A Second Silo Field

Jeffrey Lewis 0:06

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:21

And I'm Aaron Stein, the Director of Research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in a warm, hot, muggy Philadelphia.

Scott LaFoy 0:29

And I am Scott LaFoy, super producer of the Arms Control Wonk Pod and program manager for national security and intelligence at Exeter Federal Solutions.

Aaron 0:38

We have a three way.

Scott 0:39

Hey, guys. You can't. You've got to pick a different. No, I like I'm rolling with it. You've got to pick a different term.

Jeffrey 0:47

So, for listeners, you will no doubt by now have seen that friend of Pod, Matt Korda at the Federation of American Scientists, inspired by the example of young Decker Eveleth, went a-hunting to find himself some more Chinese missile silos, and we got a new silo field. It's Not 110 yet. It's a few bouncy houses of death. But just given the scale of the field that Matt found, it looks like that in addition to the 120 silos at Yumin and the 16 or whatever silos at Jilantai, they're going to add another 110 silos out in Xinjiang for a total of something like 226 ICBM silos.

F***. Yeah. That's not great. It's a lot. Well, for, you know, listeners know this, but for perspective, on the one hand... The last China military power report, China was thought to have about 100 ICBMs that could target the United States. And I think that was pushing it in terms of numbers. And so adding 226 silos or something is, I guess, some of the Jilin Tai ones were counted.

But adding more than 200 silos definitely is a substantial increase in the number of forces at the same time. The Minuteman force is 400 or 420. Did we get rid of the 20?

Scott 2:25

I don't remember U.S. forces nearly as well as I remember other people's forces. So I do not know.

Aaron 2:31

I don't remember either. It's either 400 or 420.

Scott 2:34

If it was 420, surely we'd have different memes in the nuclear community than the ones we do. I suspect it's not. But regardless, the point stands. Minuteman, there's an almost two to one match on Minutemen to currently known bouncy castles of death and silos in the desert in China. Perhaps not a coincidence.

Aaron 2:59

No, and I think that perhaps the best way to start the conversation here is that with the first discovery, so let's call it the Decker and Jeffrey discovery, there was, I would say, consensus, but some pushback on the shell game theory, i.e. They're not going to put a missile in every single silo. They're going to kind of shuffle them around.

But with the second field, let's call that the Matt discovery, I've seen some speculation that perhaps the shell game no longer holds water because there's just a lot more of them.

Jeffrey 3:37

Oh, I have exactly the opposite opinion.

Aaron 3:39

I do too, but I'm just posing this to start our debate.

Jeffrey 3:43

I think it makes the shell game much more likely. Because, well, so listeners, what we wanted to talk about today is to go a little bit more in depth in the idea of what the math is involved with silo construction. Because I think people have a really kind of very simple idea of like, if this is the shell game, why would you just build empty silos, right?

And the answer is because silos are less expensive than the missiles. And so you can sort of expand your number of aim points and increase the survivability of a single missile. Relatively inexpensively. But at the same time, I keep hearing like, but silos are vulnerable. And while they are relatively vulnerable, when we're doing... Probability and looking at a silo field of something like now, you know, in excess of 200 silos, the probabilities really start to scale in favor of the defender if what the defender wants to do is to preserve a minimum retaliatory capability.

And that's kind of what I think we wanted to talk about.

Scott 4:51

Yeah, I think that's an important salient point because especially with the discourse in terms of both these expanded Chinese nuclear forces and within the U.S. rebudgeting and nuclear recapitalization cycle, I think that... The discussion on silos gets very confused and muddied because people are having 17 discussions at once. So I think a walkthrough of the math and of the framework for approaching this problem is pretty important for understanding what we mean when we say these things.

Aaron 5:22

And Jeffrey, you've done the math or at least taken a stab at it.

Jeffrey 5:26

Yeah, I have. I have badly done the math. I am here with my trusty spreadsheet. So let me introduce some ideas. So what we are interested in is the single shot kill probability. The chance that one US warhead will destroy a Chinese silo with a missile in it. In order to calculate that, we need to know three things.

