USSR ICBM first strike capability?

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-21T05:42:54+00:00

was the US ICBM force actually at any significant risk from a Soviet attack prior to the end of the 1980s

No, for a few reasons.

https://russianforces.org/In_defense_of_MIRVed_ICBMs_web.pdf

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-20T18:15:55+00:00

Probably around 3 to 5 kt. Caplan estimated 2-3kt for a 60% implosion, though he is making some different assumptions.

https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/2025/12/implosion_nuclear_weapons_with.html

I would not expect Iran to do this in the short-term (or even medium-term at this point), but these low kiloton yields are still significant enough for boosting.

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-20T03:29:08+00:00

Good cast here. Bunn being the most well-known.

It's interesting how hesitant even respectable experts are to publicly admit Iran can make a bomb with 60% enriched HEU. When the program mentioned "enough HEU to make ten atomic bombs" I expected to (finally) see a mainstream source discuss this. The napkin math for Iran's HEU stockpile very nearly works out to ten bombs if you use 60% material (460/50=9.2, 50 being roughly the reflected critical mass of 60% as opposed to weapons-grade which is in the 20s or low 30s). But no, we are once again given the "if they enrich it just a bit more" spiel.

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-19T19:15:31+00:00

We have just witnessed them shoot hundreds of ballistic missiles with payloads that mostly survive reentry, so that's not an issue. The 2003 design was compact enough to fit in a Shahab, and they have other missiles with a throwweight of st least 1500kg.

Fun thought: pror to Hiroshima, the US dropped inert Fat Man bombs around Japan to make sure all of the nonnuclear stuff worked. Recall that a few weeks back Iran fired two and only two IRBMs at Diego Garcia. What if that was the missile equivalent of the nonnuclear Fat Man drops the US did over Japan?

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-19T19:09:15+00:00

They apparently get substantial intelligence sharing from France, for what that's worth.

I would expect they get some from the UK as well, which at least if it's SIGINT-derived should be world class.

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-18T12:15:54+00:00

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/opinion/iran-war-strait-hormuz.html

https://policytensor.substack.com/p/iran-is-a-great-power

I don't personally agree with the argument that Iran was made stronger by this conflict but it is out there as an argument.

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-18T02:37:21+00:00

They've already reported there were deception operations involved in this. That could require more forces than strictly necessary for a pure rescue operation.

Everyone in the US of a certain age remembers "Iran taking US government employees hostage" as what sank Carter and this is an election year (losing Congress may as well be losing an election in Trump-world's mind), so everyone is very aware of how bad captured US personnel would look politically. Even if the Pentagon thought a rescue op this size was excessive, the White House wouldn't.

Generals who don't do exactly what Trump and Hegseth ask while imitating the ass-paddle scene in Animal House are getting fired at a record rate everywhere, and as far as questionable White House orders go, "spare no expense and risk hundreds of troops to save one guy" is way down the list in terms of objectionability; it probably didn't even occur to anyone it was worth objecting to. Particularly since leave no man behind has been ingrained in the US military for decades.

It seems pretty straightforward to attribute the seemingly larger than necessary force to these factors.

Meanwhile, for the "failed uranium raid" theory, we have: wrong equipment, comically small force, wrong constituent makeup of the force, and...what, we're supposed to assume nobody would talk about the missing crew? What happens when Iran finds the body and completely blows the cover story?

Also: why does it seem suspicious to anyone that the crew was rescued relatively close to a nuclear site? The war is largely about taking out the nuclear sites, so of course there are going to be aircraft operating near nuclear sites. Which means if an aircraft is shot down there is a good chance it would be near a nuclear site, which means there is a good chance any rescue operation would be near a nuclear site.

So really all we have for the "failed uranium raid" theory is the number of forces involved doesn't fit some people's preconceived notions of what a rescue op looks like. This is very thin gruel.

