1,100 Declassified U.S. Nuclear Targets | Hacker News Reader

1,100 Declassified U.S. Nuclear Targets

futureoflife.org

113 pointsthrowup238153 comments

To my knowledge, no Russian targeting plans have ever been declassified, but an open source project called OPEN-RISOP[^1] has a few hypothetical attack plans that give some idea of what would be targeted.

Its creator, David Teter, is a former advisor to USSTRATCOM, DIA, and DTRA on strategic plans (SIOP/OPLANs 8044/8010), kinetic and non-kinetic weapon effects, vulnerability analysis, and targeting.

It's raw data, so to get a visualization you need to use something like Nuclear War Simulator[^2]†. Here's a video showing one such plan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF0mEOCK2KE

[^1]: https://github.com/davidteter/OPEN-RISOP

[^2]: https://nuclearwarsimulator.com

† NWS is on Steam, but don't go into it expecting a game-like experience. It's more of a rather technical "what-if" simulator.

There exist at least one declassified plan of the Warsaw Pact showing all the targets the Soviets would strike with nuclear weapons but also showing expected nuclear strikes by NATO forces. It also shows extensive use of chemical weapons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_to_the_River_Rhine A very detailed map was declassified, unfortunately it's not included in the wiki article. But you can google it

There was some documentary about a Ukrainian silo with dampened launchers and they mentioned they targeted China among others.

This is pretty fascinating when living in an ex-USSR country. There’s a target between two major cities in the forest at a non-descript village. I know what’s there though. In the Soviet times there used to be a large facility hosting hundreds of tanks.

At the same time, I know of a place that used to be a rocket launch base. There were around 10 across my country alone. I don’t see any of those being targeted.

It seems the non-USSR eastern Europe would have been completely reduced to nuclear ash, unlike most of the USSR, which is much less covered due to its size and sparse population. In my city alone there were three targets.

But that’s not really surprising. There’s a lot of targets in the Baltics. But the reason is that the Soviets put a lot of military objects there because it’s just closer to the potential frontline, as well as targets further west.

I’m just happy we got out of that nightmare. If for some reason we were still part of Russia, chances are I’d be sent off to kill Ukrainians right as we speak. Given that people from ethnic minorities are 200x more likely to be drafted than Russians from Moscow or St Petersburg.

> If for some reason we were still part of Russia, chances are I’d be sent off to kill Ukrainians right as we speak

To be fair, if you were still part of the USSR then so would Ukraine, and you wouldn't be fighting a war due to MAD with the US (maybe a proxy war in Myanmar or something), you'd most likely die of alcoholism or heart disease

I'd be dead. Along with quarter of million people in my city. Just because there's a very small civilian airport with one runway that serves about 12 planes per day, on the outskirts.

Screw the coldwar US.

Time for more stories then.

I have a family friend who’s old enough to have served in the Soviet military. The guy is a sharp dude who had really good grades in math. So when he was drafted he was directly enlisted into the ‘rocket force’ as a guy who does the trajectory calculations. He served in Kaliningrad.

He tells that they’d get drills where they are woken up at night, and then need to calculate trajectories for hitting Oslo, Paris, London, etc.

I'd expect nothing less from Russian side. But my country has and always had a lot of sympathy for the US. Always awaiting their eventual win as our saviors. So it feels just wrong. It's like learning that their main plan to end the standoff was to shoot the hostages in the first volley.

In an all out nuclear exchange nobody was going to win

The plan was the results of unavoidable logic: you have to strike where the capabilities had been placed, and it was the logic of the Moscow empire to place capabilities away from places it favoured.

Capability targetted in my case is small single runway. Probably hundreds killometers from the closest stationed bomber. I won't argue that it's completely worthless, but wasn't Soviet Union mostly relying on ballistic missile launchers not strategic bombers?

Than again if you have enough missiles to glass Earth many times over, you gotta point them somewhere. Why not on every runway you can find on satellite images?

When I was studying in MIPT, we had a course on mathematical support of military operations. Basically, there was an intro to the navigation systems of ICBMs and calculations of trajectories. We even had some parts of an old ICBM in the room. I dropped out of it, once I learned that after I‘d get an officer rank at graduation there will be higher chances to be drafted to some location in Siberia and serve one year more than a private.

