At least for the US why not keep one or more nuclear missile subs in the Great Lakes?
Lake Superior alone covers 31,700 square miles to an average depth of 483 feet. It’s far to large an area to target with a first strike and well protected from non US/Canadian forces.
The idea is subs deliver missiles halfway around the world, the rockets do the rest. It’s a matter of an hour for a rocket to transit from the Great Lakes to the other side of the planet, but half that for rockets fired from most of the way there already.
Shortening the time to target is one of the benefits (well, is that really the right term here?) of submarines, yes, but another is survivability for a retaliatory strike as a deterrent. Trident missiles have at least a 7,500 mile range. A couple in the Great Lakes would provide that with complete safety against Russian hunter-killer subs.
Passing through Montreal and Quebec City at 27' of depth in the dead of night (challenging for a Yasen at 32' draft but possibly some freak condition might make it possible) a few drunks watching in awe as it slides silently under bridges. River patrol craft carefully edging out of the way (a tearful salute offered to brave comrades, perhaps a lifted glass of Vodka or a gentle pat on the wallet to acknowledge regular payment). Other patrol craft can be seen lying idle by the side of the water due to their crew celebrating "arranged" events, or being "taken out" by the KGB (or whatever they've taken to calling themselves now).
Now it runs through Lake Ontario and spends a day lolling in the deep cold waters there before night falls once more and enters the Nigara river (oh shit, you see where this is going) and starts the run through Nigara City.
At full speed the most daring Naval maneuver of all time is about to be attempted. Now, finally, the true value of the Yansen class will be revealed as two vast titanium wings snap out from under the hull and the super-cavitating bubble generator is deployed. The hidden rocket engines on the rear of the boat ignite. The submarine fills with the stench of human excrement as the whole crew void their bowels in unison and the Russian sub leaps from the water in front of Nigara falls and..
oh I give up.
Just when HN seemed to have settled into semi-intelligent tech talk we get this.
It does seem silly, but not out or the realm of possibility. The Great Lakes stretch further north and closer to the Russian heartland than almost any land in America. Any international waters further north and closer by great circle distance to Moscow, besides the north Atlantic, are covered in ice part of the year. Someone said it's cheaper to dig holes in the ground. The problem is those holes are on a first strike list. There's a case for second strike capabilities based in the Great Lakes.
Great lakes commercial fisherman and also crew on container ships have said for years that they see weird stuff dozens of miles offshore in the Great lakes.
Fish stories and all that. But there is precedent for submarines and even aircraft carriers in the Great lakes. Lake Michigan is filled with crashed trainer aircraft from WWII.
You're skipping over the concept of "survivability" of submarines which enable a second-strike capability. It's not about getting the missiles closer to the enemy, but ensuring that there are nukes that can be launched in the case of the US falling to a surprise attack.
In theory this would deter a first-strike against the US because the subs could still retaliate with massive damage. Thus, cutting second-strike capability could make first-strike more likely in the eyes of US strategic (eg nuclear) planning.
Yes, the fact that nobody really knew where the subs were was a key factor in that first strike survivability. Even ComSubPacFlt only knew of very large sectors of ocean that a boat was to patrol, the rest was up to the captain and circumstances.
Hmm…maybe I don’t quite understand what you’re saying. But I think you’re implying is that subs drive pretty far away with their nuclear missiles and shoot closer to the target?
Those will be among the targets in the first strike. Unless they can fire before the nukes hit they're not useful. Subs are pretty much the only option.
I suspect foreign agents try to bribe people in submarine crews to sabotage their sub in the event of a strike. If someone onboard could stop the American second strike missiles being fired they'd give Russia a huge advantage. I imagine the Navy have considerer this.
>Unless they can fire before the nukes hit they're not useful.
