Submarine Collision
 

What the heck?
A few pressing questions come to mind as I read this article:

Wouldn't they have advanced navigation systems to prevent an incident like this - how do submarines run into each other?

Why were they carrying nuclear weapons in the Northern Atlantic Ocean? There aren't any wars in that part of the world that I'm aware of.

Why risk carting around nukes when they will never be used?

Mmm, yes. "Nuclear deterrent." Keeping nukes at sea at all times means you'd better think twice before nuking us. This is the same reason why places like Iran and North Korea would want nukes. They aren't merely for destruction. It's what they can do more so than what they do. When was the last time nukes were used against anybody? When was the first time?

As far as the collision is concerned, you should always factor in human error. Technology only works when you know how to work it without fail. Sometimes it fails; sometimes the operator(s) fail(s).

Yeah, this is pretty scary.

You can sleep safely tonight because this could never happen.....xoxoxoo

Jeez...when I start thinking about the probability of this happening (it's very, very small), and then the probability of an incident occurring wherein the nuclear warheads somehow manage to detonate (even smaller), it blows my mind that this could happen.

On CNN yesterday, it sounded as if one of the subs dented up its nose pretty badly; I think it was the French sub as I recall that they mentioned the sonar had been damaged on this vessel. Some of the payload is located in the nose.

Part of the issue is that since the end of the Cold War, militaries have had a difficult time adjusting to the lack of a clear enemy. We've responded to this in the United States with the Global War on Terror (when you've gone so long with a boogeyman, it's hard to let go), but we still have protocols and practices that are more in line with what we were doing in the Cold War. Obviously, other militaries are having the same problem.

The whole point of submarines is being unseen, unheard – even to each other. (Well, to those not of your own nation.) So, it's really not so surprising that, eventually, two of them would blunder into each other.

How the fuck...?

Lewis Page has a great article in the Register that looks at it from a levelheaded approach. One thing to consider with his point on using active sonar is that it's just like the movies. When you're pinging, you're sending out an audible sound that's easy to detect, and if you ping another sub, everyone on board will hear it.
16th February 2009 Archive ? The Register

Fascinating article, MSD. Thank you for sharing. It helps to clarify the overall concept of sonar and submarine tracking systems.

The point of doing it is you never know where the guy with a nuke is hiding, and he is ALWAYS out there just in case.

As for the navigation system... you fail to realize how good these subs are. The Modern Nuclear Attack sub is quieter than a shrimp when it's at cruising speed. The modern Nuclear Missile Submarine is even quieter. My uncle was a P3 Orion pilot (sub hunter plane), he says you don't look for their sound... you look for an abnormally quiet spot in the water.

As stated before, the entire point is to NOT be seen. Subs have collided before, even those armed with Nuclear missiles. The US/Soviet submarines in the Cold War actually had quite a few run-ins, the Soviets lost one while we've had a couple damaged.

Every once in awhile you read a story about a whale bonking into a submarine because it had no idea there was anything in the area.

The odds of two subs being in the same place, at the same depth at the same time in the huge ocean is just too great to calculate. Kind of like two satellites in space.

What is going on?

Probably both navigating a particular set of underwater geography at low speed and missed each other. The actually patrol locations are somewhat limited, and since both subs will travel in roughly the same direction to reach them its not hard to believe that they had a minor snafoo.

Either that or the captains were playing cat and mouse.

The odds of two specific vehicles being in the same place at the same time and colliding are also vanishingly small. This does not mean that the wreck you see on the way home from work is a conspiracy or evidence of Armageddon ;)

every morning i see the ocean and every morning one thing i notice about the ocean is that it is really really big.
big big big.
while i understand all this secret floating about underwater blindly so as to maintain the fun and excitement of being secret, and, even as i think it's ridiculous, understand the carrying nukes around as you do that ("we have em, so we might as well sail them around") what i really don't get is how these two submarines could possibly have clunked into each other given how very very big the ocean is.

i know other folk have noted this bigness factor with reference to the ocean, but i just looked at it again on the way out of essex this morning and so have a new and improved sense of the bigness of the ocean.

it is really fucking big.

So what are we suggesting here? "The ocean's too big for them to have possibly accidentally collided and therefore. . .they did it on purpose?"