Do the trajectories between fixed locations change very often?

Yes and no. The basic flight path would not change, but it does get affected by weather conditions and such. So the drill would be that they get the weather data and other inputs, and would need to provide the guidance set up parameters.

He also told that they’d also do drills where they need to hit an actual target on the other side of the Soviet Union with an actual ICBM. Some kind of a polygon made for such drills. If I recall correctly, getting it within a kilometer was considered acing it.

Kola Peninsula, IMMSMV. 1km is an OK circular error for the strategic weapons, they use the air burst anyway.

The US is no saint to be sure, but this goes both ways. I was aware growing up I’d be vaporized if nuclear war ever broke out seeing as I lived right next to a major Air Force base.

I grew up near the Cold Regions Research and Evaluation Laboratory in New Hampshire, and we (schoolkids) were told that our little town would be a primary target because “that’s where they study how we could survive a nuclear winter.” I’ve never actually figured out whether that claim is reasonable.

Back then every area claimed to be near a primary target due to some reasoning or another. Some of the stated reasons were more plausible than others, but the reality is there were far more of these claims than there could be primary targets.

> the reality is there were far more of these claims than there could be primary targets

The USSR peaked at nearly 40,000 nuclear weapons, one for every 10,000 people in the US with 15,000 to spare for allies.

I suppose it depends on one's definition of "primary target". There's a difference between "target viewed as more important than most others" and "well shit, everything is gonna get nuked anyways"

A substantial fraction of those weapons were considered "Tactical" or "Battlefield" and could not easily reach the North American mainland. Europe, on the other hand...

Cold War Joke: Q: How can you tell if a nuclear explosion is strategic or tactical? A: It is tactical if it explodes in Germany.

Remember, towns in Germany average 7kt apart.

This airport was most likely a military airbase during the Cold War though?

At least that's the case in the closest target about 40km from my home village in Altenburg in Thuringia/Germany (a small town of 30k people). Today this is a tiny civilian airport, but during the Cold War a Soviet military airbase: https://www.mil-airfields.de/de/altenburg.htm

You were considered an enemy back then and rightfully so as your government would have sent their military to attack US and their allies. If you want to be mad at somebody then it should be Russians who forced your country into this situation.

Invasion of US was always absolutele fantasy that US invented and cherished for decades. Fear is so nice. It lets you get away with all sorts of things and nobody dears to make a peep.

Allies probably. But US was just something far away, to be nuked if it interferes with local Russian interests which is Europe. That was the entirety of the Russian interest for US. Still is.

In actuality the only places where Warsaw pact was sending soldiers was countries of Warsaw pact that didn't like being part of Warsaw pact.

I didn't propose that Russia had any capacity to realistically attack US mainland at any given point, but it had plausible capacity to attack US forces on allied territories in attempt to overtake allied territory if it were not effectively countered by the allied effort.

This could have easily developed into a strategic nuclear exchange.

But what Russia did with relative success was to infiltrate US using its spy network and soft power. Even today there still is a large number of useful idiots in US and in the West in general who effectively help Russian goal even when it is has clearly displayed that it is a genocidal dictatorship.

It's kind of surprising how well Russia was and is doing even now on the information front. Russian trolls in recent years seemed to be throwing stuff at the wall, but if anything sticks (like anti-vaccine messaging or US election adjecent rumours) they notice it very quickly and push it super strong. Anything to disrupt and make random Westerner weaker and dumber.

Well, how many US ICBMs actually work is an open question and the recent test results aren't good. You might not have much to worry about.

Can you provide details? I’ve not heard any concern about the readiness of US weapons, but have heard a lot since the Ukraine war about the poor state of Russian military equipment.

I don't know about the weapons, but there have certainly been reports of a lot of personnel readiness issues [1]

I suspect in the cold war, missile crews could feel it was an important job, high-tech and well-funded, even if it tedious, unsociable and morally questionable. It no longer has those upsides.

[1] https://apnews.com/united-states-government-b942adacae524dcf...

