Quote:
Originally Posted by Raellus
For the past couple of weeks, news hasn't been good for Ukraine and it keeps getting worse. I think Russia's use of an experimental IRBM armed with conventional warheads is interesting. Apparently, Moscow warned the US gov't beforehand. This is a dangerous precedent and will require a mutual trust that hasn't been earned and I don't think either side is particularly eager to give.
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Probably unearned, but the trajectory of a ballistic shot becomes obvious fairly immediately on launch, and the launches themselves are trackable by FIRMS and more advanced national reconnaissance assets; a ballistic threat to the United States isn't exactly something that would go unnoticed,
Publicly, we're no longer launch on warning, with the stated doctrine being to launch following a confirmed detonation (again, something that would be detected immediately), but one imagines that this doctrine would go out the window if multiple launches were detected and the course tracks indicated deployments against strategic assets, which in and of itself is a straightforward mathematical exercise in firing solutions.
One assumes this is why we maintain launch on warning readiness and capability despite not officially maintaining it as policy. Sidelong observations being a full nuclear deployment would be rather difficult to miss, given the nature of how it must be conducted to have even a remote hope of knocking out enough assets to make such a gambit "worth it," and that a single delivery vehicle being launched would be madness, as it would precipitate a full strategic escalation without inflicting any serious damage to the United States; a half measure would be utter suicide, and a functional deployment would be the most obvious event imaginable.
Though this is entirely conjecture, it's also likely we knew about the launch prep even before they told us; our defense intelligence apparatus has flexed several times in the past two decades with detailed information about Russian test launches immediately prior to or immediately after the Russians have issued a bare public acknowledgement.
On another front, one wonders exactly what state their nuclear arsenal is in. Their entire defense budget (including nuclear readiness) amounts to roughly about what we spend on nuclear maintenance alone.