We have to know how hard the silo is, we have to know the yield of the warhead, and we have to know the accuracy of the missile. So, for example, the W78 on the Minuteman has a yield reportedly of 335 kilotons. It has a 200 meter circular error probability and against a 2,000, a silo hardened against 2,000 pounds of pressure per square inch, 2,000 PSI.

That works out to an SSKP of 0.66, which very conveniently is the unclassified number that Congress was using for the SSPK of a Minuteman 3 back during the Cold War when we had this discussion last time. Now, you know, your mileage may vary a little. Chinese silos may be harder. 2000 PSI is kind of what our Minutemen were hardened to deal with.

You could definitely make harder silos than that if you want. You know, yields go up and down and maybe accuracy has gotten a little better. But, you know, that's kind of the ballpark you're in. So what you then have to do is ask... How many warheads are we going to put against each silo? And I just use two because, you know, the Minuteman force is not really large enough to do more than that.

That's actually a little more than the Minuteman force could do. You could start Merving it, but it would be really hard to do three. So two warheads per silo. And then you do a binomial distribution to see, given two warheads, each with an independent probability of about two-thirds of destroying the silo, if you launched two warheads at every silo, how many will survive?

And the way I think about this, and what I find really... Powerful conceptually is everyone sort of says like silos are very vulnerable, and and the answer is yes, but because the median number of surviving silos, right you know, 50 chance that you'll get more, 50 chance that you'll get less, the median number is is 26 basically.

You know, you're going to kill median number of surviving. Yeah, you're going to kill between 199 and 200 silos.

Scott 8:48

So that basically means with the open source numbers available and the open source sort of calculations that we have used in the past for modeling exchange scenarios, the current build out of Chinese silos, if it was fully filled, if each of them were fully filled and you target all of them, It means the median you're running is that that firing doctrine is going to get you 26 survivors that we will not catch.

Jeffrey 9:14

And if you assume they're going to go with the shell game, and we just decide it's like 22 missiles hidden among those, which is why I think it does strengthen the case for the shell game quite a bit. Basically, the median number is like two and a half. And since the DF-41 is MIRVed, you know, very conservatively with only three warheads, you know, you're looking at eight surviving warheads.

Aaron 9:46

And we should be clear that this is just out of the silos. This doesn't account for other strategic forces that the Chinese may have, right?

Jeffrey 9:54

Yeah, that's right. And so, you know, that's not a great day for us, right, if eight survive. And that's only if they do one in ten. And by the way, that assumes a silo hardness of 2,000 PSI. So if you jump it up to 3,000 PSI, which is totally doable... You know, your median number of surviving missiles is a little above four.

So then you're looking at, you know, 13 warheads.

Aaron 10:27

And I think two podcasts ago, we talked a little bit, but I think it's worth reminding people about the estimates of the amount of warheads that you can pack onto the DF-41. I think it's between two and 10, but we sort of scale down to, our assumption is somewhere around two, right? Yeah.

Jeffrey 10:43

Yeah, I use three. We've seen them test it with two, and it probably can carry more than they want us to know. And so I think three is safe. But obviously, if it's five, if the silos are 3,000 PSI and it's five warheads, then the median surviving number of warheads is 20. So just... This is not a crazy strategy.

This ensures a retaliatory force. You know, unless we well, it already throwing all of our land based missiles against it. It's an enormous warhead sponge. And as I think we've said in other cases. Every pair of warheads we're using to go after a silo is a pair of warheads that aren't being used to barrage the areas where road and I think eventually rail mobile missiles will be.

Scott 11:44

I think they've dug themselves back into a minimum deterrent. So basically, from the perspective you're approaching it at is basically that by building out this large, you're kind of doing the Russian thing. Let me back up a little bit. You're kind of doing the Russian thing and the Soviet thing. You are not using silos or TELs alone.

They are a complementary force because it is incredibly complex to interdict TELs prior to these mobile launch platforms actually launching their systems. And it's difficult to... Frankly, wipe and preempt a vast silo field. And if you mix the two, they complement each other without having to actually go all the way in on one of the other technologies, which is what the United States does, where it's all in on silos and then the rest in different strategic systems.

