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Tay Zonday
@tayzonday
My understanding is that a key role of American attack submarines is to coordinate with undersea microphone networks to shadow adversary ballistic missile submarines. There aren’t that many ballistic missile subs in the world. The UK and France have four total (no more than 1-2 patrol at once) and get ruled out as strategic threats. India and Israel’s four subs are regional and get ruled out as strategic threats. That leaves Russia’s four total and China’s six total. Only Russia’s are equally stealthy as UK/France/US. So right now the threat is two stealthy Russian ballistic missile subs and three older/noisier Chinese ones (assuming 50% continuous deployment). They are hunted by 53 American fast-attack submarines and undisclosed undersea monitoring capability. Part of the impetus behind AUKUS (the trilateral US/UK/Australia strategic partnership)— as well as American attack subs being based and built in Australia— is China’s expected transition to Type 096 missile subs with equal stealth.
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delronde
@delronde.eth
It's impossible to know from the outside, but it's likely we are very close to (or already have) the technology to detect the type and location of all submarines everywhere via much better signal processing and deep learning algos. Search for "transparent oceans". The location from satellite based ballistic launch detection combined with known missile capabilities (range, payload, flight characteristics). Barring that, it's possible to trace the place of origin of the fissile material from the radioactive fallout based on the ratio of the isotopes and other trace elements (a key plot point in Sum of All Fears). As to @kyle's point, while these don't help for an immediate second-strike, it's not possible to hide the originating country forever. So, game theoretically it doesn't make sense to use only submarines in a first strike, since you want to optimize for eliminating the possibility of retaliation. This is why the primary role of submarines in the nuclear triad is second-strike assurance.
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