Why is the US the only nation with the 'air force' in its nuclear 'triad'?
Besides giving US air generals muh nukes to play with of course.
Why is the US the only nation with the 'air force' in its nuclear 'triad'?
Why is the US the only nation with the 'air force' in its nuclear 'triad'?
Besides giving US air generals muh nukes to play with of course.
They are the only ones capable of deploying enough warheads that way for it to matter as a viable part of a second or retaliatory strike.
At least that's the theory.
because they can afford it
/thread
Pretty much the answer to anything smart or stupid that the US military does.
Isn't France's only method of nuke delivery based on airplanes?
No, they have SSBNs as well. They're a bit smaller than US and British ones though
They also have Triomphant-class SSBN as part of the nuclear dyad (duo? Idk). They historically had silo and TEL-based nuclear arsenal. IIRC, France was the only country besides America and the Soviet that had proper nuclear triad.
France eliminated their ground launched MRBMs; they’re an air/sea duo now
Yeah, and Israel has f-16s that can deliver nukes.
Israel isn't a nuclear power.
Everybody know they have nukes but still.
Do you have any sauce on their delivery method?
As other anons pointed out, no, it's planes + subs.
If I remember correctly, the M51 missile could be land fired or easily adapted to but it is not as the submarine fired ones are seen as a sufficient deterrent.
>Israel isn't a nuclear power
>Everybody know they have nukes
well, which is it?
>no
more accurately, "not anymore"
Since we've gone this whole thread and nobody bothered; here, meet Pluton, aka "yes, you really CAN put anything on a tank chassis"
In the movie "The Sum of all Fears", it's shown that the Israelis have f-16 jets that carry nuclear free fall bombs.
In the movie Transformers it's shown that the USA have a railgun
it was a skyhawk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_(missile)
https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2022/01/israels-submarine-secret-new-dolphin-class-boat-could-have-vls/
lying israelite
No, they have solid-fueled SLBMs. The whole reason the Ariane 5 and 6 use solid rocket boosters is to keep the production lines going for their missiles. This is also related to why the Space Shuttle and SLS use the world's largest solid rocket boosters.
I thought they used solids because they were also meant to be human-rated, even if Hermes got cancelled at the end.
No, they were just cargo culting the space shuttle. Solids are janky and shaky and unpleasant for astronauts, and caused the Challenger disaster.
>I thought they used solids because they were also meant to be human-rated
Using solids on human-rated rockets is the last thing you want to do. They only reason they use SRB's on Ariane, SLS, STS, or Starliner is becasue of hydromeme
>They
the*
Why does France need nukes anyway?
So they don't need to rely on anyone else's nuclear umbrella.
From the Wikipedia
>De Gaulle felt that France should never entrust its defense and therefore its very existence to a foreign and thus-unreliable protector.
And he was fricking right about that.
>435 t of chemicals warhead
>second production in the wolrd of chemical weapons behind USA
France has been doing independent arms development for over a thousand years they won't stop now
Because they're French and they like being special.
>be Ukraine
>trade nukes for gibs
>get invaded
>suprisedpikachu.jpeg
france had all 3, like the USA, until the end of the cold war where cutbacks and the ghost of De Gaulle had receded enough to decommission the land based ICBM's . In theory the M51 is every bit as capable as the current Trident, we'll have to wait at least 60 years to find out about the design of both.
The air launched tactical missile - the AMP-A is still very much part of the frogs playbook, with a stated goal of 'an ultimate warning to threatening nations before the use of subs' - how ominous. Given the competence and scale of the french (no I'm not capitalising the F) nuclear and space industry, there should be no doubt concerning the quality and capability of french warheads and MIRV's
The ghost of De Gaulle lives on - unfortunately.
Russian TU bombers that skirt NORAD airspace aren’t armed with nukes?
Nope. If anything, they don't bring any munitions. Their purpose is to check response times and reaction, not to actually drop munitions.