Aaron 12:32

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Jeffrey 12:34

I mean, it's not crazy. No. And by the way, if they build a third freaking one of these fields, it's going to be, you know, even harder.

Scott 12:44

Yeah, I would request very formally they do not or they undo it if they have.

Aaron 12:50

And I think we should say that one of the assumptions that we make that they're not going to fill every silo is the assumption that comes from our own data that comes out of the Department of Defense, which is estimates on the amount of fissile material that they have. So if you take those as a baseline, as your clear assumption, it's that they – They face constraints, self-imposed constraints, on the amount of fizzle material they have.

Therefore, it would be impractical to put every single, so basically all of it towards filling every single silo. I think it's worth fleshing that out a little bit to further drive home why we think that this makes some sense, the shell game. The shell game scenario makes some sense.

Jeffrey 13:32

Yeah. I mean, I don't know at this point. There are a lot of questions about whether the Chinese would be willing to deploy a warhead that they hadn't had a chance to test because they haven't done a nuclear explosive test since they signed the CTBT in 1996. And so this question of how much material goes into each warhead, how big is each warhead in terms of its yield, how much does it weigh, all of that is...

Frozen in 1996. So we don't we don't know if they're willing to be a little bit more aggressive but just given how conservative the warhead designs that they executed in the past were it does seem like They're unlikely to try to stretch their fissile material stockpile with really aggressive designs and and so if you step back and say like well look I It's going to be hard for them to get their arsenal up past more than a few hundred warheads.

You know, the DOT estimate is they're in the low 200s now. And maybe they could double that. But, you know, after that, it's going to get a little tight. You don't have to do that. Right. Because every one of these freaking empty silos sitting in the ground gobbles up to U.S. warheads. And and honestly, silos are cheap in the 80s.

The estimate for silos and, you know, it gets more expensive. You want to make them harder and so on and so forth. But it's like a couple million bucks a silo back then. And like it's not like Chinese construction is expensive. Right. And so, yeah, like on the one hand, you could. Build missiles and build the facilities to produce the warheads, the material for the warheads and the warheads, and you could do all of that expansion.

There's some of that expansion going on. But if you are really just looking at your problem as like, how do I ensure that I have a minimum retaliatory capability, building lots and lots and lots of silos is not a bad way to do it. And I guess the way I think of it is like this. If we build a system that can destroy 99% of the stuff they throw at us, if they fire one, we're going to get it.

And if they fire 10, we're still probably going to get it. And if they fire 100, yeah, you know, we'll probably get them all. If they fire 1,000, a couple are going to get through. Like... You can never approach perfection. And so as you can approach perfection, you can never reach perfection. And so as the numbers rise, the cost of imperfection grows.

So like they can just it's cheap for them to build their way out of vulnerability in this manner. Like this is not an expensive plan for them. Like let's say it's five million bucks a silo. So like what is this, a billion dollars? What is GBSD going to cost us?

Scott 16:36

A hundred billion dollars? I think when we're looking at competitive strategy things internally, what's the cost of a silo instead of the cost of that fizzmat increase like you said? A five million dollar silo versus how much does it cost China to produce a warhead? Yeah, just not a known number, but like it's less, it is certainly less. There's a lot less concern about building a bunch of inert concrete in the ground and leaving the opportunity to maybe fill it if you really want. You can also always change your mind. Yeah, you can 100% change your mind. That's what makes me so uncomfortable about this. This is something where For me, a lot of the decision on this, on what it is, like the strategies fit.

I think there's a very logical, you lay out a logical case for this, a logical strategic case for a shell game. It fits their MO. It fits what the PLARF has done before. The PLARF really likes shell game type things. Obfuscation and deception as a money saving opportunity and as a means of ensuring a minimum deterrent is what they have done before.

If they did not do that now, that would be a change, a significant shift. But they are leaving that door open right now. They could make that specific shift, and it's going to come down partially to the FISMAT, I think. Like you talked about, James Acton has talked about this a lot, that fissile material tracking to figure out if they can practically produce enough warheads to go on that many DF-41s is going to be a big deal.

