Deep bunkers like that are expensive and rare, and even if the bunker itself survived, ground bursts are messy and would likely leave it inaccessible.
There are thousands of underground mines in the US (14000 active mines, but many are surface mines), and I think it would only require 1 or a few to store thousands of nuclear weapons. Maybe the weapons would be spread out over many mines. It would not be feasible to make thousands of mines inaccessible.
Missile warheads are only of use as a source of raw materials, and while you might be able to get gravity bombs to bombers, you wouldnāt get many, and probably couldnāt fly all that many sorties anyway.
Are you saying that missile warheads could not be quickly configured to be used as a gravity bomb? Iām not claiming that most of the non-deployed nuclear weapons could be used in a few days, but I would think it would be feasible in a few months (it would only take a few surviving bombers if the warheads could be used as gravity bombs).
OK, remember that weāre dealing with nuclear weapons, which inspire governments to levels of paranoia you maybe see when dealing with crypto. Dropping a dozen nukes down a mine somewhere is not going to happen without a lot of paperwork and armed guards and a bunch of security systems. And those costs donāt really scale with number of warheads. Sure, if you were trying to disperse the stockpile during a period of rising tension, you could take a few infantry companies and say āhang the paperworkā. But that requires thinking about the weapons in a very different way from how they actually do, and frankly they wouldnāt be all that useful even if you did do that, because of the other problems with this plan.
Are you saying that missile warheads could not be quickly configured to be used as a gravity bomb?
Yes, I am. The first commandment of nuclear weapons design since 1960 or so has been āit must not go off by accidentā. So a modern missile warhead has an accelerometer which will not arm it unless it is pretty sure it has been fired by the relevant type of missile. And trying to bypass it is probably a no-go. The design standard is that one of the national labs couldnāt set a US warhead off without the codes, so I doubt you can easily bypass that.
it would only take a few surviving bombers if the warheads could be used as gravity bombs
A modern bomber is a very complex machine, and the US hasnāt set ours up to keep working out of what could survive a nuclear exchange. (This is possible, but would require mobile servicing facilities and drills, which we do not have.) Not to mention that they canāt make a round-trip unrefueled from CONUS to any plausible enemy, and the odds of having forward tankers left are slim to none.
I might be misreading it, but that paper seems to bury a lot of the same assumptions that Iām objecting to. They assume a firestorm will form as part of the basis of how the fire is modeled, and then explicitly take the 5 Tg of stratospheric soot per 100 fires number and use that as the basis for further modeling.
For reference, here is what they say about their fire modelling:
The goal of the fire simulations in this work is to better characterize the spatial and temporal distribution of smoke from a mass urban fire resulting from a 15ākt nuclear detonation. Therefore, our modeling is informed by the Hiroshima firestorm, and the Hamburg firestorm, due to its rough similarity to the Hiroshima firestorm in size and duration. The assumption that all 100 detonations cause fires, and that these fires are more like the Hiroshima firestorm than Nagasaki, is a worst-case scenario. The studies of Penner et al. (1986) and Toon et al. (2007) also use fire parameters based on these historical cases (Hiroshima and Hamburg), so our fire parameters have the additional benefit of being similar to these previous studies. To produce simulations of fires similar to Hiroshima and Hamburg, it is assumed that the terrain is flat (i.e., topography does not provide shielding of thermal radiation) and there is uniform fuel loading over the area where thermal radiation is sufficient to ignite standard construction materials, such as wood. The WRF model source code is modified to allow for specification of surface fluxes of heat, water vapor and smoke (or black carbon), requiring quantification of these three fluxes, as well as the fire shape, size and duration.
The Hiroshima firestorm burned an area of about 11 to 13 km2 in 4 to 9āh, taking 20 to 30āmin to develop into a firestorm (Glasstone, 1962; Rodden et al., 1965). The Hamburg firestorm burned a comparable 12 km2 in about 6āh (Carrier et al., 1985). Therefore, we specify a circular area with a 2 km radius (12.57 km2) for our fires. Each fire has a 30āmin ramp-up period as surface fluxes increase linearly from zero, followed by a 4āh fire duration where surface fluxes are constant. The 4āh duration is chosen because it is the shortest time estimate for the fire in Hiroshima, and releasing a given mass of emissions and burning a given fuel amount over the shorter time period will result in higher smoke concentrations and heat fluxes, thus providing a worst-case estimate.
There are thousands of underground mines in the US (14000 active mines, but many are surface mines), and I think it would only require 1 or a few to store thousands of nuclear weapons. Maybe the weapons would be spread out over many mines. It would not be feasible to make thousands of mines inaccessible.
Are you saying that missile warheads could not be quickly configured to be used as a gravity bomb? Iām not claiming that most of the non-deployed nuclear weapons could be used in a few days, but I would think it would be feasible in a few months (it would only take a few surviving bombers if the warheads could be used as gravity bombs).
OK, remember that weāre dealing with nuclear weapons, which inspire governments to levels of paranoia you maybe see when dealing with crypto. Dropping a dozen nukes down a mine somewhere is not going to happen without a lot of paperwork and armed guards and a bunch of security systems. And those costs donāt really scale with number of warheads. Sure, if you were trying to disperse the stockpile during a period of rising tension, you could take a few infantry companies and say āhang the paperworkā. But that requires thinking about the weapons in a very different way from how they actually do, and frankly they wouldnāt be all that useful even if you did do that, because of the other problems with this plan.
Yes, I am. The first commandment of nuclear weapons design since 1960 or so has been āit must not go off by accidentā. So a modern missile warhead has an accelerometer which will not arm it unless it is pretty sure it has been fired by the relevant type of missile. And trying to bypass it is probably a no-go. The design standard is that one of the national labs couldnāt set a US warhead off without the codes, so I doubt you can easily bypass that.
A modern bomber is a very complex machine, and the US hasnāt set ours up to keep working out of what could survive a nuclear exchange. (This is possible, but would require mobile servicing facilities and drills, which we do not have.) Not to mention that they canāt make a round-trip unrefueled from CONUS to any plausible enemy, and the odds of having forward tankers left are slim to none.
Thanks for the engagement, David and Bean!
For reference, here is what they say about their fire modelling: