Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: NGTM-1R on May 07, 2011, 11:29:26 pm
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I am reading unclassified information on what my father once called "The Day Three Problem" and how it related to winning the Cold War. It's Day Three of a nuclear war. All land-based missiles and bombers have been destroyed or expended in attacks. Most, possibly all, surface ships have likewise been destroyed. There are no cities. Your communications networks are in ruins. The SSBNs still have missiles, though.
How do you give them target tasking and launch orders?
It's a form of uniquely American planned insanity and systems engineering; the Soviets never tried to answer The Day Three Problem apparently, and if they are to be believed the realization that we were actually serious about doing so contributed greatly to the sense that this was a bad job and they should get out of the fight while the ratio of dirt to black glass was still high.
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hmmmm, well didn't the subs carry pre-determined targets for just such an occasion?
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hmmmm, well didn't the subs carry pre-determined targets for just such an occasion?
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They doubtlessly did, but since you've got enough icbms to glass every major Russian city, and enough bombers to glass every town and airfield unless they get shot down, how do you make sure that the subs are shooting their missiles at something that hasn't already been violently rendered glow-in-the-dark? How do General Ripper and the guys at SACNORAD buried the better part of a mile under the unpleasantly warm remains of the greater Denver Metropolitan Crater convey the information that pre-assigned attack plan Code 'R' will deliver optimum missile coverage to the remaining three un-bombed county seats, plus the airfield near the afghanistan border that was lucky enough to shoot down all the bombers assigned to it, and a nice array of power plants and factories as well? How freaked out am I to even be considering this ****?
Speaking of Nuclear Winter, I've just finished watching season one of Jericho. Why do I never find out about the good TV shows until they've been off the air for years?
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hmmmm, well didn't the subs carry pre-determined targets for just such an occasion?
On Day Three, anything that was a predetermined target no longer exists. (They don't make it past Day Two. Most of them will not survive the first hour.) You're targeting armies in the field or nations getting uppity now that the super-powers are gone.
The one being tossed around in what I read was India deciding to go "lulz Gulf is mine naow kay?", but North Korea and in recent years the Ukraine are also highly possible Day Three targets.
This is sobering stuff. It's all very well-thought-out, very carefully prepared and researched, but at some point you realize you are discussing the effective annihilation of humanity and you start trying to reject it all as insane. It's not. But god do you wish it was.
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I don't understand how the annihilation of humanity is justified/not insane in that scenario. Hasn't the world basically already ended? What's the point of ending it more at that point? It's like fulfilling a contract for someone you've already killed. You've made a promise but there's no need to keep it.
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The ascension of the Ordinary Man... (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXkIuVLnsFE)
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I don't understand how the annihilation of humanity is justified/not insane in that scenario. Hasn't the world basically already ended? What's the point of ending it more at that point? It's like fulfilling a contract for someone you've already killed. You've made a promise but there's no need to keep it.
The concept of MAD rests on the assurance that the launch orders will happen. If there is no execution, the system falls apart. Answering The Day Three Problem makes Day One vastly less likely by creating a situation in which no successful preemptive strike is possible. But, more to the point...
Winning and losing at this point are more than a little relative terms, but being able to win Day Three (in effect, still being able to issue orders to your remaining strike forces and having remaining strike forces) effectively negates Day One and Day Two as an option for your opponent, for any opponent. There's nothing in the cards for engineering a war between the superpowers now either. It will only buy you annihilation in nuclear fire.
This is MAD at it is most fundamental, its most important. Nobody has anything left to gain, not even the neutrals and the fifth-tier who'll never be targeted. Nobody with delusions of grandeur and one or two faithful men can start a nuclear war now, just as the major players cannot. Like all MAD, it's in the hope of never executing. This does not change the fact that to be effective, it must perform as advertised.
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This reminds me of Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men.
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I am reading unclassified information on what my father once called "The Day Three Problem" and how it related to winning the Cold War. It's Day Three of a nuclear war. All land-based missiles and bombers have been destroyed or expended in attacks. Most, possibly all, surface ships have likewise been destroyed. There are no cities. Your communications networks are in ruins. The SSBNs still have missiles, though.
