I never believed my school or church basement was a "Fallout Shelter." Boring question, for your AMA, but, yeah. I mean, I guess it would be better, for a day or two, than being out on the street, but...lol
I expected something like "to break up large armored formations in the first and second echelons and destroy logistic and C2 nodes but it was going to work" but your answer says the same thing.
In honor of Gene Hackman, did the U.S. ever get close to a Crimson Tide-style scenario (a commander was hellbent on launching and came *this close* to doing it)?
Did the burden of needing to maintain both a conventional and a nuclear force contribute to the USSR’s fall? Would either side of the Cold War have had the appetite to invade the other if one side had unilaterally disarmed their nukes but kept their conventional forces?
I met Colin Hay after his Men at Work heydays and during his comeback one man acoustic tour; an amazingly nice man. IMO the acoustic version of “Overkill” is better than the original… thx for sharing your list
Pretty confident, but my short and non-classified understanding is that the system was/is designed to overcome that, because you don't need unanimity in the entire wing
We're doing it now: Dismantling them. Big backlog at Energy department.
(You can hate on Reagan, but getting rid of INF - we crushed ours in a machine after taking the warheads off - was a big thing)
Did my first presentation on Uranium 232, CANDU reactors, and the way they both produce power in grade 9.
I was just asking since my MA focussed on the lack of planning for post ‘success’ Afghanistan. I was wondering if a similar failure to plan long term existed.
Could you explain to the folks how in 1980 a Titan II could've vaporized part of rural Arkansas? Elon and the kids don't really understand what they keep f'n' with do they?
I grew up in an Oregon town [redacted] w/a plant that made nuclear warheads. The local paper had an *annual reminder!* that my town was a direct target in case of nuclear war w/ the Soviet Union. As GenX, it's impossible to wrap my mind around the pivot to pro Trump/Russia my generation has become.
I know. It’s insane. My first job out of college was on a Cold War classified defense project. I was one of about 20 Democrats out of 200 people. I can’t imagine all those Republicans suddenly being ok with mishandling classified documents and sucking up to Russia.
The loss of the *greatest generation* and their collective memories AND so much peace* has allowed Americans to not care about the putinization of our country. * Somebody should write a book about that
My very typical middle class neighborhood consisted of young families Korean War, WWII, and Vietnam Vets. We all mixed & cared for one another. I was in awe of my WWII fighter pilot neighbor and his aerial maps where he fought fires in Oregon before retiring. Cross generational connection= LOSS.
Not to mention my newly American neighbors (fleeing the Khmer Rouge) from Cambodia under Reagan. Don't disagree. My point is that GenX touched so many prior generations that served in war/touched communist threat. Soviet threat loomed SO LARGE that it defies comprehension for GX to consider a T vote
How did advancements in miniaturization and guidance systems during the 1980s impact nuclear strategy, particularly in terms of MIRV warheads and counterforce targeting?
Why didn't the MX missile program replace the Minuteman program? I seem to recall that the MX program was always in the news in the early/mid-'80s and than they were retired in the '00s as part of START talks with the Russians, while the older Minuteman missiles are still around.
Well, MX was a response to Soviet big baddies like the SS-18, and the goal was to response with a big MIRV and get them OUT of the silos and put them on mobile launchers and be more survivable. Didn't happen, obvs.
People often claim that the Soviet Union trying to keep up with SDI and US nuclear spending bankrupted them. How much of that is true and how much is Reagan hagiography?
It cost them, but mostly in terms of the USSR not increasing spending, but feeling they couldn't *decrease* it. They also spent more on science - they were cheating on ABM - and that was big bucks too.
Was the INF Treaty much more expansive or watered down? Did the US benifited from it more than the Soviets in the end or vice versa? (I was told the US did)
I think it was an excellent treaty, and actually limited the US more than the USSR (who had a home-court advantage and could put them back much more easily - as Russia is doing now)
Did SDI get anywhere? Teaching about the Cold War in high school history classes, I’ve used clips of vids like this https://youtu.be/sMfmVzHZvkc?si=K_Nl5i7pambJBkTG but as far as I know, it was all just theoretical. Any interesting tidbits / trivia?
I remember when it was first aired, much was left on the editor's floor.
This longer version is far superior in its impact, direction, acting (Jason Robards is given time to explore humanity within desperation).
Thanks for sharing it.
Nightmares and an unease all through the waking hours that lasted until the Berlin Wall came down.
Now? The Berlin Wall is still down but the same unease has returned. A new wall is spreading across new areas of the world - including between your country and mine. 💔
I’m sorry about that. Wasn’t what I wanted either and your country has been the best neighbors we could ever ask for. It’s very disheartening and sad and embarrassing for those of us that didn’t vote for the orange nut.
I was in college & had to leave watching at the intermission to go play an intramural basketball game. Numbing stepping away when the nukes went off. Don't recall if my team won our game, but I know everyone in the movie lost.
I remember the next day in school (I was in high school), a teacher asked us if we'd watched it.
Everybody in the class did, except for one girl. She said she'd forgotten. I felt bad for her, because back in those days, if you missed a show, that was it. You were screwed. It was gone.
