▲ 16 points

Ask HN: So what IS the end game for any WW3 scenario?

by EwanG·3y ago·31 comments·view on hn ↗

Given today's announcements about Russia pulling out of START, I got to thinking about whether it makes a real difference. I mean, once any one of the major atomic powers decides to "go for broke" I don't see any way that they don't all have to use most of their missiles. Even if it's only two of them initially, it's not likely any of the others want to wait to see if one of the others has enough left to impose their will on the rest.

At which point - then what? None of the major atomic powers has enough (if any) missiles left to be much of a deterrent, and none of them will have armed forces that are any more prepared to do an Atlantic or Pacific crossing and invasion than they are now. So it's just that much worse for everyone?

31 comments

This is my personal belief, which I have no way to substantiate, and solely statistical, but it helps me sleep at night or so to speak.

Nobody spends more on defense than US. Also, the new technology that you hear about today is essentially declassified tech from ~20 years ago. I remember reading in the past about Boeing doing experiments with a 747 carrying a giant laser that could lock on and fry ICBMs. There was also stuff like this 14 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBMU6l6GsdM

Extrapolating to today, I firmly believe that US (and probably NATO and other countries who share intel) are watching Russian launch sites closely, ready to drop kinetic warheads from orbit at the first sign of activation, not to mention multiple layers of defense with kinetic kill vehicles, lasers, EMPS, jammers, e.t.c. That is assuming, we don't have stuxnet like malware hiding in computer systems that would just magically cause the missiles to fail.

After all, Russian military was shown to be wildly incompetent (which US probably already knew), so that translates to easy infiltration/intel and creation of a safeguard plan to counter anything they have.

The US is working on missile defense and there are technologies that might change things in decade or two. But there is no way that they have been deployed in secret. The scale would be too large to hide and the government likes to brag. Deploying a full system requires SpaceX Starship and the number of launches would be large. Even then, it may not be possible to have system that works against major attack.

The 747 laser was retired 9 years ago. They are working on laser firing drones but don't have any prototypes after years. Also, these are boost phase lasers which are fine with North Korea since can get close but don't work with Russia.

There is talk about kinetic kill vehicles in space but I haven't found any concrete programs. This sometimes gets mixed with the Space Development Agency satellite constellationm but that is more about communication and detection.

Kinetic warheads are not a thing. There haven't been enough satellite launches to put anything in orbit. They need to be big, both to have enough mass and for the rocket to get down. One big problem is that it takes 15-30 minutes for them to descend; shorter time requires a bigger rocket. The reaction time is one reason they are a bad idea since target can't tell if they are nukes or first strike.

EMP and jammers don't work against nuclear missiles. They are self-guided. The electronics, like a lot of military electronics, are hardened and tested.

I want to add to that, that lasers are situational in the atmosphere (e.g. launch your nukes when it rains at the target to disadvantage the defender), there is so much absorption and scattering.

Even the space-borne concepts were duds due to their one-time use: they were chemically pumped since you needed so much power to make it through the atmosphere and the guiding mirrors would rapidly break due to micrometeorites.

Short range concepts these days rely on multiple laser-emitter sites (like the Rheinmetall fiber-laser turret) to intercept a single target, with multiple beams on target. Dwell times are in the range of multiple seconds for drones and with rain, they can easily go up by a factor of 8 - for some incoming targets (e.g. rockets), the dwell time is already 10s of seconds and rain extends the dwell time beyond what the round needs to impact (as in this study [0]).

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/EFFECTIV...

Government definitely has secrets. There is definitely compartmentalized projects with weapon systems that we don't know of. X-37B for example spent some time in orbit, nobody knows why.

>The 747 laser was retired 9 years ago.

That you know of. The 747 laser may not be a thing, but a military warplane with the next gen version of that laser may very well be

> Kinetic warheads are not a thing.