How do you give them target tasking and launch orders?
It's a form of uniquely American planned insanity and systems engineering; the Soviets never tried to answer The Day Three Problem apparently, and if they are to be believed the realization that we were actually serious about doing so contributed greatly to the sense that this was a bad job and they should get out of the fight while the ratio of dirt to black glass was still high.
If the Soviets didn't bother to plan past Day Two because there wouldn't be anything left that's worth fighting for, why did we?
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I don't understand how the annihilation of humanity is justified/not insane in that scenario. Hasn't the world basically already ended? What's the point of ending it more at that point? It's like fulfilling a contract for someone you've already killed. You've made a promise but there's no need to keep it.
The concept of MAD rests on the assurance that the launch orders will happen. If there is no execution, the system falls apart. Answering The Day Three Problem makes Day One vastly less likely by creating a situation in which no successful preemptive strike is possible. But, more to the point...
Winning and losing at this point are more than a little relative terms, but being able to win Day Three (in effect, still being able to issue orders to your remaining strike forces and having remaining strike forces) effectively negates Day One and Day Two as an option for your opponent, for any opponent. There's nothing in the cards for engineering a war between the superpowers now either. It will only buy you annihilation in nuclear fire.
This is MAD at it is most fundamental, its most important. Nobody has anything left to gain, not even the neutrals and the fifth-tier who'll never be targeted. Nobody with delusions of grandeur and one or two faithful men can start a nuclear war now, just as the major players cannot. Like all MAD, it's in the hope of never executing. This does not change the fact that to be effective, it must perform as advertised.
Well, not really. To be effective everyone simply has to believe that it will perform as advertised, whereas continuing to perform if you find yourself at Day Two is pointless. Of course you might deny this in order to achieve the former, but that doesn't change the latter, which seems like a pretty self-evident fact.
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The MAD principle can also be used to great effect to strenghten relationships by exchanging embarassing pictures with your significant other. :)
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So we've got subs for the ocean, but on land we only have silos. We need something mobile on land too. A nuclear launch platform that can operate from any kind of terrain. It would render the concept of deterrence obsolete! :eek:
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Sounds interesting. Any links to the stuff you've been reading, NGTM-1R, or has it been offline stuff?
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So we've got subs for the ocean, but on land we only have silos. We need something mobile on land too. A nuclear launch platform that can operate from any kind of terrain. It would render the concept of deterrence obsolete! :eek:
The Russians have a bunch of them.
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Well, I know they have those truck things. I was going for a MGS reference really...
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It would have been a great reference if you had gotten it, Kosh. Damn Vorlons...
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i dont really think a mad strategy would end all life on earth nor would i think that there would be zero survivors. it would suck for them, blotting out their sun and making their balls not work. but there will be people alive after the fact. so i think its an awesome strategy, and i think it would be awesome if we carried it out from time to time.
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If the Soviets didn't bother to plan past Day Two because there wouldn't be anything left that's worth fighting for, why did we?
because we wanted the soviets to know that if they got to day two we would still be able to fight back, in other words, we wanted to make sure it was absolutely clear to them that they would completely lose if they started a war, that it was impossible to win, that way they wouldn't try to win, they would accept the stalemate.
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Y'know, in all the history I've studied, I've still found the best explanation of the Cold War in general and MAD doctrine in particular is the film Dr. Strangelove. One of my history profs recommended it to his students every year.
And it's hilarious as well as educational.
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the Soviets never tried to answer The Day Three Problem apparently
I hard believe that... do you have proof? They had so many subs spread everywhere, they must have foreseen a Day Three-like scenario, or anything like it.
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I am tempted to say they were just willing to wing day 3, but from what I know of Soviet mentality there had to be a plan for everything from how to operate the toilet to what to do if the US president sent them chocolates, so they probably had a plan tucked away in some comity member's filing cabinet with duplicates in certain bunkers which have been forgotten about with the transition from communism.
