Emm , I remember in one thread you had posted something what Intel had to say about US, Indian and Russians.

what Intel or Microsoft says has nothing to do with this matter. they are utlilizing a science which is freely available to every one. here we are discussing closed Cities and Science which hasnt been outside the closed wall of labs and results of experiments seen only by chosen one.

I dont know how advanced US or Russian Nukes are in terms of Weight to Yeald ratio for their newer designs , I just said what we had in terms of what was tested in 1998.

No one can know for sure as it is secret. there was documentary on Russiatoday.ru about A-16 this februray. and Head director couldnt clearly say why it is still closed.

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309056780&page=15
Arzamas-16 and Chelyabinsk-70 are the nuclear weapons design laboratories of the FSU, roughly analogous to Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories in the United States. Both Arzamas-16 and Chelyabinsk-70 are located in remote cities, and even today access to them is closely controlled. Visits by foreigners must be requested months in advance and approved by the Ministry of Atomic Energy.
Although the number of institute staff has decreased by about 5,000 in recent years, much of this is due to privatization of services; there has been no real downsizing of science and engineering personnel to meet the reduced funding. The reasons for this are several: the Government appears to control the movement of these people and seems to allow very little emigration;

The better way to look at this aspect is to look at the technologically advanced nature of India Civil Nuclear Program , you will get an idea how advanced Indian Nuclear program is.

Japan/France has far more advanced Civilian nuke program but they cannot reach to what US/Russia has achieved. US/Russia just produced or absorbed more phycist which are specai expert on weopons.

Building a Nuke weapons is far less a challenging job for any country with Advanced Civil Nuclear Program , There are countries who can build advance Nukes like Japan but choose not to for their own reasoning.

here we are not discussing ordinary nukes. Japan can make millions of car engines but it cannot make Jet engines lik GE. thats why u will not see Japanese in Nobel Prize winners. If certain science is offlimits. they cannot create that science.

There is no evidence to suggest that India cannot or does not have any advanced computer modelling capability , BARC has its own breed of supercomputer to do all that stuff.

India hast done alot of simple things.

You need at the minumum one test to validate your design to see all that modelling , simulation etc works as it is designed to be.

ur oversimplifying these things. US/Russia reached that staged after very long time and huge amount of experiance and money spent on it and that results are available to them only. No one else on this planet. If they dont share no one will know unless they went through same process.

Thats the scientific aspect of it , The military aspect is you would like to do more test to prove the robustness of the design and try the various yeald of design and for the political aspect you would want to get the max bang to say that you have an equally bigger bang as the rest of the world has or your neighbour has.

Political aspect was achieved for US/Russia very long time ago. just 1961 nuclear test was 60 to 100 mega tons.

So the bottom line is if you are a country with advanced Nuclear know how and for all the simulation , computer modelling available one test of the new design is good to validate your design

advance nuclear know how is relative term. unless u make thousands of warheads, build entire cities and labs and have test data that on one else have. u cannot claim this in weopons field.

http://www.ukraine-observer.com/articles/184/92
Arzamas-16 is not only a state within a state, fenced off on all sides by barbed wire, a wide control strip and frontier observation towers. It also incorporates the intellectual forces of a huge country on one place – the creation of the mightiest and most destructive weapons to have been manufactured on Earth – thermo-nuclear weapons. The first Soviet atom bomb was created here, behind barbed wire, then the world’s first hydrogen bomb. Here Sakharov, Zeidovich, Tamm and Frank-Kamensky all worked once…

A narrow concrete road, winding round the trees, brought us quite quickly to the main streets of the secret city. By a quirk of fate, the first atomic centre in Russia was located near the Sarovsky Monastery, where the famous St. Serafim Sarovsky lived who foretold many cataclysms of our uneasy century. The ancient structures of the monastery, bordering standard, large-panel, multi-storied houses, make a classic hybrid of the Russian provincial city. But the main focus of secrets is not here – the so-called industrial zone is hidden away from curious eyes: even satellites cannot work out what is being cooked up in the secret shops and bunkers of Arzamas-16.

The level of secrecy is such that even the designers of a subdivision do not know what is happening in the next one. When it was officially announced that a hydrogen weapon had been produced in the USSR, the design section chief of the atomic centre of Arzamas-16 expressed his astonishment in a conversation with colleagues: “Imagine, apparently another centre is working on this weapon.” The first hydrogen bomb prepared for testing was practically under his nose… A video recording of the first hydrogen explosion is shattering: this is probably what the apocalypse looks like…

look at this scale of effort.

http://bcsia.ksg.harvard.edu/publication.cfm?program=STPP&ctype=article&item_id=419
The nuclear facilities inside the cities lie within even more tightly controlled security zones. At Krasnoyarsk-26, where the madness of the Cold War reached a peak, the plutonium production complex, including three reactors, is located 600 feet beneath a mountain. That way, it could continue to produce plutonium even after a nuclear war had laid waste to the surface

I just re-read that part of your reply, you’re totally of the mark. I was talking about Iran’s power generation concerns in that paragraph, not about any attempt on American or Israeli lives. The Bushehr plant is part of their plan to meet a significant percentage of their electricity requirements from nuclear power. What the regime is (officially) worried about is that the lights will go out in Teheran if Russia doesn’t supply fuel for whatever reason and the centrifuges are an attempt to become self-sufficient as a hedge against this.

