Deep Space Deployments

A companion to Joe Buff's "On 21st Century Nuclear Deterrence" series. This thought piece explores the wider technical and policy implications behind solving a problem raised by many defense experts.

What if some hypothetical new, all-seeing sub hunting breakthrough rendered today's super-stealthy nuclear missile submarines easy to locate and attack? How might America then regain the guaranteed second-strike deterrence needed to sustain global strategic stability against nuclear-armed adversary superpowers? The author suggests looking to the outer solar system, while thinking about another pressing defense need affecting Humanity: a reliable method for deflecting comets and asteroids that are on a collision course with Planet Earth, especially those known to be "flying rubble piles," or which move in weakly bound groups, or even sometimes have their own moons or rings.

Joe grew up in New York City, and now lives in upstate New York with his wife, Sheila. After winning a Westinghouse National Science Talent Search scholarship at age 15, he earned a BA, Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with Honors in Math from NYU. He won a National Science Foundation Fellowship in math. He earned an MS in algebraic topology from MIT. He became a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries (FSA) in 1980. Buff spent twenty years working on quantitative modeling, risk analysis, and strategic planning in Wall Street and as a partner in a top-10 global management consulting firm. Joe Buff is the author of "On 21st Century Nuclear Deterrence-- Volume I", and 6 bestselling technothriller novels in the submarine tactical-nuclear warfare "Captain Jeffrey Fuller" series. He has a 50-year track record as a creative researcher in the application of his actuarial risk mitigation expertise to national defense. In the most recent twenty-five years, as President of Joe Buff Inc. he has been an award-winning writer and commentator about submarine warfare and nuclear deterrence. In 1997, Joe established Joe Buff Inc. and wrote some of the two dozen, forward-looking articles about undersea warfare tactics and technology for The Submarine Review. Five of the articles won Annual Literary Awards from Naval Submarine League. He is now hard at work on Volume II of his on 21st Century Nuclear Deterrence non-fiction series.