US admiral says forces prepared to confront Iran

reply to post by Aim64C


I would doubt that China still has only 20 nukes to deal with its adversaries. Commies do not think like that. They sure have several hundreds in the underground. Pak alone has 100-120 warheads and so has India. Israel has more than 200. Somewhere I read China has 3000 nukes stashed away in secret sites. Also, China can use biological weapons which can be 10x as drastic than the nukes.

If 911 caused a $500B instant damage and threw US into recession then I do not know what would a dozen nukes do. The economic system is like a chain reaction itself, too many structures are inter winded together. One goes off the other is ready to go off automatically.

Life would go on but at what level, like drop from scale of 8/10 to 1.5/10. That is too much damage to the human society.

If US can take China with mere a flinch on the face, then why is it so scared of Iran having couple of 10KT toys to feel happy about.

reply to post by victor7


They can't get them over the big slough of salt water.

They'll need them to deal with India and Russia if the Middle East becomes too hot, so that they can secure their gas needs out of the Siberian gas reserves.

reply to post by Glassbender777

My you're on a run aren't you? How is the view from up there? When did you become a semi-god?

Maybe we should just throw every leader on the street and replace all of em with you, our majesty. You could fix everything, I'm sure. I mean, you're not driven by greed and power. You're love and intellect.

You know, you should come back to reality. Do you remember what that is? We don't fight wars so we can spill more blood and savor the suffering. We fight for love and intellect and a common understanding. This is the thing you and others like you do not want to accept. You cannot accept a world where there's peace and war. You must have either one or the other. That's why you deny everything and detach yourself from reality. If you somehow manage to come back down here from your castle in the clouds you might relearn your humanity and discover that we were with you all along. We too want peace. We want love. We want a better world. But we, unlike you, understand that war is sometimes necessary in this imperfect world.

History is not filled with war because we're evil, it's filled with war because of the nature of reality. One, there cannot be perfect knowledge. Therefore, nations will arrive at different ends. From their different perspectives they're unlikely to find a common understanding, and war is one of the potential results. Conflict of some other sort is another. Two, there's conservation of energy. We must always distribute the resources available among our numbers dependent on some system of rule or accounting. Not everyone can be rich. Not everyone can be the smartest. And the fog of war surrounds us and blinds us from perfect knowledge. We will fight endlessly about how to distribute what's available. Lastly, evolution. Evolution is based on two primary drivers. The first is competition. We compete over what's available and those who fail do not survive. The second is expansion into new territory. This temporary respite from direct competition becomes a fountain of creation and freedom. It brings about change as well and contributes to species development. So, in conclusion, these things are the nuts and bolts of reality and they're the true source of our worries, our dreams, our sufferings, our glories, and everything else we know in life.

Sounds like the US are ready to combat any military action Iran try to use. Perhaps Iran will realise that they no longer can flex their muscles, say silly things and get away with purportedly making nuclear weapons. Also lets not forgot what they have done today. Well done America.

Most of this isn't about America, or Israel. Its about Europe.

I'm not sure why that isn't obvious to people.

reply to post by victor7

I would doubt that China still has only 20 nukes to deal with its adversaries.

The problem isn't nuclear warheads.

Commies do not think like that.

I'm sure communism is the root of their strategic nuclear planning....

They sure have several hundreds in the underground. Pak alone has 100-120 warheads and so has India. Israel has more than 200.

If you look at the source article, you'll see that they have a total estimated arsenal between roughly 500 and 800 nuclear warheads, total.

The issue is that they only have a small number of delivery systems. Further, not all warheads are made equal. Most of those are tactical yield nuclear warheads - below 20 kilotons.

The real costs of maintaining a nuclear arsenal come from the delivery systems necessary to make them relevant weapons. The ICBM made the intercontinental nuclear bombers 'obsolete' - their role being converted to the delivery of tactical yield nuclear missiles. However, the missiles are far more complex than the warheads they carry. They cannot rely on any radio homing system as the ionized gasses created during more intense portions of the boosting phases and upon re-entry interfere with any kind of guidance signals (not to mention the difficulty in transmitting these signals around the planet).

ICBMs rely on inertial navigation systems that are technologically complex. Older systems (likely still in use by the chinese) still utilize inertial masses (as opposed to the more accurate Laser Ring Gyroscopic systems) and must be very well maintained if you want to land the nuclear weapon in the city (let alone aim for some kind of landmark - a good LRG could land you within a cubic centimeter of where you wanted to go from a ballistic launch around the planet).

Beyond that, you have the electromechanical controls for the rocket, which must be able to provide a very stable boost phase, etc. Since most of these are liquid fueled, as well - they require considerable ground support to keep them in a mission ready state.

Further - China still sees itself as poised for an economic MADD policy against the U.S. (the only western power they would potentially consider a nuclear war with... Argentina isn't exactly posing much of a threat to them). It doesn't make much sense for them, with that perspective, to develop costly long-range missiles that would only really be used against one country they can simply target with trade sanctions.

Somewhere I read China has 3000 nukes stashed away in secret sites.

You're talking about a very interesting (and controversial) project.

Here: seattletimes.nwsource.com...

Led by a hard-charging professor, a former top Pentagon official, they have translated hundreds of documents, combed through satellite imagery, obtained restricted Chinese military documents and waded through hundreds of gigabytes of online data.

The result: the largest body of public knowledge about thousands of miles of tunnels dug by the Second Artillery Corps, a secretive branch of the Chinese military in charge of protecting and deploying ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads.

Journalism, apparently, isn't dead.

www.voanews.com...

However, it's not without its criticism.

There is, certainly, stuff to go on. However, the report did neglect to do the science on the industrial footprint the manufacture of new missiles, new warheads, and other major issues involved in a substantial arms buildup (that would, likely, already be tracked by intel analysts).

If 911 caused a $500B instant damage and threw US into recession then I do not know what would a dozen nukes do. The economic system is like a chain reaction itself, too many structures are inter winded together. One goes off the other is ready to go off automatically.

There was a slight down-turn following some drops in stocks. However, the -real- economy is productivity. You'll find that nuclear weapons are an even larger motivator that capital investment.

As for cascading failure:

globalguerrillas.typepad.com...

In dynamic architectures (people), cascading failure is only a temporary disruption as load is shifted to surviving nodes (which then adapt).

Node/network dynamics are an interesting and relatively new area of research and modeling. The models are known for being very reliable in forecasting social and economic behavior under various stressors.

I like the node theory. It is darpanet taken and applied to many other problems.

Very interesting.