That you know of. Putting a rack of tungsten rods with basic guidance's system on a payload isn't really that complicated. They don't really need to be that big for localized destruction either. A 20x1 foot one has destructive power of an ICBM. A smaller one could take out a silo easily as it would penetrate quite far.

>EMP and jammers don't work against nuclear missiles. They are self-guided.

If they use gps for guidance, they can definitely be jammed/misdirected with a strong enough fake gps signal. And setting off an emp that creates magnetic fields strong enough to cause high current in circuitry is not that farfetched - the guidance computer may be fairly shielded, but you still have servos and other parts exposed that would be affected.

Regarding the tungsten rods from god (RFG), your specified 20x1 round would be about 24,000lbs. That means that you could put two shots up per Falcon 9 launch with hardly anything left to spare for anything non-tungsten (guidance, fuel). Just using launch capacity we can see that unless Starlink, and basically all of SpaceX, is a giant maskirovka, then the US hasn't fielded any such weapon in meaningful amounts.[0]

The RFG sats would need to be LEO or some polar orbit to have some chance of not immediately being outed (a bigass GEO/GSO parked over Moscow would draw notice). Additionally LEO sats deorbit after a human-relevant-while so your rods from god would need to have and EOL plan or some way to do on orbit maintenance because if they deorbit from either EOL or guidance failure then they wouldn't burn up on the way down and could be catastrophic. Then let's also consider the risk that such a weapon draws an ASAT attack either wittingly or unwittingly from Russia or China. Now we have a cloud of tungsten flechettes in orbit.

As much as I'd love to see some awesome space weapons, at the moment there's no way they're fielded and a big reason for that is that they'd basically be more of a liability than a capability at the moment.

Also the ballistic missiles in question don't use (only) GPS for guidance, they also use inertial and celestial navigation which is pretty spoof-proof when you're aiming at a city.

[0] also since we can track and even see starlink sats, we can be confident that none of those flights were used for RFGs, so that further reduces the hypothetical upper bound of the rounds in orbit.

We (US mil) use GPS and INS, with tons of error detection/correction in those weapon systems.

They aren’t going off-course due to jamming. We’ve been aware of jamming since day one because we were the first to experiment with it.

> That you know of. The 747 laser may not be a thing, but a military warplane with the next gen version of that laser may very well be

There is no reason to keep laser aircraft secret since they are only for limited use. The whole YAL-1 aircraft and the follow on program have been announced but we haven't seen the prototype. If was secretly working, wouldn’t have Congress complaining about budgets being cut. Laser research has been focused on short-range air defense.

You missed the part about deployment. Boost phase lasers need to be close to target, we would have noticed ones flying from Japan or South Korea around North Korea. If there was working laser system, they wouldn't be spending tons of money of missile-based defense.

> That you know of. Putting a rack of tungsten rods with basic guidance's system on a payload isn't really that complicated. They don't really need to be that big for localized destruction either. A 20x1 foot one has destructive power of an ICBM. A smaller one could take out a silo easily as it would penetrate quite far.

Hypersonic guidance is hard, ICBMs aren't guided. China has anti-ship missile but that is on slower IRBM. Unguided ballistic projectiles may not be accurate enough to hit silos.

That much tungsten weighs 34 tons. You also need to send up the rocket to drop it out of orbit. Falcon 9 can only put 22 ton into LEO, Falcon Heavy is 50 tons. Basically means either need smaller (there is a limit to size) or wait for Starship. SpaceX has dropped the price but it is also projectile per launch.

That size projectile would do 850 ton TNT at 10 km/s. Not as destructive as an warhead which are 100x more powerful. Other problem is that there isn't much use for 1 kT strike, it is too big for conventional warfare that prefers lots of precision strikes. Strategic attacks can be done with cruise missiles against non-peers and not at all against peers.

Final problem with kinetic bombardment is proliferation. There is no way to know if it is kinetic or nuclear payload and nuclear is much better option. Opponent would have to assume that any launch could be nuclear attack. Or if conventional then your proposed first strike. It is the same problem that scrapped conventional ICBM.

