All Bets Are ON

[John Hall]

Actually, I hadn't realized they had once gotten so compact.  The Davy
Crocket Warhead was only .02Kt.  The non-nuclear Daisy Cutter weighs .01Kt.,
and the explosive force might actually be more than the Davy Crocket.
Making a bomb like that is incredibly hard.

It depends on who YOU are.  Making lots of nukes is incredibly expensive.  I
think the Davy Crockets above came in at over $500K each, and that was built
on an infrastructure that cost untold Billions.

And if the situation is serious enough for us to use Nukes on you, then just
having one won't help.  It might push us into an extermination strike
instead of a tactical strike, though.

Outside of WMD use on the US, I only see 3 WMD scenarios.

1) Taking out something like a WMD factory built under a mountain.  We
considered that in Libya once.
2) North Korea.  I don't think the US will attack North Korea.  But a war
there has a very high chance of seeing a Nuclear release.
3) China & Taiwan.  Bad news.


-----Original Message-----
From: Eugene Leitl [mailto:Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de]
Sent: Tuesday, March 12, 2002 9:14 AM
To: Stephen D. Williams
Cc: johnhall@evergo.net; FoRK
Subject: Re: All Bets Are ON

On Tue, 12 Mar 2002, Stephen D. Williams wrote:

> We already have 'Poor Mans Nukes', i.e. FAE (Fuel Air Explosives), which
> we've been using frequently lately.

FAEs are big and heavy, nukes are compact. This involves the logistics of
delivering it to remote parts of the world, and how small your weapon
platform can be. Also, FAEs are useless is you want to nuke a city via
ballistic delivery, which is very difficult to protect against.

>   FAE's take the place, to a large extent, of tactical nukes with none
> of the political or actual fallout.

It depends on the target type. FAEs are useless for deep bunkers, all they
do is a big pressure wave on the surface.

> Talking about using actual nukes, which I disagree with but I'm not
> irrational about either, is likely a red herring to both scare potential
> and actual enemies and to be a bargaining chip.

If you threaten me with nukes I do one thing: I make my own, lots of them.
This is called deterrence. Anyone talking about first use of nukes in war
theatre deserves a taste of the same. Plus, lowering the threshold for
nuke use is Bad Idea.

More nukes in the world more readily used --> Major Bad Idea.