This may surprise you but big projects with no shared understanding of intent are not unique to Washington DC.
It can be argued that a major project with no agreement on what is to be done is a corruption-free boondoggle. It won't result in anything but the money flows to the correct pockets.
Now dipshit wants to build a USA-sized "iron dome," (present day, not 80's), which, from what I understand, and as I understood about "Star Wars" back then as a late teen, is bullshit.
I have no idea if "golden dome" could work now. I know it would be ridiculously expensive. But missile defense has definitely come a long way since the 80's. I just can't fathom the DoD thinking they could actually build a workable missile defense from nothing in the 80's. It's crazy!
I have memories reading software engineering journals in the early '90s. Looking at mean errors per 1,000 lines of code (kLoC). Of best practice errors per 1,000 kLoC. And how may kLoC SDI required.
- didn't expect results for 20 years
- thought it might work well enough to layer a defense over the missile fields
- knew it would drive the Soviets apeshit crazy
- hoped it would shut up the anti-nuke people (no, really)
Central Mass 1980’s, C-130s in a formation of 5? would fly super super low, from Westover to ? in the afternoon weekly. Any idea what those missions were for & if related to the overall mission of nuclear weapons, say in a support role?
It was a transport training command, they were just doing touch and goes, I remember playing golf with them coming in so low at the base that a really high shot coulda hit them in the belly.
“only way to win the game is to never play the game.” turns out the way to win the game is to threaten another nuclear power so they will let you take whatever non-nuclear power you want.
Why did the West allow crumbling third world communist countries to acquire them and mass produce them? Why weren't these regimes decisively crushed before that happened?
I remember duck and cover in elementary school in the late 1960’s. Or going into the corridor and hiding our faces in the lockers. Then thinking the metal would melt onto our faces. It was fun being 8 years old then
I am way too old to have experience of that. Worst we had were some Jamaican gang fights with razor blades once. And a guy that almost killed me in HS ( not a joke, he just had a soft moment) getting sent to prison a few yrs later for trying to murder his gf. On parole he tried again. Last I heard
I turned 7 in 1980, remember hearing about the MX missile and driving past Carswell AFB in Ft Worth and seeing the B-52s take off. Nuclear weapons have never left the back of my mind. Do you think overall things are more stable now than in the 80s, or has it degraded?
Related to the 1980s but not nukes- I heard your Cliff Calvin impersonation on the Bulwark recently and it was truly remarkable! Did it take practice or is it just natural ability?
How much do you think the emergent nuclear powers (those who achieved the capability outside the Cold War) have studied the 1980s US/USSR & NATO policies and approach to nukes? That mix of deterrence, limitation, & advancing technologies—especially in the deployment of nukes
Oooooh great question. No one *officially* knows, but hard to see how the evidence points to anything but "likely, yeah" because it's pretty clear that SOMEONE did
I feel this is a suggestive sequence of events:
1962: China invades India
1964: China explodes atomic bomb
1974: India explodes atomic bomb
1998: Pakistan explodes atomic bomb
Was India worried about CHINA, not Pakistan?
Obviously Pakistan was worried about India.
The first mission (Pokhran 1) was only supposed to check if they even work and was small blast whereas Pokhran 2 was much bigger than that and India wanted to show that they also have nuclear weapons which are effective. But yeah you are right that initiation was done by india
A few months ago I read "Nuclear War: A Scenario" by American journalist Annie Jacobsen. Yikes. I lost a lot of sleep after that. In the 80s a lot of us protested against the proliferation of nuclear weapons but once communism fell in Europe and Russia, people got complacent
Is it still the 1980s? Cuz Russia seems like the USSR. Btw, I have your playlist of 1980s nuclear themed music; nicely curated. And I also loved The End of Expertise. The bit about college is particularly interest to me because I have a kid in college.
the whole warhead isn't, because that typically includes arming, fuzing, and firing functions. the nuclear explosive package, or nuclear assembly system, is often referred to as the "physics package" because typically once it gets its required signals, "physics takes over"
I mean, everything is physics at some level. But if you find the highest density of physicists in the US, you're probably at or near a nuclear weapons lab.
I'd like to think people also took the wrong lessons from a move from a USSR ruled by an elderly politburo to a Russian Federation ruled by a tipsy Yeltsin.
How can we be sure we ever had that many nuclear weapons? What if we only built four or five real ones and filled the rest with junk….just a bunch of shoddy parts, like something Doc Brown would slap together with used pinball machine parts?
I lived in Baltimore until
I was eleven. That included the Cuban Missile crisis. We didn’t bother with drills. If they were coming, we were toast. Literally.
That’s what is always in the back of my mind when I visit Washington DC. Especially felt it when looking at the submarine pens at San Diego. Like Silvio Dante says: you’ll never hear it coming.
As a US Army armor crewman defending the Fulda gap from a full-scale Soviet invasion, would I have been more likely to die from enemy conventional fires or from a tactical nuclear weapon in 1980?
Follow on question: how many of them still would work properly... I.e. haven't had the fuel siphoned off to heat homes in winter, or had steel taken off to build a fence or wall Or have electronics that haven't corroded away, or something?