Was one of the captains Sean Connery?

shakran:

i don't think it was intentional. to think that you'd have to subscribe to a version of the theory advanced by jamie brockett in that old strange song "the ballad of the uss titanic" to explain that collision. , if memory serves, ithe theory involved433 1/2 feet of rope made from hemp. while i expect that you can derive the rest of the theory, here's what i remember of it: at the critical moment, the captain of the titanic, who has just previously been passed out after smoking a length of that rope, woke up, saw the iceberg and bellowed: "I'M GONNA MOVE YOU BABY."

i think the song ends just after that. what more is there to say really?
but i haven't heard it since high school and am surprised that i remember as much of it as (apparently) i do.

more realistically, who knows?
maybe there are particular corridors where submarines like to hang out, like puppy parks for submariners where they go to frolic about and chase each other and something went awry.

There's this little bit:
Digital Chosunilbo (English Edition) : Daily News in English About Korea

I hope they don't have an urge to lay eggs in those nesting grounds

what Baraka said, Roach. There are corridors where subs like to go due to ease of navigation, or predictable and good thermal layers (which help keep subs hidden), or proximity to somewhere the sub is supposed to be hitting.

Also, esp. with US and Russian subs, we each know where the other country's subs like to hang out. If you were running the US submarine fleet, and you knew that Russia liked to park a nuclear missile-armed boomer in a certain place, wouldn't you send your hunter submarines over there to watch for it? So really, it's not at all surprising that submarines from different countries wind up in the same general area and that, from time to time, they run into each other.

I'm fairly sure they try to follow each other, just for practice.

It's like aircraft collisions. The sky is huge.... so in theory there would be no collisions. However, military aircraft fly close to each other and crash occasionally. Although it's different reasons there.

Anyways... I'd not want to travel in a previously damaged sub.

LOL, I disagree, ASU2003 has a valid question.

What is going on??

It's been explained.

The odds of any one particular sub being in any one particular place are the same as it being in any other particular place. These subs happened to be in the same place.

What are the odds that I will crash into your car tomorrow? Pretty small, right? Yes, but that doesn't mean that it can't happen. Otherwise wrecks would never occur. Same with this story. Yes, the odds were very small, but there was still a chance that it would happen, as evidenced by the fact that it happened.


The only other conclusion we can draw other than "It was an accident because they both happened to be there at the same time" is that it was deliberate, in which case the question would have to be posed, WHY, was it deliberately done? If you want to sink a sub, there are much more effective ways to do it than to ram into it at very slow speeds. That's why submarines have torpedos.

Is it really that hard to believe thatthe captains of two equivalent subs, serving two advanced navies, very likely with almost identical training, looked at the same spot and said, "that looks like a good place to chill"?

Um... forgive me if I'm wrong... but it doesn't say where in the Atlantic it happened. Is it so odd if they ran into each other near the Straights of Gibraltar? Yeah it's a big ocean... but they have intersections.

Aside from that, subs travel with a certain level of buffer between them and the ocean floor. In addition, they like to find trenches and valleys which further mask their signal. Saying it's 1:1k chance is like saying aircraft colliding is equal chance in trans-ocean flight as hovering over an airfield. There are certain areas of high-traffic which increase likelihood.

Aha.

The Brits drive on the LHS. Which side do the the French drive on?

Could be the problem right there.

what i learned from this:

"Le Triomphant" serait plus endommagé qu'annoncé - Europe - Le Monde.fr

is (a) these submarines were frolicking about together in the context of manoevers, which for reasons obscure the uk spokesmodel cited in the earlier article had decided to be coy about. this reduces puzzlement over the bigness of the ocean as such by providing some other framework for thinking about proximity and frolicking in the way that fully armed nuclear submarines will, apparently, frolic, much in the way that flipper once did on television except with nuclear weapons on board and a nuclear reactor too.

i also learned that the french sub was pretty heavily fucked up by the encounter, much more than had previously been admitted.

i also learned that the french sub is one of two of this generation of submarines, but will for quite some time be the lonely, sad nuclear submarine with nuclear weapons on board and a nuclear powered engine as well that will not be able to go out and frolick with its other fully-armed nuclear submarine buddies.

poor lonely and sad fully armed nuclear submarine.

*sigh*

Dude, this statement is SO wrong!!! Please stop. How many people own cars, ok now, how many people own submarines?! Do you get why the number of cars tip the scale of chances there will be a wreck?

