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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Scary to think in retrospect that the presence of this silo might have made y'all a direct target during the Cold War should things have actually turned hot. (Assuming the counter intelligence and reconnaissance determined there was a silo present.)

I'd also worry (not much, but just enough to be creeped out and never want to buy one of these) that there may be some system that is still programmed with old silos as targets. If things heat up again, or if there is some error, that property might be a target.

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> I'd also worry (not much, but just enough to be creeped out and never want to buy one of these) that there may be some system that is still programmed with old silos as targets. If things heat up again, or if there is some error, that property might be a target.

At that point I think you'd also want to ask yourself whether surviving a nuclear war would really be the preferable outcome.

Is there an actual reason why you think it might not be preferable to survive? You can always change your mind if it turns out that it was the wrong choice, right?

Being instantly obliterated might be preferable to watching the only world you've known be destroyed and everyone you ever knew or loved die horribly.

Highly doubtful. If anything you would be free to become the twisted, savage raider you've always wanted to become, roving the lands for scrap and caps.

Have you ever heard the term "nuclear sponge"? Projections for a nuclear war is that like half of the midwest gets nuked to smithereens in order to hit the silos; it probably doesn't matter much if one is in your backyard or a hundred miles down the road.

During the Cold War, we had 1050 holes in the ground, spread across Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, Montana, and the Dakotas. It was exactly that, an impossible sponge to soak up the Soviet capability. And that's just the Northern Tier Missile field.

I grew up in an area absolutely covered in targets (Mather AFB, McClellan AFB, Travis AFB, various Army depots, and the California state Capitol.) I figured I was radioactive vapor if things got that far, so I didn’t obsess over it.

I grew up in Germany in the cold war, around 80 km west of the iron curtain. Prime target for nukes from both sides as it would be the place where Nato and Warshaw Pact would collide. In fact there were even nuclear "landmines" near bridges or other tactical points for making areas impassable by soviet tanks.

During the 80s I was fully aware that - if WW3 would have broken out, even in a limited way - it would have meant game over for me. You'll learn just not to worry about that.

> In fact there were even nuclear "landmines" near bridges or other tactical points for making areas impassable by soviet tanks.

Wait, were these ever actually deployed?! They were certainly studied, but I didn't think they ever made it into the ground.

NATO learnt quickly not to discuss results of their own exercises publicly.

Turns out that "success" involved "most of germany dead by NATO nukes" didn't bring positive attention.

I grew up in Naperville, IL, and one of my teachers told us that we were goners in a nuclear war because we were halfway between Fermilab and Argonne National Lab. We also had a missile silo in our town, although it had been decommissioned and turned into a park by the 90s. Probably would have caught a nuke, just in case.

Nike missile sites were common around the major cities in the US. The were there to shoot down Soviet bombers and try to shoot down an ICBM warhead.

Of course being 1960s technology, the missiles’ inaccuracy and lack of numbers, was offset by having nuclear warheads.

The plan was to set a nuke off above your own city, to try to destroy/deflect another nuke, or an entire bomber squadron. SMH

The nuclear option was added later on.

The house I grew up in was right next to a Nike base outside of Philadelphia.

For those in the Bay Area, there's a Nike base that offers tours a few days a week in Golden Gate Recreational Area.

You would have loved the Air-2A Genie weapon. An air-to-air anti-aircraft missile. Nuclear.

Or the time we dropped nukes down a couple gas wells to experiment with Nuclear Fracking.

The Genie was a rocket, not a missile. Missiles are guided. A nuclear bomb you can just generally boresight more or less in the direction of a bomber formation and let fly, or so went the theory.

Eerie was living in Topeka in the early 80s when “the day after” was released. For those not familiar with the movie or Kansas, Topeka is just west of Lawrence where the movie was set. Seeing the birds fly from familiar looking land freaked me out.

I had never heard of this film before, but the Wikipedia article leads me to believe it had a profound impact on American society and policymakers,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After

Pretty incredible. Thanks for sharing!

I was in elementary school at the time. This movie scared the living shit out of every single person I know. Nuclear war didn’t feel hypothetical or fake back then, it felt like a real thing that adults were worried might actually happen.

Agreed I was growing up in Charleston, SC at the time. Big Polaris base there at the time. We told we were pretty much ash when (not if) WWIII kicked off.

I was terrified of this movie when I was a little kid. Circa 10 years old. Just seeing the trailer (on NBC?) scared me. Never watched it, even to this day. There was one other movie of this ilk. I remember in the trailer for one or the other, there being a scene with a woman protester, shouting with a British accent, "You cannot win a nuclear war!"

That other movie is Threads (1984), the scene you describe is in the trailer and the full movie is available at archive.org (https://archive.org/details/threads_202007)

"Command and Control" by Eric Schlosser (I think it was) contains a report about the USA being extremely hesitant and taking ages to reprogram the missiles. So yeah, I'd not be surprised either.

Also, that's a great (audio) book on the general subject.

> the property is designed to withstand a nuclear strike

I really don't see the problem

Unfortunately I personally lived in an even worse spot ... just far enough away to "survive"... for a while.

IMHO, it less scary than living in New York, Washington, Beijing, Moscow, and so on. They are the main targets.

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