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I think what we're missing in the nuke chat is: What possible reason could there have been for WWIII to start out as a conventional war which then escalates into nuclear war? I mean, we know from several examples that all-out nuclear war could have started more or less by accident in any number of ways - faulty equipment, overly paranoid commanders, what have you. The system was set up with hair triggers and ultra-short reaction times. But what on earth would have caused either side to start a conventional war in Europe - because let's be real, that's the only way a conventional WWIII would have started. We know for a fact that the proxy wars like Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan wouldn't do it. What reasons would the Soviets have to invade western Europe? There is no strategic military purpose that I can see. They already had buffer states set up since WWII. Likewise, I can't see any realistic political goal. "Liberating" any capitalist nation would only highlight just how much the socialist economy was lagging behind, and how much worse off the socialist citizens were. The soviet leaders knew this. No-one in their right mind within the Warsaw pact wanted Germany reunited by force. And why would NATO invade eastern Europe? To "liberate" the Peoples' Republics? To open a land corridor to West Berlin? There are no reasons that make any sense, outside of retarded propaganda ("The imperialists will do anything to enslave the people of the world!"/"The Bolsheviks want to conquer the entire earth!").
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Feb 22, 2012 23:46
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Did we really just discuss whether or not DU ammunition is a "nuclear weapon"? What in the hell?
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Feb 23, 2012 00:47
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bewbies posted:Did we really just discuss whether or not DU ammunition is a "nuclear weapon"? What in the hell? Bullets are a chemical weapon. Lead is a chemical.
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Feb 23, 2012 00:53
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Judo is a biological weapon.
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Feb 23, 2012 01:24
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New Division posted:So, I'm kind of morbidly curious as to what the potential aftermath of a full scale nuclear exchange between NATO and the Warsaw Pact would have looked like. Have there been many publicly released studies that speculate on the aftermath of the Cold War turning extremely hot? I know of a few good documentaries based around the actual actual government studies of the expected results of nuclear war. There is The War Game released in 1964 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58NmAzQzRjk and there is Threads released in 1984 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQo0BQM3OlQ both about the consequences of a nuclear exchange in the United Kingdom. They're both "docudramas" that follow fictional people through the horrors of nuclear war but still have a lot of good info. In the scenario Threads uses 3000 megatons are exploded world wide while Britain is hit with 210 megatons of nuclear force. Immediate causalities expected to be between 17-30 million. The attack occurs on May 26, meaning the nuclear winter produced by the dust and ash blasted into the upper atmosphere is likely to kill any crops planted that spring, essentially destroying all agricultural production for the year. Subsequent years harvests are likely to be severely reduced by predicted shortages in fertilizer and petrochemicals. The exchange is likely to have damaged the ozone layer, producing global increases in ultraviolet radiation and all the diseases ultraviolet radiation causes. The population is expected to continue declining for 3-8 years, bottoming somewhere between 4 and 11 million persons, similar to Britain's population in the Middle Ages. Some of this info might be outdated but it really hammers home why everyone ever has backed down when looking down the barrel of an ICBM. If there are any official government studies floating around for nuclear attacks I'd love to see them.
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Feb 23, 2012 04:14
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I hate to seem like someone who is pro-nuclear war or something here, but I can't help but play a slight Devil's advocate here. A lot of the nuclear war predictions produced during the Cold War are very far from accurate. Many of were based on faulty or greatly exaggerated early notions of nuclear winter, nuclear summer, and poor assumptions about what would constitute actual strategic targets.
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Feb 23, 2012 05:06
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ripped0ff posted:I hate to seem like someone who is pro-nuclear war or something here, but I can't help but play a slight Devil's advocate here. Can you go into a little more detail about why the predictions are faulty? I'm not arguing here, just wondering.