C'mon man!!!

Look at it from a mathematical point of view. the number of submarines and the number of cars is irrelevant. The odds of your specific car being at any one place at any one time are not, unless one counts traffic jams, influenced by how many other cars there are out there. Similarly, the odds of any one specific submarine being in any one specific place at one specific time are not influenced by how many submarines are out there.

You seem to think that the odds are zero, that two submarines could be in the same place at the same time. This is not true, even if you dismiss the hard evidence we have that you are wrong seeing as how two of them ran into each other.

Besides which, your point does not seem to make a whit of sense. What are you suggesting here? The odds of the subs running into each other are too great (which you incorrectly seem to take to mean that it cannot happen) and therefore . . . What? It didn't happen? It did happen but it was on purpose? Something else happened and they're only claiming the subs ran into each other? What alternative are you suggesting in order to justify what you're saying in here?


My point about the automobiles is not that wrecks cannot happen. It is that wrecks can and do happen, even though the odds of one specific car being in the same place at the same time as another specific car are vanishingly small. If the odds were not vanishingly small, you'd wreck every time you left your driveway. Even though the odds of this happening are vanishingly small, we do not run around and say "holy shit! The odds of those two specific cars colliding are so small. . What's going on here! It's a bloody conspiracy!"

The same point applies to the submarines.

generally arguments from probability are so much fun once something has happened: the probability of what just happened happening is 1, yes?
just saying.

hehe.

You'd think so, but you'd be wrong. If the probability was 1, then it would happen to every submarine.

Yep. I mean, the odds that the ether would coalesce into our universe are astronomically small-- that proves that there is at god a work. Or something.

The odds of anything happening ever are vanishingly small if you examine them from the proper vantage point. Within that context, one in a million billion, billion doesn't seem that bad.

well, we're talking about these two submarines not all submarines...and they collided. so for those two submarines, it'd be 1.

at any rate, what puzzled me up front about the collision was cleared up by the article in le monde, which actually says "there were manoevers happening..." so there was a reason for the subs to be around each other. so the big big big ocean thing became less a factor.

speaking for myself, at least some of the goofing about this situation is motivated by the fact that these were nuclear submarines and were fully armed. while i know that the weapons themselves are not set up to detonate without a particular command sequence, the engines seem more problematic to me. and there's something alarming in general about 2 nuclear anythings crashing into each other. just now, i was almost run over by a fedex truck. that alarmed me. but this collision alarmed me more.

I had some hope of seeing a reduction in these weapons back when Reagan and Gorbachev seemed to be coming close to an agreement.

What happened?

Point me to a place for info, please.

/end threadjack.

the probability that it /did/ happen is 1 because it happened. The probability that they /will/ collide is still vanishingly small (otherwise as soon as they got repaired, they'd go out to sea and hit each other again)

As for nuke boats hitting each other, there really isn't a whole lot of risk of a nuclear incident. In the first place, the Kursk did not cause nuclear fallout, and its wreck was a lot worse than this one. The reactors are very, very tough, and a collision at sea will not make them explode.

Even if the fissile material is exposed t o the ocean, nothing much will happen. The ocean is the world's biggest cooling tank. The minuscule amount of radioactive material in a submarines reactor vessel would cause no noticeable effects to the environment of the ocean, certainly not on a long-term basis. Probably the worst nuclear accident on a sub happened in a bay in Russia in the 80's. A refueling accident caused the nuclear fuel to explode, taking the reactor and part of the ship with it, and spewing radioactive debris all over the harbor and dock. Within 7 months, radiation levels in the harbor were back to normal. And that's in a sheltered, enclosed body of water. In the depths of the ocean, you'd barely notice it.



In fact, the old style submarines (and other naval vessels - -Aircraft carriers are nuclear too) would cause more damage because they had diesel engines that had to run often to keep the batteries charged, and that pollutes the oceans in a big way.

I'm not a fan of nuclear myself, but it is the best solution, especially for submarines if you don't want them to have to surface all the time to snorkel air.

As far as what happened to the reduction of weapons. . .There already has been a reduction of weapons. That's why nuclear missile launch sites in the Dakotas, Florida, and elsewhere are abandoned (some having been converted into private homes). The reduction is pretty meaningless, however. If I have a revolver, and I remove 5 bullets, leaving one, and then hold it up to your head, are you gonna feel any safer that I've complied with arms reduction? No, because you're still gonna die if I pull the trigger.

