Basically yes, we are always designing new nuclear bombs. This isn't done to increase yield, we've actually been moving towards lower yield nuclear bombs ever since the mid Cold War. In the 60s the US deployed the B41 bomb with a maximum yield of 25 megatons, making it the most powerful bomb ever deployed by the US. When the B41 was retired in the late 70s, the most powerful bomb in the US arsenal was the B53 with a yield of 9 megatons. The B53 was retired in 2011, leaving the B83 as the most powerful bomb in the US arsenal with a yield of only 1.2 megatons.
There are two kinds of targeting that can be employed in a nuclear war: counterforce and countervalue. Counterforce is targeting enemy military installations, and especially enemy nuclear installations. Countervalue is targeting civilian targets like cities and infrastructure. In an all out nuclear war counterforce targets are saturated with nuclear weapons, with each target receiving multiple strikes to hedge against the risks of weapon failure, weapon interception, and general target survival due to being in a fortified underground positions. Any weapons that are not needed for counterforce saturation strike countervalue targets. It turns out that having a yield greater than a megaton is basically just overkill for both counterforce and countervalue. If you're striking an underground military target (like a missile silo) protected by air defenses, your odds of destroying that target are higher if you use three one megaton yield weapons than if you use a single 20 megaton yield weapon. If you're striking a countervalue target, the devastation caused by a single nuclear detonation will be catastrophic enough to make optimizing for maximum damage pointless.
Thus, weapons designers started to optimize for things other than yield. Safety is a big one, an American nuclear weapon going off on US soil would have far reaching political effects and would likely cause the president to resign. Weapons must fail safely when the bomber carrying them bursts into flames on the tarmac, or when the rail carrying the bomb breaks unexpectedly. They must be resilient against both operator error and malicious sabotage. Oh, and none of these safety considerations are allowed to get in the way of the weapon detonating when it is supposed to. This is really hard to get right!
Another consideration is cost. Nuclear weapons are expensive to make, so a design that can get a high yield out of a small amount of fissile material is preferred. Maintenance, and the cost of maintenance, is also relevant. Will the weapon still work in 30 years, and how much money is required to ensure that?
The final consideration is flexibility and effectiveness. Using a megaton yield weapon on the battlefield to destroy enemy troop concentrations is not a viable tactic because your own troops would likely get caught in the strike. But lower yield weapons suitable for battlefield use (often referred to as tactical nuclear weapons) aren't useful for striking counterforce targets like missile silos. Thus, modern weapon designs are variable yield. The B83 mentioned above can be configured to detonate with a yield in the low kilotons, or up to 1.2 megatons. Thus a single B83 weapon in the US arsenal can cover multiple continencies, making it cheaper and more effective than maintaining a larger arsenal of single yield weapons. This is in addition to special purpose weapons designed to penetrate underground bunkers or destroy satellites via EMP, which have their own design considerations.
Great comment- I have only one thing to add. Many people will enjoy reading "Command and Control" which covers the history of nuclear weapons accidents in the US and how they were managed/mitigated. It's always interesting to learn that a missile silo can explode, popping the warhead up and out (but without it exploding due to fission/fusion), that from the perspective of the nuclear warhead, the safety controls worked.
> Another consideration is cost. Nuclear weapons are expensive to make, so a design that can get a high yield out of a small amount of fissile material is preferred. Maintenance, and the cost of maintenance, is also relevant. Will the weapon still work in 30 years, and how much money is required to ensure that?
I've seen speculation that Russia's (former Soviet) nuclear weapons are so old and poorly maintained that they probably wouldn't work. Not that anyone wants to find out.
Yep, in 2021 the FBI was opening a new China related investigation every 12 hours. China steals billions of dollars worth of industrial knowledge and secrets from the US every year through industrial espionage.
> Even Bing, widely considered a failure, on last reported revenue and current P/E ratio, would be 12th most valuable tech company in the world, between Tencent and ASML.
A tiny slice of the search market (4% IIRC) is worth this much? Incredible. Everyone knows Google is swimming in money, but I guess it never really computed for me that managing to grab a tiny slice of the search market would be so valuable. If I was making a guess prior to reading this, my intuition would have been that Bing was some kind of loss leader. Shows what I know! Hah
Bing Ads is big business. Digital marketing is enormous. Google and Facebook have larger portions of the pie, but a sliver of a huge pie is still a lot of pie.
> The market as a whole is completely zero sum in my view.
How is it even possible to believe this? How do you think societies should manage their resources and plan for the future, if not a market? Soviet style central planning, or a cash and barter only economy? And if the answer is that we should have a market, then the market is providing some utility (because if it was providing neutral or negative utility then why have it) and is therefore not zero sum.