Jeffrey 18:13

Yeah. And, you know, we just don't know. Yeah. Honestly, we honestly don't know how great either the road or rail based system is. That's the other thing that's worth considering, which is we're always like, well, they spent all this money on mobiles. So isn't this just a giant waste of money on silos? Like. I don't know. Like how much does it cost to make one of those tells?

How fast is one of those tells? How great do those tells do when they're going over bridges? Are there any bridges that can hold up those tells? Like there are a million possibilities that might drive you in this direction. It strikes me as a smart diversification that gets them to a minimum deterrent pretty cheaply.

Aaron 18:54

And one of the things that you see pop up in the discussion is that perhaps this is in reaction to either missile defenses or counterforce or together. And I think it's worth fleshing that out a little bit, that even if you have, in my brain, You know, because you just ran these calculations, and to destroy these hardened silos, you most probably need a nuclear weapon, right, to get the amount of PSI pressure to be able to collapse them.

It's unlikely that you could do it with a conventional weapon. So the counterforce option, I always think of in terms of countering those TELs and their mobile platforms. So while you could have a mix of conventional and nuclear, your conventional will be tied up and going after mobile TELs, while if this is the shell game, and again, we don't know, It does make some strategic sense to be able to get that sort of statistical probability that you will have things survive to, to make the United States feel vulnerability in itself.

Would you say that's an accurate sort of assumption? That's how at least I think about it. My brain.

Jeffrey 19:58

Yeah. I think it is very unlikely that we would feel confident that we could use a conventional weapon against, against a missile silo. You'd have to be really, really, really, really precise. And I just, boy, boy, it seems tough. You know, there was a whole discussion about this when conventional Trident was under discussion. And, you know, the big problem with the initial conventional Trident proposal was it was soft kill only.

And the National Academies tried to work out a hard target kill version of it. But even then, you know, like... I mean, I'm a big fan of conventional weapons in the vast majority of circumstances. But when you're trying to travel intercontinental ranges, there are just going to be limitations on your accuracy. I mean, so at that point, like, go with the bigger yield, I think.

So, yeah, this is a fantastic warhead sponge for them.

Scott 21:05

And this is where I get, this is like me getting preemptively defensive on because I expect one of the retorts to this is why if this is such a good idea is GBSD opposed and people talk about the unsurvivability when it comes into the American context. And so that's the first thing and I just think that's worth addressing here where It's the way to make silos survivable besides the fact of super hardening them is to make a fuck ton of them.

Like that's where the idea of the sponge comes. And that's what we've been talking about here is that if you build out that much, it becomes very, very complicated to run the targeting to feel safe against them because there's just a lot going on. Same thing with tells, but with a different problem, even when it's static like that.

And I just want to kind of throw that out there as a follow up.

Jeffrey 22:00

Yeah. Well, from my perspective, I am not worried about the vulnerability of silos. I mean, my opposition to GBSD is just that it's freaking expensive. And if I could have $100 billion to spend on 400 ICBMs, I would rather take that money and buy more SSBNs with D5s. And that's just I just think it's a better it's a better use of defense dollars.

And I'm not worried about the oceans becoming transparent. Or to put it another way, I'm much more worried in the very long term about silo vulnerability than I am the oceans becoming transparent. But like, whatever, that's it's neither here nor there. If you want to put, this is why I say, if you want to put D5 in Minuteman silos, that's so cheap, I can't really object to it.

That's fine. If people are saying that the GBSD is going to be vulnerable, we shouldn't build it, I wouldn't agree with that. I just think that the GBSD is going to be super expensive, and its opportunity cost is going to be a lot of better stuff that I would rather have. But, Stepping back, you know, like, I have a fundamentally minimum deterrence perspective.

Like, not just, like, I want us to have a minimum deterrence. Like, I believe that's all nuclear weapons really do credibly. And so when I look at the math that I ran for the Chinese, and, you know, again, I'm looking at that median number of surviving missiles. Again, just assuming 10% of those things are armed. And... Putting two warheads on every silo, if it's just one freaking missile surviving, we're in tough shape.