Wha??

a) My point was, your wrong ... plain and simple. It doesnt matter about a specific sub, what matters is two monoliths of navigation FAILED TO NAVIGATE!!
b) I want to know why they ran into each other, and no, it was not an accident.
c) Were not all crazy just because we assume WE DONT KNOW WHATS A-HAPPENING.

My question would be. Can they get internet ?

That would be awesome if they could. but I bet signal would play a factor in this..?

1) you are confusing navigation with collision avoidance.
2) You are confusing the navigator with the sonar operator.
3) They navigated just fine. They just happened to navigate into the same place at the same time.


If it was not an accident, then it was deliberate. I trust you have an interesting theory as to why anyone would want to run a mutli-billion dollar submarine into another multi-billion dollar submarine. Perhaps you are suggesting insurance fraud writ large? You are surely not suggesting that it was a deliberate aggressive act from one sub to the other, because as I have already explained, that's what torpedos are for. They're cool 'cause they let you break the other guy's submarine without hurting your own.


Eh, from my standpoint it's pretty crazy to look at two things that accidentally ran into each other and to automatically assume that it was deliberate, even though you either have no ideas or have failed to tell us your ideas as to what actually happened.

Disarmament is a feel-good bullshit gesture, and mutually assured destruction, not idealism or goodwill, is what has kept us from being destroyed. The only surefire way to keep rational actors from using weapons of mass destruction is to ensure that they know there will be an equal or greater retaliation.
Did you ever play hide-and-seek when you were young? Did you ever pick the same hiding place as another kid? If you were both almost invisible, chances are you would have bumped into each other.

If this were completely true, France and England would still be at war and not merely bumping their nuclear toys into each other during their oceanic bathtime.

But I think I get your point on one end of the spectrum, and it's unfortunate.

I followed the link to that Ogle Earth page, which was mentioned in the news article that I quoted in my previous post...

http://www.ogleearth.com/navyprop.jpg

Wow. I hadn't imagined a modern-day nuclear sub would have a prop like that. It looks wicked, like something out of a Jules Verne story.

this sounds very doctor strangelove.

Maybe it does sound like something out of Doctor Strangelove. But it is true, for the most part, that it's been "mutually assured destruction", and not idealism or goodwill, that has kept the world from being destroyed by a nuclear war.

As for "disarmament": What is the difference, really, whether the world has 1,500 operational (i.e. not merely intact) nuclear warheads, or 15,000? Because, 1,500 would be more than enough to destroy the world.

1500 are too many...1 is too many.


"If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds."
Bhagavad Gita, the sacred Hindu epic recalled by J. Robert Oppenheimer while viewing the first nuclear explosion in Alamagordo, New Mexico, July 16, 1945
"And just at that instant there rose as if from the bowels of the earth a light not of this world, the light of many suns in one. It was a sunrise such as the world had never seen, a great green supersun climbing in a fraction of a second to a height of more than eight thousand feet, rising ever higher until it touched the clouds, lighting up earth and sky all around with dazzling luminosity. Up it went, a great wall of fire about a mile in diameter, changing colors as it kept shooting upward, from deep purple to orange, expanding, growing bigger, rising as it was expanding, an elemental force freed from its bonds after being chained for billions of years."
William L. Laurence, New York Times, August 26, 1945, Account of the Trinity Test on 16 July 1945

"We can sum it up in one sentence: Our technical civilization has just reached its greatest level of savagery. We will have to choose, in the more or less near future, between collective suicide and the intelligent use of our scientific conquests.......Before the terrifying prospects now available to humanity, we see even more clearly that peace is the only goal worth struggling for. This is no longer a prayer but a demand to be made by all peoples to their governments -- a demand to choose definitively between hell and reason."
Albert Camus, Combat, 8 August 1945

"We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead. That is our business. Behind the black portent of the new atomic age lies a hope which, seized upon with faith, can work out a salvation. If we fail, then we have damned every man to be the slave of fear. Let us not deceive ourselves: we must elect world peace or world destruction."
Bernard Baruch, Speech to UN Atomic Energy Commission, 14 August 1946

