Current Nuclear Weapons Development

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Ban on Russian uranium helps US build nuclear fuel capacity, official says

The U.S. has been preparing since 2022 for the possibility that Russian President Vladimir Putin would stop selling it nuclear power fuel, and a pending ban on Russian imports will help boost domestic capacity to process uranium fuel, the outgoing top nuclear energy official told Reuters. The...
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Forest Green said:
I agree. At the moment a nameless protagonist may choose to use tactical nukes under the thinking that the opposition wouldn't resort to strategic nuclear arms over a few tactical nukes. That idea needs stamping on hard.
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If the USN does decide to restore the use of tactical nuclear weapons from its CVNs then they're going to be spending some serious money ensuring the the F-35B and F-35C can carry special-stores.
 
Forest Green said:
I agree. At the moment a nameless protagonist may choose to use tactical nukes under the thinking that the opposition wouldn't resort to strategic nuclear arms over a few tactical nukes. That idea needs stamping on hard.
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The actual outcome is more likely both sides agree to limit the use to tactical weapons rather than needlessly "escalate deterrence". III MEF is already talking about what happens after three years of sustained tactical nuclear combat in a regional war with the PLA and how to win.

(...)

But if one were to write the novel that more precisely illustrates the long, global grind that a war between the United States and China would entail, it might appear something like this:

The opening pages showcase the trends of modern war games and novels, where naval combatants, fifth-generation aircraft, missile forces, and non-kinetic effects wreak havoc in the war’s opening days, crippling the air and naval power of the belligerents. Thousands upon thousands are killed in this first stage of the conflict. But the war expands horizontally, with China, Russia, and North Korea aligned against the United States, Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, Australia, South Korea, and others. Fighting occurs in multiple theaters within United States Indo-Pacific Command and beyond, including a massive conflagration on the Korean peninsula. Soon, the ability to hurl precision munitions back and forth culminates as expenditure rapidly outpaces production capacity and as US fuel stocks in the Pacific dwindle. With pressure increasing and options decreasing, tactical nuclear weapons are employed on the battlefield . . . and yet the war drives on.

Thus would end the first chapter. The reader turns the page, which says: “Three years later.”

And with some skillfully placed exposition, the author reveals the massive changes that have occurred across society as belligerents commit to a long, bloody war. Nations have fully mobilized their economies to support what is now an existential war. Drafts and conscription are made mandatory to fill and maintain the ranks of multiple field armies, amphibious corps, fleets, and air forces. The war is not limited to the first island chain, but has multiple theaters that span the globe and escalates horizontally, with simultaneous conflicts drawing in additional belligerents. Emergency powers are universally invoked by executive branches, curtailing liberties in even the historically freest societies. The threat of nuclear holocaust is ever-present, and continuous fighting through tactical nuclear exchanges shatters previous conceptions of escalation management.

(...)
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www.atlanticcouncil.org

There will be no ‘short, sharp’ war. A fight between the US and China would likely go on for years.

US policymakers and military leaders must rigorously study and plan for a broad range of implications from a years-long war against China.
www.atlanticcouncil.org www.atlanticcouncil.org

Tactical nukes become incredibly appealing once you expend your 15 day stock of JASSMs and YJ-83s on whatever.

Blah blah "does not represent" you know LTC Kerg is talking about this at lunch and bouncing ideas off the rest of III MEF's G5.

NMaude said:
If the USN does decide to restore the use of tactical nuclear weapons from its CVNs then they're going to be spending some serious money ensuring the the F-35B and F-35C can carry special-stores.
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This won't happen for much the same reasons the B-1s aren't getting their nuclear certs back.
 
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NMaude said:
Why?
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No one is going to nuclear re-certify the B-1 when the B-21 is entering service. Just like no one is going to nuclear re-certify the carriers when the submarine launched missile is entering service. I'm not sure if the Fords or later Nimitzes even still have nuclear storage areas aboard the ship tbh since they were ordered after Bush's withdraw of surface nuclear weapons.

Since -A is already nuclear certified the -C will work. It's highly debatable whether -B can because it has smaller bomb bays, but I think they're "only" as small as Raptor's so...maybe? But that requires putting nukes back on carriers which won't happen. It's too much effort.

Realistically you're getting a Burke with a SLCM-N or Sandia SWERVE bursting out of his grave to arm the Zumwalt hypersonic missile.
 
