Listen and read USA nuclear forces Emergency Action Messages, heard on 11175 kHz

Yes. But you have to go beyond page one of Google results because there is so much slop, human and otherwise. See [1] for a technical overview. See page 14 of [2] for the strategic and political aspects of who controlled what in a crisis. "Cheget No. 1 (the Soviet premier's portable terminal) had priority status: its owner could enact heightened level of alert and, after the early warning system registered the launch of U.S. nuclear weapons, give launch order (transmit codes unblocking the launch command)." That's the key point. The premier of the USSR did not have personal first strike authority.

Putin, however, has said that he now does. Trump has first-strike authority too.

The definitive book on this seems to be "Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces"[3], an English translation from MIT Press of a Soviet-era document. That's what the good sources cite.

[1] https://subhranil.com/the-dead-hand-system-a-technical-analy...

[2] https://npolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Controlling_S...

[3] https://search.worldcat.org/title/51969872

It’s why the US mostly gave up on fallout shelters - no realistic amount of time to get to them unless you’re already sitting on it.

If you had the resources to run and maintain a nuclear submarine force, but were also resource limited to a single form of strategic deterrence, then yeah, you would probably go with SLBMs. This is what the UK and France settled into.

But it costs a lot to feel confident in SLBMs, especially if the top of your target list includes the USA.

Otherwise, if you're talking about the USA specifically... ICBMs should probably be considered an expensive hedge.

Finally, "optimal" depends on your definition. China has chosen a public "no first strike", while also avoiding launch on warning likely for a variety reasons. China's publicly stated "minimal deterrence strategy" (which they seem to be walking away from) was probably at least partly a pragmatic choice, driven by resource constraints. Also, for what its worth, it does seem like China is also walking away from a strict "no launch on warning" policy as well.

The lack of launch on warning (this is my speculation) was probably a combination of lack of technical capability (both ISR and C2), wanting to maintain tight central control, and wanting to play up the advantages of being "the third player".

Here's a whole recent report on China's nuclear force: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2025.2...

The main problem with submarines is that it is not possible to communicate with them while they are submerged. In particular, the submarine can receive but not transmit ELF signals and nothing else really penetrates sea water, so if you want to immediately know the status of a submarine you would have to transmit an order to surface and report in (doing so is rare because it is very easy to detect the submarine when it surfaces). If a country relies exclusively on submarines it will be vulnerable to a surprise "disarming attack" -- the submarines could all be destroyed while at sea, and then the country could be attacked with a first strike and would have no chance to retaliate. Exclusively relying on the submarine force will also allow the other side to devote more of its resources to anti-submarine warfare.

One reason to maintain an ICBM force is that the ICBM silos protect the missiles against anything less than a direct nuclear strike; by placing the silos far from urban areas you force the opponent to expend many nuclear weapons attacking individual silos, which greatly increases the cost of a first strike. If you were wondering where bomber forces fit in, maintaining both ICBM and bomber forces creates a "synchronization problem" -- both must be destroyed at the same time to prevent retaliation, and by strategically placing the air fields and missile silos a country can make a synchronized attack more difficult (the attack will be detected long before anything is destroyed, but one of the two will have more time to initiate the retaliatory strike). Bombers also force the opponent to expend significant resources on air defense, resources that could otherwise be devoted to offensive weapons. Another reason to have a bomber force is that bombers can be recalled after being ordered to strike; missiles cannot be recalled once launched and even if they could be the other side will detect the launches and immediately retaliate.

The US and USSR developed an entire theory of the nuclear triad during the cold war, and both reached the same basic conclusions about the need for all three legs.

I literally left. 5.5 is so much better. I don't know how they managed to mess up 5 so bad

I did leave. Opus was just pumping out so much verbosity and wasting tokens on all that nonsense, plus I was bitter that Anthropic gates the best model behind usage credits, so I switched to ChatGPT just as Astra came out.

Then Opus 5.5 came out and I switched back to Ant after 1 month of OAI. Opus 5.5 fixed all the previous Opus 5 problems, and while Fable still requires credits, there's hardly any need to use it since Opus 5.5 is so good and so token efficient.

I fully agree, and think the international community is making a big mistake by not (re)formalizing international law and the rules of war, we should force all nations (including those not in conflict -yet-) to store school locations etc. as machine readable maps... we will never be able to roll back the clock and find out if Iran would have properly declared the presence of the school or not, ... but we can PREVENT SIMILAR SITUATIONS in the future, or at the very least have a mechanism which makes it crystal clear when one or more parties are playing very dirty games.

Wouldn't it be much nicer to live in a first world with more clarity, where it is immediately obvious which nation either knowingly bombed a kids school, or what other nation knowingly uses some poor children as human shieds...

But thats not the world we live in: apparently we live in the world where the event also happened, but where the rules weren't set up to provide such clarity a priori. And this second world is IMHO darker than the also dark first world.

Did you know nearly every middle to larger sized US military base has base housing and even schools?

That’s the twist.

It's one thing to throw thousands of tons of unguided missiles randomly, and it's something else when you brag about the "all knowing AI", how your intelligence services are the best and how your missiles are accurate.

And the civilian bombings, explicitly named "morale bombing" (we called it "terror bombing" when the Axis did the same) were later found to be completely inefficient; a waste of trained crews and expensive bombers that did not contribute to victory at all. Or in other words,

YES.jpg

Not every nation thinks it has a God-given right to go half-way around the world and bomb other nation's bases, let alone schools. The kids at Fort Bragg Literacywatsdat Junior High have more to worry about violence-wise from each other cf. some imaginary foreign threat.

Again, really difficult concept to grasp. Take some time.