Second-strike survivability

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The engineering problem underneath deterrence, and the one that actually consumed the money. A retaliatory threat is only credible if the forces making it will still exist after the first blow lands, so the whole period is a sequence of attempts to make warheads hard to find or hard to kill: bombers moved from parked alert to airborne alert, liquid-fuelled missiles that took hours to prepare gave way to solid-fuelled missiles that could launch in minutes, missiles moved from open pads into hardened underground silos, and finally into submarines, which cannot be targeted because they cannot be located. The last of those is decisive — a submarine at sea is the only leg of the arsenal that an adversary cannot count and aim at — and it is why the invulnerable-basing problem, not the yield of any warhead, is the technical heart of the confrontation. The same logic runs backwards and explains why missile defence was treated as destabilising: a defence that might absorb a ragged retaliation makes striking first look survivable again.

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