[KMag]

Interesting. I had an internship at a company that did inertial navigation, mostly for defence applications. I only knew of ring lasers for use in gyroscopes. (Send a laser around a loop wave guide/fiberoptic, and any translational acceleration cancels out going out and back, but any acceleration in rotational velocity in the plane of the ring/rotation vector perpendicular to the ring shows up as a Dopler shift. Tune the laser to have a standing wave, and rotational acceleration shifts the nodes of the standing wave around the ring.)

I had a colleague who got called up when a Trident missile MIRV bus fell off a forklift and he had to do simulations to tell the Navy if it was still good or needed to be brought back in for rework/recalibration. My understanding is that either the MRIV bus itself or its container has integral devices that record peak 3-axis acceleration for just such a scenario. I imagine they're as simple as a few precise weights on a few wires with precise failure strains, so you can bracket the peak acceleration by which wires broke and which survived.

On the one hand, it's great to have more accurate nukes, which allow lower yields, smaller stockpiles, and presumably smaller craters if everything goes sideways. On the other hand, "surgical" nukes result in it more likely that one side will use them and gamble that the other side won't massively retaliate.

[XorNot]

You could look at it a different way: a more accurate nuke means a nuke that's targeted at military facilities and not sized 10x larger and aimed at "everything around that city over there".

If it was ever used, that work saves lives.

[KMag]

More importantly, I think more accurate nukes along with good satellite multispectral and signals intelligence means that top generals carrying out orders for nuclear first strikes can be more certain that they're signing their own death warrants. Hopefully this results in any leader ordering a nuclear first strike getting deposed by military coup rather than starting a nuclear war.

[XorNot]

People are willing to die for causes all the time. The idea that a bunch of people would not take an action because it might kill them, particularly in the military, is pretty naive.

The history of nuclear brinksmanship is built on almost the exact opposite problem: people who are completely willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause and their government and who believe fully that the cost would be worth it and the decision would be correct.

At the expense of one's own life is one of the easiest sacrifices to make, and people who believe it are dangerous because they tend to volunteer a bunch of others to do so alongside them.

Nuclear command and control isn't about keeping any one person alive, it's very much about keeping the system functional so the deterrent is preserved. There's no way, within it, to actually ensure any level of personal survival - but the various advocates for first strikes at different points in history have never been concerned with that. They want their legacy, they want the problem solved "forever".

[tablespoon]

> More importantly, I think more accurate nukes along with good satellite multispectral and signals intelligence means that top generals carrying out orders for nuclear first strikes can be more certain that they're signing their own death warrants.

How would you do that? In the event of a nuclear war, my understanding is they'll mostly be flying around on special command and control planes. I don't think nuclear intercontinental SAMs are a thing. I'm not even sure if they could even be possible (wouldn't they need active guidance, which would be very hard on reentry).

[KMag]

Ahh, yes, the flaw in my optimism is that those doomsday planes do in fact have direct radio links to send the PAL codes and authenticated launch orders directly to the silos, submarines, and standby bombers.

The tier of generals just not senior enough to have a seat on the doomsday planes isn't in the emergency line of command to the nuclear weapons. So, regardless of how powerful a small coalition of those generals is, they cannot reliably prevent a nuclear launch. (They'd need a pre-existing conspiracy to quickly and efficiently turn their own air defence batteries against their own doomsday planes... at which point it seems very likely they'd just launch a coup long before a nuclear strike was ordered.)

So, I guess our last hope is that a small conspiracy of generals just under the doomsday plane tier would stage a coup once the nuclear sabre rattling reached a sufficient magnitude, before the nuclear first strike order is given.

[tablespoon]

> So, I guess our last hope is that a small conspiracy of generals just under the doomsday plane tier would stage a coup once the nuclear sabre rattling reached a sufficient magnitude, before the nuclear first strike order is given.

Even if that happened, it's just buying a little time. Some set of leaders/generals in the future will push the button (or build automated systems that do it for them).

Disarmament ain't gonna happen, and anything with a small chance of happening will happen, given a long enough period of time.

[throwbadubadu]

Please just don't do that. (Or missed irony?)