Recent Minuteman ICBM test failure: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2023/11/02/minuteman-iii...

I’ve not heard any concern

Because you’re not supposed to.

have heard a lot since the Ukraine war

Because you’re supposed to.

I remember a scandal around a decade ago where it turned out a singular wrench specific to minutemen warheads had to keep getting shipped between multiple different bases due to general degradation and mismanagement of US nuclear forces. It was enough of an embarrassment that it ultimately resulted in something like a $300 billion dollar refurbishment program for the whole triad over the next three decades.

So for the answer to that question, a lot of them didn't work... and now they do.

Was your launch base established in 1956? The US went through several launch systems during the cold war and some launch sites were reused but some sites were new.

I don’t really know. The context is that as a kid I went to a kind of a military training after school activity. That sounds super weird, I know, but it was fun, got to learn the basic military training.

Anyway, we had a summer camp for a week or so near one of these decommissioned rocket facilities, and we were just told to not go anywhere near the silos, as they’re pretty deep. So, I know where it is, but I don’t know when it was commissioned.

All the slio locations are public information and have wikipedia pages. If you know the location you are interested in you can probably find it with some sleuthing or googling "decomissioned nuclear silo [state]". e.g. here are the north dakota ones

https://www.nps.gov/articles/mappingmissilefield.htm

That's just US silo's near as I can see ...

jgillias was specifically recalling silo's from a childhood "living in an ex-USSR country."

Googled around a bit. I’m old enough to read Russian, so found info on runet. It was commissioned in 1962 and was active until 1982.

> as a kid I went to a kind of a military training after school activity. That sounds super weird, I know, but it was fun, got to learn the basic military training.

It sounds like the way I've always heard dictorships indoctrinate kids and start training them, but was that your experience?

Many countries have versions of the ROTC and Scouts though.

I recall drilling after primary school here in Australia for a "get 'em while they're young" proto military kids club.

Super boring and way less interesting than being a solo ranger in my own time.

lol I'm not OP but curious where you are

in USA we have JROTC which is basically a military larp alternative to marching band. I appreciate the gun twirling as an art form, don't think it's that weird at all if you're going to have a warrior society, some kids are going to look up to and want to be warriors, nothing to do with dictatorships

> if you're going to have a warrior society

Would you share what you mean by that?

Not really. Context is important, I think. So I’m talking about Latvia specifically. Just after regaining independence we had to rebuild any military capability from scratch. So a kind of a citizen paramilitary national guard was formed called “Zemessardze”. In the first few years it did everything. From securing the borders to guarding high level government officials.

Zemessardze has a youth wing for teenagers who are interested in military stuff called Jaunsardze. So that’s what I did because a friend of mine wanted to do it but didn’t want to go alone.

Looking back to it, there was completely no political indoctrination whatsoever. It was mostly physical conditioning, knowing your way around maps and terrain, basic wilderness survival skills, how to get over a stream without getting wet, a little bit of weapons training.

Thanks for sharing your experience; that is always the richest part of HN. And Latvia obviously is in an unusual position.

That's probably the case for the US too. The numerous missile silos all over middle America, in the middle of farmlands probably made for very attractive targets.

Yeah they went to great lengths to hide them but did this really work? I always doubt it.

I never really saw the point in hiding or targeting them though. But the time a Russian launch would be detected the launch would be triggered and the silos would have already been empty by the time the warhead arrived.

We didn't hide ours (American). We put up chain link with barbed wire, razor tape, and nice signs that started, "Use of deadly force authorized."

Oh ok I thought they were hidden. But that mainly comes from the memory of WarGames, where the staff enters into the missile silo through a fake house :P

But I think keeping such massive project secret in a society like the US is much more difficult anyway than in a tightly controlled autocracy like the soviet union.

My guess is that it’s an open secret kind of thing. There’s not a big sign that says “nukes here!” but when you see stuff like the previous poster mentioned, you can guess what’s going on.

It was easy to get confused in a lot of dirt roads out in Nebraska, but just ask any local rancher, "Hey, where's Sierra Seven?" They'd tell you. All the locals knew all about it, the original quarter acre plots were bought from local ranchers. And, of course, every several years, a big missile on a lowboy would come down the road, with a convoy.

