Comment by lumost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lumost | Hacker News Reader

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Studies done in the 60s and 70s were aimed at much larger scale conflicts than would occur in 2022. However the general sentiment is accurate. Food production post-nuclear war is a wildcard, dependent on both fallout pattern, global capacity to increase food production, global interest in helping countries devastated by nuclear war, and targeting.

The assumption that nukes would primarily target ICBM silos seems suspect to me, as it would seem pointless to target silos which have already fired their missiles. The assumption that both sides haven't done some planning for both scorched earth targetting approaches, and "survivable" exchanges also seems suspect. Who's to say that Russia wouldn't target conventional military infrastructure, and civilian population centers, having assumed that all deployable warheads would already have been fired? They could reasonably assess that the value of targeting silos which have already fired their missiles is low, and the need for post-war food production will be high.

Alternately, they could adopt a scorched earth targeting policy to maximize fallout and leave the US in a permanently weakened state. I'm sure all nuclear powers have tried to maximize their choices in how to deploy weapons in any conflict.

"The assumption that nukes would primarily target ICBM silos seems suspect to me, as it would seem pointless to target silos which have already fired their missiles."

That's what SLBMs are for. An SLBM launched off the Oregon coast could hit missile silos in Montana in under 5 minutes. Launch in the middle of the night and there's not enough time to get the President out of bed and brief him before the missiles impact. (For that matter, if you park an SSBN 500 miles off Washington DC, it can get nuked in 3 minutes, probably killing the president as there's not enough time to get him down into the bunker. That's why the U.S. developed the SOSUS network, so you can't park an SSBN 500 miles off Washington without us knowing about it.)

Modern SLBMs (1980s and onwards) are explicitly designed for this role, with depressed flight trajectories, low CEP, MIRVs, hardened silo penetrators, and warhead yields calibrated to destroy typical silos, given an accurate ground burst.

There are multiple plans for multiple contingencies. A couple of different examples are here:

https://github.com/davidteter/OPEN-RISOP

The fallout thing is kinda a unlikely thing. Fallout from typical ground-bursts is something that denies area for weeks at most.

There are weapons systems that can do area denial for much longer by using weapons salted with materials that will remain radioactive for many years (essentially the plot of Dr. Strangelove -- that "doomsday" system is based on realistic weapons possibilities, and the Russians in the past decade intimated that they have developed a submersible drone system designed to cross the ocean and detonate huge salted weapons to poison the U.S. coasts for decades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status-6_Oceanic_Multipurpose_... ) -- but as far as anyone in the open source info world knows, these kinds of weapons are not deployed.

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