Au contraire! An important aspect of them as land based is the "nuclear sponge" concept: every single nuke spent on a silo is a nuke not aimed at a population center or vital infrastructure. They're out in the middle of nowhere for a reason (well, multiple reasons, but that's one of them). Even if they're all lost they've constrained the opponent's tactical choices merely by their existence, pushing towards the logic of a counter force strike instead of counter value.
Any nuclear exchange would be very bad, but unlike Europe the US does indeed have a lot of near completely uninhabited non-arable land for strategic depth. Makes sense to use it.
In the event of a full nuclear war, whoever is on board the sub has probably just had their family, friends, and home vaporized.
Further, they are trapped in a small metal tube with 100 other people in similar condition, and who will probably be....not pleased if any sabotage is discovered.
I suspect it would be very hard to successfully bribe said crew members. (And have them actually follow through with their end of the deal, rather than just taking the money and...not doing it if the war ever happened)
You may be joking, but do keep in mind that the Canadians (well, the British, but if memory serves, a significant fraction of the force were from Canada) sacked Washington D.C. in 1814.
Not that it matters, but I am Canadian and we were taught in school Canada was created in 1867 via the BNA (British North American Act).
Therefor, those who "sacked" Washington must be British, the same way that George Washington must British as well be given he was born prior to the formation of the USA. He became "American" later, much as "Canada" was created later..
I think we could but why build a whole base complete with nuclear weapons handling and reactor maintenance facilities on the Great Lakes? Just use the ones in Georgia/Washington.
Wikipedia lists the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawaymax size as allowing at most 26.5’ of draft, while the Ohio-class submarines require 35.5’. So treaty aside, it seems probably not physically possible, even though the locks are bigger in other dimensions.
The idea is that ones based in the Great Lakes would be immune to interception by enemy submarines discovering and shadowing them; you're not gonna get an Akula up the St. Lawrence Seaway.
However, it would leave them is a small, well-known area and would allow for easier signature profiling via sensors mounted on any number of craft, that could then be used on other subs of the same class elsewhere in the world. That was the reason why when some idiot in the White House revealed where our subs were near China and HK, it was a big deal.
Wouldn't the pressure wave from a underwater burst make the submarine hull collapse, given the lake has limited depth to disperse the energy of the blast, when compared to open oceans.
Not something I know that much about, though nuclear depth charges where apparently replaced with torpedoes because they aren’t that great a weapon.
Best case 500 ft vs 12,000 feet means the blast might have a range roughly square root of 24 or 5x as far. But a more variable topology might work like the walls of an anechoic chamber and disparate the blast much faster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anechoic_chamber#/media/File:C...
The Trident II Submarine Ballistic Missile has a range of more than 7500 miles (12000km). The exact capability is still classified, but you could easily hit places like Moscow or Beijing from a submarine in the great lakes.
What could a dozen 1MT warheads, sunk to a depth of 100ft, do to submarines anywhere in the Great Lakes? Shockwaves travel through water much better than through air. Water explodes into steam in a way that air doesn't.
My intuition is that you actually could pretty reliably paste a sub inside the Great Lakes using some nukes launches from Russia. The lakes may just not be deep or big enough to hide in.
This is leaving aside the treaty, the lack of freshwater sub technology, the long time to retaliation due to long range, the lack of a sub facility on the lakes, and the unnecessary nature of the whole enterprise (if the US lost 1 boomer sub to an enemy they could bring the others into a defensive posture making them practically impossible to hunt down, to preserve 2nd strike capability).
They aren’t that much better than depth charges in part because energy is spread in 3D space. 1,000,000 times the energy means ~100x the range, but depth charges are very short range weapons. In WWII with a sub on radar and using 12 depth charges in a grid they only had a 5-10% kill chance. Which is one reason why nuclear depth charges where replaced by target seeking torpedoes.
Carpet bombing the Great Lakes with thousands of nukes could work but that’s a great nuclear sponge. Directing a huge quantity of munitions away from other targets.
PS: 100ft is likely shallow with much of the blast being sent into the air but that’s not very important to your suggestion.