Though it depends on how they were thinking, wiping out NATO had to be the main plan for a nuke war, did neutral/minor nations factor in their plans or with the US out of the picture come day 3 according to their plans did they consider such nations to be an issue?
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If the Soviets didn't bother to plan past Day Two because there wouldn't be anything left that's worth fighting for, why did we?
because we wanted the soviets to know that if they got to day two we would still be able to fight back, in other words, we wanted to make sure it was absolutely clear to them that they would completely lose if they started a war, that it was impossible to win, that way they wouldn't try to win, they would accept the stalemate.
How about a nice game of chess?
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Well, not really. To be effective everyone simply has to believe that it will perform as advertised, whereas continuing to perform if you find yourself at Day Two is pointless. Of course you might deny this in order to achieve the former, but that doesn't change the latter, which seems like a pretty self-evident fact.
With a subject like this, depending on belief is not sufficient, because somebody will inevitably go nuclear-agnostic on you. It must be a self-evident fact, impossible to deny. This requires that it be...a self-evident fact. It's the glory of MAD. They only way you can be assured you will not have to destroy the world is to be actually able to destroy the world.
I hard believe that... do you have proof? They had so many subs spread everywhere, they must have foreseen a Day Three-like scenario, or anything like it.
There were big, really big, differences in deployment and tactics by both sides. One thing you have to understand is that most Soviet military hardware was not designed to be survivable. (Their divisions, for example, were designed to operate for twenty-four hours of combat; after that, they expected them to be no longer combat effective.) The Soviets didn't expect to have nuclear assets left that late in the game. They knew we could shadow their submarines with our own and didn't expect them to survive. They didn't expect their missile-launch complexes to still exist. They thought their mobile launchers might, but weren't entirely sure, and were very sure they wouldn't be able to communicate with them or rearm them if they did.
They never tried to answer The Day Three Problem because they didn't think they'd have strike assets remaining on Day Three. We were predicting surviving nuclear strike assets up to Day Seven, after which it gets a lot easier to survive since everyone's pretty much run out of weapons.
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In day seven, most people would have just mentally collapsed.
MAD strategy is indeed mad. It makes perfect logical sense, so for that reason it was a lunatic strategy. Only madmen use logic to this extreme. Humans should not be expected to behave rationally. What happens if someone makes a mistake? What happens if some really mad person takes charge? Game Theory only works if the players are fully rational, and we are ****ing humanoids! This MAD **** was built for the robot era, not for the homo sapiens era. Thank goodness we survive such madness...
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They were mad times, an almost irrational hatred and fear of Communism had been perculated, which was further highlighted by the missile crisis. In fact the attitude towards 'Ruskies' back in the late 70's was easily as hostile as the attitude towards Fundamentalists is today. The main difference being that rather than a collection of semi-educated civilians with limited training and out of date weapons, the Russians really did have the ability to do more than simply bluster.
It became a spiral of posturing in many ways, the very spiral that killed the CCCP, each power trying to intimidate the other into not firing their weapons, which seems like an odd way of thinking nowadays, but that was the cycle that both sides got locked into.
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i dont really think a mad strategy would end all life on earth nor would i think that there would be zero survivors. it would suck for them, blotting out their sun and making their balls not work. but there will be people alive after the fact. so i think its an awesome strategy, and i think it would be awesome if we carried it out from time to time.
It wouldn't even have a 50% casualty rate for the initial bombings. Many more people would end up dying in the aftermath due to disease, lack of food, and fallout. The fallout zones would remain impossible to move across for a couple of months afterwards, and you wouldn't want to spend any real amount of time in them for another few years. The groundbursts necessary to eliminate targets even as soft as railyards and such ensure this; imagine Chernobyl on a much larger scale with much more and nastier, longer-lived fallout. For each initiation.
