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points by twoodfin 10 hours ago | 0 comments

I may be misremembering this, but the desire to move missiles around may be downstream of the START and New START arms limitation treaties.

These give the US and Russian governments what are supposed to be adequate inspection regimes to count the number of active missiles, but of course make no requirement on the signatories to make it easy to locate all the missiles at any given moment.

So there’s a strong strategic incentive to shuffle them around between treaty-mandated inspections.

[–] tristanj 10 hours ago

START and New START have both expired. New START effectively ended in 2023 after Russia stopped complying due to US materiel support for Ukraine. It formally expired earlier this year.

Regardless, the treaties are strategically irrelevant since China is a non-signatory and it has refused to sign on to a joint arms control agreement.

[–] vkou 58 minutes ago

Isn't China's nuclear arsenal a tiny fraction of that of Russia and the US?

Why is its non-involvement relevant, but the non-involvement of Israel, Pakistan, India isn't?

[–] twoodfin 10 hours ago

Sure, but the legal techniques of subterfuge developed under those treaties were designed to be effective against satellite and other intelligence in combination with treaty inspections. That those inspections have at least temporarily stopped is no reason to stop playing three-card monte with the missiles. These are big missiles, on which decades of information was collected by Russia, treaty-directed and otherwise.

[–] kryogen1c 9 hours ago

> adequate inspection regimes to count the number of active missiles

It should be noted that a missle designed with a removable component requiring 30 seconds of install time does not count as an active missle when not assembled.

[–] bunabhucan 9 hours ago

There are 400 missiles in 400 silos and 50 kept in a warm status. I think the "moving around" is servicing them, replacing the tritium and so on.

[–] jakeydus 10 hours ago

A new start? Hmm, how to fit that on a license plate… ANUSTART?

[–] srean 9 hours ago

Well, it can also tokenizes as

ANUS TART

Maybe that was your point.

It is a good idea to screen urls for alternative parses and tokenizations. For example

http://therapistfinder.com

For my day job I had written such a tokenizer, so I do this almost automatically.