And it's not. It's like two and a half. So at that point, you're talking about eight nuclear warheads landing in the United States. I'm deterred by that. So, you know, I just, I know we do these, the argument is always this kind of exquisite force calculation of like, they'll be able to hit us with a bigger number and we'll only be able to hit them with a smaller number.

And the idea is that that somehow conveys some superiority to the side with the bigger number. I feel like that's actually just still parity. You know, if if if we're putting 30 warheads on China and urban areas in China and they're only putting eight warheads on urban areas in the United States, I still think that's a tie.

So, you know, this works for them. They they still have a credible deterrent. And, you know, like this isn't in a way this is an arms race, right? They have they have built their way to a minimum deterrent.

Aaron 24:46

Well, let me ask you this. This is my concern. So my concern is that, you know, when it was in the dyad, when it was just the US and the Russians, just the US and the Soviets, is that if you made reciprocal reductions, right, perhaps splitting your forces, you know, across two different countries, like in the case of the US, perhaps, you know, splitting your forces between multiple different scenarios, right?

It now makes further reductions really, really complicated. You know, because if you were to go back five years ago, wasn't the easiest thing in the Monterey or Middlebury Institute seminar was, you know, cut the, cut, you know, of course there's politics involved, but, you know, like you could make a credible case was to cut the land-based ICBMs or that that was a place for some pruning.

Where is this going to go in four years as they build up? Even if it's a shell game, right? And even if they keep their top line numbers, or at least their warhead numbers, relatively in the same sort of ballpark, right? Whether it's 200, 250, 300, right?

Jeffrey 25:45

It does. It makes everything else more complicated. The bad news and then the worst news. So the bad news is you can verify the shell game. When the U.S. was looking at The shell game, they did envision pretty detailed protocols that would ensure that only a single missile was circulating among a certain number of silos and that you couldn't move the canisters among them.

So you wouldn't necessarily know where it was hidden, but you would know that there still couldn't be any more than whatever number of canisters hidden among them. So we could divide up the Chinese silo fields to ensure that there weren't more than, you know, like whatever, 22 canisters floating among them. However, and this is not great, like that was a really intrusive.

Arrangement of the kind that is so far beyond any kind of arms control we have ever imagined with the Chinese, right? So the bad news is you can do it, but it requires an unprecedented level of openness from the Chinese to inspection. And then what makes it worse is I think the only route to get the Chinese to even consider something like that is if we're willing to limit missile defenses, which I think is what is fundamentally justifying all of this.

And so, you know, like, it'll be a cold day in hell, I think, when Xi Jinping agrees to that level of transparency for his missile forces. But it'll be an even colder day in hell when you get enough Republicans in the Senate to agree to the compromises on missile defense that would be required to get Xi Jinping to do this.

So, like, you know, I've said it over and over again. We know what we have to do. And it is completely feasible, except that it would require being extremely courageous, which means it's impossible.

Aaron 27:57

I'm cheery. It, it's, it's not whether being pessimistic or optimistic, it's about forecasting, looking into the future based upon our own political idiosyncrasies around this issue and sort of the, the generic policy recommendation I see right both on left and right, right? Like on the left, for I would say probably altruistic reasons, and on the right, probably perhaps Deceptive reasons, it's to engage the Chinese in some sort of arms control.

I just don't see a pathway to do that. Certainly not in the timeframe in which that we would be expected to make further reductions with the Russians. And so it's just, I worry that we're really at the precipice here of a buildup and it's going to take some sort of catalyzing event to see that we need to begin to institute some limits around here.

Jeffrey 28:49

Yeah. Two things. One, I realized I kept doing the math with 226 silos. It's 246 silos. So everything I said, it's actually worse than that. There's one other thing I want to talk about. And a colleague asked me about this on Twitter the other day, and it really struck me as a kind of very big, I don't know if it's a generational difference or what kind of difference it is, but the person really wanted to understand why I thought it was credible that China would be responding to U.S. missile defenses.

Yeah. And so I think there are two things that are really important to say if you haven't been following these debates in and out. It used to be that we called missile defenses ABMs, anti-ballistic missiles. And the decision to call them missile defenses was rebranding because defenses are good, right? The argument against ABM systems is that they are not likely to work If the other side unloads everything on them and you try to just defend, it's like the end of missile command where there's too much.