"There are plenty of problems in the world, many of them interconnected. But there is no problem which compares with this central, universal problem of saving the human race from extinction."
John Foster Dulles, Speech to UN General Assembly, 1952

"The survivors would envy the dead."
Nikita Khrushchev, Pravda, 20 July 1963

"A full scale nuclear exchange, lasting less than 60 minutes...could wipe out more than 300 million Americans, Europeans, and Russians, as well as untold numbers elsewhere. And the survivors--as Chairman Khrushchev warned the Communist Chinese, `the survivors would envy the dead.' For they would inherit a world so devastated by explosions and poison and fire that today we cannot conceive of its horrors."
President John F. Kennedy, address to the nation on the Limited Test Ban Treaty, 26 July 1963

"In an all-out nuclear war, more destructive power than in all of World War II would be unleashed every second during the long afternoon it would take for all the missiles and bombs to fall. A World War II every second--more people killed in the first few hours than all the wars of history put together. The survivors, if any, would live in despair amid the poisoned ruins of a civilization that had committed suicide."
President Jimmy Carter, Farewell Address to the American People, 14 January 1981

"From now on it is only through a conscious choice and through a deliberate policy that humanity can survive."
Pope John Paul II, Address in Hiroshima, 1981

"it is not morally acceptable to intend to kill the innocent as part of a strategy of deterring nuclear war."
U.S. Catholic Bishops' Pastoral Letter on War and Peace, 1983

"It is simply not acceptable that our future lies in the hands of only five nuclear weapon states. It belongs to all nations, to all peoples, to present as well as future generations."
Joint declaration of the members of the Five Continent Peace Initiative, 22 May 1984

"Almost imperceptibly, over the last four decades, every nation and every human being has lost ultimate control over their own life and death. For all of us, it is a small group of men and machines in cities far away who can decide our fate. Every day we remain alive is a day of grace as if mankind as a whole were a prisoner in the death cell awaiting the uncertain moment of execution. And like every innocent defendant, we refuse to believe that the execution will ever take place."
Members of the Five Continent Peace Initiative, Argentina, India, Mexico, Tanzania, Sweden, and Greece, The "Delhi Declaration" 28 January 1985

"Humankind continues to face the threat of nuclear annihilation. Today's hesitation leads to tomorrow's destruction. The fates of all of us are bound together here on earth. There can be no survival for any without peaceful coexistence for all."
Takeshi Araki, Mayor of Hiroshima, 6 August 1985

"Nuclear weapons are clearly inhumane weapons in obvious violation of international law. So long as such weapons exist, it is inevitable that the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will be repeated -- somewhere, sometime -- in an unforgivable affront to humanity itself."
Takashi Hiraoka, Mayor of Hiroshima, Hiroshima Peace Declaration, 6 August 1995

"The human race cannot coexist with nuclear weapons."
Iccho Itoh, Mayor of Nagasaki, Nagasaki Peace Declaration, 9 August 1995

The Insanity
"It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives."
Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, Testimony to House Appropriations Committee, 1961
"Everybody's going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around...Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top. It's the dirt that does it."
T.K. Jones, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces, Research and Engineering, LA Times 16 January 1982

"U.S. defense policies ensure our preparedness to respond to and, if necessary, successfully fight either a conventional or nuclear war."
FY 1983 Budget of the United States Government

"the supreme guarantee of the security of the [NATO] Allies is provided by the strategic nuclear forces of the Alliance. ...Alliance nuclear forces continue to play a unique and essential role in the Alliance's strategy of war prevention..."
NATO Communique, 29 November 1995

"Anyone who considers using a weapon of mass destruction against the United States or its allies must first consider the consequences. ...We would not specify in advance what our response would be, but it would be both overwhelming and devastating."
Secretary of Defense William Perry, 18 April 1996

The newer design is even cooler. I won't go into it... but those engineers know what they're doing.