> If they use gps for guidance, they can definitely be jammed/misdirected with a strong enough fake gps signal. And setting off an emp that creates magnetic fields strong enough to cause high current in circuitry is not that farfetched - the guidance computer may be fairly shielded, but you still have servos and other parts exposed that would be affected.

They don't use GPS, they are inertially guided. Once they launch there is no outside output. The military hardens all of its electronics. Warheads are designed to have nuclear explosion go off next to them, both for nearby siblings and nuclear-armed SAMs.

>Boost phase lasers need to be close to target

Sure, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist. Im just saying technology was proven to work, and could exist in some form and way even if its not the primary defense method. There is a possibility of Aurora existing (i.e the current gen SR71) that can catch up to a missile and hit it with a laser.

>That much tungsten weighs 34 tons.

Yes, but a smaller 5 ton one can still do a shitload of damage to the target. And flight paths of a VERY streamlined object reentering atmosphere hypersonically are pretty predictable, you don't need fancy guidance (keep in mind there is technology to do guidance on a bullet fired out of a gun that exists today) . A smaller one would not look like a nuke at all, it would just be a localized explosion, with a delivery method that is hard to detect/intercept.

>They don't use GPS, they are inertially guided.

I may be wrong but I think the first stage prior to deployment still uses GPS to set the trajectory accurately, after separation of first stage its all inertial guidance.

>Warheads are designed to have nuclear explosion go off next to them,

Warheads yes, delivery vehicles no.

> They are working on laser firing drones but don't have any prototypes after years.

Sure.

Me too. While I have some doubts, I also think that the US is not unprepared for a scenario where nukes are flying. I think Russia is still a significant threat, but also that the US has, given their budget, developed/implemented technology the public doesn't even know about to counter this possibility. In fact, I would be beyond shocked if the US hasn't developed anything like that.

I certainly would like to not be in a scenario where the public finds out about possible technology like this, because it would probably mean war has already broken out.

What's the benefit of hiding such technology? Any viable deterring capabilities the US has should be loudly advertised.

I too believe the US can eliminate a huge portion of the threat. But even just a couple getting through can have devastating consequences.

Hope those buttons never get pushed.

US Defense is known to be heavily bloated. They spend millions or even billions on projects that just end up in the dumpster.

Spending shouldn't be taken at face value. If the Chinese develop 1 perfect rocket for attacking Taiwan and then produce 1000s at low cost, they can just saturate the whole island and destroy any resistance by sheer force.

> I firmly believe that US (and probably NATO and other countries who share intel) are watching Russian launch sites closely

You can't watch the submarines though, as there's no technology to locate them? Until it emerges on the US coast and fires off a nuclear missile that is, but that might be too late.

> ready to drop kinetic warheads from orbit

I don't think those are a thing. It's so much easier and cheaper and faster to launch things from the ground (or water).

Yes but putting a bunch of tungsten rods with basic guidance into orbit on a payload is cheaper then dealing with missile systems, and also allows you to have a first strike capability that will be not readily detected like a missile

here's a pop-sci whole thing about the feasibility of orbital based defense/offense

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_n1FZaKzF8

tl:dr they're crazy expensive, impossible to aim, and you'd need lots of them to be the coverage of a ground based setup

There is no end game when the end game is MAD. Neither did I nor 99.999% of the planet made up these rules, but they're just part of the game. Worst case scenario we revert back to living like its 900AD except with radiation.

That being said, humanity will go on. Even if the entire nuclear arsenal was detonated like a fireworks show gone wrong, I highly doubt all places on the earth will be affected. Hell we've been hit by a massive asteroid once, and life still went on. Highly doubt a few thousand nukes going off will be any close to that bad. Also its not like they're gonna nuke the shit out of Africa, S. America, or some pacific islands. Even if nuclear winter will suck and what not, again - some people will survive and for me personally that's all that matters.

