Study on US-Russia nuclear war: 91.5 MM casualties in first few hours (2019)
icanw.org
icanw.org
https://breakingdefense.com/2022/02/no-us-missile-defense-sy...
Also, Europeans are our friends. It's right to help defend them.
> Also, Europeans are our friends. It's right to help defend them.
You've read too much into my comment. I support NATO and believe America is generally a force for good.
An example of those wars is Afganistan. Yes, the US managed to destroy the country but could not win the war. Russia also destroyed Ukraine and probably will not win the war.
But trust me, defense industry lobbyists are very eager for the US Government to spend even more money to address these shortcomings...
I am in Ukraine and I do not feel like I am in a destroyed country.
That’s a downright lie.
There was a whole anti-ballistic missile treaty which banned the US and the USSR (and then its successor states) from developing anti-ballistic missile systems. George W. Bush withdrew the US from the treaty in 2002.
Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Ballistic_Missile_Treaty
> Mutual assured destruction (MAD) is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy ...
I'm unable to find anything about the "Assured Destruction" doctrine which isn't about MAD. If you have some links I should read to learn more, please do send them. But presumably, the US's official doctrine is that if Russia sends in a first strike, the US will retaliate with a second strike? And presumably Russia's official doctrine is the same? If that's the case, isn't that just the MAD doctrine, even if it's under a different name officially? Or has both countries officially said that a first strike won't be followed up by a second strike?
MAD is a game theory construct. It may inform doctrine, but it doesn't actually dictate how we employ forces. US doctrine can be found in the nuclear posture review : https://media.defense.gov/2018/Feb/02/2001872877/-1/-1/1/EXE...
It amounts to : the primary point of the US arsenal is deterrence. As such, we will assure that we can destroy the enemy as necessary.
Russian doctrine had explicitly contemplated the first use of nuclear weapons "in response to large-scale aggression utilizing conventional weapons in situations critical to the national security of the Russian Federation." So if they get in a war and start losing.
The critical part of MAD is a so called balance of terror. But the US doesn't use nuclear weapons because it's afraid of getting nuked in return, and Russia believes that they can win a nuclear war. So it's both not doctrine (because it's not how either military plans to use forces) and not real (because the preconditions don't exist).
Because then the solution would be to disable all of the other country's nukes simultaneously and then trigger your own.
They responded by participating in arms reduction treaties which had the same effect as the US building an anti-missile system which could intercept 95% of Russian weapons. If the US built a full missile defense umbrella, adversaries would respond by building enough weapons to defeat the umbrella.
Could the adversaries afford that ?
In the end, dummy IBCMs are easy to build, and it will be hard for any system to shoot them all down if there are a thousand dummies for every live missile. Missile defense it ultimately impossible, IMO.
Nuking a country where 90% of money is spent on offensive capabilities means the retaliation will be extreme. Probably not worth nuking as you will get attacked back much harder.
US Defense spending is the biggest welfare program in human history and both political parties fully support it.
But is it welfare for the right people?
So one could look at where the CIA spends money to see if effort is put there over strictly military. Not that the Pentagon has been audited lately or anything...
Enemy launches warheads single file (one behind another at a specific distance) towards a target. Your defense system sends up a missile to destroy that warhead, effectively. Now you have a smoke screen and sensor blackout at altitude X.
Oh look, you’ve detected a new nuke exiting the smoke screen. Now you can blow that one up, but the smoke screen moves closer to the intended target. Repeat until a nuke hits you.
Nukes produce broadband noise. Improved radars let you get much better signal to noise and see through it anyway.
And the warheads you're streaming in need to actually detonate to give noise. Otherwise you just get a debris field.
There are some videos of MIRV reentries on youtube that really something to see. Seeing those bright lights come down from the sky in a line, one after another, is simultaneously chilling and awe inspiring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7X89a531CY
This is a thought that keeps me up at night.
For the flee to New Zealand crowd; I am quite curious what will happen when everyone with access to a long range airliner or business jet heads in that direction…
Related, NZ could do with some serious thinking about its inability to enforce airspace sovereignty.
Hope ya have a farm. GL trying to get through an airport, GL trying to drive anywhere.
We thought we were standing on the shoulders of giants, turns out we where standing on cards.
Seems like such a goofy attitude/plan, so many failure modes.
The only realistic plan for this scenario is to leave before the war even starts.
>goofy attitude
Just a little gallows humor. As for planning, I have enough canned food and bottled water in my closet to last about a week. But that's more a plan for lockdowns/etc than for a nuclear war. As long as I live here, I earnestly don't think there is much sense in planning for that.
I started noticing this sentiment on Reddit sometime last year. Usually with some jingoistic fantasy about whatever country the news media told them to hate.