>it was revealed to me in a dream
>Nope. If anything, they don't bring any munitions. Their purpose is to check response times and reaction, not to actually drop munitions.
They don't carry any weapons to save money by running at what amounts to only 1/3 max load.
It isn't.
Partly it's a legacy thing; the USAAF was the only means of delivering early nukes, and it emerged from the war with a powerful political advantage that secured ample funding in the early years of the Cold War.
ICBMs and SLBMs took over the majority of the role, but there was still a need for people to get into Soviet airspace and hunt down key targets, right up to the end of the Cold War. Today, of course, the bomber leg of the triad is in some ways the weakest of the three, but it has advantages in having a man-in-the-loop much closer to the enemy, which means NCA has more options for control. Plus, bombers are somewhat less escalatory than ballistic missiles; if the US absolutely had to nuke, say, Best Korea, using bombs or ALCMs would freak Russia and China out less than using the other two legs of the triad.
Russia also has the ability to deliver nukes with its bombers; given the issues we've seen this last year, they may actually be the most reliable leg of their triad, since it's probably easier to find and fix issues with a bomber than with a rocket motor. For everybody else, it's generally too expensive to maintain a force of heavy bombers, especially since trying to use them against the USAF would be rather silly. Also, fighters can carry tactical nukes several hundred miles, and for countries like India and Pakistan (or European nations with access to US nukes), that's all that they really require.
Bombers are useful in that you can get them off the ground, and this away from incoming nukes, before you are truly sure you have to use them.
Russian bombers might be the most reliable way for them to deliver their nukes in terms of shit actually working, but they are not going to reliably penetrate NATO airspace.
>not going to reliably penetrate NATO airspace
Standoff missiles.
if youre gonna rely on a missile why not just shoot from a silo?
Everyone can see a silo launch and surmise it's probably a nuke; how can you tell which one bomb of the thousands being rained down every day across the front is actually a nuke, before it explodes?
>since it's probably easier to find and fix issues with a bomber than with a rocket motor
ICBMs/SLBMs use either solid rockets which can sit unattended for literal decades, at which point the tritium igniter is going to decay away to uselessness first, or moron-simple hypergolic liquid fueled engines running on hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide which ignite on contact with each other. Just keep the plumbing intact and they'll work. Bombers sitting outside on Russian airfields are actually a much larger maintenance task.
Good point about bombers being less escalatory. Long range radar all over the world sees ICBMs go up, alarm bells start ringing - but if they see one detonation alone, they aren't going to retaliate until everything's figured out and probably not even then.
I'm pretty sure Russia also has nuclear equipped aircraft and they are the only nation with mobile land based nuclear missile launchers.
>they are the only nation with mobile land based nuclear missile launchers.
china also has them. and most likely north korea as well.
Fricking Pakistan and their hindu frienemy also has them
Also Iran*
cause we invented nukes
so did china, uk, france, rus, pajeets and literal pakis
nope
yes
Didn't Russia steal the secret recipe from the US and then work from there?
And China got most of their nuclear know how from the Russians.
The Pakis got knowhow and hardware from some swiss guy of all people.
No idea how Britain and France got nukes, but since they aren't third world shitholes maybe they actually put the work in.
I don't know about the frogs but the bongs helped do a lot of work on the OG Manhattan Project, only for the burgers to refuse to share the end results despite their input, so the bongs ended up having to develop their own nukes using their portion of the project.
Then they nuked Australia
>Then they nuked Australia
Sources state that the country looked exactly the same after the tests.
Will it stop the wieneratoos from launching a second strike, though?
My sides
>only for the burgers to refuse to share the end results despite their input
To be fair, our intelligence agencies are infested with commie sympathisers and we were as leaky as a sieve. Ironically in the end it was some American scientists themselves that defected.