The book “Command and Control” has a gripping narrative of the accident. There’s also a Titan II silo south of Tucson that’s a museum now if you want to see one.
To take a different track, what's your silliest nuke story? Mine was from when I was six or seven and had just become aware of both nukes and the American Revolution. I distinctly remember lying in bed terrified the British were going to nuke us because they were still angry.
More concerned about nuclear missiles in the late 2020s at this point. But were the European partners really as reluctant as they made themselves out to be during the Pershing deployments? I remember the attitude being "meh - America's going to America - not much we can do."
I am pretty sure in this context it is short for "Ask Me Anything".
I want to use age as my excuse for not knowing that, but I am actually younger than Dr. Nichols. 😳
Considering we had nukes in Turkey (and Italy?) and they had them in Cuba to much surprise ( I mean, really? A communist country was surprising?), could the middle crisis have been dealt with differently? Perhaps not as intensely than it was portrayed?
Comments
Like, firing at point-blank range at invading Soviet armies in Germany. Good luck, fellas!
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2022-10-03/soviet-submarines-nuclear-torpedoes-cuban-missile-crisis#:~:text=An%20incident%20occurred%20on%20one,of%20the%20crisis%2C%20October%2027.
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2019/06/25/you-can-call-2007-nuke-mishandling-an-embarrassment-but-dont-call-it-the-minot-incident/
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1EDAKoHyCVJnjw8ozmpP8l?si=b16a2b94f11a4e1b
I also recall watching "The day after" at school.
What was more likely?
Being safe under my desk?
Or survival after a nuclear strike?
It was a small west coast town known for hippies, running and Nike. So, a few extra days....
And I was going to ask you about the pros and cons of cancelling Midgetman.
So I despise Reagan. You think various things about the man. Most of which I disagree with.
But my question is: was there ever consideration given to what to do with these weapons long term should they not be needed?
(You can hate on Reagan, but getting rid of INF - we crushed ours in a machine after taking the warheads off - was a big thing)
I was just asking since my MA focussed on the lack of planning for post ‘success’ Afghanistan. I was wondering if a similar failure to plan long term existed.
My MA thesis was on CIA planning for Afghanistan during the Reagan admin. Among many observations, I noted there was no long term plan for the country
I will never understand it.
70 miles from Grand Forks AFB, a SAC bomber base, went to UND there.
Kinda comforting, really -no sense in prepping for nuclear winter, it's gonna land on your head!
Once, years ago, I drove out to the gate. There's a sign that says, "If this light is flashing, find shelter".
So... um... what were they working on?
"Major Reinhart, we have a massive attack against the US at this time. ICBMs. Numerous ICMBs. Over 300 missiles inbound now."
Hands him a Lucky…….
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-1983-military-drill-that-nearly-sparked-nuclear-war-with-the-soviets-180979980/
This longer version is far superior in its impact, direction, acting (Jason Robards is given time to explore humanity within desperation).
Thanks for sharing it.
It terrified me as well but I felt vindicated all the same. Growing up under Nuke Fear was real.
Now? The Berlin Wall is still down but the same unease has returned. A new wall is spreading across new areas of the world - including between your country and mine. 💔
What a bonkers thing to tell kids.
I remember the next day in school (I was in high school), a teacher asked us if we'd watched it.
Everybody in the class did, except for one girl. She said she'd forgotten. I felt bad for her, because back in those days, if you missed a show, that was it. You were screwed. It was gone.
;)
And in fact I had *no* idea…
It can be argued that a major project with no agreement on what is to be done is a corruption-free boondoggle. It won't result in anything but the money flows to the correct pockets.
Also, you really should feed @gpgomez.bsky.social. She's a good and loyal kid who deserves hot food at least once a month.
- didn't expect results for 20 years
- thought it might work well enough to layer a defense over the missile fields
- knew it would drive the Soviets apeshit crazy
- hoped it would shut up the anti-nuke people (no, really)
1- another nuclear power?
2- a conventional threat?
3- a small cat?
2. One, maybe
3. Cats don't do the nuclear
2 - You have to get rid of him NOW. Waiting longer will be much harder to fix the damage.
3 - A world war or a nuclear attack on you might end everything. He's creating enemies. Ask Macron.
I don't think you want no. 3.
How bad would it have been if we launched at peak nuke? How bad would it be if we launched now?
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/revisiting-1979-vela-mystery-report-critical-oral-history-conference
1962: China invades India
1964: China explodes atomic bomb
1974: India explodes atomic bomb
1998: Pakistan explodes atomic bomb
Was India worried about CHINA, not Pakistan?
Obviously Pakistan was worried about India.
The only academic I've ever heard us this pronunciation was from the south - though I should say my sample has mostly biologists.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2022-03-24/colonel-odoms-chilling-four-am-phone-call
I was eleven. That included the Cuban Missile crisis. We didn’t bother with drills. If they were coming, we were toast. Literally.
"A Titan II missile exploded within its launch duct at Launch Complex 374-7 in Southside, Arkansas on September 19, 1980. "
I want to use age as my excuse for not knowing that, but I am actually younger than Dr. Nichols. 😳