>Britain will pay for a new nuclear deterrent
>Delivered by ordering 12x (twelve) F35A
>Attacking Moscow subject to the authorisation of Nato's nuclear planning group as well as the US president and British prime minister
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c335406gxdvo

I don't see the point of this. If POTUS let's us nook then surely the US would be throwing nukes anyway and when inevitably the US tells us that Russia can just have Poland it's such a small force that the only thing it'll do is complicate supply chains.

>>63892007 (OP)
But what if the Queen or Kang wants to nook but POTUS is busy on the golf course?

Look at a population density map of Russia. You don't need a large force for this specific deterrence task.

>>63892007 (OP)
sorry Pakistan but we shant be nuking anyone if you're not coming with us and vice versa

>>63892007 (OP)
Seems pretty cucked to invest however much in a new asset that can only be used with the approval of a foreign state.

If the Frogs can manufacture a truly independent arsenal then the Brits should be able to as well.

>>63892170
The English decided long ago to roll their nuclear program into ours. We wanted them under our control and they didn't want to pay for true independence after proving they could, in fact, get the bomb. So now we've got this shared nuclear thing going on.

France is completely different because no one wanted them to have a nuke and they absolutely wanted to have one at any cost. That's why they have and are willing to find it today.

>>63892170
>Seems pretty cucked to invest however much in a new asset that can only be used with the approval of a foreign state
Giving your freinds a big stick makes you valuable to them.

>>63892007 (OP)
Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands & Turkey are all part of US nuclear bomb sharing, the UK is simply supplying delivery systems that can be loaned to these countries if SHTF.
Also I would be surprised if UK and French nukes don't use the US arming system as commonality is vital to NATO operations.

>>63892007 (OP)

Is this going to be replacing the Vanguard-class or is it intended to augment it?

They're just buying F35A's
Thats it, thats the whole article.

>>63892273
>the UK is simply supplying delivery systems that can be loaned to these countries if SHTF

No, Britain is also buying and maintaining its an airborne deterrent based on US negotiations.

>>63892276
Augment. Airborne delivery is useful for tactical nuke escalation while the subs ensure that if Radio 4 ever goes off the air then Moscow will glow in the dark.

>>63892181
The British were broke as fuck when they made that decision. They never economically recovered from the world wars, and a huge part of the reason was a certain other country's businessmen acting as loan sharks on their assets to fund it.

>>63892294
>Britain is also buying and maintaining its an airborne deterrent based on US negotiations
I'm sure the US wants them to buy more F-35s but what better option would the UK get instead? The F-35 is the cheapest delivery system that can penetrate air defences.

>>63892007 (OP)
F-35 wins yets again.
Your points about American pre-authorization are Russian talking points designed to sow disunity in NATO.

>>63892293
A's with nuclear arming pads, it's an optional extra.

>>63892315
Russian air defences.

But really you could put nuclear mines in the Baltics and dare Russia to come and eat them which would both send a clear signal of commitment and save a lot of time by making the boom happen onsite. I suppose it's more about keeping the US happy.

>>63892326
>Your points about American pre-authorization are Russian talking points designed to sow disunity in NATO.

Do they sound better when they come from the mouth of your president or secretary of defence?

>>63892361
Trump and Hegseth really shouldn't be taken credibly. They probably got some briefing about how some key spare parts for the F-35 are only made in USA, and filtered that as us having a kill switch.

>>63892361
>you could put nuclear mines in the Baltics and dare Russia to come and eat them
That isn't a nuclear deterrent as Russia can nuke you without getting nuked back.
Counter value strikes are the key to nuclear deterrents so you have to be able to hit population and production centres.
The options for this depend on range to population centres, the norks can use nuclear arty but everyone else needs missiles or planes.

>>63892361
Please read up of what deterrence is.

>>63892381
>>63892399
That's what Trident is for.

>>63892415
ICBMs are great but planes allow rapid strikes anywhere.
You need both.

>>63892419
planes
>parked in predetermined locations
>mach 1-2 flight speed
icbm
>parked in predetermined locations
>mach 20 flight speed

Your argument only makes sense if you have a lot of aircraft carriers (i.e., one country). Otherwise, ICBMs are better. Nuclear-armed submarines defeat any advantage you think planes have.

>>63892273
>Also I would be surprised if UK and French nukes don't use the US arming system as commonality is vital to NATO operations.
Lmao
French deterrence was specifically built as a trump card for when the US/NATO predictably bails out on Europe. This is the one area where you can be 100% certain everything is in-house and ITAR free, specifically because the purpose was always to have a deterrence option the US couldn't have any say in.