I'm not one of the uber rich (and no I don't mean the trust fund kid nor the startup founder who had a 9 figure exit), so I don't really care nor know what they'll be doing. But I'm sure some of them will already have prepared for this scenario. If I was uber rich, I know I probably would have.

Most of us plebs will most likely perish. I will most likely be one of the first ones gone because I live in the bay area.

Some of us will survive though. Instead of slinging infrastructure or loading up test data, we will be forced to survive at all and any costs. If I survive, I am taking zero chances with people I don't know or trust. My water, my food, my shelter.

Again, no hard feelings and I have no expectations from others- I want to survive as long as possible because why not... Until we have a New California Republic or something like that, on God zero chances. Plus, it would be cool to rebuild.

End of the day, its just a game for better or worse. Might as well play it. I might get in a car accident and perish later today lol in which.. no ww3 for me.

There hasn't been much thinking about multilateral nuclear war. Until recently, China didn't have enough missiles to make it an issue. I don't think the smaller powers were considered; UK and France were on the US side and the others didn't matter. Also, Russia and China were probably targeted together.

One factor is that don't need that many missiles for retaliatory strike; a single SSBN would be enough. The place where calculation could change is first strike since that takes lots of warheads and would leave attacker depleted. The other issue is keeping uninvolved country from launching, better tracking would help with that. But is good argument for not having nuclear war.

Also, there wasn't much thought about strategy after nuclear war. I think it was assumed that the decision makers and most of their countries would be dead. Collapse of civilization and nuclear winter would mean that survival is the focus. Nobody will be worried about "imposing their will" but not starving.

The whole world is held together by nukes. Hiroshima & Nagasaki were outliers though. If we do use them, it has long been a prediction that 'intelligent' lifeforms eventually wipe themselves out, rather than being star-faring and preserving the species on other planets (Mars as Plan B). This is a test of how enlightened we are as a species.

> The New START treaty, signed in 2010 by U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, limits each country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers.

I'm not sure how much worse mutual assured destruction could get by going over what they already have.

Wait until someone starts to conduct nuclear tests, not simulated.

There's a computer game about it, you have go to through killing a lot of rats first until you get into the good parts though.

I feel like adjusting the doomsday clock another few seconds to midnight after reading this.

The nukes will be flying. At least 10-20 cities in the US, EU, China, Russia (and possibly other countries as well) will be destroyed.

Though I see it very likely that thousands of nukes will fly, under the 'use it or lose it' policy.

Those that don't die immediately will wish they had.

It kind of sad that leaders in the West and Russia are gambling with the future of humanity, now that we are very close to bring life to other planets.

The wet dream of space population always rubs me the wrong way. Basically all of these purely human issues will exist anywhere we go until we solve them. Earth is the only planet we know of that is perfectly made for us. No other place can fit us as well. And yet we can't even utilize it properly.

Given that, it's almost childish to think that our #1 priority is to populate other random nearby planets.

If we colonize other planets, there's a far chance they'll be politically connected with the Earth empires and so the nuclear exchange woul happen there as well. Essentially, instead of WW3, we'd have Solar System War I.

How do you figure we are close to bringing a meaningful amount of life to other planets? Just because we have the ability to put a few people on Mars like we did the Moon if we focus on it doesn't mean those three to six people will be able to create a civilization. They'll get back on there ship and head home. I realize becoming a true space fairing civilization may follow an exponential curve but were so far down on the curve with no guarantee of exponential progress that I wouldn't bet any amount of money that mattered on someone four generations from me being able to life in space or on another planet with no support from earth.

The core issue is still there: Power can destroy other planets again. Human being is self-destructive.

Moving away from consumption based growth and imposing ideologies (inc. religious) could stop the need to conquer and expand.

If it is possible at all is anyone's guess.

It would take the one in power to lead the change (US), but having seen what they have been up to it is quite hard.

The alternative is the rise of a new power that is willing to lead a change.