>in the end
Bro the Soviets were getting nuclear secrets back during the DEVELOPMENT of the atomic bomb. Thats how they had a nuke ready by 1947. It had nothing to do with the intel agencies, it's just that the US flatout wanted a monopoly on nuclear weapons and wasn't willing to share. Particularly since at that time a lot of the nuclear materials came from the British Empire and if they knew how to make them, they wouldn't need the Americans to make them.
The Manhattan Project is the American expansion pack (trademark pending) of the British Tube Alloys research project - which did a lot of the leg work. When Churchill (and it was Churchill as far as I know) recognised that British hadn't the resources or the safety from German bombers to design, build, test and field a nuclear bomb on its own without jeapordising the rest of the war effort, all the know how - considerably further advanced than contemporary American research on the matter was transferred to America and the rest is history.
America having refused to re transfer atomic secrets to us after a law was passed in 1945, We then decided to make it ourselves, first fission device in 1950 and 1st thermonuclear device in 1957. We also made and tested the largest hybrid - 700KT of whoop ass in case the thermonuclear bomb didn't work. It should be noted that even today, while the missiles ARE American, (which is a shame), the actual bombs and MIRV's, are very much British. With the Chevaline warheads, in the latter half of the cold war helped advance the design of hardened and super hardened weapons and RV's. Work promptly nicked by the Americans.
>nicked and torpedo'd by the USA, the story of British thermonuclear ambition. Maybe we should sail up the potomac again?
*Though I should say both We and those fricking degenerate frogs had informal help from American scientists in the form of indirect answers to 'questions' (no its not that you see, we absolutely wouldn't build it that way kind of thing) for our first weapons. France later gave significant help to Israel for its nuclear ambitions, israel thus helped South Africa back when it was still based to build its nukes. So French, Israeli AND Suid-Afrika 🙂 nukes are all one big family.
sino-soviet split happened in 1959 and the first chinese nuke test was in 1964 so unlikely the soviet helped much.
nukes are not hard to make. before the Non-proliferation treaty it was estimated that 20 countries would have nukes in 20 years. it's 1945 tech, you just get a ball of plutonium then compress it.
making your ball the right size is hard, as is getting the explosives the right shape to squeeze the ball correctly
you can do some other, harder things to make it better like little spheres that contain neutron sources that get broken open by the squeeze and release enough neutrons to kickstart the fission or whatever
Nukes take longer to develop than you think, China had direct assistance in nuclear research from 1951 to 1959
Soviets expected China's nuclear efforts to crumble after 1959, which it did, they did not expect China to keep detonating shit in the desert aimlessly for two more years until they reverse engineered the rest of what they needed to keep stable payloads.
>Nukes take longer to develop than you think
didnt the fricking pakistanis (pbut) do it in 2 years? Meanwhile Iran has been "trying" to get nukes for like 40. I really dont know if these metrics are useful. Just sayin
Getting nuke bomb technology is fairly simple (simple, not easy) once the science behind it is understood. Pretty much everyone at this point acknowledged Iran capability to develop nuke warhead. The main issue is whether they already made couple of them.
My take is that Iran chose not to develop nuke warhead until there's clear signal for war, specifically against the US or Israel. Right now both the military and political power in Iran denied having nuke and they choose to deny it instead of going chimpout mode like the Norks because unlike the norks Iran has a healthy, working relationship with the west (sans america) and they'd like to keep it that way
Britain literally helped the United States with the Manhattan project anon, they did a LOT of work on it too. They were genuinely surprised that after the war we didn't share some of the secrets with them, but all they were really missing iirc was the detonation geometry (which was one of the harder parts of it).
They KNEW we were working on an atomic bomb. They supplied a lot of the parts and science work too. We just kept them in the dark on the final 20% of the road, which they were able to fill in pretty quick.
There never was a "secret recipe". It's physics. Once the genie was out of the bottle and people knew it was possible, narrowing down the exact procedure became little more than a question of time and resource investment.
You forgot Best Korea and Israel
>No idea how France got nukes
From scratch after France rejected the US/UK terms to share the technology.
> Op is in high school.