There are no additional weapons being discussed outside SLCM-M. The is no point in nuclearizing B-1s;they are the way out. There is no point in nuclearizing carriers; their ability to deliver a nuclear attack over launch range is a little questionable. I personally do not see what SLCM-N can due that LRSO cannot, other than be based in theater from the outset. But it looks like it might be produced. I’m curious what platforms it would be based on.
 
Kat Tsun said:
The actual outcome is more likely both sides agree to limit the use to tactical weapons rather than needlessly "escalate deterrence". III MEF is already talking about what happens after three years of sustained tactical nuclear combat in a regional war with the PLA and how to win.



www.atlanticcouncil.org

There will be no ‘short, sharp’ war. A fight between the US and China would likely go on for years.

US policymakers and military leaders must rigorously study and plan for a broad range of implications from a years-long war against China.
www.atlanticcouncil.org www.atlanticcouncil.org

Tactical nukes become incredibly appealing once you expend your 15 day stock of JASSMs and YJ-83s on whatever.

Blah blah "does not represent" you know LTC Kerg is talking about this at lunch and bouncing ideas off the rest of III MEF's G5.
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That theory was widely regarded as being wrong during the Cold War. In ny scenario the use of tactical nukes was seen as escalating into a full-scale nuclear exchange.
 
Forest Green said:
That theory was widely regarded as being wrong during the Cold War. In ny scenario the use of tactical nukes was seen as escalating into a full-scale nuclear exchange.
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Yeah but I'm probably gonna trust the guy who is doing this for a living in today's world. There's a reason people all over the world (USA, Russia, PRC) are investing in low yield, high accuracy nuclear bombs: They want to hit things like airbases and aircraft carriers and make sure they're actually dead and not just having some window panes broken.

Conventional weapons are unreliable in the face of modern air defense because by the time they penetrate the air defense they are often reduced to irrelevance. It's very different from the Cold War where PGMs could reliably defeat heavy armor forces with little issue. PGMs can barely hit targets now. Nuclear weapons are back in vogue, because even if a single bomb gets through, you have killed your target. The only hard part is that you need a bunch of them and everyone stopped doing that 30 years ago.
 
Kat Tsun said:
Yeah but I'm probably gonna trust the guy who is doing this for a living in today's world. There's a reason people all over the world (USA, Russia, PRC) are investing in low yield, high accuracy nuclear bombs: They want to hit things like airbases and aircraft carriers and make sure they're actually dead and not just having some window panes broken.

Conventional weapons are unreliable in the face of modern air defense because by the time they penetrate the air defense they are often reduced to irrelevance. It's very different from the Cold War where PGMs could reliably defeat heavy armor forces with little issue. PGMs can barely hit targets now. Nuclear weapons are back in vogue, because even if a single bomb gets through, you have killed your target. The only hard part is that you need a bunch of them and everyone stopped doing that 30 years ago.
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If the enemy has such weapons then you need them certainly because the threat of responding with low yield nukes seems more credible to an opponent than a fullscale nuclear holocaust. However, that does not retract from the fact that any use is highly likely to escalate into the latter. It's about deterrence after all. The same principles were at play during the Cold War.
 
Kat Tsun said:
Yeah but I'm probably gonna trust the guy who is doing this for a living in today's world. There's a reason people all over the world (USA, Russia, PRC) are investing in low yield, high accuracy nuclear bombs: They want to hit things like airbases and aircraft carriers and make sure they're actually dead and not just having some window panes broken.

Conventional weapons are unreliable in the face of modern air defense because by the time they penetrate the air defense they are often reduced to irrelevance. It's very different from the Cold War where PGMs could reliably defeat heavy armor forces with little issue. PGMs can barely hit targets now. Nuclear weapons are back in vogue, because even if a single bomb gets through, you have killed your target. The only hard part is that you need a bunch of them and everyone stopped doing that 30 years ago.
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It is hard to imagine destroying an airbase or carrier would not be interpreted as a limited strategic exchange by the other side.

As for conventional weapons, I would argue carrying a nuclear warhead imbues no specially invulnerability to being shot down and that any tactical use would have to be assisted by a hail of conventional decoys or actual missiles to absorb the brunt of the defenses. Additionally, conventional weapons can be much lighter and cheaper depending on the target set. Destroying an air base completely is very difficult; routinely destroying any aircraft out in the open might be quite achievable with either a cheap stand off solution or sufficiently survivable platform using stand in munitions.

All in all I think tactical first use is likely impractical for both sides - it is a threshold you would only want to cross if you were pretty convinced you were losing/going to lose anyway. That said, the US needs to adopt sufficient tactical nuclear capability and doctrine such that first use is always discouraged regardless of the realities of the conventional battlefield.
 

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