War between great powers with WMD now seems possible.

[Pekka]

It would be great world if fists were enough deterrent.. 'if you attack us, we'll come and hit you in the face.. YES RIGHT IN THE FACE!'

[GePap]

Originally posted by Calc II
MAD works. Nuclear weapon obsoletes itself because of MAD.

Which then allows you to forge ahead with a conventional arms race as normal.

The thing with MAD is, once you reach a certain point, more nukes are not usefull. With 1000 hundread's of kiloton warheads you can pretty much destroy any modern state, no matter the physical size or its pop. (Be it Russia, the US, or China). Why then did the US and USSR exceed 15,000 warheads each at the height of the Cold War? Seems like utterly useless overkill, until you start examining all the "nuclear warfighting" strategies that came up, such as how to use your nuclear arsenal to take out his, and then, well victory!

[Zero]

With detection system thats available these days, can you fire a nuclear warhead w/o other countries retaliating ASAP? I dunno, you tell me.

Also, even if we are talking about state w/ WMD VS State w/o WMD, there will be huge diplomatic repercussions for who uses it first. Human beings have this ridiculous preference of choosing "civilized" method of shooting down people and bombing them into bits instead of one big drop leveling the country.

[GePap]

With detection system thats available these days, can you fire a nuclear warhead w/o other countries retaliating ASAP? I dunno, you tell me.

For a time, you may not know where the missiles are going, and by the time you do know, then you have to start to mobilize everything. Not all nucear weapons were on a hair trigger. There were stuides done about the timing of each incoming warhead into a silo field, to make sure the second warhead came after the dangers posed to it by the first detonation were passed.

Many in the US theorized that with the new weaposn the US was coming out with in the late 80's, the Us could do a conventional strike to try to take out the bulk of Soviet nuclear forces.

As I said, South Asia right now is where the theory opf MAD may get its test. Speically since neither India nor Pakistan may trully have a survivable second strike capability, whcih would give the incentive to whomever fired nukes first to take out the other sides delivery systems.

[spiritof1202]

With detection system thats available these days, can you fire a nuclear warhead w/o other countries retaliating ASAP? I dunno, you tell me.

Theoretically, a group of subs stationed along a coast line, could simultaneously fire a volley of nuclear tipped cruise missiles, with flight times insufficient to provide for warning and response. The US and Russia are both too large to be prone to such an attack, without being able to retaliate... however.

The subs do have to get into position to fire, though.

The US sub fleet is certainly more than capable, of premptively destroying many nations before the fact that they'd noticed launches.

The Russian sub fleet might not be able to achieve a coast line attack, due to its obsolescent and degraded state. They'd rely on their boomer (SSBN) fleet to provide for nuclear deterence: they maintain a boomer fleet of 18 vessels, down from 62, pre breakup.