Only possible way you would think France, the UK, Russia and everyone else doesn't have nuclear equipped aircraft.
they're not the only ones
and for diplomatic posturing on nukelet non-countries
>nuclear armed bombers
>photo of a Su-25
moron
So close yet so far
Hey moron, you mistyped the wrong number.
Basically, after the WWII, there was a dispute between the Air Force and The Navy about who's gonna be in charge of the nukes. Then, the Air Force just dropped a dummy bomb on Pearl Harbor without being noticed by the Navy. And that was the argument that the Navy can't do jack shit and the Airforce can deliver the nuke wherever they want. And so, the nukes were given to the Airforce.
>the navy has 1/3rd of the nuclear triad anyway
>used to have nuclear tomahawks
The fight didn’t end in 1946.
air dropped nuclear weapons are a pretty integral part of NATO, hence why we have gravity bombs stationed in places like Turkey, Italy, etc. Pretty much everyone has nuke-approved planes in NATO for that reason--if we have to start passing out nukes, they need planes that can carry them. It allows nations to basically have a nuclear weapon without actually OWNING the nuclear weapon, so much as a promissory note that if the third world war happens the US will throw open the armory and start passing them around.
Because the rest of the western world offshores its defence needs to America so their politicians can carry on be globalist buttholes who doesn't afraid of anything. This means that the U.S. is the only nation that has a budget set aside for the capability to even have nukes on an aircraft, nevermind that this method of delivery became outdated decades ago, because why the frick not? Add some lasers while your at it, maybe a nuclear powered toilet, the money is literally limitless and nobody else needs to spend on defence or even send their troops to die as long as they just let America handle the bad guys and pretend to be part an active member of NATO.
Whenever China or Russia starts to get uppity, everyone just call the U.S. to sort it and they immediately do with every toy project DARPA has churned out. Everyone can sit back, watch the fireworks, and spend literally nothing on their own defence. The good guys win against the terrorists, the U.S. gets to lead the free world, and the west continues its glorious march to the globalist utopia from here to stars.
tl:dr - the U.S. is the only nation with the obligation to have it. Everyone else can spend the taxpayers shekels on their own ~~*people*~~.
>Because the rest of the western world offshores its defence needs to America so their politicians can carry on be globalist buttholes who doesn't afraid of anything.
Is this what they teach in your schools, or just on Faux news? The US military still occupies Europe by US design.
The Russians have been playing Tu-95 pattycake with Alaskan air defenses since the 1950s, OP. Those aren't in preparation for dropping conventional bombs. They also sometimes park Backfires in Venezuela. That's not for bombing Brazil.
Also the British used to have strategic bombers, but those got phased out as missile response times shrank and SAMs improved since even in a first strike there was no way for them to reach Moscow.
The fun part is because patrols are no longer a thing, the entire leg of the triad that represent nuclear bombers would be easily wiped out in a surprise attack.
nuclear bombers represent entirely a way to dunk on non-nuclear nations with a plausible path to not triggering global thermonuclear annihilation now
yeah it could, but the flexibility of bombers is still unparalleled by submarines or land based silos, no matter the trick fusing system and thus accuracy of the W88 warheads.
Since we're talking about nukes, I should say at this point that all the hype around hypersonic missiles is overrated and they're a bit of a meme/wunderwaffe. Hypersonic weapons. have existed for almost 60 years now, they're called ballistic missiles.
>bbbut these ones manouvre, yes, so can re entry vehicles, google the Chevaline and MARV programs.
The only 'new' thing they bring, is that we can now launch them from a plane and they have an engine to sustain such speeds, instead of being lobbed into fricking space. Any hypersonic missile could be seen as an adversary, and rightly so as a nuclear weapon so their use would be pretty limited.
Low angle hypersonics are also a problem for control because they can't be recalled after launch or even remotely defused. Any object traveling that fast through the troposphere or stratosphere is going to be wrapped in a plasma sheath like a reentering spacecraft that makes radio comms impossible. (Incidentally this is why Russian and Chinese claims of hypersonic weapons are probably exaggerated.) Once they leave the launcher the die is cast.