The US uses ballistic missile submarines to provide counterstrike capability that can't be destroyed by a nuclear first strike. This deters adversaries from attacking us because they'll know that no matter what they do, we'll still be able to annihilate them in response.
If, as this article claims, it will be impossible for submarines to hide in open waters in the future, hiding submarines in large, protected bodies of water such as the Great Lakes becomes a compelling option.
Can nuke subs do that much damage to a ship? I thought they were equipped to hide from everything and deliver massive damage to large land-based targets.
A few Virginia class escorts could probably sink almost any non-NATO navy task force on their own. Add a carrier group on top/to the rear of them, and you can scratch "almost".
The Ohio subs do not go unprotected. However, they are designed to be able to carry not only nukes but also cruise missiles (up to 154 Tomahawks for instance), which would make the a huge threat to any naval force.
Also, let's say that these subs were used to deliver a few hundred anti-surface Tomahawks against for instance a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Not only would the missiles themselves be able to sink a lot of surface assets, the use of these subs would also signal their presence, indicating that the USN was meaning business.
Different classes of subs are specialized to do different things. Some specialize as missile platforms, some specialize in hunting other submarines. Many can do both at least to some extent.
No it doesn't. Ballistic missile submarines are exclusively useful as second strike weapons: they don't carry enough warheads, nor are they accurate enough to first strike weapons (which have to reliably hit military targets and threaten an opponent's retaliation ability).
Those would be Virginia class attacks subs, not ballistic missile subs, I think. An Ohio class could be added temporarily, though, to add even more cruise missile capability to the task force. (Since they, or at least some of them, are now dual purpose platforms.)
A treaty limited them to 20 ICMB’s on each of 14 subs down from 24. Each ICMB can hold 12 independently targeting 100kt warheads or 8 larger 0.45 MT nukes.
However, it might be that less than 20 missiles are loaded and or teach ICBM is not carrying the maximum capacity of nukes, but we just don’t know.
Again: no they aren't, except in a narrow and strategically irrelevant "well it's still a missile you can launch".
If you're executing a first strike, then your goal has to be to take out your opponents ability to retaliate...or you're trying to pull off a limited first strike.
In both cases, submarines add no strategic value if used: in the limited strike scenario you give away a submarines location, and in the first-strike scenario you are not going to have enough missiles, with up to date enough targeting data, in order to hit targets any quicker then land-launched ICBMs are.
The time you waste trying to maneuver your submarines close enough to your target to launch, the fact that it's entirely possible they get taken out before they launch their entire payload (US and Russian subs shadow each other as a matter of course to track their movements), and the inherent communications problems coordinating with submarines all make them irrelevant as first-strike weapons.
The point of a nuclear ballistic missile submarine is a guaranteed second-strike capability. Your opponent might surprise you take out your bombers. They might surprise you can take out your land-based ICBMs. But there's no way they can ever be sure they got every boomer sub, and boomer subs don't target military targets: they target cities, capitals and command bunkers. They exist to ensure no useful advantage is ever gained from first-strike.
Seems naive that, as the article claims, nations might agree to limit their detection technology to enhance survivability of their adversaries’ nuclear forces.
If “ocean transparency” comes to pass, it seems much likelier that we’d have to deal with a realignment of the MAD calculus.
Even though this seems paradoxical, there's actually a logic to it.
One of the reasons countries like the United States and Russia (previously, the USSR) maintain such large nuclear arsenals is to project a credible thread of a second strike - i.e., the idea that any first strike wouldn't be able to completely knock out the opponent's nuclear arsenal. If both sides think that the "submarine" portion of their nuclear triad isn't sufficiently contributing to second strike capability, that'll probably just mean significantly doubling down on ICBMs and forward-deployed bombers (or investing in a different delivery system) so that the calculus remains fundamentally unchanged.
