile as an actual obsession with things that go boom (well, maybe excluding Teller...), but surely before the tactical thinking could commence, the board had to be set by policy makers and other thinkers? As you say, it played an important role in the existence of free European states, I have no objections there.

The point is that decisions on nuclear weapons aren't driven by obsessions, they're driven by cold calculation and strategy, whether it's China or the US.

I wouldn't be so adamant about that. I have no idea how communistic the Chinks are these days, but communism by definition had components in its thinking that our culture calls absurd, at the least, or illogical. Of course one can be cold and calculating starting out from deranged axioms, that's the key to a successful aggressive authoritarian state, after all, so there's that. And as inconvenient or embarrassing as it may be, there are segments of the ruling classes in America that value nuclear programs and other policies due to religious reasons, which at least I must consider inherently irrational and divorced of cold calculation.

I understand your objection to Minx's dismissive comment, but I'm not convinced the situation is as pristine and devoid of humanity as you paint it. Whether this is worth discussing, I don't know.

[Aimless]

My apologies, I didn't intend to be dismissive or to insult the US, I was simply thinking of the continued American preoccupation with its nuclear arsenal a couple of decades after the fall of the Soviet Union despite total dominance and an apparently non-existent nuclear threat from China (well, if not non-existant, then probably not particularly influenced by further enhancements to your present arsenal).

Tbh I don't spend much of my time and energy fretting about the US nuclear arsenal, I was just reacting to this:

http://www.fas.org/press/news/2006/2...tusreport.html

(commentary: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/HL14Ad01.html)

[Loki]

The Pentagon exaggerating a foreign threat to get more money? How totally surprising. I never realized government agencies ever did such a thing.

[Aimless]

The Pentagon exaggerating a foreign threat to get more money? How totally surprising. I never realized government agencies ever did such a thing.

Dude, is this an appropriate use of sarcasm? I mean, I'm not surprised, I'm not particularly invested in the discussion (which I only entered to casually question OG's implied worries about China), and I'm not trying to be aggressive or insulting. So please ask yourself, at your leisure, what the indications are for sarcasm on your part, and what the possible contraindications may be.

[Nessus]

The Pentagon exaggerating a foreign threat to get more money? How totally surprising. I never realized government agencies ever did such a thing.

You have an overly optimistic view on humanity, it seems!

[Loki]

Dude, is this an appropriate use of sarcasm? I mean, I'm not surprised, I'm not particularly invested in the discussion (which I only entered to casually question OG's implied worries about China), and I'm not trying to be aggressive or insulting. So please ask yourself, at your leisure, what the indications are for sarcasm on your part, and what the possible contraindications may be.

The point is that what you said doesn't indicate any special preoccupation with nuclear weapons, but rather a preoccupation by a government department with exaggerating their usefulness/backwardness in order to get more resources.

[Aimless]

I suppose then that it would have been more appropriate for me to refer to the general US/Pentagon obsession with things that go boom and vroom I just assumed nukes had more to do with nukes.

But perhaps we're being too hard on the Pentagon. How do they feel about NewSTART?

[Lewkowski]

http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/st...-spending-cuts

The Deficit Supercommittee will probably not reach an agreement by its Wednesday deadline - and the result might be 1.2 trillion in "automatic cuts" over the next 10 years. $600 billion of that would come out of the defense budget.

Politicians howl about that.

"We cannot put America's safety in jeopardy by virtue of the failure of this committee," Romney said.

"We can't do that to our brave men and women who are on the ground fighting for us," Bachmann noted.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently said that the cuts would be "devastating."

This is all ridiculous. Because as Senator Rand Paul told CNN yesterday, these are not real cuts. They are cuts in planned increases in spending.

Paul: "This may surprise some people, but there will be no cuts in military spending because we're only cutting proposed increases. If we do nothing, military spending goes up 23% over 10 years. If we [make this cut], it will still go up 16%."

Only in Washington is a 16% increase considered a "devastating" cut.