Those houses do exist, and they're not fake. They're where the non-active launch officers live (the active ones are living below ground, in the silo).

Launch detection was, I believe, not all that robust in the early days, and making sure that the enemy couldn't precisely target all of your silos, and making sure they knew they couldn't, was presumably useful for deterrence.

Looks like an ICBM flight is about 30 minutes. Even if you have good launch detection, that's not a lot of time to communicate, decide, and launch the counter strike. If missiles aren't on standby, it takes time to prepare them.

There's a good chance some counter launches get delayed... Seems like a lucky first strike could significantly reduce the counter strike. But everyone loses anyway.

No but that's what defcon was for. Things like a mass preemptive strike don't come out of the blue but out of an ongoing conflict. The idea was that it would be more or less expected.

And ICBMs these days are all solid fueled, I don't think they need much preparatory time.

Depressed trajectory submarine launched ballistic missiles can drop that below ten minutes… depending on what they are aiming at and where they fire from .. it’s a technique that uses the unused propulsion power to hit closer targets faster than a full ballistic launch on the most efficient trajectory would use.

And it’s why the SSBN is such a deadly second strike platform. If you know the nukes flying at you, you send the global alert, the SSBNs stationed secretly close to enemy coastlines surface to get emergency orders, and then let their nukes fly potentially before the first strike wave has had time to hit their targets… I’ve even seen some war game scenarios where the second strike SSBN based nukes can hit the enemy before the first strike reaches the original targets (obviously this is theoretical war game scenario stuff so it must be taken with several grains of salt, but it’s a surprising realisation that submarines can in the best case scenarios, put nukes on your enemies faster than their first wave of nukes will get to you… )

Tertiary strike capability days or weeks after the first and second strikes seems theoretically useful. Being able to launch another strike on your rebuilding target after they've spent time pooling their resources and showing their hand as to where their new major centres are would be especially brutal in keeping them down. 900 nukes today and 100 nukes a week later sounds far more devastating than 1100 nukes today.

It wouldn't surprise me to find some SSBNs are being reserved for such a capability. Gotta maintain your grip on that empire of radioactive dirt once it's all that's left.

I'm not sure this would even make sense to build - the purpose of a nuclear deterrent is to ensure that a first strike against the power in question is rendered impossible under rational conditions. If both sides have been reduced to ash, there hardly seems a point to maintaining that kind of posture - it's inconceivable that a war could be fought under the conditions that a mass nuclear exchange would entail.

What would there even be left to fight for? Once the first salvos have been launched, the rest of the arsenal becomes essentially useless.

I'm approaching this not from the perspective of 'nuclear war is rational, and this is how it should be fought', I'm trying to look at it through the perspective of someone whose job it is to optimize for the unoptimizable. It seems very unlikely that any nuclear strategy planning ends at 'then (they/we) unleash a second strike, and that's it', so then it becomes worth it to consider how to completely crush any attempt at revenge in the living memory of those you killed.

There's going to be competition over what little habitable land and untainted resources remain, and the appetite for revenge in such a scenario will be insatiable. Reserving some small % of the arsenal for tertiary strikes seems sensible if you're planning for this, particularly since SSBNs will be basically unaffected if nuclear war is happening above them and launch sites that aren't destroyed would probably still be able to launch for some time if this is accounted for in the design.

I believe USSR had a preference for mobile launch mechanisms (like trains) over silos, so maybe the US had to prioritize other targets for the relatively inaccurate ICBMs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT-23_Molodets

It is interesting to see that in Southern Urals the major nuclear manufacturing sites Chelyabinsk-40 and Zlatoust-20 (as they were named in 1956) are not targets and would not be affected, but their civilian doppelgängers would be hit. The secrecy of the Soviet nuclear program was probably quite good.

It was probably so much easier (and still is) to integrate as a spy in the U.S. than the other way around.

My understanding is spies are mostly compromised nationals as opposed to foreigners trying to blend in.