I'm not sure it'd change the calculus for the UK or France because they are NATO members which effectively ensures their second strike capability. (It certainly might change the cost/benefit calculation on building submarines, though!) Israel probably doesn't even subscribe to a second strike doctrine given that the potential adversaries they're trying to deter don't even have nuclear weapons.
France has made a deliberate point of not relying on NATO, and instead maintaining its own nuclear arsenal.
If the Cold War had turned hot, the Soviet plan was to drive to the Rhine and then negotiate, on the theory that the US might sacrifice West Germany, but that France would definitely retaliate on its own.
Pakistan does have nuclear weapons and the risk of them transferring them to an Islamic fundamentalist trying to rid the middle east of Jews is nonzero.
I would guess that on some level, some analyst many years ago laid out a plan for what should happen with that, and the first thing would be to have a few armed satellites to ensure the continued effectiveness of MAD as a concept.
Yes, it would violate treaties against the weaponization of space but I would lay even money on the idea that some country has already done this.
It's tricky because if you do it in secret, it's not MAD, and it's not actually an effective deterrent.
It only works as a deterrent if you break the treaty and everyone knows you've broken the treaty (whether you publicly admit it or not) but we aren't there afaik.
> It only works as a deterrent if you break the treaty and everyone knows you've broken the treaty (whether you publicly admit it or not) but we aren't there afaik.
It could work if it gets to the point where 'only an idiot' wouldn't have broken the treaty, so you can just assume everyone has, because the idea is fairly obvious, the technology is easy, and there's not any other good options. Or if a rogue state does it or something like it, then you can assume the US and Russia have done it or will be doing it shortly.
MAD has been in constant re-alignment since it became a thing. first with detection to be able to retaliate before getting blown up. then with guaranteed second strike from subs. then with missile defense which we don’t have yet but in theory if you can shoot down the nukes you can strike without retaliation
Bit of a tangent, but the 'mutually assured destruction' meme is a cold-war-era concept relying on some strong assumptions - namely that any country would be able to credibly claim that they could take out US strike capabilities in the first place.
Russia claims to have inherited that capability from the Soviet union, but that claim looks increasingly suspicious, with the war in Ukraine exposing not only systemic corruption in the Russian military, but also near-total failure on the intelligence front: officials were lining their pockets with funds destined to maintain and enhance military capabilities, and Russian generals were greeted with precision strikes upon arrival in Ukraine. If they can't keep their sh*t secret from Ukraine, how could they hope to keep a nuclear launch order secret from the US? A nuclear arsenal also requires expensive upkeep to remain functional, money that might also have been used to buy fancy appartments and yachts in London, Cyprus,... At this point it's questionable whether Russia would even be able to launch a succesful first strike and not see it intercepted by the US (they might still be able to land more than zero succesful strikes, but taking out US strike capabilities is a wholly different ball game).
Of course it's possible that other players might rise to be a threat, but basically I'm saying we should first check how realistic the scenario is before analyzing the whole situation through the lens of those overly simplified game theory models.
> namely that any country would be able to credibly claim that they could take out US strike capabilities in the first place.
That has nothing to do with mutually assured destruction. MAD is about: “you strike at us? We will detect it and strike back at you destroying your cities. Our people might all die, but your people will too.”
It does not assume that any party can take out the strike force of any other party.
And even if a significant percentage of the around 6000 Russian nuclear warheads aren't functional (due to various reasons), the sheer amount is a credible deterrence.
I've heard this dangerous narrative down playing dangers of nuclear war from people who have never experienced a total war before & are leaning into narratives spread by the military-industrial complex.
However many failures the Russian military may have, all it takes is 1 missile hitting a major city and you'll see more deaths in the US than have been seen in all the wars it fought combined.
I don't think MIC would support this, I think they are at least somewhat competent and it's in their interest to disseminate FUD, not the "russia weak" narrative. The latter is something that would have come out of reddit's heavily censored echo chamber
There are two narratives being told - one to the top brass to increase investment and one to gen population of not to worry we're going to win so don't be a defeatist/pacifist/collaborator.