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Feb 23, 2012 08:38
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The effects of nuclear winter are the most common exaggeration. The entire notion was one that popular myth took the ball and started running with, well ahead of any serious study into the idea. Most nuclear winter scenarios portray a bleak world of endless winter and a total lack of sunlight. In actuality, the best predictions indicate that nuclear winter would result in a severe temperate change (5-10 degrees) for the first few months, and then a moderate change (2-3 degrees) for the next several years. While this would have catastrophic ecological effects, it's hardly the disaster many envision. The same is true of the nuclear summer concept. It's not so much that it can't or won't happen, it's that most popular references to it (and even early scientific ones) are greatly exaggerated. Keep in mind, most of these notions of massive world climate changes as a result of nuclear exchanges were conceived during a time when we knew even less about climate change than we do today. Even today, we still hardly understand what the results of our actions might be to the climate. As far a targeting goes, the biggest thing people didn't understand is that population centers generally weren't considered strategic targets. The idea that each side has "enough bombs to nuke the entire world twice over" contributed to this popular myth. Perhaps a few key population centers would have been hit, but for the most part, both our planning and the Soviets focused on military and industrial targets. Even if you had enough nukes to nuke all of those twice over, you still kept them targeted on military and industrial targets for the sake of redundancy. You can't assume that your boomer is going to get all its missiles off and they'll all make it to their targets; you have to plan for some level of redundancy.
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Feb 23, 2012 14:35
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If WWII was any indication, the workforce of your enemy is a legitimate target, so "constraining yourself to military targets" still means cities get nuked to hell and back (nevermind the fact that most industrial areas ARE in cities in the first place).
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Feb 23, 2012 16:13
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Yay, finally found the NRDC paper that has it all: http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/warplan/index.asp READ THIS
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Feb 23, 2012 16:50
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ArchangeI posted:If WWII was any indication, the workforce of your enemy is a legitimate target, so "constraining yourself to military targets" still means cities get nuked to hell and back (nevermind the fact that most industrial areas ARE in cities in the first place). If the plans on the US side are any indication, civilian and industrial targets were not targets for the surprise first strike, just military. The idea being, the best situation to be in is to destroy all of their retaliatory capability with your first strike, and then send over a telegram saying "Hey, so... we still have plenty of nukes left and you don't have any. So surrender to our will or we start hitting cities." If you've already hit the cities, that's not an option. Of course, this thinking I'm describing is as of 1959 - it gets a lot more complicated once the enemy has subs with nuclear missiles, so their retaliatory capability is much tougher to get in the first wave, as well as other issues like if one side constructed a Dr Strangelove style doomsday machine. Check out the book I mentioned in my previous post, Strategy In The Missile Age by Bernard Brodie at the RAND Corporation in 1959, who helped write the US's early ICBM era nuclear strike plans, and he goes into a lot more detail why it doesn't make sense to hit non-military targets with a surprise first strike.
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Feb 23, 2012 19:37
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Koesj posted:Yay, finally found the NRDC paper that has it all: http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/warplan/index.asp It's kind of interesting, but they seem to base their conclusions on some really flawed assumptions: 1. That we don't need to plan for any redundancy in our nuclear strikes (The reason we had so many was specifically for redundancy). 2. That certain targets would only require one warhead. This is especially flawed when viewed from the Soviet end. Their ICBM had serious accuracy issues; which is part of the reason they built such humongous warheads to compensate. The use of silo clusters especially calls for high levels of redundancy since debris from strikes on nearby silos was expected to destroy a high percentage in incoming warheads (this was the whole reason we built silos in dense clusters). 3. Even individual silos could be expected to take multiple strikes. Titan II silos, for instance, were built to withstand a 1 megaton blast up to one mile from the facility. They weren't even the most well-hardened structures. 4. The US Cold War strategy always called for us to be able to defeat not just our largest enemy, but our largest and second-largest enemies simultaneously. The horror scenario a lot of strategic planners saw was the USSR and NATO expending all their resources on each other, and then having the PRC roll us both up. What this meant in practical terms was that our nuclear arsenal was designed to be large enough to launch a full strike against the USSR, and then still have enough remaining to launch a full strike against China. Whether this seems insane now, it is nonetheless what we planned for. When you consider that individual silos would require 2-3 warheads, and silo clusters could require dozens, and that half of our arsenal wasn't even targeted at the USSR, you start to understand why we had so drat many nukes.