>>63892601
>Nuclear strategic bombers
>Parked
Not how it works.

>>63892170
Britain is the country that came up with stuffing a nuke with ball bearings as a safety measure. Them not having homegrown designs isn't cuckery it's a service to humanity

>>63893077
Can't talk too much shit about the ball bearing design. Our version used a boron wire which could be withdrawn quickly using an electric motor, except the wire got brittle over time and would snap when you tried to withdraw it. Oh, and the lubricant they used on the wire ate away at the plutonium pit. The Navy estimated that 75% of the warheads used in the Polaris missile would have failed to detonate. The entire W47 production run had to be sent back for full rebuilds to correct the problem.

>>63892375
>Trump and Hegseth really shouldn't be taken credibly.
It's the fucking president and his Top Guy.

>>63892857
M. de Gaulle, je m'agenouille...

>>63893107
That's better than a near useless rube goldberg machine which could fizzle an entire base and surrounding area if dropped sufficiently hard enough

>>63892601
>ICBM
>everyone knows the moment you fire one
>strategic bomber
>demonstrated how you could deliver a strike that no one sees coming literally this week

Bonus round, planes get to pick their targets once they arrive, while ICBMs do it at launch, which means substantially more effective strikes since you aren't required to dedicate multiple warheads to ensure a singular one gets through.

>>63892857

>>63892303
Your economy was shit because you let pinkos manage it.

>>63893225
Yeah, and they're both retards. Because half our nation are retards. So what?

>>63893232
The boron chain was introduced because the W47 was a single point failure design too

>b61s
us never should have cancelled sram ii and sram should have still been in active duty

>>63892181
The British kinda helped the French obtain nukes

>>63893345
with saying that, they may just make prsm nuclear capable; atacms was nuclear capable after all, and some want to adapt prsm to air, surface and sub-platforms.

>>63892007 (OP)
Not a terrible idea. As it stands they're solely reliant on a class of 4 SSBN to function as their nuclear deterrent. This is (probably?) the cheapest and quickest way to expand that capability even if it comes with some red tape.
Though I imagine in the long term this would be replaced with a similar capability attached to GCAP.

>>63893077
You do realise the US used the exact same safety mechanism to start with...
It's ok though, your permanent seethe about this issue is so blatant it makes me love bongs more.

what we need is EURONUKE
a secret EU program to build 2000 nuke tipped ICBMs with which we can destroy the united states or china, whichever is worse at our time of choosing

>>63893808
Good luck convincing every member of the union to cooperate for more than five seconds.

>>63893586
The only reason it should be a thing is for the same reason France has theirs independently. It allows you to tell your partners no if you don't want to.
Trident is all good until you end up with a president who doesn't want you deploying them against an enemy.
Independent nuclear arms is something any country with sense pursues and its why Israel is right to have theirs just as Iran is right to pursue theirs.
North Korea has proven it by the amount of sabre rattling that's vanished since they proved they have the big bottle rocket and the same with Pakistan, India and, prior to disarming, South Africa.

>>63892419
SLBM also allow strikes anywhere.

The advantage of air-launched is they can be used to deliver tactical nukes without triggering MAD but it's difficult to imagine Britain operating that way unless SHTF but then in those scenarios you know where Ivan will be and what the red lines are.

>>63893822
>Trident is all good until you end up with a president who doesn't want you deploying them against an enemy.

Trident doesn't need authorisation from anyone to launch. If the sub decides that the world must burn then it shall, there's a note the PM writes to be read in the event they lose contact with Britain but that's it and it's probably just a picture of a cock anyway.

The complication with Trident is that the delivery component requires the US for maintenance so if Trump decides to be a massive faggot at the NATO summit this week then there's a few months/years of reliable use before someone has to work out how we can still do launch. You can't just borrow French delivery because the missiles are different sizes.

>>63892036
>Look at a population density map of Russia
Is this supposed to be some unique observation? That countries have high population density centres around main cities? Jesus Christ what a fucking genius you are, everyone else was under the assumption that people just lived evenly spread out across each country until your revelation.

