And the proof is in the pudding, during these 75 years not a single bomb exploded with intent to kill. The forecast for the next 75 years surely is more dire.
Seriously, if someone decides to nuke the US, where would they start? Almost certainly Washington DC and NYC. The US is too big to bomb in its entirety.
Maybe I should move to Boise, Idaho or something. I don't think they're going to get bombed, and it seems nice.
Grim times ahead for sure but i'm not that stressed considering that something like 70% of russia's population is in the west of the country, very, very close to europe
> The US is too big to bomb in its entirety.
Russia has ~5500 warheads, so maybe not every square inch but certainly several cities and other locations in each state.
First, nuclear forces: ICBM and IRBM silos and their C2, nuclear weapons storage, strategic airfields and ballistic-missile submarine bases. (This is why nuclear arsenals escalate against each other. The defensive role of missile silos is both deference and to soak up the enemy’s nukes.)
Second, leadership: command posts and communication.
Third, other military: barracks, supply depots, marshalling points, airfields, ammunition storage, tank and vehicle storage.
Fourth, military industry: ammo, tank, APC factories; refineries; railyards and repair facilities. Steel, aluminum and power generation.
Fifth, population centres. (You don’t want to nuke New York if that could have taken out a silo that will flatten a dozen of your cities.)
In summary, somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere :).
So, attacking them just means they launch everything at you while also wasting your nukes.
Nuking full siloes is the point of a first strike. So yes, you’re relatively safe near a silo field if America is launching first and the adversary assumes or knows that every silo launched perfectly.
I’m not saying nobody would ever target a missile silo, just that they aren’t particularly high on this list of targets.
The target list is obviously conditional on a nuclear war happening. Unless your position is the U.S. is invulnerable to a first strike, then the silos should stay at the top of the list. (Even in a second strike you hit them and hit them fast. If there was a launch error you get a tremendous defensive ROI in taking them out.)
Even France and the UK has 4 nuclear subs, the US has what 14 ballistic missile submarines?
That’s incoherent with this thread, which started with someone asking what would happen “if someone decides to nuke the US.” Not if France launched a suicidal first strike on America.
The realistic scenarios for America getting nuked are a first strike from a rogue state, first strike from Russia or China, and second strike from Russia or China.
First strike from a rogue state is basically nuclear terrorism; it will probably target a population centre or something close and hittable, e.g. Guam for Pyongyang. First strikes from Russia or China would target silos. (Unless theatre-based, e.g. hitting Guam and our Japanese airbases ahead of an invasion of Taiwan.) Second strike would mean silos are probably empty, though not necessarily, these are hundreds of decades-old mechanisms in who knows what condition of readiness, but sure, if the American first strike is comprehensive and flawless, and the enemy omnipotent, we’d probably not see too many nukes go at silos. (You would at other nuclear infrastructure.)
So in general, no, if we’re in wide-scale nuclear war the planners who thought about this for decades in the Cold War may not have missed that launched tubes that have launched are now empty.
Obviously by definition someone can attack first, however:
“First strike capability is a country's ability to defeat another nuclear power by destroying its arsenal to the point where the attacking country can survive the weakened retaliation while the opposing side is left unable to continue war.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_strike_(nuclear_strategy...
So yes in theory sure a first strike would take out nuclear silos, but neither side believed they could preform a successful first strike. It’s a theoretical goal, not something that seems to have been possible barring the very early days of the Cold War before ICBM’s existed.
Which then brings up the question of what exactly you target if you assume thousands of nukes will hit you regardless of what you aim for.
By useful I mean you can do significantly better than saying if it’s targeting the middle of the US, east, or west coast. Though it’s quite a large area.
If you’re doing a first strike and aren’t a moron, you conventionally strike the early-warning radars first. Ideally in a plausibly-deniable way.
There’s no plausibility deniable way to take these systems down in practice.
He's already talked about invading Greenland, what's to stop him from trying to invade somewhere else, somewhere with more firepower to fight back? All it would take is Fox News or OAN to start running stories about how the US is actually entitled to the land of France. It's not like it matters if there's any truth to it.
Is it? I mean I don't think they could legally refuse (if use of force was authorized by the president and congress)? So it would still effectively be a military "coup" and those can obviously still happen in authoritarian countries.
I'm a non-believer when it comes to these sorts of things, but if anything was to convince me otherwise it'd be watching Trump speed run us towards another World War these past few weeks.
I think the concern is that telling Ukraine to surrender their land after they were invaded by Russia will give Russia the confidence to start attacking other European countries. Traditionally, NATO would have protected us from that happening, but with Trump upsetting all our NATO partners, I'm kind of concerned that that won't help this time.