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Feb 23, 2012 21:24
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I don't care for their message but the technical analysis is impressive. As for your points, they're targeting 2 warheads at each silo? And wrt more redundancy: "achieving near-100 percent kill against many such targets is only possible by allocating a disproportionately greater number of attacking warheads. At this point of diminished returns, obtained by assigning more attacking warheads to achieve a higher kill probability, an alternative option would be to integrate missile defense capabilities with offensive forces" I don't even know what you're trying to argue here, did you read the entire study?
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Feb 23, 2012 22:09
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http://www.archive.org/details/nuclearwarwhatsi00grou This was what I read as a kid. The conclusion was: everybody dies. davecrazy fucked around with this message at 23:28 on Feb 23, 2012 |
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Feb 23, 2012 23:24
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ripped0ff posted:The effects of nuclear winter are the most common exaggeration. The entire notion was one that popular myth took the ball and started running with, well ahead of any serious study into the idea. Most nuclear winter scenarios portray a bleak world of endless winter and a total lack of sunlight. In actuality, the best predictions indicate that nuclear winter would result in a severe temperate change (5-10 degrees) for the first few months, and then a moderate change (2-3 degrees) for the next several years. While this would have catastrophic ecological effects, it's hardly the disaster many envision. I have heard that the threat of nuclear winter is exaggerated before but a change of 5-10 degrees (F?) sounds absolutely horrific. For context, the eruption of of Mount Tambora in 1816 lowered global temperatures by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1.3 °F). It doesn't sound like a lot but still caused what became known as the "year without summer;" it actually snowed on Albany New York in June. Its no stretch to imagine 5-10 degrees F preventing virtually all agriculture on earth for an entire year, I can't imagine how you would respond to such a situation. I guess it wouldn't be the end of the world but you'd still see people starving in the streets of every nation on the planet.
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Feb 24, 2012 00:50
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Squalid posted:I have heard that the threat of nuclear winter is exaggerated before but a change of 5-10 degrees (F?) sounds absolutely horrific. For context, the eruption of of Mount Tambora in 1816 lowered global temperatures by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1.3 °F). It doesn't sound like a lot but still caused what became known as the "year without summer;" it actually snowed on Albany New York in June. Its no stretch to imagine 5-10 degrees F preventing virtually all agriculture on earth for an entire year, I can't imagine how you would respond to such a situation. I guess it wouldn't be the end of the world but you'd still see people starving in the streets of every nation on the planet. At least we wouldn't need to cut on our carbon emissions if we had a nuclear war once in a century! Global warming and nuclear winter would cancel each others out.
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Feb 24, 2012 01:24
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Nenonen posted:At least we wouldn't need to cut on our carbon emissions if we had a nuclear war once in a century! Global warming and nuclear winter would cancel each others out. Does anyone know a decent amount of about Cuban involvement in Angola, as well as the Congo? Hell, any of their jaunts really, it's fascinating that a small island nation did so much. I even read somewhere that Nelson Mandela thinks they were crucial in ending apartheid.
