Hacker News Reader

Comment by mupuff1234 | Hacker News Reader

> For instance, priority targets in New York City are likely to include Bayonne/Port Elizabeth and Red Hook in Brooklyn instead of Manhattan, as Moscow cares more about New York as a place where armies can sail for Europe than as a place where investment bankers live.

This person is delusional.

The financial hub of the world is definitely a much higher value target than another port in an armageddon type scenario.

View on HN

> The financial hub of the world is definitely a much higher value target than another port in an armageddon type scenario.

What? So civilisation is collapsing around you, and instead of a port and ships that can move grain and life-saving goods, you would rather have an army of bankers so that they can trade triple-A rated collateralized debt obligations for newly radiactive real estate?

But actually, why not target both? There are thousands of warheads from what I understand. It doesn’t seem like they need to be choosey.

The article covers that. It boils down to “there’s a lot of bombs but the world is really, really big.”

I did see that. I suppose my thinking is that both seem like prime targets, so they could easily both be high on the list.

I’m probably failing to recognize the number of “prime” targets in the really, really big world though. It’s in the territory of scales so huge that brains are bad at drawing useful conclusions. I also have no idea about war strategy, let alone of this variety.

It seems like you have the order of things mixed up. The point is that destroying a financial hub of the world is a more effective way of collapsing civilization than destroying a port.

Could you provide at least some reasoning, if not evidence, to support this counter-intuitive assertion?

I don’t have an opinion regarding order of port vs. financial hub. New York is a target for its communications infrastructure. That is in large part a component which facilitates its staus as a financial/economic hub. If you have a city of ~9M and a metro area of 20M without orderly communication, things can unravel from within very quickly. And everything not destroyed at that point becomes easy pickings.

1. Moscow is definitely getting targeted, as it’s a big administrative centre. But it’s also a big population centre, so a revenge attack on a big population centre is to be expected.

2. Food and manufacturing nowadays depends on things like futures contracts, foreign currency exchange, lines of credit and so on. Not to mention the ownership of the companies doing it! The right type of damage to the financial system could be very impactful.

3. There’s plenty of bombs to go around.

Transporting grain makes a bit more sense than sending ground troops to Europe in a post nuclear war situation, but it’s still mostly nonsense. New York isn’t a hub of bankers. It’s the hub of commerce. Yes, it’s critically important.

NYC is essentially leveled in any kind of attack that includes countervalue.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/davidteter/OPEN-RISOP/main...

Counterforce vs. countervalue strategy. A limited nuclear exchange would almost certainly be counterforce, and focused on things like military targets and ports. A larger exchange would become a countervalue exercise focused on economic targets.

Why? Finance wouldn't be worth much after an armageddon anyway.

Following a nuclear exchange, it is unlikely that a country without ports, airports, transit networks, or a military, would remain the financial hub of the world.

Also, according to the Nukemap website the author links to: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ you can hit everything from Philadelphia to New York with a single single Tsar bomba. With a bomb like that it hardly matters if you aim it at Port Elizabeth or Manhattan.

Tsar bomba is not in service in anyone's arsenal. It was a one-off test device built to see how big an explosion you could generate with a multi-stage thermonuclear reaction.

Not to mention it's not very effective since ICBMs rely on having many projectiles per missile to try and confuse any defensive technology. Tsar Bomba would very much be a Death Star like threat. Scary on paper, but concentrating too much force in a single place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com