Enough so that quickly scaling a "proper response" just isn't possible. Even if just a single large city (500K+ pop) was hit with a single, typical modern warhead (200-300kt), the results would be covered in history books for the rest of the millennium.
A large scale exchange? The best you could hope for is that you're living in the Southern hemisphere to avoid the immediate horror, though the next 20 years would still be horrific.
I think that was a fear of death cope. Downplaying such events reduces the temporary anxiety of thinking about living in a world where nukes have been unleashed.
It's hard to overstate how annihilating these weapons are to the areas that are struck by them, and how decimating they are even to the population areas not directly struck but heavily dependent on the major population centers.
I don't really see a meaningful distinction between "end of the human race" and merely "end of civilization as we know it", but it's interesting to learn about the current debate among experts.
Particularly not when as big of a chunk of our population believes the rapture is coming in their lifetimes.
For the crowd simply hoping for some variation of On the Beach, you should be aware that a nuclear war in the 2020s would almost certainly see Australia targeted by Chinese nukes.
In an apocalypse scenario, they are just extra mouths to feed - I wouldn't waste any missiles to target rich people's mansions in any country, but the locals might have plans for them...
Fwiw I’d be more disappointed by a belligerent navy coming to show up our strategic shortcomings.
Nowadays, the apparent incompetence of the Russian army, compared with the apparent utter irrationality of the Russian leadership got me thinking. Assuming that Russia loses the next big battle and ends up in the defensive, it's totally possible that the Russian leadership decides to deploy tactical nukes in an attempt to "escalate to deescalate". Such a scenario can very easily lead to a NATO-Russia war and consequently to a large-scale nuclear exchange. Hence, a nuclear first strike doesn't look so outlandish anymore. After all, the incompetence of the Russian army has been proven, so maybe their second strike would be somehow survivable.
It's an odd train of thoughts, but presented with the facts of Russia's irrational invasion of Ukraine and its utter incompetence in military strategy, it's hard to argue that it's not at least reasonable.
As recently as last year I have read people proclaiming that war was "obsolete" because it was too expensive because we are too economically intertwined, but apparently this is not a big enough of a deterrent for some leaders, so again we can never count on this idea again, it was naive.
How? The nuclear umbrella makes sense as a defensive strategy: you can't advance when entire divisions can be destroyed by nuclear weapons. It doesn't make sense as an offensive strategy on the operational level. It might work on the strategic level, but that would be such a horrible war crime you would essentially throw away any chance of maintaining popular legitimacy.
You might be right about this, but I'm not yet writing it off. So far, it seems the most affected countries are not as integrated as the others, like Sri Lanka, and Pakistan (of course them more so than Sri Lanka).
When it hits an economically integrated country with power, then we'll see what happens.
The amount of technology that must go right and logistics involved to successfully deliver a nuclear weapon to a foreign overseas country is enormously difficult. I now seriously wonder if Russia is actually capable of delivering 10% of their first strike weapons to the United States in an attack.
Unfortunately the only workable strategy seems to be containment and hoping the wheels come off domestically ("SU 2.0"). This doesn't mean we should heed Putler's boasting about his phallic red button in response to any aid to Ukraine, but it does mean a long period of watching genocide and other organized crimes against humanity while waiting for those wheels to work themselves off.
The Pentagon will eliminate the sole nuclear gravity bomb in the U.S. strategic weapons arsenal capable of blasting deeply buried underground structures as part of the Biden administration‘s review of strategic weapons policy, according to U.S. officials. The retirement of the B83 bomb, a megatonclass weapon delivered by B-2 stealth bombers, was disclosed to Congress last month as part of the Biden administration’s classified nuclear posture review, a major reassessment of strategic forces and their employment. The bomb is “costly to maintain and of increasingly limited value,” a senior defense official told The Washington Times.
“Limited value?” Not so. Both Russia and China have deep underground nuclear missile bunkers and manufacturing and storage facilities that only this weapon can attack. Even our land based and sub-launched warheads can’t penetrate these hardened facilities...
Source Joel Skousen Latest WAB
The only thing that it doesn't take into account the weapons we've developed since then. Like Cyber, Anti-Air "Iron Dome", satelite responses, etc.
It's crazy how many zero-days are hoarded instead of fixed. It's crazy how interconnected and reliant on technology we are.
Take out a city with a nuke, that's really bad. But disable wifi, electricity, water, oil or any other nessecity and instead of destroying that city you watch that city destroy itself.
Maybe its something like Mega-huMans?
> MM ("thousand thousands", from Latin "Mille" ...)
For example, 'pp' to represent 'pages'.
Bunker, Stein, und Eisen dicht, aber deine Maske nicht! Dam Dam. Dam Dam.