I don’t pretend to know Iran’s true intentions, but things aren’t that black and white and the situation can be seen as analogous to the rationale you were trying to get across about GBI. That’s what I was trying to say.

u look at Iranian case. it seems that centrifuge technlogy definitely comes from EU. Centrifuge is very difficult technology to master even for Chinese. only EU/Russia has for industrial scale and needs big investment. US is just begining.

http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2007/04/23/001.html
Taking a dig at the West, Ivanov said Russia was in full compliance of international law, unlike Europe’s Urenco, a manufacturer of enriched uranium. Iran has said the centrifuges in its controversial nuclear program are based on Urenco designs
Reporters were barred from viewing a completed centrifuge because, as Ivanov said, it was “a commercial secret.”

It is a security precaution as well, said the plant’s chief designer, Alexander Samorodsky. “If we declassify everything, then people would start making centrifuges and enriching uranium in their backyards,” he said.

He added, however, that “there are some talks” to export the equipment, possibly to China.

Centrifuges were made available to China about a decade ago, and the Chinese took them apart but still could not figure out how they worked, said an official with Tenex, the state nuclear fuel trader
Kovrov director Maxim Kovalchuk gave Ivanov and Kiriyenko a private tour of the plant’s classified premises. “Russia is 15 years ahead of the United States and European countries,” he told them, RIA-Novosti reported

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/22/AR2007042200981_2.html?hpid=topnews
The tight security is traceable to the colorful history of centrifuge technology and its status as a poster child for nuclear proliferation.

It was invented, in its modern form, in a Soviet camp for captured German and Austrian scientists immediately after World War II. The Soviets released the leading engineer of the team, Austrian Gernot Zippe, in 1956, and Zippe shared his secrets first with U.S. officials, then with the Europeans who founded Urenco.
“I saw that the West was far behind what we did in Russia, and I decided that it would be wrong to leave this to the Russians,” Zippe said in 1992

I didn’t even touch the manoeuvrability subject actually. When I mean cover a much wider area, I don’t mean range, I mean you could dispatch, say, 4 Rafales to different places and guard a much bigger part of the sky than a Tu 160 (which must cost more than 4 Rafales???), and they will be much more discreet thanks to their much reduced RCS compared to a plane the size of a Tu 160. Also, the opponent has to attack only one target, so they can concentrate their forces on the Tu, while they’d need to shoot down 4 much harder to detect Rafales.

actually the cost of Tu-160 is around $100m. so u can buy only one rafale/EFfor that price. Mass production of Tu-160 will further bring down the cost. imagine the price of building One rafale per year. and no 4 rafales cannot guard much bigger part of Sky with short range MICA and much shorter range.
One Tu-160 has range of 6 Rafales. and will be able to carry 80 300KM range R-37 missiles or future 500 Km range Project 810 missiles. or else put 200 R-77M class BVR.

(you can replace Rafale by Typhoon and so on).

If it gomes against a F22 or a PAK-FA, the scenario will be even worse.p.

Not actually. put a 10,000 T/R modules build with Diamond into the nose of Tu-160 and many times more powerfull EW suite with supercomputers.

IMO it’s counterproductive to concentrate so much money and fire power into 1 such vulnerable asset… UNLESS !

and that one assest can intercept further into the oceans from ground bases without external refuelling and need of aircraft carriers and can spray BVR missiles on whole group of fighters and can turn around with full afterburner. It has great deterence value.

Or else I much rather prefer the idea of a huge AWACS with a big AESA radar and a bomb bay specially equipped of very long range missiles on rotary launchers. Pretty much like Sams (longer range since they don’t have to climb all the way) fitted to an AWACS.

Nic

AWACS is slow and cannot carry 45 tons at such high speed. Just make Tu-160 with composite materials like Rafale and more powerful engines and no can catch it even in non afterburning thrust.

and those cluster bombs are so inaccurate that it will not directly hit the aircraft? In modern warfare when u release the weopon. it will either hit it with sufficient damage or miss it completely.
and there is no gurantee that ground fire will not completely bring down the aircaft. even A-10/Su-25/Su-34 survival is in doubt. J-10 does not even comes close to them. there is no reason of not making lighter for supercruise atleast. It is pretty obsolete.

that is very small possibility of sharpenels in modern warfare. Most weopons are pretty accurate or inaccurate. Metal vs composites does not matter.
there are alot of advantage of composites.

MIG-21 radar is either 470mm or 500mm. not 600mm. there was some report of IAF/RSAF MIG-21/F-16 exercises where they were seeing each other at same distance. I still think RDY has advantage interms of air to air over other slot arrays. It is the most expensive upgrade.
http://www.phazotron.com/en/military.parts.html

And the US Army ATACMS block 1A fired from MRLS can saturtate a target at 300 km, so what’s the point?

Back to the thread: from all the planes flying, there is no one that has more chances to penetrate a heavily defended airspace, to locate a target using its own sensors or external data, to hit a tarrget and go safely back, other than the Raptor. If anyone knows one, pls., name it:D

this thing is export version. not necessary representing domestic version capability. they are looking 2500-5000KM tactical billistic missile production. this is the single most important strike weopon for them. so lower ranges are pretty much covered.
and about other question. Russian say the same about Su-34.