>>63893819
>Good luck convincing every member of the union to cooperate for more than five seconds.
we tell them all we will be nuking russia, they will agree in 5 seconds and then we actually false flag nuke gulf of mexico and that chinese dam

>>63893850
>Trident doesn't need authorisation from anyone to launch. If the sub decides that the world must burn then it shall
accident waiting to happen

>>63893861
extremely low IQ post
of course every country tends to have population density spike around major cities; the difference is that compared to most countries, the contrast in population density (between essentially one city, moscow and the entirety of the rest of russia) is much more extreme in russia, and therefore worth bringing up. Put it another way, to seriously threaten the US for instance or china with nukes, you'd need to be able to target dozens and dozens and dozens of cities/targets seperated by hundreds if not thousands of miles from one another. In russia, only one.

>>63892246
The only friends US needs and wants apparently are israel and puzzia

>>63893884
London makes up for 22% of UK's entire population, Moscow 14% of Russia's, Paris 18%, Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan area in Germany makes up for 16%, New York 7%, Shanghai Economic Zone 17% of China. Tokyo 30%.
You have no point, you are just stupid.

please bomb the UK, they are ruled by satanist women and weak, effeminate men. the entire country is in shambles, the US should focus on taking back the motherlond

>>63893918
no, you are stupid. China is significantly larger than every single country you listed there, with the exception of china, which is not comparable due to having 10x russia's population. Russia is one and a half cities (moscow and st petersburg) and the rest is almost entirely empty and contains little of note. You would literally just need one squadron of planes with nukes or a handful of warheads to cripple the country in a way that simply wouldn't be feasible if you tried the same thing on america or china.

>>63893933
*russia is significantly larger

>>63893933
China and US are roughly the same size. Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei metropolitan zone and Shanghai Economic Zone account for 25% of China's population, one MIRV for each. New York metropolitan area and greater LA 12% of US population, one MIRV for each. Moscow and St Petersburg metropolitan areas 19% for Russia, one MIRV for each.

Again, you are retarded and you have no point.

>>63893954
you're being wilfully obtuse with your numbers
my fundamental point is that if you put one mirv on china or the US, both countries are still in fighting condition;
one mirv on russia, and it isn't
that's my point
I also haven't even mentioned the value contrast between rural russia and the moscow area, compared to china and the US.

>>63893972
>my fundamental point is that if you put one mirv on china or the US, both countries are still in fighting condition;
one mirv on russia, and it isn't
By what metric, something you just pulled out of your arse? I give you numbers, you give me a point out of your arse, fantastic. Fantastically stupid. I don't even know why you would feel the need to post something as stupid as this, too much time on your armchair?

Having a nuke that you need someone's else approval to use is worse than not having a nuke, because you're basically establishing yourself as a vassal state and everyone knows that if you're in true trouble that nuke is going back home on the first flight, leaving you to get fucked.

>>63893998
explain to me exactly why the following assertion is wrong
>one MIRV on moscow would do significantly more damage to russia (proportionally speaking) than one MIRV on beijing or new york would to china and the US respectively

>>63894073
New York isn't US capital retard.

>>63892170
>Actually we want a multipolar world now

>>63894076
see >>63893954, you specifically mentioned beijing and new yorks' respective metropolitan areas earlier, I'm just bringing them up again for consistency and because new york is a far better equivalent to moscow than washington DC would be in this scenario

>>63894076
you still haven't disproved the assertion btw I'm still waiting on that

>>63894073
>(proportionally speaking)
I already showed you the proportions you imbecile.

>>63894102
And I'm telling you that one numerical statistic doesn't make up for big-picture reasoning

>>63893998
Russia has nuclear submarines like many countries. Nuking Moscow would not prevent Russia from retaliating.

>>63894112
What big picture reasoning you retard, you've provided none except population density, which I've walked you through to show how nonsensical you are.
>>63894157
You're replying to the wrong person.

>>63893249
Yeah, its hard to see a strategic bomber coming when you have literally no air defence

>>63892007 (OP)
>Attacking Moscow
You think that you could just fly into Russian airspace and nuke Moscow without being detected?

>>63894213
Ukraine does it daily

>>63894223
Drones are not the same thing as an strategic bomber or ICMB

>>63894273
F-35 is even more difficult than a drone.
ICBMs, if those are launched then we're all dead anyway.

>>63892028
If the King wanted to do away with Orange man, all he would need to do is invite him to be knighted (You know Orange man couldn’t resist that) and when he’s on his knees in front of the King, all the King would have to do once his sword is on Orange man’s shoulder is swipe left instead of lifting it to the other shoulder and then be like “Oops, I slipped”.

>>63894294
It's difficult to say because actual radar signatures and effectiveness of stealth is classified, but I don't believe an F-35 would be stealthier than a drone in that context.