Yes, but you still need local handlers for them, and they would be “foreigners trying to blend in”

Handlers don't need to blend it nearly as much. They just need a plausible reason to be in the vicinity of their assets. A lot of diplomatic staff are spy handlers. Also, businessmen, military attaches, etc. Every country has some contact with foreigners. Any of those foreigners can be handlers.

Dragon Ladies flew over Soviet Union from 1955 until 1960, when Powers was shot down near Sverdlovsk, i.e. a bit farther to the north from interesting locations. Those spy planes could make a photo of the sites.

The more common scenario AIUI for spying is turning someone already in place, either because they have sympathies with your side, or because you have leverage on them - and probably a mix of both. It's a pretty cynical game.

You’re only looking at the declassified sites though

On a related note: Cold War-era Polish military maps of the British Isles, in case of a Warsaw Pact invasion thereof:

https://earthlymission.com/map-of-britain-teach-invading-pol...

> This Cold War era map was created to teach Polish troops how to pronounce English place names in the event of an invasion against Britain (click to enlarge). Towns and cities in Essex and Kent are spelled out phonetically – resulting in interesting transformations such as Southend-On-Sea into Saufend-On-Sji.

An interesting choice of (non)targets. Bratislava, the second-largest city of Czechoslovakia (and capital of Slovakia) would have been spared.

I get that the military targets got priority, but I would have expected that large population centers would get hit as overall strategic targets too.

Another thing I noticed is how many targets there are in the Baltics given the small population. It has like triple the amount of targets in comparison to Czechoslovakia even though it has/had only about half of the population. I don't know how to explain that, it's not like Czechoslovakia had less strategic position or smaller weapon industry.

It's likely due to being close to Vienna that would take an indirect hit in that case. Also, it seems to be covered in the follow up fallout so it would be severely damaged anyway.

"Likely" based on what? I'm not sure how much consideration NATO gave to neutral countries. Vienna is about 50 kilometers from Bratislava, it shouldn't receive that much damage.

Compare that with West Berlin (a NATO city) which is getting 5 nukes all around its borders, not farther than 10 kilometers. (with some more nukes in a slightly larger distance, but still less than 50)

If that was the case, they would not target Brno.

> Even though today’s nuclear targets list is classified, it probably doesn’t look dramatically different.

Uh I'm pretty sure it does look dramatically different in Europe at least because a huge proportion of the targeted Warsaw pact and Soviet Socialist Republic countries in 1956 are now part of NATO.

Seems like a very ignorant statement to make.

Reminds me of seeing Putin bragging a few months ago about how Russia has more nukes than the US/NATO/whatever. Well yes, you better hope so, because if shit hits the fan, you have to take on basically the entire free world by yourself, whereas the entire free world is aiming everything they've got at just you.

Could we also have lists of targets compiled by other nuclear powers?

There's something deeply unsettling about an interaction where you pick a location (not in the US) and click "detonate"

That might be intentional (and could make for an interesting art experience!) but I'm honestly more interested in understanding averages than individual examples. Eg ten warheads are randomly detonated at one of the locations, 100? 1000?

It's important to note that there's no chance we have dozens of nuclear warheads flying without retaliatory strikes

I remember reading that although France had a completely independent nuclear force they did secretly cooperate with NATO on targeting sites so that none of their nukes would be "wasted".

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/best-places-to-survive-...

has a map of what would get hit in the US

I have just tidbit - that Vienna, the capital of a neutral country Austria, was one of the first Soviet targets for nuclear strike: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/13...

I guess the Soviets' thinking was that if the nuclear war breaks out nobody needs their favourite spy city anymore.

Neutral Helsinki had its airport targeted by the West because of treaty obligations to the commies.

The Nordic countries all know their airports will be gone in the first 2-3 days of any kind of war, nuclear or conventional. The Swedes are essentially specialists in mobile fighter jet operations using highways, and Finland builds select roads wider than needed just to prepare for that...

The number of targets in an area resemble the population density of that area. It feels very strange to see the targets in the former GDR. A lot of them close to Berlin. Part of that city was not part of the USSR, but would still be affected heavily by the attacks of the targets nearby.