And they're here to stay. They're going to sit and decay, be replaced with newer, more powerful, more efficient ones when they reach the end of their shelf life, and politicians are going to continue to squabble about the numbers, brag about their achievements when the numbers go down, and point fingers at each other and call names when the numbers go up.

the assertion--it's not an argument---that mutually assured destruction, which was the american nuclear "strategy" during the cold war, the "winning" scenario within which was a bunch of military types wandering bunker system beneath the surface of some irradiated wasteland every once in a while pausing to congratulate themselves on having won---is somehow responsible for the fact that we've not all been vaporized is the kind of claim that could be made about anything, really: since the middle 1950s, people have consistently sat in chairs and we've not been vaporized so sitting in chairs has contributed to our not being vaporized. you could say the same thing about any action. and it'd be no more absurd than the claim that the rationale behind nuclear proliferation has somehow made us safer.

i don't think that disarmament is necessarily "feel-good bullshit"---it's more a problem for the extensive patronage networks that have taken shape around the nuclear procurement systems of the national security state. by extension, what disarmament poses a direct challenge to is the national security state, which has no ongoing justification, which is an incredible drain of resources and which really should be dismantled.

dismantling nuclear weapons systems is a desirable goal and is in principle entirely within the realm of possibility. of course to do that, those rational actors who sell such technologies would have to do something else. or be stopped. which is also doable. it would not be a simple matter, particularly at the level of enforcement, so long as obsolete notions of nation-states persist--but even there, nothing about the difficulty of disarmament leads to a metaphysical claim as to impossibility.

The reason it's feelgood bullshit is that even if Russia claims to have gotten rid of all its nukes, how do we know that's true?

Now, I agree that having enough nukes to kill off the planet 100 times over is a bit much, but having enough to do the job 3 or 4 times pretty much guarantees that the other guy won't think he can wipe your country off the face of the planet on a whim.

I remind you that no country, including ours as was evidenced by the previous Commander in Chief, is immune from having reactionary idiots at the helm with their finger inches from the launch button. If Khrushchev had gotten the notion that a nuclear attack on the US would result in the US getting wiped out with no damage to the USSR, do you seriously think he'd not have attacked? I'm more comfortable with both of us having weapons of mass destruction that we're too afraid to use because the other guy would use his too, than I am with either one of us being the only side with nukes.

these are all self-evident problems that say almost nothing about the assertions concerning mad earlier.

the problems of verification are mostly political. at this point, the same problem you raise about russia could be raised about the united states or israel...the political question is resolvable once it is decided that these weapons are not worth having. and i do not think that they are worth having in principle: but you have to recognize that circulation of technologies, materials and designs through the magickal market (for example) places limits on what disarmament can functionally mean--but reducing the number of nuclear weapons to the greatest possible extent seems a good idea. i don't see the objection to it on principle, and think that these "realistic" assessments confuse a political situation with a natural situation.

closest analogy so far--international agreements to ban the use of shit like mustard gas after world war 1.
does that mean that such items are not produced? hell no--the cold war was a great time for the migration of the worst possible types of thinking about weapons systems. has gas been used since world war 1? in isolated cases, yes--but the key is in isolated cases. so it's possible for the international community to simply decide that there's no ethical or political justification for NOT dismantling nuclear weapons to the greatest possible extent and doing it.

the counter argument seems to me to amount to a reading of the word "disarmament" so that it can only be operative if it's total.
i don't see that as a particularly compelling interpretation.

Yeah, I should start by writing a letter to my member of parliament....oh, wait—

Never mind. That isn't necessary.

The current world wide financial implosion, that seems to be snowballing
more quickly than even the experts can fathom or control,
just might perhaps be beneficial towards disarmament as a necessity.

Nationalism has been dead for some time now.
I believe that the US, and other countries,
will be moving past this denial phase we've been clinging to,
soon.

I have to disagree. Nationalism is NOT dead. If it were, we'd have a heck of a time getting new recruits and we would have ran out of re-enlistees a long time ago.

As far as nuclear disarming, it would be as effective as the Pope outlawing the crossbow. Few powers can afford to live without it. Hopefully it'll never again come to be used, but the ultimate trump card retaliation is hard to ignore. Much may have been made about MAD, arguably too much, however in the parallel universe of no-nuclear weapons it's hard to imagine the massive standoff not coming to blows.

Look at non-trivial armed conflicts since 1945. How many armed conflicts have been perpetrated against nuclear states compared to the number perpetrated by non-nuclear states, and against whom they are perpetrated. It is a matter of performing a very simple cost-benefit analysis to conclude that if the number on nuclear weapons in the world is equal to or greater than one, it is more beneficial to have one or more than to have none.