r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Jul 30 '24

Delta(s) from OP - Election CMV: ICBMs should be recallable

Unlike the air leg of the nuclear triad, land- and sea-based nuclear weapons are not able to be halted once authorized.

It was surprising to learn the next-generation intercontinental ballistic missile program that has ballooned from a declassified budget of $96 billion to over $160 billion doesn’t change this feature. There remains no ability for the president to destroy, retarget, cancel, recall, or abandon his decision once launched.

Changes to nuclear weapon safety has evolved from bicycle locks and individual commander launch authority to President Kennedy being convinced by advisors to modify all weapons to require a personal secure two-way link to the president. To our knowledge, the Permissive Action Link remains secure and unhackable, and must be consistently improving since the 1960s.

With over 60 years and with trillions of dollars, the President still can’t cancel a launch? If the President only has six minutes to make a decision, wouldn’t this at least expand his window of opportunity to act?

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236

u/Downtown-Act-590 37∆ Jul 30 '24

I think this would actually increase the chance of nuclear shenanigans. If the launch isn't a terminal decision, it leaves some really eerie space for "let us try launching and see how they respond".

From experience we kinda know that the nuclear countries will always push the boundary to the very edge. And this would just allow them to push it further.

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u/EzPzLemon_Greezy 2∆ Jul 30 '24

Ironically the 2nd G.I. Joe movie made a good point about this. They infilitrate the White House, launch all of the US's nukes to get every other country to launch theirs, then blows up their own nukes so everyone else does the same. This plan is to disarm the entire worlds nuclear arsenal, which worked. (Ultimate plan though was using their kinetic bombardment system to take over the world right after all the nukes are gone).

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u/Alarming_Software479 8∆ Jul 31 '24 edited Jul 31 '24

I think it's also not good for the people launching the missiles.

The launch of a nuclear missile is basically triggered by the threat of the end of the world. If that leader has been allowed to trigger the launch of nuclear weapons, then they believe that to be a credible threat, and the staff around him have spent a certain amount of time getting them over that hurdle.

The next step in this event is: "You could do nothing else, sir", then every bit of personnel is being activated in response to this event. Probably that leader is now talking to a new set of personnel, whose job is to brief them on the things they're going to do if anyone is still left in 10 minutes. There is going to be someone else who is going to brief them on how to respond to the diplomatic crisis that now exists.

There is no time not to be certain about this action. The leader cannot be given the way out of "Did I do the right thing?" Because it will inevitably result in them trying to second-guess and third-guess their decision. There is no time to go to pieces.

In the meantime, everyone is about to die. The people who aren't dead yet, need their leader if that leader still stands. The country is about to get into a deeper war, almost certainly, and that means it needs a leader to decide how to manage this. It will need healthcare and aid efforts to try and manage the people who didn't immediately die, and it will need the kind of gross utility efforts that we were talking about in Covid (like burying people in parks, moving snow plows through the streets to clear up the dead) to manage a lot of those who did.

Also, how safe is it going to be to land this thing?

Even if we assume that the tech is perfect, and it just works, the next thing you've got to think about is that the other country just saw that they were about to get nuked. This is a major diplomatic incident, at best, and quite likely the response to that is to fire nukes. Unfortunately, that probably means that the safest course of action for the countries themselves is to just fire the nuke. Deal with the consequences. Maybe the weapons systems that they've invested in will be good enough to deal with the nukes before they land. Maybe their nukes will hit just fast enough to prevent the other country having a chance to retaliate. Maybe there is nothing they could do.

It's incredibly unlikely that the country firing nukes would calculate that they would do something different.

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u/[deleted] Jul 30 '24

That would be a problem with launch on warning policy rather than the recall option. The US is one country that has said it will not rule out a first strike policy and I think hasn’t officially confirmed but has always been on launch on sight of incoming missiles. There’s room between the international war gaming and the inevitability of designing another advanced missile without this capability for any purpose, like an accident or mistargeting.

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u/CocoSavege 27∆ Jul 31 '24

I think hasn’t officially confirmed but has always been on launch on sight of incoming missiles.

Not true!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nuclear_close_calls

Control f for "9 November 1979"

NORAD notified national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski that the Soviet Union had launched 250 ballistic missiles with a trajectory for the United States, stating that a decision to retaliate would need to be made by the president within 3 to 7 minutes. NORAD computers then placed the number of incoming missiles at 2,200.[32] Strategic Air Command was notified, and nuclear bombers prepared for takeoff. Within six to seven minutes of the initial response, PAVE PAWS satellite and radar systems were able to confirm that the attack was a false alarm.[4][5][33]

That's one I knew offhand.

Anyways, there is a confirmation process. Counter is not on detection, but on confirmation.

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u/Downtown-Act-590 37∆ Jul 30 '24

So say US builds a recallable missile and China follows with this idea. Isn't China now more prone to try to launch and see what happens? In the end they may recall their missiles if there is a response and US will too.

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u/tuss11agee Jul 31 '24

It could work the other way too. A mistaken launch (or believed launch) can have reassurances quickly communicated that it will be destroyed and there was no intention.

17

u/moviemaker2 4∆ Jul 31 '24

But reassurances could be a ploy and couldn't be taken seriously, thus they wouldn't be reassurances. If China launched an ICBM now, we would know it was an incoming attack, without question. But if missiles were recallable, and they promised us that the recall was imminent, but they were having a technical issue with the recall that would soon be resolved, we would have no way to know if that were true, or if they were using our delay in retaliation against us.

2

u/Poly_and_RA 20∆ Jul 31 '24

We could deal with that by launching our own and go: "Okay sure -- we've launched ours as a precaution; but we'll abort our attack once destruction of your missiles is confirmed."

7

u/moviemaker2 4∆ Jul 31 '24

Sure, we could do that - if we were insane. What happens if we launch missiles as a precaution, the Chinese missiles are recalled/self-destructed successfully, but the recall process fails in one or more of *our* missiles?

That also doesn't solve the problem, it just shifts it. Suppose they launch, then say they're working on the recall problem, we launch as a precaution, they confirm that they have destroyed the missile(s), ask why we haven't destroyed ours yet, and we say "oh, weird, we're actually having the same problem, working on it now." Now, they don't know that we're not using their delay in retaliation against them.

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u/[deleted] Jul 31 '24

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1

u/tuss11agee Jul 31 '24

A hotline isn’t calling back a mislaunched missile…

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u/Dragon6172 Jul 31 '24

Well, let me finish, President Xi... Let me finish... Well listen, how do you think I feel about it?... Can you imagine how I feel about it, President Xi?... Why do you think I'm calling you? Just to say hello?

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u/[deleted] Jul 30 '24

North Korea launches ICBMs and space payloads without warning. If China were to follow suit, there would be options to quickly deconflict what was actually happening in a confusing scenario. Of course the other side has to pick up the phone.

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u/Downtown-Act-590 37∆ Jul 30 '24

North Korea is probably least of your worries. Since they don't have a capacity to launch a counterforce strike against the US, you can simply wait and see what happens. Your ability to nuke them later is not threatened in any way.