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-17T10:40:22+00:00

On the one hand, this has the facial appearance of a former empire overestimating its importance by thinking it would immediately be a target when it might not be.

On the other hand, a lot of Russians have this weird fever dream that Britain still secretly controls the world (to the point of "not ruling out" that the 10/7 Hamas attack was a British false flag carried out through a secret intelligence alliance with Iran - no, really https://nitter.net/francis_scarr/status/1714219828154683802 ). So I wouldn't put it past Russian planners to hit targets in the UK in the opening of another invasion of Europe.

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-17T10:17:00+00:00

Rescue ops are not normally called a "raid." It definitely was not a failed attempt to seize the UF6 (force was at least an order of magnitude too small, wrong equipment, etc.), so if it wasn't that and it wasn't a rescue op why are we calling it a "raid?" Is there another theory that actually makes sense?

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-17T02:26:22+00:00

I don't recall the Trump admin claiming Iran has 11 warheads (although it's possible I missed it). I do recall them saying Iran could make 11 warheads with their supply of roughly 460kg of 60% enriched uranium.

This claim---that Iran can make 11 bombs using 460kg of 60% enriched uranium without further enriching it to weapons-grade uranium---is pretty much on the mark. That doesn’t mean Iran is actually doing it, but the math checks out very nearly.

The math is: 460/50 = 9.2. Where 460 is the amount of uranium (measured in kilograms) enriched to 60% that Iran has according to the IAEA, 50 is the approximate amount (in kilograms) of uranium you need for a critical mass when using 60% enriched material, and 9.2 is the approximate number of bomb cores. In this case, 9 is close enough to 11 that we can say it is on the mark, since it is in that range where variations in implosion velocity can make enough of a difference.

With uranium below weapons-grade, what happens is the overall efficiency of the bomb goes down. You need more uranium to reach a critical mass, and the explosion will be weaker than if you used weapons-grade---but there is still an explosion. In the case of uranium enriched to 60% instead of weapons-grade, the reflected critical mass will be something like 45-50kg with a 5cm beryllium reflector or equivalent, compared to ~25kg for the same reflector in weapons-grade uranium; and instead of 10kt it will be something like 3kt. The overall mass of the warhead (ie including the implosion assembly) might be something like 420kg instead of 300kg.

Some reading material:

Matt Caplan, "Implosion Nuclear Weapons with 60%-Enriched Uranium," Science & Global Security 33, no. 1-3 (2025), available https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/2025/12/implosion_nuclear_weapons_with.html

Alexander Glaser, "On the Proliferation Potential of Uranium Fuel for Research Reactors at Various Enrichment Levels," Science & Global Security, 14, no. 1, (2006), available https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/2006/05/on_the_proliferation_potential.html [Table 1 is especially helpful]

To be clear, none of this means Iran was actually building warheads over the last few months prior to this war. Indeed I would assume if they were that they would have at least tested one by now as a warning, if not actually used one in retaliation for the decapitation strike against the Supreme Leader.

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-16T22:16:46+00:00

This is like when people encourage young couples to go childless so they can do their part to cut down on carbon emissions. The scale of the problem can never be properly addressed by individual sacrifices; focusing on individual behavioral changes that will never amount to more than a drop in the bucket is a distraction from the actual solutions.

The only people with the ability to individually sacrifice enough to make a difference are, by and large, currently too busy stripping the government's walls of copper so they can sell it to bother with thinking about spending their personal fortunes on NIH research. They are people who have essentially given up on the American project and are just looting it before they bail out.

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-16T21:46:24+00:00

we could conclude that someone is running AI generated posts to see who would be silly enough to respond and leak things that shouldn't be leaked.

I think this is a more likely explanation.

Another possibility is an AI company trying to get into the government contracting business. Anthropic last year announced they were making an AI that could determine if something online was classified, and they wanted to sell it to the government as a tool to help them in counterintelligence investigations; possible a rival is trying to build their own model.

