Precision is, counterintuitively, still a big deal in the logic of nuclear weapons strategy. Nuking Moscow is easy, nuking hardened targets can be a lot harder.
> Before the invention of this new fuzing mechanism, even the most accurate ballistic missile warheads might not detonate close enough to targets hardened against nuclear attack to destroy them. But the new super-fuze is designed to destroy fixed targets by detonating above and around a target in a much more effective way. Warheads that would otherwise overfly a target and land too far away will now, because of the new fuzing system, detonate above the target...
> As a consequence, the US submarine force today is much more capable than it was previously against hardened targets such as Russian ICBM silos. A decade ago, only about 20 percent of US submarine warheads had hard-target kill capability; today they all do.
But importantly, making sure a nuke can still hit Moscow despite geolocation countermeasures has lots of worrying consequences for normal people that are in normal cities. If nukes are hitting random countryside then a lot less people die.
But when it's the difference between hitting a hardened target or being off by 200 meters, that doesn't really affect normal people.
> has lots of worrying consequences for normal people that are in normal cities.
Which is precisely why even the mere ownership of nuclear weapons was ruled by the ICJ to be illegal: a violation of inter alia the Hague [1907], UN Charter and Geneva Conventions.
Specifically the Geneva Convention Protocol I (1977) states that ‘the civilian population shall not be the object of attack’.
The 1977 Geneva Protocol was ratified by the USA, so its not even that mystical international law thing - its domestic law.
The nuclear powers have spent the next 25 years trying to lobby and bully their way out of this inconvenient bit of international law. Expect to see some in the comments.
The US does not belong to the ICJ, so that judgement would only be valid if the US Supreme court would say so. I dislike a lot nuclear weapons but they are an escalation deterrent like the humanity never had[1]. I hope they continue to be a deterrent but never ever launched in war.
[1] If Ukraine kept the nuclear weapons post USSR collapse we probably would not have the war on Ukraine, lots of dangerous threats but nothing else.
> If Ukraine kept the nuclear weapons post USSR collapse we probably would not have the war on Ukraine, lots of dangerous threats but nothing else.
If Ukraine tried to keep the nuclear weapons they would have been invaded within half an hour of that becoming apparent in or around 1994. They had no meaningful operational control over them, thus it would not have acted as a deterrent against that invasion.
Yes, nukes are really potent deterrent. Ukraine's case is not the right one to show this.
If you are looking for an example where nuclear deterrent works Russia's case is much better. They are badly bogged down in Ukraine. The reason why nobody dares to escalate and turn Moscow to rubble is because they have the nukes as a credible deterrent. All the tiptoeing around the range of missiles given to Ukraine and the constraints they have on not targeting Russia directly with them is due to that.
And even if they'd held onto them, keeping them operational for three decades without a nuclear weapons program of their own would have been impossible. They would have had to spend a huge amount of money they didn't have to build the infrastructure to do it.
The USA does belong to the ICJ and has since its inception (the USA not a member of the ICC - different court).
Its just that after the invasion of Nicaragua in 1984 it decided to abide by the court "on a case to case basis". Russia also decided to ignore the ICJ in 2022.
FWIW I agree that everyone should have nukes, there would be a lot fewer military adventures. But that's not the _current_ USA/UK/FR domestic* and international law.
I'm not sure there are much in the way of geolocation countermeasures against ICBMs anyway, they're inertially guided. Unless you can generate localized gravity anomalies at will, I guess.
And if that's not enough, I'm sure you could get the rest of the way with cameras and AI. In 2024, it can't be too challenging to train a machine to recognize Moscow.