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Feb 24, 2012 04:15
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Squalid posted:I have heard that the threat of nuclear winter is exaggerated before but a change of 5-10 degrees (F?) sounds absolutely horrific. For context, the eruption of of Mount Tambora in 1816 lowered global temperatures by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1.3 °F). It doesn't sound like a lot but still caused what became known as the "year without summer;" it actually snowed on Albany New York in June. Its no stretch to imagine 5-10 degrees F preventing virtually all agriculture on earth for an entire year, I can't imagine how you would respond to such a situation. I guess it wouldn't be the end of the world but you'd still see people starving in the streets of every nation on the planet. Oh, I'm not arguing that it wouldn't be horrific. It would definitely be. The thing is, it wouldn't be the endless deep freeze of popular myth. What you're talking about is a year without a summer/really harsh winter followed by a few troubling years, and then a return to norm. Again, even the best guesses were really just that in the end. The study of climate change was still incredibly undeveloped towards the end of the Cold War. Koesj posted:I don't care for their message but the technical analysis is impressive. Honestly, no. I didn't read through even a great chunk of it. I just skimmed it before posting and cruising off to work. If I'm glancing over some major issues then I'll defer to your read of the topic. I'm not really sure I understand what the snippet you posted is implying. Are they attempting to imply that the alternative to knocking out an enemy's strike capability with ballistic missiles would be to give your conventional forces missile defense options? How is this supposed to help the Soviets counter our ICBMs in Wyoming? Is the implication that systems like Nike could actually be counted on to have any real hope of intercepting MIRVs? I'm not trying to be snippy here; I seriously just don't even understand that point. The "alternative option" they're offering just seems ridiculous. Nog fucked around with this message at 06:26 on Feb 24, 2012 |
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Feb 24, 2012 06:18
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Well I guess we can be happy that nuclear war won't instantly lead to The Road.
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Feb 24, 2012 09:27
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Well, the road takes place some time after the disaster that takes place. So maybe those statistics are all wrong and poo poo gets way worse! So go US Military! Yet another prediction you hosed up!
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Feb 24, 2012 10:03
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ripped0ff posted:I'm not really sure I understand what the snippet you posted is implying. Are they attempting to imply that the alternative to knocking out an enemy's strike capability with ballistic missiles would be to give your conventional forces missile defense options? How is this supposed to help the Soviets counter our ICBMs in Wyoming? Is the implication that systems like Nike could actually be counted on to have any real hope of intercepting MIRVs? I'm not trying to be snippy here; I seriously just don't even understand that point. The "alternative option" they're offering just seems ridiculous. "NRDC Report, Ch.2, p.47-48 posted:The attack uses 500 W87 warheads—equivalent to all MM III missiles converted to Two warheads each against 360 silo aimpoints for a 60~97% chance of taking them out, depending on RV CEP and reliability. Leaving, on average, after 288 seperate scenario calculations, 24 silos operational of which only, again on average, another 7 would have been taken out by increasing the number of warheads per aimpoint to three. You're quickly going to get up to a point of very marginal returns when upping the numbers of warheads for a better chance of taking out hardened targets. The point they try to make is that it's much more interesting to catch the stragglers on the defensive side. This is a june 2001 report on the then current situation so you can't parse it one on one to a cold war scenario but the trade-offs are the same. Do yourself a favor and read the report, you'll see that while this: quote:Perhaps a few key population centers would have been hit, but for the most part, both our planning and the Soviets focused on military and industrial targets. might be true strictly from a planning perspective, the effects of those strikes on population centers would have been way more severe than any (semi-)clean counterforce scenario suggests. There's a nice countervalue scenario in Ch. 5 outlining the potential of having a single SSBN warload as a countervalue deterrent. 50 million plus casualties in most cases, which is more than one third of the Russian population in 2001.
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Feb 24, 2012 15:36
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It would probably be better to have lived in the Soviet Union in the event of nuclear war just because of how massive the country was. Gives you a better chance to survive if you are not near any targets.
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Feb 24, 2012 15:59
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:It would probably be better to have lived in the Soviet Union in the event of nuclear war just because of how massive the country was. Gives you a better chance to survive if you are not near any targets.
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Feb 24, 2012 16:22
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:It would probably be better to have lived in the Soviet Union in the event of nuclear war just because of how massive the country was. Gives you a better chance to survive if you are not near any targets. While good in theory, the majority of the strategic targets were not that far away from the population centres. The European part of Soviet Union, where you were most likely to live, was only half the size of USA.  