Unfortunately, this is how politicians always talk about spending. It's why the entire deficit reduction compromise (including military "cuts") that Republicans and Democrats reached after months of name-calling this summer ultimately boils down to this:

Read more: http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/st...#ixzz1fJP2zaLm


************************************************** *************

Only in Washington is a 16% increase considered a "devastating" cut.

I get inflation exists. But its high time that people talk about "cuts" and "decreases in spending" as two completely separate things. A cut is where you spend less RAW dollars than you did the previous year. So yeah screw any compromise let the auto "cuts" take place to defense spending and domestic spending. I'll be very pleased if Obama actually veto's any compromise bill like he's promised to do. Not that I think he will.

[Nessus]

Lewkowski against guns? Oh my!

[wiggin]

As you can probably guess from my rather...Bleak disposition towards humanity, I've read up a little on the Cold War as well (it's not all Nazis and whiskey in my house!), and am familiar at least with the basic gist on both sides. But even starting from the anti-Hitlerian sentiment in the Manhattan project, there was always a component of, hm, emotional motivation in addition to the strategical thinking. Of course it isn't as juvenile as an actual obsession with things that go boom (well, maybe excluding Teller...), but surely before the tactical thinking could commence, the board had to be set by policy makers and other thinkers? As you say, it played an important role in the existence of free European states, I have no objections there.

I wouldn't be so adamant about that. I have no idea how communistic the Chinks are these days, but communism by definition had components in its thinking that our culture calls absurd, at the least, or illogical. Of course one can be cold and calculating starting out from deranged axioms, that's the key to a successful aggressive authoritarian state, after all, so there's that. And as inconvenient or embarrassing as it may be, there are segments of the ruling classes in America that value nuclear programs and other policies due to religious reasons, which at least I must consider inherently irrational and divorced of cold calculation.

I think the irrationality has nothing to do with nukes per se, though. The US defense establishment frequently may seem obsessive because it's their job to imagine worst case scenarios and plan appropriately for them. But it's no more obsessive than a military that is concerned about dropping ground troop strength by 10-20k when total numbers are currently about 500k. They plan for massive wars that tax their resources to the breaking point, not piddly little conflicts with pushover adversaries.

Remember that the Manhattan project was not started as a result of planning by some defense wonk or a paranoid American leadership - rather, Einstein sent a letter warning about a potentially powerful new weapons system to the president. The decision to undertake a massive weapons project (that sapped engineering and physics talent from the rest of the defense industry at a critical time) was not based on irrationality. I won't deny that at times the public perception of American nukes and MAD has been irrational - whether irrational panic about our adversaries, or weird feelings of pride in the size and strength of the US arsenal - but I think that has had little impact on nuclear posture reviews and the like. They tend to be based on cold, hard facts coupled with worst case scenario wargaming.

(Also - there are segments of our ruling classes that have religious reasons for valuing our nuclear program? Would you care to support that?)

My apologies, I didn't intend to be dismissive or to insult the US, I was simply thinking of the continued American preoccupation with its nuclear arsenal a couple of decades after the fall of the Soviet Union despite total dominance and an apparently non-existent nuclear threat from China (well, if not non-existant, then probably not particularly influenced by further enhancements to your present arsenal).

Tbh I don't spend much of my time and energy fretting about the US nuclear arsenal, I was just reacting to this:

http://www.fas.org/press/news/2006/2...tusreport.html

(commentary: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/HL14Ad01.html)

Since the fall of the USSR, US nuclear stockpiles have fallen precipitously to a level that can barely keep strategic deterrence (in line with negotiated drops in the Russia arsenal). The US hasn't carried out a nuclear test in decades, hasn't developed a new delivery system or warhead in decades, and is currently experiencing a sharp debate between those who support 'stockpile stewardship' (i.e. figuring out how to keep our aging nuclear weapons from becoming unreliable) and developing a long-term 'renewable replacement warhead'. US strategic platforms are designed to keep a minimum of deterrence and second strike capability against any conceivable collection of enemies over the long term; fairly reasonable for Pentagon planning, IMO. I skimmed the FAS piece, and it was both outdated (like Loki's piece) as well as wrong on a number of points. The biggest one being that they dismissed Pentagon concern about growing threats to US interests from a nascent Chinese strategic weapons program, when a mere 5 years later, those basic threats have materialized.