Due to the distribution in targets in any industrialized country, large portions of the targeted nations would remain impassable for those few months following the week of the war. This causes society in those nations to break down rather precipitously. Modern industrial civilization would break down even in nations which were not targeted at all. This is because of the interconnectedness of the global economy, even at the time. For example, making modern computer chips requires very precise optics, among many other precision tools. You know who makes those? Only the US, Japan, and Germany. That's it. You know who makes almost all the precision machine tools in the world? Germany. Once those sources are gone, and the tooling begins to break down, it will not be back for a long, long time. Air travel and such would shut down within a year or two, as spares are exhausted. The factories where those parts were made and assembled, with all their precision tooling and such, were almost exclusively in Europe (Airbus) or the US (Boeing). They of course would have been hit on day one. Just about every high-tech, or even not so high-tech, good in the modern world is like this. Industrial civilization wouldn't completely disappear in countries that weren't bombed, but it would regress at least 50-100 years.
In day seven, most people would have just mentally collapsed.
MAD strategy is indeed mad. It makes perfect logical sense, so for that reason it was a lunatic strategy. Only madmen use logic to this extreme. Humans should not be expected to behave rationally. What happens if someone makes a mistake? What happens if some really mad person takes charge? Game Theory only works if the players are fully rational, and we are ****ing humanoids! This MAD **** was built for the robot era, not for the homo sapiens era. Thank goodness we survive such madness...
MAD is predicated on one simple truth: humans wish to stay alive and in power. Give anyone who is not in fact mentally ill the reins of a nuclear power, and he will not get anywhere close to using nuclear weapons in any form, except if his country is getting destroyed anyway. Even a place like Pakistan, easily the most unstable nuclear power, does this. They may rattle sabers against India, and India rattles them back, but war with India has been off the table ever since both of them acquired the bomb. If they did not have successful nuclear programs, I imagine we'd have seen a major conventional war between them at some point, or would in the future. The advent of nuclear weapons has effectively ended the era of war between the great powers because of the ability of nukes to utterly destroy nations in a single night.
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irony.
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BURN THE EARTH NAO!!!!
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I'm reading through this great self-titled anthology about the Manhattan Project, and it's fascinating to see how many of the top scientists on it foresaw the general concept of MAD, even before the Trinity test took place. There was a very real sense that the development of the technology by someone was inevitable, so we should be the ones to do it first in order to act as a deterrent to anyone who followed.
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BURN THE EARTH NAO!!!!
Peace on Earth. Purity of Essence.
Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face!
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Well, not really. To be effective everyone simply has to believe that it will perform as advertised, whereas continuing to perform if you find yourself at Day Two is pointless. Of course you might deny this in order to achieve the former, but that doesn't change the latter, which seems like a pretty self-evident fact.
With a subject like this, depending on belief is not sufficient, because somebody will inevitably go nuclear-agnostic on you. It must be a self-evident fact, impossible to deny. This requires that it be...a self-evident fact. It's the glory of MAD. They only way you can be assured you will not have to destroy the world is to be actually able to destroy the world.
No one can prove that they'd actually ever carry out their Day Two or Day Three plans as long as humans are involved in the decision-making. Likewise you can't know if the other guys will carry out their plans either. No matter plans you have, as long as it's not a 100% automated system you'll still have to decide on Day Two and Day Three whether to follow them or not.
So, to put it simply:
1. You can choose on Day Two or Day Three whether you'll continue launching nukes or not.
2. Continuing launching nukes would be pointless.
Without making it into a completely automated system which can't be stopped even by its operators, the continued launching of nukes can't be guaranteed. The plausibility of your claims that you'd continue on Day Two have next to nothing to do with your decision of whether or not to continue on Day Two.
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BURN THE EARTH NAO!!!!
Peace on Earth. Purity of Essence.
Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face!
PURIFY THE EARTH WITH NUCLEAR FIRE!!!
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BURN THE EARTH NAO!!!!
Peace on Earth. Purity of Essence.
Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face!
PURIFY THE EARTH WITH NUCLEAR FIRE!!!
Nuclear Fire: It's What's for Eternity!