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Feb 24, 2012 16:32
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 quote:FIGURE 4.11
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Feb 24, 2012 17:20
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Have these reports y'all have posted placed any estimates on global casualties? Are we talking a 1% drop in world population? 10%? Also, can anyone give a little more detail on these hardened nuclear bunkers that Ardent Communist mentioned?
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Feb 24, 2012 17:24
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to counter all the nuclear stuff what about the smaller wars within ww2 like French-Siamese war of 1940. Poland taking a chunk of Czechoslovakia in 1938 or the soviet taking Bessarabia (Transnistria) from the Romanians in 1939. I think there also was a war between Hungary and Romania in 1940 over transylvania that Germany mediated inquote:fought between Thailand and Vichy France over certain areas of French Indochina that had once belonged to Thailand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Thai_War
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Feb 24, 2012 18:03
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Have these reports y'all have posted placed any estimates on global casualties? Are we talking a 1% drop in world population? 10%? Depends on what you're targeting. McNamara theorised about having an assured deterrent when you're able to threaten 25% of the enemy population. If it had come to total war these are the potential numbers you're looking at, 1999 ones at least: All NATO Member Countries Total pop.: 754,933,329 25%: 188,730,000 Warheads needed to threaten 25%: 300 Russia Total pop.: 151,827,600 25%: 37,956,300 Warheads needed to threaten 25%: 51 China Total pop.: 1,281,008,318 25: 320,252,079 Warheads needed to threaten 25%: 368 500kt. warheads I think, little less than half a billion casualties for the big three nuclear powers/alliance blocks when citybusting with 717 warheads, easily done in the seventies and eighties. That's probably more than 10% of the world population as an immediate casualty with way less than 10% of stockpiled warheads used during those decades.
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Feb 24, 2012 18:52
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Trench_Rat posted:Poland taking a chunk of Czechoslovakia in 1938 or the soviet taking Bessarabia (Transnistria) from the Romanians in 1939. I think there also was a war between Hungary and Romania in 1940 over transylvania that Germany mediated in The Polish occupation of Bohumin wasn't really a war. It was part of the area demanded by Germany, but with a Polish majority, for which reason Poland and Czechoslovakia had fought for it in 1919. Czechoslovakia was in no condition to go to war over it, so they withdrew their forces and the next day Poland annexed the area. Likewise the Hungarian occupation of southern Slovakia in 1938 and Ruthenia in 1939 were unopposed. Neither was the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia. Soviets were fully prepared to go to war, but Romanians gave it over because there was no help coming to them - the area was part of Soviet sphere of influence under the Molotov-Ribbentrop protocols so Germany refused to help, France had just fallen and Britain had its own problems. The Transylvanian question was also 'solved' by Germany demanding Romania to give northern Transylvania to Hungary, and they obliged. The relations between the two were bad throughout WW2, but it only broke into an open war in 1944 after Romania joined the Allies. Most people remember Romanians for ha ha being overrun at Stalingrad, but not so many know that they had to declare war on Germany after the armistice with Allies and their forces suffered huge casualties in the heavy fighting with Hungarian and German forces under very difficult conditions.
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Feb 24, 2012 19:00
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Koesj posted:That's probably more than 10% of the world population as an immediate casualty with way less than 10% of stockpiled warheads used during those decades. You'll also need to mind the long time and global consequences. The disturbance on grain trade caused by WWIII, combined with the effect on climate causing crops to suffer everywhere, would have terrible consequences. Especially in third world countries already suffering from famines. For a few years the whole world would be living like North Koreans, while the North Koreans would become even slimmer.
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Feb 24, 2012 19:08
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Nenonen posted:You'll also need to mind the long time and global consequences. The disturbance on grain trade caused by WWIII, combined with the effect on climate causing crops to suffer everywhere, would have terrible consequences. Especially in third world countries already suffering from famines. For a few years the whole world would be living like North Koreans, while the North Koreans would become even slimmer. Immediate casualty were the operative words here.