The way missile defenses or ABMs are really likely to be effective is if you launch the attack, And, you know, you have this situation I'm talking about where five or six missiles survive. You can feasibly design an ABM that would have some chance at dealing with a threat like that. Now that gets harder once it gets MIRVed and, you know, I think they can still build out of it.

So I don't think it's a great idea. But the point is, they have to MIRV and they have to build out of it. And you see it very clearly in our own planning. When the Soviets started deploying the ABM system around Moscow, we started dedicating larger and larger numbers of forces to destroying those ABM systems. And so it drives the arms race.

Because you don't believe you have a secure retaliatory capability unless you have enough that will survive the strike and then be able to overwhelm the ABM system. So that's why we say defenses are destabilizing. Because they're not really defenses. They work best as part of offensive capabilities. And then they force your opponents to build their way back to a secure second strike capability, which then, of course, then requires you to build more offensive capabilities and more ABM systems, which just then is the spiral that leads to the arms race.

But then there is this empirical question of, do the Chinese believe it? And it's really interesting to me. They have said this consistently for like 35 years. You know, they have very directly described the interaction that I am talking about. And they have said that it is worrisome to them and that they would likely be compelled to respond.

And so given that I understand their logic, like it's impeccable logic to me, it's how I would respond.

Scott 32:03

And given the fact that they say that that is how they look at the problem...

Jeffrey 32:09

It doesn't strike me as being particularly controversial. China had an extremely small and restrained force for a long time. And even when they had such a force and were choosing to keep such a force, and so it wasn't like they were trying to justify something they were doing, they were consistently saying, if this problem isn't addressed, this force structure for us will be unsustainable.

And, you know, like there are definitely domestic politics, like the Russians are responding to missile defenses in a different way than the Chinese are. So it's not like this stuff isn't mediated through domestic politics because it is. But at a basic level, if you imagine a hawkish Chinese general who always wanted more nuclear weapons trying to persuade a hawkish party official who might want more nuclear weapons, the best argument that guy and it's like really likely to be a guy.

The best argument that that guy is going to have is to say that. You don't have to change China's strategy. All you're doing is building back to this level of security that China had prior to the deployment of the ABM system.

Aaron 33:21

I'm going to add one more thing to this, is that some of our suppositions about this, I think, are... I understand that there's long sort of front-loaded times to when the decision between we need to play a shell game or not, you know, put in, you know, 236 new ICBMs, whatever the case may be, versus when concrete is poured.

But I also don't think you can disaggregate this from the debates going on within the US and Russia about the advent of new conventional systems designed, you know, to fly it at high speed, whether, I mean, obviously it's hypersonic or something along those lines. With increased accuracy so that the counterforce problem, you know, perhaps our old assumptions is that the counterforce problem could be dismissed away because conventional weapons weren't as accurate as they wanted to be.

And while they may never be at ICBM ranges like perfectly accurate, if you move them in closer and you sort of worst case scenario plan, you can't just think about missile defenses in sort of. Sort of alone, right? It's the full spectrum of capabilities that come into place here and trying to at least ensure that you can deter major conflict.

I really think of them as together. And so the collapse of the INF, the investments in new systems, well, perhaps warranted by Russian actions, have reverberating and knock-on effects that play out in other parts of the world.

Scott 34:46

I have one last thing and that's that Jeffrey's numbers make me crazy nervous because when I hear that two or eight or such a small number of warheads are getting through and we talk about the PRCs discomfort with the ABM treaty or the, the lack of controls on us ABMs that makes me worried that we're looking for a third silo or a bigger fill.

I'd get real nervous. Oh, I think so, too.

Aaron 35:14

Yeah, let me say.

Jeffrey 35:16

Yeah, I think that's right. So I re-ran the numbers. So it's not so much different. But, you know, future Jeffrey just catching us up. So 246 silos. That's 120 plus 110 plus 16 at Jilanti. Is that right? It's something like that. So let's say it's 25 missiles among 246 silos. Just making the math easy. 2,000 PSI hardness, same W78 going at them, two W78s per silo.