Probably true, Mission control could still communicate with the Space Shuttle during re entry because the antennae were in the tail and away from the bulk of the plasma stream - something similar could be in use on hypersonics. The Mercury program also tested a system with water that had limited success but wasn't implemented.
Finally, someone who knows what they're talking about.
the shuttle beamed transmissions up to the NASA TRDS satellites and then back down to Earth during reentry, the plasma sheath is opaque generally
>shuttle comms used tards satellites
this explains a lot
>Any object traveling that fast through the troposphere or stratosphere is going to be wrapped in a plasma sheath like a reentering spacecraft that makes radio comms impossible.
It's not THAT hard to communicate with a hypersonic vehicle covered in a plasma sheath. Chemical injection to control the plasma, magnetic windows to control the flow field, aerodynamic shaping and strategic placement of the antenna in non-ionized regions, etc. It's just that communicating with a human controlled reentry vehicle wasn't too much of a concern if it dropped for a minute.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/piercing-the-plasma/
https://patents.google.com/patent/US7237752B1/en
https://www.math.arizona.edu/~anewell/publications/Comm_through_Plasma_Sheaths.pdf
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20100008938/downloads/20100008938.pdf
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19720008294/downloads/19720008294.pdf
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19700008892/downloads/19700008892.pdf
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Design_and_Testing_of_a_Chemical_Injecti/gVjTqemvEhgC
>surprise attack.
No such thing.
>hydromeme
Translation from /sfg/ lingo: Hydrogen-oxygen rocket stages are maximally efficient but very low thrust because liquid hydrogen is so fluffy (only ~70kg/m^3, liquid water is 1000kg/m^3), which means they need strap on boosters to lift themselves off the ground if used in a first stage, and the hydrogen engines become a "sustainer" stage. This architecture was most famously used on the Space Shuttle, but also on Delta 4, SLS, ESA's Ariane 5/6, Japan's H-2/3, the Soviet Energia/Buran shuttle clone, and several proposed Chinese designs. This design is generally considered a bad idea compared to the design pattern most famously used in the Saturn V: a kerosene-oxygen first stage and one or more hydrogen-oxygen upper stages that aren't fighting as much gravity or atmosphere so the hydrogen engines' higher efficiency really gets used to maximal advantage. SpaceX's design for Starship is sort of a unique min-max that relies on extremely clean-burning engines and some clever tank design tricks to use methane-oxygen stages that get close enough to hydrogen-oxygen in efficiency per unit propellant that liquid methane's more favorable handling properties (no foam required, more bulk dense than hydrogen, etc.) get you more real world performance than a hydrogen-oxygen stage. Starship therefore presents if not the absolute theoretical peak of chemical rocket performance something within spitting distance of it.
And that's why NASA and DoD love Starship.
the Atlas rockets also use booster/sustainer even without hydrolox, it's just an easy way to improve rocket performance if you have shit engines
The Atlas rockets use hydrolox upper stages and were actually the first to do so in the 60s. Atlas V and Centaur still fly descendants of that original Centaur upper stage, and SLS (and the Saturn IB) uses descendants of the RL10 engine from Centaur in its own upper stages ICPS (current) and EUS (future).
yes but all of the early Atlas (Able, Agena, Mercury etcetera) as well as Atlas I and II used booster sustainer design on the core stage
the engines they dropped were liquid engines instead of SRBs but still
Atlas V uses a more traditional Booster/Sustainer design with SRBs providing takeoff T/W and then being ditched
shut up
At least give the (You), you frick
It was a penalty for breaking containment and not even bothering to explain terms.
>posting the fake version the animegay ruined
please fricking kill your family and then yourself
i think all nations with nuclear weapons have aircraft launched nukes
I think North Korea is missiles only just because they're surrounded by hostile SAM batteries and interceptors.