> economists and other types who sole concern is "How much more money can we make from cheap shipping"
This is most people? National defense and the domestic shipbuilding industry are important, but the value of cheap shipping should not be underestimated. Plus, giving credit to the Jones Act for the current state of US civilian and military shipbuilding is, in my opinion, perhaps the strongest possible argument for repealing the Jones Act. The current state of American shipbuilding is disgraceful.
The contingency feared by Western planners is Russia invading while the US is unable or unwilling to come to Poland's aid. The two most obvious scenarios are Trump getting elected and withdrawing the US from NATO (either officially, or by using his authority as commander in chief to refuse to deploy US forces in support of Article V), or US forces being tied up in a war with China. European nations would probably help, but European militaries don't have the same expeditionary capabilities as the US so they'd probably be limited in how much they could practically do.
No, your time horizon is too short. Prices go up in the short term, which increases profits, which incentivizes competition, which brings prices down in the long term. A few years of increased prices is worth increased efficiency over decades. Prices are going in most industries, US markets are generally quite competitive.
Increasing profits often doesn't incentivize competition, especially when barriers to entry are high. Instead, it decreases competition by giving existing corporations even more money and power to use against newcomers. Look at what happened to Bandcamp: bought up by a music licensing company and gutted.
I would also like to point out that the "long term" is just a collection of several "short terms", so if the short terms are only price increases (which they are), then the long term will also just be that.
Increasing profits just enables attacking competitors in other ways than via product competition. The narrative that profits get turned into RnD instead of executive bonuses and stock buybacks or acquisitions is a Econ 101 fantasy.
In the real world, Cisco, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft don't make better products to win, they just buy Splunk, Insta, Whole Foods, and Bethesda.
C# recently came out with Native AOT (ahead of time) compilation that compiles your app to a binary that can run without the .NET runtime (!!), and has fast startup and lower memory overhead. There are a few drawbacks: many reflection and run-time code generation and loading features are unavailable, and LINQ expressions must be interpreted which makes them slow. But it's easy to work around those limitations for a greenfield infra project, and C# has great performance characteristics.
I listened to https://www.theredlinepodcast.com/post/tajikistan-and-region... yesterday. It's an extremely interesting discussion on the geopolitical factors both internal and external that shape Tajikistan's security sitation, and who's interests Tajikistan's security dysfunction serves.
There are two kinds of targeting that can be employed in a nuclear war: counterforce and countervalue. Counterforce is targeting enemy military installations, and especially enemy nuclear installations. Countervalue is targeting civilian targets like cities and infrastructure. In an all out nuclear war counterforce targets are saturated with nuclear weapons, with each target receiving multiple strikes to hedge against the risks of weapon failure, weapon interception, and general target survival due to being in a fortified underground positions. Any weapons that are not needed for counterforce saturation strike countervalue targets. It turns out that having a yield greater than a megaton is basically just overkill for both counterforce and countervalue. If you're striking an underground military target (like a missile silo) protected by air defenses, your odds of destroying that target are higher if you use three one megaton yield weapons than if you use a single 20 megaton yield weapon. If you're striking a countervalue target, the devastation caused by a single nuclear detonation will be catastrophic enough to make optimizing for maximum damage pointless.
Thus, weapons designers started to optimize for things other than yield. Safety is a big one, an American nuclear weapon going off on US soil would have far reaching political effects and would likely cause the president to resign. Weapons must fail safely when the bomber carrying them bursts into flames on the tarmac, or when the rail carrying the bomb breaks unexpectedly. They must be resilient against both operator error and malicious sabotage. Oh, and none of these safety considerations are allowed to get in the way of the weapon detonating when it is supposed to. This is really hard to get right!
Another consideration is cost. Nuclear weapons are expensive to make, so a design that can get a high yield out of a small amount of fissile material is preferred. Maintenance, and the cost of maintenance, is also relevant. Will the weapon still work in 30 years, and how much money is required to ensure that?
The final consideration is flexibility and effectiveness. Using a megaton yield weapon on the battlefield to destroy enemy troop concentrations is not a viable tactic because your own troops would likely get caught in the strike. But lower yield weapons suitable for battlefield use (often referred to as tactical nuclear weapons) aren't useful for striking counterforce targets like missile silos. Thus, modern weapon designs are variable yield. The B83 mentioned above can be configured to detonate with a yield in the low kilotons, or up to 1.2 megatons. Thus a single B83 weapon in the US arsenal can cover multiple continencies, making it cheaper and more effective than maintaining a larger arsenal of single yield weapons. This is in addition to special purpose weapons designed to penetrate underground bunkers or destroy satellites via EMP, which have their own design considerations.