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Wasn't ARPANET designed to carry information reliably even through a nuclear attack? I don't know how it would have fared had all major cities been destroyed, though... As long as there was a way through, it would make it, but I'm pretty sure everything eventually has to pass through a major city / base...
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1. You can choose on Day Two or Day Three whether you'll continue launching nukes or not.
2. Continuing launching nukes would be pointless.
There are still people.
They can still pose a threat to yourself or your allies.
There are no other options left to convince them to leave well enough alone since they all just got blown up.
A nuclear exchange between the USSR and NATO would actually leave significant portions of the planet (temporarily) untouched. Continuing to launch is hardly pointless; the continued threat ensures the territorial sovereignty of your overseas possessions and your countrymen, as well as preventing everyone in the world from deciding It's On Now and attacking their neighbors for the lulz of it.
The assertion that because there are people in the loop it cannot be assured is, at best, indicative of a severe failure to understand the degree to which people can be trained to operate exactly like parts of an automated system. This is the purpose of military training; and the people in question are extremely highly trained. You posit a fiction that bears no resemblance to reality; I could cite dozens of cases where people continued fighting to no obvious purpose simply because ordered to.
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1. You can choose on Day Two or Day Three whether you'll continue launching nukes or not.
2. Continuing launching nukes would be pointless.
There are still people.
They can still pose a threat to yourself or your allies.
There are no other options left to convince them to leave well enough alone since they all just got blown up.
A nuclear exchange between the USSR and NATO would actually leave significant portions of the planet (temporarily) untouched. Continuing to launch is hardly pointless; the continued threat ensures the territorial sovereignty of your overseas possessions and your countrymen, as well as preventing everyone in the world from deciding It's On Now and attacking their neighbors for the lulz of it.
The territorial sovereignty of your overseas possessions and your countrymen as well as your allies would be much better ensured by stopping launching. When you stop and the other guys will notice, they'll stop too. They won't continue just because they can if they realize you've stopped. If you continue launching, then the other guys will continue launching as well (unless they're smarter than you, that is) which obviously only leads to more destruction which is the worse choice for anyone.
The assertion that because there are people in the loop it cannot be assured is, at best, indicative of a severe failure to understand the degree to which people can be trained to operate exactly like parts of an automated system. This is the purpose of military training; and the people in question are extremely highly trained. You posit a fiction that bears no resemblance to reality; I could cite dozens of cases where people continued fighting to no obvious purpose simply because ordered to.
Firstly, launching nuclear missiles is on a completely different scale than anything anyone's been ordered to do before, with the exception of the crews of Enola Gay and Bockscar, and it's arguable that they didn't fully realize how bad dropping a nuke is, unlike everyone today.
Secondly, the decision to launch nuclear missiles surely isn't up to ordinary grunts who can be trained to do pretty much anything if ordered. Of course you'll probably have a grunt physically pressing the button, but for example a captain of a nuclear sub is less of a drone and they do actually have to be able to think for themselves and make decisions.
Thirdly, there would likewise be dozens of cases where people disobeyed orders or intentionally botched up carrying them out because they disagreed with them, wouldn't there?
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Posted this recently somewhere else, might be relevant. Referenced this thread as well.
"Ya know, tbh I’m pretty sure the US would have “lost” the Cold War, in so much as that the USSR would have won the aftermath. US hardware, while advanced, always prized performance over maintainability. Russia, while fraught with problems, was nevertheless more prepared for a world-ending holocaustic war. It’s equipment could last longer without maintenance, the residents had more experience with extreme temperatures and tougher living conditions, and in the end I think they were more scared of us being the crazy ones than we were of them. I read an interesting post on a forum, talking about the “Day Three Problem” - basically, after the third day and pretty much everything is destroyed, how do you ensure that you can still send orders out to your remaining military units. The USSR never tried to answer that question - but the US did. To me, it seems like naivety on the part of the US to even consider something like that. I don’t think the US planners had a real sense of what they were planning for, while the Soviet commanders did.
The thread:
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=76003.0"
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To put it into simplest terms the reason why the US tried to solve the problem was to make the Russians think we were ****ing crazy.