>'mutually assured destruction' meme is a cold-war-era concept relying on some strong assumptions - namely that any country would be able to credibly claim that they could take out US strike capabilities in the first place.
No, it just means that the Soviets or the US can take each other out. That's why first-strike weapons where so important and ""too" much countermeasures against them was kind of "badly regarded".
And it was no "meme" but official politics, until Ronald Reagan and his star-wars program, where the end goal was not a stalemate towards the Soviets but the destruction of their capability to deliver aka "100% protection from soviet ICBM's"
> Russian generals were greeted with precision strikes upon arrival in Ukraine. If they can't keep their sh*t secret from Ukraine, how could they hope to keep a nuclear launch order secret from the US?
It's worth noting that the targeting information for these strikes came from the US.[0]
Officials in the Biden administration first boasted about the role of US intelligence in these strikes, but the administration then decided that acknowledging US involvement in strikes on Russian generals is unwise.[1]
> It's worth noting that the targeting information for these strikes came from the US
Hmm, dubious; surely if the targeting info came from the US, then the Ukrainians would have blown up several of their own hospitals, schools, wedding parties etc?!
Look into the Nuclear Triad. States with this capability can strike at any time by missile, aircraft and subs. There's no chance to take out strike capabilities.
A since-deleted comment suggested that you'd need nuclear power to operate long durations under water decoys.
Not neceessarily. There's a fleet of solar-powered self-navigating sensor drone ships being developed.
Something quite similar, with a low detection profile, could drag an array undewater at submarine depth as desired. And presumably at low cost.
For all that data fuzzing is challenging, in this case (thin positive signal), it might work well, especially within the period of error / uncertainty around peak concern.
Best I can tell, Team R have 17 nuclear attack submarines, and 11 ballistic missile submarines. I suspect only a subset are active at any one time.
I love the skeuomorphic design of the Boya Gongdao Robot Technology Robo-Shark shown in the article. Looks like they anodized it into a Space Gray shade too for that extra touch, at least in the render.
Human robots and robot training (aka military, police, medical, fire) are still the states best assets for controlling the already present threat to the countries borders ie the population, as well as foreign countries and their array of human robots. However drones like those mentioned in this article, do not suffer from human problems like the Chinese Whispers/Telephone/transmission chain experiments in the same way humans do, they can also lie dormant outside the normal confines of a sustainable human environment, ie food, shelter, sewage, etc. If nuclear powered drone's dont exist here before 2050 or even today, I'd be very surprised considering the obviious nuclear powered subs, how the placement of land based nuclear power stations are predominantly on the edge of water bodies, like lakes and sea's. The out of sight out of mind attitude with decisions makers, as seen with sewage outlets into rivers and sea's is another example of their thinking. Air based nuclear powered drones are not out of sight or mind, excluding the nuclear powered satellites which will burn up on entry, dissipating their nuclear radiation over a wider area, hopefully not triggering any of the radiation sensors placed around various countries.
Can such detection be countered with the same technology? Eg an ML system that controls emission of noise, light (optical and otherwise), and wiggles a magnetic field about in just the right way to make it look like natural noise, to an adversary's state-of-the-art AI-based detection system.
Optics would need line of sight. The earth's curvature puts a very hard limit to how far you could communicate. The accepted standard in underwater is VLF, but as the name implies you are only capable of very low data rates.
The name implies only the frequency, which doesnt have anything to do with data rates. The VLF band is tiny though - only 27kHz. The small bandwidth is the main reason it would be slow.
True but if your emitter is not underwater like the receiver then you will have to account for air/water refraction not sure how that would work in the real world. Also I suspect it would be fairly easy for a rogue state to infer submarine locations from emitter beam orientation in low orbit space.
> To protect the stealth of submarines, Mishra says, “There is a need for creative thinking. One possibility is exploring a code of conduct for the employment of emerging technologies for surveillance missions.”