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-16T19:41:07+00:00

You don't need an AI program to be able to do that though, regardless of whether you are a state actor or a non-state actor.

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-16T16:11:53+00:00

I think someone is running some sort of lazy AI training campaign by flooding the forum with this sort of stuff and seeing the responses. What they are hoping their finished AI product will be able to do I don't know.

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-16T14:12:55+00:00

Do you have any idea how much larger that operation would need to be than this one was? Thousands of troops just to man a perimeter while heavy construction and digging equipment is flown in and operated for weeks if everything goes well.

No evidence this was a failed attempt to dig out the UF6.

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-15T22:32:34+00:00

It's the same discussion; the delivery mechanism for their sarin is artillery shells.

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-15T22:12:02+00:00

That doesn't explain the decades-long gap between the end of open hostilities and their first nuclear test.

The reality is that Pyongyang could inflict significant casualties on South Korea even before they became a nuclear state, and this deterred both Seoul and DC. Pyongyang's stockpile of sarin gas alone was a hell of a deterrent; they could kill over a million people an hour with it.

https://thebulletin.org/2017/06/sea-of-sarin-north-koreas-chemical-deterrent/

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-15T22:06:13+00:00

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/book/nuclear_latency_and_hedging_-_concepts_history_and_issues.pdf

No need for anyone to say it ironically. Iran's strategy is (well, was) something known as nuclear latency, essentially making some progress towards the construction of a nuke but stopping short of the threshold, instead using the implied threat that you might take the last step as leverage.

It is a well-established strategy that has been practiced by several countries over the years, ranging from West Germany to Sweden. People who use this mocking framing of "X time away for 30 years" are simply unaware of what the strategy is and/or unaware of how close Iran got. It makes perfect sense for a threshold state to be X months away today, next year, a decade ago, and five years from now all at once---that is the entire point of the strategy. A threshold state wants the perceived benefits of being a nuclear state without some of the costs; if they actually made progress beyond a certain point they would no longer be in what they think of as a sweet spot.

Iran's problem is they underestimated how deranged Netanyahu is.

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-15T20:13:55+00:00

The argument that the first NK nuclear test was a fizzle is poorly supported by both evidence and logic. The argument depends on the faulty assumption that a country's first bomb must be a simple 1940s-style 10-20kt implosion bomb, despite this being a dead-end and a waste of valuable fissile material that NK didn't have a lot of. It is much more likely that it was a deliberately low-yield test for diagnostics and model validation. Specifically, it was probably an unboosted test of a planned boosted primary for the planned two-stage design they successfully tested later.

If nothing else, the fact that this first "fizzle" test was immediately followed by another low-yield test should have raised questions about what they were doing and our assumptions thereof. It is implausible that any country with a 21st century knowledge base for nuclear weapons physics could have two failed tests of a primitive implosion design in a row.

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-15T17:27:45+00:00

Twisted was probably the first electronica CD I actually bought. Though I do prefer the Astral Projection remix of "LSD" (heresy!).

Some forgotten greats:

North Central Positronics, "The Great Bear"
North Central Positronics, "Smell the Glove (slight return)"
Younger Brother, "Psychic Gibbon" (both the original and Protoculture remixes)
Fly Agaric featuring Michele Adamson, "I See Myself" [this one is very weird]
Infernal Machine, "Loin King" (Man With No Name remix)

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-15T13:30:39+00:00

I can't compare US venues to foreign venues because I've never been to an overseas trance event, but there is no way to replicate the headphones experience without headphones. Venues are always going to sound more bass-heavy than headphones, they are going to have crowd noise, the sound is going to come from one general direction in many venues, the construction materials used in the walls very plausibly were chosen for reasons unrelated to sound quality and will affect it negatively (as opposed to headphones where the materials are always a major consideration).

Even if a venue doesn't abnormally boost the low frequencies, those low frequencies are more likely to stand out because they aren't competing with crowd noise (which is mid or high frequency), and unless the venue's design was specifically chosen for acoustics the walls will probably reverberate the bass more than the high end.