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Feb 24, 2012 19:12
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:It would probably be better to have lived in the Soviet Union in the event of nuclear war just because of how massive the country was. Gives you a better chance to survive if you are not near any targets. I think with thousands and thousands of warheads, every population center in Siberia is hosed too. How many population centers in Soviet Union there are that have above a thousand people? 5000? In the 80s U.S. could have lobbed two nukes in each and STILL have like 10,000 left. U.S. is pretty vast too. I don't think the differences would be that great, especially compared with U.S.'s greater degree of de-centralization which would ensure that total breakdown of order wouldn't happen instantly. Best place probably to live is something that is so inconsequential that neither power would nuke you...not sure if such a place existed.
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Feb 24, 2012 19:21
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DarkCrawler posted:Best place probably to live is something that is so inconsequential that neither power would nuke you...not sure if such a place existed. I'd imagine the entire southern hemisphere more or less would be OK, to the extent that you could be OK in this scenario. Brazil for example wasn't a NATO member. South Africa may or may not be ok. Australia would be boned if the Chinese go for it.
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Feb 24, 2012 19:25
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Nenonen posted:The Polish occupation of Bohumin wasn't really a war. It was part of the area demanded by Germany, but with a Polish majority, for which reason Poland and Czechoslovakia had fought for it in 1919. Czechoslovakia was in no condition to go to war over it, so they withdrew their forces and the next day Poland annexed the area. Likewise the Hungarian occupation of southern Slovakia in 1938 and Ruthenia in 1939 were unopposed. The Romanians were the only country in WW2 to fight on (and get attacked by) every side. First they fought with the Axis, mainly against the Soviets. The Allies also proceeded to bomb the poo poo out of their oil fields. Then, when Barbarossa went tits up, they tried to join the Allies to escape the wrath of the Soviets. Unfortunately they did it too early and the retreating Germans kicked the poo poo out of them. Then the Soviets arrived, laughed at their attempt to join the Allies, took them over, and made them fight against the Germans. Basically, the Romanians got bent over the table by every party.
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Feb 24, 2012 19:31
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DarkCrawler posted:I think with thousands and thousands of warheads, every population center in Siberia is hosed too. How many population centers in Soviet Union there are that have above a thousand people? 5000? In the 80s U.S. could have lobbed two nukes in each and STILL have like 10,000 left. US policymakers talked about what they'd hit in case they wanted to launch a surprise first strike, and they explicitly decided not to specifically target civilian centers. Better to destroy the enemy's retaliatory nuclear capability, and then have the civilian targets still standing so you have something to hold hostage, to encourage the enemy not to launch a retaliatory strike with their surviving nuclear capability. Consider two scenarios: first, a first strike launched at all targets, civilian and military. You of course don't get every enemy nuclear warhead, since some are on trains or subs or the nukes sent to kill them miss, but you get most of them. You also kill the vast majority of the enemy's civilians. At this point, the enemy is likely to say screw it, they killed our civvies, let's return the favor, and they nuke your civilian targets. Compare this to another scenario - you launch a first strike at solely military targets. You of course don't get every enemy nuclear warhead, since some are on trains or subs or the nukes sent to kill them miss, but you get most of them. Then, you send over a telegram saying "The vast majority of your nuclear capability is destroyed and your civilians are vulnerable. We still have plenty of nukes and you have few. If you retaliate, we will kill your civilians. The only way to save your people is to surrender." The enemy is much more likely to surrender without sending a retaliatory strike compared to the other scenario, where they almost certainly will retaliate. So the second plan, to not specifically target civilian centers, would be considered superior. Of course, a great many civilians would still die from fallout and from being near military targets, but in the minds of policymakers there was a difference between explicitly targeting civilian targets and not. It does mean that if you were a Soviet civilian, as long as you didn't live within blast radius of an ICBM silo or a military airfield or port, you were unlikely to get vaporized in a surprise first strike. One can argue about whether this logic (that the enemy would be less likely to retaliate if their own civilians were still mostly alive and held hostage) is correct or not, but it was what US policymakers largely thought as of the late 50s and early 60s, according to the guys making the policy. Of course, many of them did also think this was silly and that the enemy would retaliate no matter what you did or didn't hit, and that no surprise first strike should ever be launched. There was internal debate on this question, but it was generally agreed that if a strike was to be launched, hitting civilian targets would not be productive. Soviet records of what their strategic thinking at the time was are of course still highly classified and probably will never be known to the public. gohuskies fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Feb 24, 2012 |
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Feb 24, 2012 19:41
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Flippycunt posted:The Romanians were the only country in WW2 to fight on (and get attacked by) every side. After the Russo-Finnish armistice in 1944, Germans attempted to capture the Suursaari island in the Gulf of Finland to continue blocking Soviet access to Baltic Sea. This was an utter failure as the Finnish defenders didn't surrender or evacuate like the German commander had hoped, and Soviet air forces joined in to bomb the Germans pinned in the harbour. Soon after this Finns started their offensive operations in Lapland, with the amphibious invasion of Tornio really putting some momentum to it. Last Germans left northern Lapland by the end of April 1945. Bulgaria also participated in the war on both sides of the fence, first occupying parts of Greece, then after the coup defending against German attack, with some Bulgarian occupation detachments having to fight their way back to home. Then the Bulgarian army continued as part of Allied forces to Austria, just like Romanians.
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Feb 24, 2012 20:17
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gohuskies posted:US policymakers talked about what they'd hit in case they wanted to launch a surprise first strike, and they explicitly decided not to specifically target civilian centers. Better to destroy the enemy's retaliatory nuclear capability, and then have the civilian targets still standing so you have something to hold hostage, to encourage the enemy not to launch a retaliatory strike with their surviving nuclear capability. Consider two scenarios: first, a first strike launched at all targets, civilian and military. You of course don't get every enemy nuclear warhead, since some are on trains or subs or the nukes sent to kill them miss, but you get most of them. You also kill the vast majority of the enemy's civilians. At this point, the enemy is likely to say screw it, they killed our civvies, let's return the favor, and they nuke your civilian targets. That is assuming that the other side does not launch on detection. Most of MAD is based on the idea that whoever shoots first dies second.
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Feb 24, 2012 20:21
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ArchangeI posted:That is assuming that the other side does not launch on detection. Most of MAD is based on the idea that whoever shoots first dies second. I should have clarified that my source was as of 1959. We were just finishing development of our Ballistic Missile Early Warning System at that time, and I don't know what kind of ICBM detection system the Soviets had then but I'd be surprised if it was better than ours. The calculus might have changed somewhat as ICBM detection got better but I don't know if it would change significantly. Either way, there were still plenty of people who'd agree with your statement - that even not targeting enemy civilians, a first strike was still a mutual suicide pact. MAD's almost certainly true, but policymakers still wanted to think of a way that there would be at least a possibility of not being a mutually assured destruction, and not targeting civilians and hoping the enemy doesn't launch before yours hit was about the only chance of that happening.
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Feb 24, 2012 20:32
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gohuskies posted:I should have clarified that my source was as of 1959. Maybe, but you're crediting the Powers with late-80s technology except for the early-warning. I don't know of any real rail-based ICBMs until the handful of SS-24, and you can't do counterforce for poo poo with the CEPs in '59. You're not giving a whole lot of consideration to the bomber element of the triad, either.
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Feb 24, 2012 20:42
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Umm maybe the soviets could have put an early R-7 version in flight but otherwise you're looking at no ICBMs in '59. e: wait I guess there were a handful of early-rear end Atlases around.
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Feb 24, 2012 20:48
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