A bit sobering that there is a target right in the center of Berlin with several other targets in close vicinity - a mere 7 years after the Berlin Airlift. I guess the US compassion for Berliners did have limits after all.

That would include US citizen too. They probably just realistically looked at the survival chances of West Berlin in case of full scale war. Soviets were confident that with conventional warfare they would reach the Channel in mere weeks, nuclear was really the only deterrent.

The war was going to be there. Should NATO not attack invading Soviet forces? Then they'd be in a safe zone all the way to the Atlantic.

> I guess the US compassion for Berliners did have limits after all.

I think the indiscriminate firebombing and targeting of german civilians in ww2 showed there is no such thing as 'US compassion'. It was calculated propaganda.

2016

too bad the detonate website is from an even earlier time because it doesnt work on iphone

Just use landscape orientation

"Level 7" by Mordecai Roshwald, is a sobering take on this whole nuclear dick wrangling debacle.

Rarely mentioned context whenever this declassification make the rounds: this was pre MAD. Before reliable ICBMs or triad. In 50s, Only US had large bomber based atomic stockpile. Hence planners could go wild and seriously concievable nuke all communist assets and expect minimal retaliatory losses, including non nuclear states at the time like PRC for shits and giggles.

This can't be full list from 1956, since there's nothing in Mongolia.

I doubt that there was any target of strategic importance in Mongolia, which would have justified the expense of an ICBM.

Mhmm that makes Mongolia the perfect place to put missile launchers ;)

It's a long way from the targets. The US has silos in the center of the country, but near the northern border; presumably they'd fly over the Arctic. The Soviets would put those launchers in Siberia, by that reasoning.

But the map shows there were in Albania and Tajikistan?

It doesn't seem likely there was zero things in Mongolia if the bar was that low.

Having lived through MAD, I still can't believe this century got off to a start so bent out of shape over mere terrorism.

(upon reflection, having also lived through the pandemic, I can believe it)

> so bent out of shape over mere terrorism

9/11 was an attack on the greatest symbols of American power on American soil. Suffice to say, Americans are not accustomed to that and they went mad with rage and fear. Cue a generation of death, destruction, and the reshaping of the world as America worked through that trauma.

It wasn’t just mere terrorism but also the psychological result of American strategic isolation.

I like to put it slightly differently:

9/11 was the most successful terrorist attack in modern history. We are still running scared.

> We are still running scared.

Not as compared to 9/11 through ~2017. America has largely returned to the geopolitical indifference it had in the 1990s but with much greater exhaustion for direct foreign military intervention and cynicism about strategic alliances.

Foreign policy wise the ship never was off course at all from the doctrine its had for decades. In terms of the American people though, its obvious how the event has severely damaged us both in terms of how we think about our fellow people, and the sort of restrictions and surveillance we have imposed on ourselves in the name of safety since.

It certainly fulfilled its objective of pulling the US into an unwinnable war in Afghanistan the "graveyard of empires".

I don't think most people considered the WTC as a symbol of anything other than tall buildings. Or at the worst, a symbol of unfettered capitalism. It seems to me it was made into that symbol after the fact to get everyone's feathers rustled.

In 2000, if you were to ask someone what building represented the success of the US, I'd bet the majority would say Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, or Sears Tower. Maybe that answer would be different for New Yorkers though, idk.

The psychology that should be noted was the government and media whipping the populace into a psychotic frenzy which made us willing to murder a quarter million people in a country that had nothing to do with the attack. The fact that this isn't brought up every time 9/11 is mentioned is a travesty.

I think you have the cause and the effect mixed up. The government didn't have to 'whip us up' we did that entirely on our own. The government was able to go places they never could because of that fervor, but they had at most a marginal role in creating it. You're wildly misremembering how much fear there was on day 0, before the government had a chance to do anything.

We, as a civilization, are riding the razors edge of stability. The amount of energy required to destabilize the system, when applied in just the right way, is shockingly small.

> We, as a civilization, are riding the razors edge of stability.