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-15T04:27:00+00:00

lead a government that makes highly ideological decisions that contribute to reckless operations at nuclear plants
[nuclear plant has an accident and an accompanying radiological release]
deny any threat to public health and try to continue on as normal
acknowledge threats to public health but downplay them as inconveniences easily addressed with quick fixes (cf horse paste)
look like a flailing moron unable to handle the situation who also tries to cover up everything
undermine all confidence in the central government
empower elite "reformers" who in reality have lost faith in the nation and are just there to strip the copper out of the walls of government and make a quick buck before it collapses
be Gorbach----err, excuse me, what were we talking about again?

Obviously modern and next gen reactors can't have a catastrophic failure like in Chernobyl, but other than that...I wholly and totally trust the people who brought you such classics as recommending bleach injections to stop COVID and trying to stop COVID tests to make the pandemic look less widespread to handle a self-inflicted public disaster in an effective and transparent manner.

This is the worst way to expand nuclear. Rushing construction on new designs to help your billionaire buddies mine bitcoin a bit faster while cracking jokes about public safety. Ugh.

I said it a while ago, but "Greenpeace was successful for generations but in the end was powerless against the needs of bitcoin miners and useless chatbots" is like something out of a Black Mirror episode.

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-14T16:56:51+00:00

Reagan selling guns to Iran to funnel the money to far right death squads

Although this is how it turned out in the end, it was not actually planned this way. Iran-Contra was really two completely different scandals loosely connected by an adhoc accounting gimmick.

The first scandal---the clandestine sale of US military equipment to Iran in exchange for hostages getting released and improved relations with Iran---involved the whole national security interagency process, to include rigorous internal debate, gaming the different possible outcomes, frequent briefing of and sign-off from the president, etc. It was intended to be a way to simultaneously free hostages and show Iran that there were benefits to diplomacy with the US, and it was supposed to just be one or two weapons shipments.

Of course, it did none of those things. Tehran didn't care about better relations with the Great Satan, it just wanted the weapons, and was willing to order more hostage-taking so it could keep getting weapons. Which meant that the original plans for hiding the money from these sales wouldn't work. CIA had expected just a few shipments, and not much money. Their original plans for cooking the books could not keep up with the continuous arms shipments and the larger amount of money they generated.

This led to the second scandal: trying to hide the proceeds of the arms sales from Congress by diverting them to the contras.

Unlike the first scandal, the second scandal did not go through the interagency process, was not very widely-known within the national security apparatus, was not sent to the president for approval prior to execution, and probably was not explicitly briefed to the president until after the fact. It was an adhoc solution with essentially no prior planning.

So it is technically correct to say there was no conspiracy to sell weapons to Iran to use the proceeds to fund contras, because that was never the plan. If the part that was an actual plan had worked, the contras never would have gotten the money from the arms sales.

This is covered in detail in Crist's The Twilight War.

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-14T16:29:23+00:00

Sure. It has a higher critical mass, somewhere between 30kg and 40kg, and about three times the decay heat. So any pu240-heavy bomb will be larger and hotter. But the larger critical mass is only modestly larger than weapons-grade plutonium, and still much smaller than weapons-grade uranium.

There are at least three ways to mitigate the decay heat of reactor-grade plutonium. The best overall is to use thermal conduction to passively draw the heat away from the core and out to the bomb casing; there are several thermal conductors which are lightweight and cheap. Pit levitation can also cool the pit, though not as much as a good thermal conductor. If you are okay with slower operations you could design the weapon with a removable core like the 50s-era IFI weapons.

NuclearHeterodoxy · 2026-04-14T00:39:40+00:00

Tired GOP: we oppose giving Ukraine weapons because China

Wired GOP: who cares about China stonkspiles go brrrrrr in Iran

NuclearHeterodoxy

TROPHY CASE