First of all, drones are hard to detect because they are very small, and they fly very low. It's harder to detect low flying objects because they are often hidden by terrain or obstacles, and the ground makes a natural "background noise" on radar which has to be filtered in order to make detection possible, and a very small object like a drone would probably be under the filter threshold. They can also be launched from very close which you can't do with an F-35.

In order to strike Moscow, an F-35 would need to fly at high altitude for several reasons :
>fuel consumption is significantly lower and F-35s don't have a very high fuel range
>flying low means being visible, therefore risking being reported either by civilians or military
>being low makes you vulnerable to small arms and MANPAD fire

At 40 000ft in the air, even a small object is possible to detect because there is nothing else behind. Stealth technology doesn't make planes invisible, it just reduces their radar signature. It basically means that a non-stealth plane that would be detected at a range of say 500 miles would be detected at only 100 miles with stealth. It's an advantage, but it doesn't make you invisible. The same goes for IR emissions. In order to strike Moscow, an F-35 would need to get within missile range of Moscow over Russian territory. It would mean a VERY extensive reconnaissance and intelligence effort beforehand to pinpoint the location of every air-to-air and air-to-ground radars in real time, to make sure that none is within detection range and plan your route accordingly. It's not impossible technically, but it would require so much work and present such high risk that it's not realistic.

>>63894716
>It would mean a VERY extensive reconnaissance and intelligence effort beforehand to pinpoint the location of every air-to-air and air-to-ground radars in real time, to make sure that none is within detection range and plan your route accordingly. It's not impossible technically, but it would require so much work and present such high risk that it's not realistic.
Ukraine took out most of Russia's strategic bombers and AWACs through drones taken near to the locations by Russian commercial trucks. I'm sure the same can be done to any existing AD infrastructure between the Baltic states and Moscow (360miles). Considering Russian AD underperforms as well and they've expended their stockpile to a large degree then it's all doable.
Then again the question is really why you would do that. Just nuking Moscow makes no sense, Russians will fire ICBMs back at whatever identifiable nation/coalition that did it. Nuclear deterrence is already there and has been established for 70 years now, MAD is still a working theory along with the first strike and second strike doctrines. If the goal is to just terrorize Russia by nuking its capital then a smuggled in warhead via a truck similar to how the drones were done would be much more effective, but the cost benefit analysis of doing something like that seems way off. Doing what Ukraine does and just continually pummeling Russian infrastructure and high value military assets is far more effective.

I don't think we will ever reach a stage where surgically disabling Russia's nuclear capabilities is possible, sure we can probably entirely remove their first strike capacity but they will always have enough to retaliate back with devastating consequences for us even if they are permanently done for as a country.

>>63894866
The bombers Ukraine took out were under obligation to be visible due to the New Start treaty on strategic nuclear bombers. There was basically zero intelligence required because everyone knows exactly where they are at all times. The most difficult part was taking the drone trucks near the airbases.

SEAD is much more difficult because you would need to take out :
>ground radars, easy enough everyone knows where they are
>fixed SAM sites, more difficult but still doable because satellites can locate them and I'm sure the CIA knows where they are anyways
>mobile SAMs, which are the hardest because they can be hidden inside buildings or underground, or camouflaged and activated at any moment, just one activating at the wrong time could fuck things up
>air-to-air threats, which would mean either knowing the exact CAP routes of every Russian fighters at the time, or tracking all of them in real time without alerting their radar warning systems, this would be the hardest

But I agree with you that it's unlikely that will ever happen, and if it does it would be all-out nuclear war and F-35s would be useless anyways.

>>63894922
>The bombers Ukraine took out were under obligation to be visible due to the New Start treaty on strategic nuclear bombers.
I've seen this repeated a couple of times, is there an actual source for this and didn't they renegade on the treaty a couple of years back anyway? For instance, the US is in the treaty but the b2s are never out in the open. Meanwhile they had everything out there which is why AWACS got hit too, but I'm very surprised Ukrainians didn't hit the tu160 on the same base shown in the video.

>>63894949
https://www.state.g*v/new-start-treaty
https://www.nti.o*g/media/documents/new_start_treaty.pdf

I just checked, apparently the treaty does not specify exactly that planes have to be in plain sight, just that each party has to disclose their location. It also states that nuclear-capable bombers do not fall under the treaty if they are not equipped with nuclear weapons. But they are prohibited from mixing nuclear and non-nuclear bombers at the same location.