This is massively overstating the impact on the west, and America specifically. Obviously it massively disrupted life and civilization in the Middle East and elsewhere, and it lead to the death of 10s of 1000s of military personnel and degraded civil liberties in America and elsewhere. But it had no substantial impact on “civilization” in the west.

Apart from seeding a culture of paranoia and xenophobia, and converting the Anglosphere from a mid-trust culture into a low-trust culture.

See also, airport security theatre.

> I don't think most people considered the WTC as a symbol of anything other than tall buildings

The WTC clearly represents American economic might, but the Pentagon was attacked also and that represents American military power. The White House narrowly avoided being hit. Additionally, people don’t have to consciously understand what things symbolize for that to be make an impact on them. Plus, it wasn’t just a message to Americans but to the world, especially the Muslim world, and the WTC had been unsuccessfully attacked 8 years previously so it was a symbol of failure for them. Not afterwards!

It was not so much a symbol as it was "hitting close to home".

It's one thing to see the body bags of soldiers coming back. It's another to see death and destruction in your own city.

I think the reaction to 9/11 was the US wanting to make the point “you destroy a few office buildings, we destroy a few nations” very clear to the rest of the world.

Idk, I think it was about money. Someone must have made a ton of money out of that. And that weird connection between the president and the family of the guy who pulls that off… edit: Arbusto Energy it was called.

Not only.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2003/10/saving-the-saudis-20...

That's what the terrorists were ostensibly protesting though. By fucking up Iraq we kind of proved them right.

Just as a note for the cultural impact, for many movies after they were constructed, B roll footage showing NYC skylines seemed to often feature them over things like the Empire State Building or even the Statue of Liberty. They were apparently featured in over 1100 films.

https://donnagrunewald.wixsite.com/wtcinmovies

You've evidently forgotten the concurrent attack on the Pentagon in the same hour on 9/11.

3000 civilians were killed in a single attack. It's not about the buildings or any symbolism, it's about the tragic loss of life in first hand. Everything else second. If you're looking for symbolism, you have the January 6 insurrection.

Fixed:

Cue a generation of death, destruction, and the reshaping of the world as America co-opted the trauma to start a generation of unjustifiable wars and massively reduce civil liberties.

Yep. The world generally felt for us after 9/11, and then the wars started and that really affected public perception. We invaded a country that had nothing to do with it and destabilized an entire region and didn’t find the guy that orchestrated the whole thing for an entire decade. All that along with torturing prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib made us look even worse.

Not to mention it really created an “us vs. them” environment in the American homeland which is still ever present if not getting worse.

I think Bin Laden was counting on “death by a thousand cuts” aka creeping normality and I believe that was largely successful. Americans seem to have partly turned on each other over political differences. People now have an even larger distrust of the institutions in this country. Empathy seems to have taken a sideline. I’ve seen families broken up and almost experienced it myself. People now spend so much time online in their echo chambers and sometimes refuse to even converse with “the other side”. This goes both ways.

With all of this happening I think of this part of Lincoln’s Lyceum Address:

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

"mere terrorism"? It was an attack on a civilian target. Pearl Harbor was a military installation. The USA had never faced anything approaching the scale of 9/11. The WTC 1993 attack and OK City bombing in 1995 didn't come close. It became very apparent how complacent the USA had become.

Unlike a state attacking another state, pinning down where these people were getting their orders from was difficult. Considering what your age must be, I'm surprised you struggle to understand the difference between an openly militarized nation versus terrorist cells that could be anywhere and anybody. There's no coordinates to punch into a MAD system when it comes to terrorists.

If it was so easy, years wouldn't have been spent searching for the likes of Bin Laden.

Scale? Less than 3000 people died during 9/11. That is nothing compared to anything else that's happening in the world. With or without the US's involvement.

Edit:

he U.S. post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan have taken a tremendous human toll on those countries. As of September 2021, an estimated 432,093 civilians in these countries have died violent deaths as a result of the wars

144 times as many CIVILIANS were killed by the US.

It isn't about body count, it's about a handful of people taking control of aircraft and causing mass destruction with minimal effort, energy and resources expended.

It also isn't about whether it is "nothing" compared to what is happening elsewhere, the topic at hand is the USA. The rest of the world isn't what is being discussed.