I've been listening to a lot of French news lately and France is already talking about needing to build more nuclear weapons and to extend nuclear protections across Europe, as the US has in a short few weeks completely alienated all of our allies from the past 80 years [2].
So, I don't know, seems like we're closer to everything going to shit globally than in any other time in my 40+ years.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-will-work-firmly-a...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/how-realistic-is-france...
It's a 7700nmi trip:
* http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?MS=wls&DU=nm&P=KJFK-NZAA
Not many private jets (or even commercial ones) can do non-stop:
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prep...
There's a handy map in this article:
* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/who-would-take-th...
* https://www.newsweek.com/safest-us-states-nuclear-war-attack...
In the US, the west coast and Florida seem to be the best candidates from fallout. See also perhaps:
* https://www.mirasafety.com/blogs/news/nuclear-attack-map
* https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/yc0ho2/us_cities_a...
I think it's unlikely the Russians would nuke somewhere like that as they only have two decent cities which would be hit in retaliation. It's more likely if they went nuclear that they'd hit troops in Ukraine. Biden issued a lot of threats to Putin if they did that but under Trump I'm not sure much US retaliation would happen.
You should be. The more small states with nuclear weapons, the more chances there are that any one country feels like a nuclear assault could be "worth it". Heck, just look at India and Pakistan. I can't remember which Indian government minister said it, but years ago he essentially said that India could "absorb" a nuclear strike from Pakistan, because since India is bigger with a lot more people, any nuclear volley would mean the complete annihilation of Pakistan while India would "only" lose a couple hundred million people...
The more proliferation there is, the higher the chance any one government will move away from MAD theory to "well, guess we've got nothing left to lose".
I too hope that more nuclear arms will result in reduced conflicts and a reduced risk model overall. But if I were to bet, I'd bet that if we 10x the number of players with Nuke's, we 10x the number of chances for some to be used.
It will make the world a safer place. That's why Macron is opening up this discussion at all.
Japan is considered a "paranuclear" state, with complete technical prowess to develop a nuclear weapon quickly, and is sometimes called being "one screwdriver's turn" from the bomb, as it is considered to have the materials and technical capacity to make a nuclear weapon at will.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-V#Potential_as_an_interconti...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epsilon_(rocket)#Vehicle_descr...
"The Epsilon is expected to have a shorter launch preparation time than its predecessors;[11][12][13] a function called "mobile launch control" greatly shortens the launch preparation time, and needs only eight people at the launch site,[14] compared with 150 people for earlier systems.[15]"
All this is just a coincidence. ^_-
The biggest threats to Japan are China and North Korea: you do not need ICBMs for them.
Cruise missiles have ranges of >1500km:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomahawk_(missile_family)
And with that, a missile launched from the north of Japan (e.g., Sapporo) can hit NK:
* http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?R=1500km@RJCC
Southern Japan (e.g., Nagasaki) can reach Beijing and Shanghai:
* http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?R=1500km@RJFU
Japan doesn't currently have any, but perhaps Taiwan and/or SK would be willing to sell them some existing design:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyunmoo-3
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hsiung_Feng_IIE
Though they seem to be working on updating their own design:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_12_surface-to-ship_missil...
So did Churchill [1]. Unfortunately, that way be strategic nuclear war.
For those unaware:
> The Vela incident was an unidentified double flash of light detected by an American Vela Hotel satellite on 22 September 1979 near the South African territory of Prince Edward Islands in the Indian Ocean, roughly midway between Africa and Antarctica. Today, most independent researchers believe that the flash was caused by a nuclear explosion[1][2][3]—an undeclared joint nuclear test carried out by South Africa and Israel.[4][5]
> The cause of the flash remains officially unknown, and some information about the event remains classified by the US government.[5] While it has been suggested that the signal could have been caused by a meteoroid hitting the satellite, the previous 41 double flashes detected by the Vela satellites were caused by nuclear weapons tests.[6][7][8]
Now I'm not so sure.
Small nuclear armed states will never have a credible deterrent because unfortunately due to their countries' small size they will always be at risk of a first strike. Chinese leaders believed they were in this position vis-a-vis the United States until about a decade and a half ago.
For example, we hear about North Korea a lot but they don't have a credible deterrent. Their stockpiles are easily destroyed in a surprise attack by a couple of JASSMs because they don't have the luxury of a large landmass like Russia and China to move their mobile launchers around.
> The modern world is a place where nuclear-armed great powers, led by authoritarian leaders, often feel the impulse to bully smaller nations. If those smaller nations lack nuclear weapons, they lie prostrate and vulnerable at the feet of the bullies. But if they have nukes, they are much harder to push around. This doesn’t mean they’re impervious to attack — Israel has been struck by Iran and its proxies — but having nukes dramatically improves a small country’s security.
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/japan-south-korea-and-poland-n...