The median number of surviving missiles is almost three. It's like, 2.85 and so the median number of surviving warheads is between eight and nine i hate it and so you could see how they could talk themselves into another 120 silos and you know what i'm good i'm good i'm deterred i don't need like eight that's that is that is eight too many well and this also like you said

Scott 36:27

That's before we start taking into account the rest of the ICBMs. There's, what, 100 systems that range the United States, roughly, roughly 100, to complement those eight. But that's the conventional systems, yeah.

Aaron 36:44

Yes. We really have to drive that home. I'm thinking about people who don't have a... You have to drive that home. It's not just these fields. These fields are just a sponge.

Scott 36:55

I feel like we're going to need a fun podcast on this. There's so many variables with this. This is such a... It goes back to... This level of expansion goes back to... Obviously, it's still a pale shadow of Cold War numbers. Again, always trying to emphasize that. These numbers are relatively small compared to the absolute insanity we saw in the Cold War and are still significantly smaller than Russia and U.S. numbers today.

But once you get into this size of force structure, it really starts getting into that Cold War hyper variable targeting problem where there is just so much going on. And every move and every choice has significant implications for how you do a targeting doctrine to mitigate. Mitigate risk seems like a real understatement.

Jeffrey 37:42

Well, and I will repeat the thing I said in the last podcast. The. Yes, numbers are lower than they were during the peak of the Cold War. But during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union had between 300 and 500 nuclear weapons. So... There are plenty of nuclear weapons in China to worry us. Because again, right? Yes, you're right.

There are other missiles that will hit. It's not just the silo field. But if the silo field is contributing nothing more than eight war, eight missiles with, or sorry, is contributing nothing more than three missiles with something like eight or nine warheads, that is still a giant catastrophe. You know, that is eight or nine cities, or if you're lucky and they're all targeted against the same few cities, two or three cities.

That is horrific. So, like, now, Jeffrey. Yeah.

Scott 38:50

I'm not saying we're not going to get our hair must.

Jeffrey 38:53

No more. 10 to 20 million kill. Tops. Yeah, so like if the cold, if the Cuban Missile Crisis scared you, then there are enough nuclear weapons in the world today to be worried about, even if they're not at Cold War P. That's the type of dynamite uplifting message that this podcast strives to finish on. Well, you know what's positive? Jeffrey was able to do some math. You know, I was in slow math in high school. Were you really? You're good at math?

The elementary school math teachers in Pekin, Illinois did not agree.

Aaron 39:32

Well, you've shown them, haven't you?

Scott 39:35

Yeah, how many of them have their own podcast?

Aaron 39:37

How many of them have their own podcast?

Jeffrey 39:39

Book a fancy office behind you? I still struggle. I, I, let me say, I like having this true. I like having this spreadsheet. James, James Acton and Steve Fetter both know how often I come crying with calculation problems. It's a, please excuse my dear Aunt Sarah. What? Yeah, we like to keep James on his toes.

Aaron 39:58

He can't just sit there on Massachusetts Ave looking down on all of us plebs. Anyways, are we done? Anything else you want to add? I think we did it. So if you like the Cuban Missile Crisis and if you want to learn more about it, you can head over to our Slack channel. And to do that, you have to be a Patreon member.

To do that, head on over to patreon.com slash acwpodcast. $3 if you're a student, $5 if you're a normal person. And you can join the conversation about this. Because if our hunch is correct, people are probably looking for a third ICBM field. And if they're looking for that third ICBM field, the place to be to talk about it is in our Slack channel.

If you don't want to give us money, you want to save it, buy some coffee, give us a review on iTunes and write some stuff. It helps us with the podcast and promote it. So with that, I'm done. Jeffrey, Scott, any last words? Nope. Oh, yeah. Okay. Scott's in charge of the bleeping, so that's all on you, pal.

Scott 41:01

Oh, shit. Yeah. I can work for myself.

Jeffrey 41:03

By the way, I ran it with 36 missiles hidden among 360 silos. Median number of surviving missiles is more than four.