Comment by mandevil
7 days ago
I don't think they fill the same strategic purposes, though. The value of silo based missiles to the US is as a missile-sponge, taking most of the warheads from a Russian first strike and keeping them from American cities (forcing any Russian first-strike to be counter-force instead of counter-value). This is not particularly valuable, honestly, which is why only the USSR during the height of the Cold War (largely in reaction to Minuteman) and China very recently have also made the investment into large numbers of ICBM silos.(1)
I won't claim to be as much an expert on Russian doctrine, but they seem to consider their mobile missiles to be a survivable second strike weapon, while silo based missiles are obviously not. Because their boomer fleet does not offer the same assured second strike, they rely on those mobile missiles to play a greater deterrent role then the US does.
1: That is the official justification for the US silos. The real reason for silos is, if you want to build a truly insane number of strategic warheads, silos are the only way to afford it- ships and planes and even TELs are too expensive. So first the US (worried they were behind because of the Missile Gap) built a thousand Minuteman (then tripled the deployed warheads with MIRV on the Minuteman-III). Then the Soviets responded with 1000 SS-11s of their own. But if you are only building a few hundred warheads total, you don't bother with silos, they don't add as much value as other delivery mechanisms.
I think we're talking past eachother.
I'm saying: Whether or not the Russians consider their silos to be more or less survivable than their truck-based missiles is immaterial, and doesn't change the calculus at the strategic level, because one of two things has to happen in a first-strike situation:
- You blanket the entire country in nuclear detonations and pray that you catch all the trucks scurrying around like nuclear-armed mice
or
- You spam dozens of missiles at a small number of hardened targets and hope you dent them (missile sponge silos)
Either way, you're severely depleting your arsenal to an infeasible level to do this. These are both counter-force attacks where targeting is the only difference, which the Strategic function does not concern itself with. That's a tactical consideration. Survivability of a land-based asset achieved by different means is still survivability of a land-based asset. In other words, it's still functionally a triad.
In the case of France in particular, the argument I recall reading is that: a) France was entering a period of austerity in defense spending as the Cold War ended, b) its siloed missiles were obsolete and in need of upgrades which promised to be costly, and c) France isn't very large geographically, so the "missile sponges" were limited to that little plateau north of Marseille which is pretty darn close to several major population centers, where an Ivy Mike-sized airburst could endanger Avignon and Marseille, not to mention leave a plume of fallout all the way into Germany.
But I'm just an ex Air Force officer who's been to France a bunch, so idk how accurate that is.
>The real reason for silos is, if you want to build a truly insane number of strategic warheads, silos are the only way to afford it
On this I'm in complete agreement.
Yeah, I guess I mentally slot road mobile missiles as more like "less effective SLBM on the cheap," at least for a country the size of Russia (not sure that is as true for someone like North Korea where I speculate there is a larger use-it-or-lose-it penalty). There is definitely more of a continuum here between "missile-soak" and "survivable deterrent"- e.g. at the limit you could, in theory, vaporize all of the oceans with nuclear weapons to kill all the boomers, which turns them into missile soaks, but at a truly insane level.
I've seen open-source estimates that the 33rd Guards Rocket Army can distribute their three divisions of mobile missiles across something like 5,000 square miles of Siberia, mostly steppe/taiga (which the 7917/79221 are supposed to be capable of launching from, again according to open source reporting). That's more than 10% of all of North Korea, to give an idea why it would be different for the two countries. Being open-source, I don't have a good estimate for the survivability of the TEL, but let's somewhat arbitrarily say 5PSI is the limit. A 300kt W87 can put 5PSI over 3 mi^2, so doing 5,000 mi^2 would be about 1700 of them, for a grid-square blanket search. That seems to be impracticable, just for one third of their missiles(1).
So I think it's more about guaranteed second-strike than soaking (e.g. at three warheads per silo you'd need ~600 missiles to soak up that many warheads, instead of the 70-odd from mobile). Which is why I have seen some people consider those missiles as more about assured second-strike than missile-soak, with hints that the Russians consider that their role. The Russian doctrine does not align exactly with the American one (2) for sure and there are hints that the Russians consider road-mobile to be different from silo deployments.
1: I'm not as clear on how much deployment space the 27th Guards Rocket Army, in the European parts of Russia has, and whether they will run into similar problems to the French wrt population centers. There is also a whole separate discussion about how much counter-force and counter-value are truly separate on the receiving end, given, e.g. if Barksdale gets nuked Shreveport is going to be very very sad. But the RAND people were sure they were distinct!
2: At least, as far as this monolingual American can tell. My main source for this is the Arms Control Wonk blog and podcast, which actually does read and report on what the Russians describe as their doctrine, they are my source for the "Russians seem to consider road-mobile as more survivable second-strike than silos."