I think the issue is that people look at Pentagon threat assessment (not just about nukes) and read it as paranoia rather than people doing their job. Yes, China has not in the past acted very aggressively to develop strategic weapons systems. Yet China is clearly seeing itself more and more as a regional power, and with their economic strength growing, eventually a global power. In the last 10-15 years, China has invested heavily in strategic weapons platforms that they never even touched before - a rudimentary carrier capability and other naval forces, area denial weaponry to threaten US carrier battle groups, 4.5-5th generation fighter aircraft, etc. It's true that China is not currently a threat - Pentagon officials have been saying this very clearly for years (IIRC recently Gates dismissed criticism of his decision to stop production of the F-22 at some 180 planes over concerns for China's development of fighter aircraft by pointing out that by 2020, we'd have hundreds of 5th generation aircraft in service, while China would have at most dozens). The concern is over the first and second derivatives, if you will. Weapons programs take a very long time to come to fruition - for example, our newest fighter aircraft have taken ~15-20 years to get to production, our previous nuclear programs took over a decade to get from concept to product, etc. The Pentagon has to forecast threat levels far into the future on the basis of scanty data. It's hardly surprising that their conclusions about future threats sometime seems ridiculous.

[Nessus]

I think the irrationality has nothing to do with nukes per se, though. The US defense establishment frequently may seem obsessive because it's their job to imagine worst case scenarios and plan appropriately for them. But it's no more obsessive than a military that is concerned about dropping ground troop strength by 10-20k when total numbers are currently about 500k. They plan for massive wars that tax their resources to the breaking point, not piddly little conflicts with pushover adversaries.

Remember that the Manhattan project was not started as a result of planning by some defense wonk or a paranoid American leadership - rather, Einstein sent a letter warning about a potentially powerful new weapons system to the president. The decision to undertake a massive weapons project (that sapped engineering and physics talent from the rest of the defense industry at a critical time) was not based on irrationality. I won't deny that at times the public perception of American nukes and MAD has been irrational - whether irrational panic about our adversaries, or weird feelings of pride in the size and strength of the US arsenal - but I think that has had little impact on nuclear posture reviews and the like. They tend to be based on cold, hard facts coupled with worst case scenario wargaming.

(Also - there are segments of our ruling classes that have religious reasons for valuing our nuclear program? Would you care to support that?)

Next time, I'll post the owl. Sorry for wasting your time.

[wiggin]

Hey, I'm unemployed and this is an easy way to procrastinate from doing things I need to do.

[Ominous Gamer]

Dude, is this an appropriate use of sarcasm? I mean, I'm not surprised, I'm not particularly invested in the discussion (which I only entered to casually question OG's implied worries about China), and I'm not trying to be aggressive or insulting. So please ask yourself, at your leisure, what the indications are for sarcasm on your part, and what the possible contraindications may be.

Its not really an implied worry, its more along the idea that I don't think the US could "win" if it decided to go all WarGames* on China.


*To those that haven't seen the movie, at the end end its discussed how simply having the fewest casualties isn't and shouldn't be considered a win. One of the famous lines is "The only winning move is not to play".

[Loki]

And what exactly is your thinking based on?

[Aimless]

I think he's just playing with the concept of "winning", eg. I "win" by destroying China and only letting a couple of their retaliatory missiles hit me.

[Loki]

I think he just likes being a contrarian, especially if it means going against views held by conservatives.

[Ominous Gamer]

I can't tell if you're honestly paranoid, or trying to play victim to shift focus I didn't realize I was required to repeat what Wiggin had already tried explaining to you.

[Nessus]

Hey, I'm unemployed and this is an easy way to procrastinate from doing things I need to do.

I have some books you might like