I don't buy that. It would be way too tempting to be able to detect submarines for any nation not to use the technology.
Worth noting that the Outer Space Treaty prohibits “weapons of mass destruction” in space, though that is generally interpreted to apply only to nuclear weapons.
An asteroid (or even just a huge - say 100K tons - space transport barge full of ore) with a huge rocket engine attached - until it is targeted as a weapon, it is hardly can be considered a weapon (yet for example 2000 ton coming in at 10km/s would be a Hiroshima TNT equivalent). And for MAD you do need to have credible threat to wipe your opponents Mars/Moon/etc. colonies too.
> Given the strategic importance of submarine stealth, Gower asks, “Why would any country want to detect and track submarines? It’s only something you’d do if you want to make a nuclear-armed power nervous.”
The US had the capability to detect and track Soviet subs in large swaths of the oceans for decades using SOSUS and other sensor networks.
During that time, the US did not exercise their ability to wipe out the Soviet Union. Would the Soviet Union or Putin have pursued the same course of action if they had such an advantage?
This is why it is important to keep a technological edge over authoritarian governments. Such governments are not morally equivalent to democracies. They have radically different goals, and radically different value systems.
SOSUS was eventually betrayed by the Walker spy ring, and the Soviets ended up making much quieter subs.
Putin now has a new submarine that can launch nuclear powered torpedos from hundreds of miles away. These torpedos have 100Mt warheads. I sure hope we can track this thing and neutralize it, because there is no balistic missile launch to detect and counter.
> This is why it is important to keep a technological edge over authoritarian governments. Such governments are not morally equivalent to democracies. They have radically different goals, and radically different value systems.
For all this boasting about how moral the US is, remember that the US illegally invaded Iraq, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. More generally, the US and its allies have wreaked untold havoc in the Middle East over the last 20 years. And going farther back, the US fought a long and brutal colonial war in Vietnam (plus neighboring Laos and Cambodia), in which it killed millions.
If submarines became non stealth we would likely see carrier groups and other missile ships providing high speed resilient second strike capability. A potentially destabilizing effect might be to motivate the creation of second/first strike satellite hosted weapons.
If you cannot hide a sub, you certainly cannot hide a carrier group, and carrier groups are probably not much easier to protect against attacks either, unless their air defences are radically improved (by lasers, rail guns etc to protect vs incoming missiles).
You don't just need to know where the submarines are, you also need to somehow destroy them. And the subs carry missiles with quite a range. I doubt they will "let" their adversaries have sensor networks where they intend to hide.
Modern AI can barely drive a car under ideal conditions without crashing. The ocean is full of sounds. AI is decades away (still, and I've said this now for decades) from figuring out what it is hearing.
Self-driving cars have to answer every question they encounter successfully or it's a tragedy.
Sub detection involves a series of guesses with no significant penalty for being wrong - you just spend time looking again until you're sure. It's an infinitely easier problem.
Driving a car is in many ways harder than detecting subs. In particular, the car needs to make a lot of fine-grained decisions very fast in a feedback loop that affects what it sees. A sub-detecting algorithm only needs to output Option<vec3>. There's a lot of noise, yes, but I don't think it's crazy to think that can be solved by just having a honking huge model and adding more data, e.g. chemical traces, surface lidar, etc...
don't the Russians have hypersonic intercontinental nukes that are impossible to stop because they are non ballistic (can quickly / abruptly change direction) and super fast? not convinced mutually assured destruction is over
Is anyone else sick of long-winded prefaces? If they don't get the point in the first paragraph, I just skip it and go to the comments. The top comment gives me the jist anyway.
Lake Superior alone covers 31,700 square miles to an average depth of 483 feet. It’s far to large an area to target with a first strike and well protected from non US/Canadian forces.
Edit: A US/Canadian treaty demilitarized the Great Lakes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush–Bagot_Treaty