There were weaknesses in the US national security threat model. It wasn't a major consideration that someone would hijack a plane and fly it into NYC, the major assumption was that an attack would come from another nation, and it would be military, and it would be detected as hostile in aerospace. Guise of a civilian aircraft? Yeah, that was a gaping hole.

Come on, the fucking Pentagon had a plane flown into it on the same day.

It's one thing for gov to get hacked by teens, it's another thing to have a terrorist org do all that in the space of a few hours.

> A handful of people taking control of aircraft and causing mass destruction with minimal effort, energy and resources expended.

Sure, the same can be said about the handful of people in the US: The president, the Secretary of Defense / Department of "Defense"

Again, the topic isn't other countries, the topic is the USA. My comment addresses that topic. You're trying to argue something completely orthogonal to what my comment or the one I'm responding to is about.

I don't see how the US responded in Rest of World is even remotely irrelevant.

Given you only want to measure US impact: The US lost more soldiers in the war on terror than people killed in 9/11. And spent by some counts $8 trillion. Compared to the threats posts by MAD, 9/11 was a rounding error and wasted an enormous amount of blood, treasure and political capital. On that day, the world was with you. We were all New Yorkers.

But instead of fixing a few gaps and taking out a few leaders per month indefinitely, the US allowed itself to be distracted massively for decades, surely way beyond what the terrorists could have dreamed of. It was basically first prize for Osama. I’m not sure what the full count of the US economic and social losses are but it’s probably indescribable. Someone waved a red flag and Bush couldn’t help himself.

The smart move would have been to rise above it. You’re the greatest nation on earth. You don’t get distracted by a few terrorists, you get on with changing the world.

I'm a Brit. You're talking to me like I'm an American.

I understand your sentiment, but I disagree, "you get on with changing the world", which should include preserving that which already exists.

People forget about the concurrent attack on the Pentagon on 9/11. If all that can happen in the space of less than an hour, that was not a threat to be ignored, and more would have followed had something not been done.

You're also conflating improving national security with boots-on-the-ground searching for supposed WMDs in another country. The two things are not the same in any way. Your argument is total "whataboutery".

If you have holes in national security that allowed something like 9/11 to happen, including the attack on the Pentagon on that same morning, you do something to prevent the likes of it, or worse, from happening again. You can't even argue against that.

> I'm a Brit. You're talking to me like I'm an American.

You got me.

> whataboutery

Since we’re slinging terms around: false dichotomy.

I’m not arguing that they should have ignored it. Fix the specific issues without creating more, broader, deeper issues. The approach used wasted massive resources of all kinds - economic, social, lives, focus. There were infinitely better outcomes that could have been achieved at lower overall cost. 8 trillion is a lot of misplaced focus spent in deserts far away.

Don’t mix up the “what” with “how”. Fix the problem, but not stupidly.

Somehow I suspect taking control of governments by - for example - invading them, or fomenting revolutions, is more dangerous than taking control of aircraft.

And the "security weaknesses" were mostly in the White House.

https://www.politico.eu/article/attacks-will-be-spectacular-...

Oh, you mean like the concurrent attack on the Pentagon on 9/11? https://www.history.navy.mil/research/archives/digital-exhib...

Sure, just like Sadam.. Have your seen Bush recently about that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58DXSSBs4u0

"the result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.. i mean of Ukraine... heh.. Iraq too"

What a piece of shit lol. Even Putin at least pretends (wink wink) that he actually thinks his invasion is justified. That the US has no problem with basically not just letting this guy get away with it but even "rehabilitating" him in the past few years... it's a bit unbelievable and clearly sets the precedent internationally. This video always plays back in my head whenever I hear about how good pax americana is or how our side at least has "good intentions" lmao.

> absence of checks and balances in Russia and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.. i mean of Ukraine... heh.. Iraq too

Uh, the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were sanctioned by the Congress. Overwhelmingly. Then the people who started them were replaced, thrice, giving the problem fresh sets of eyes. Comparing W. Bush et al to Putin is ridiculous on many levels, even if the wars per se share characteristics. (Most potently, in being massive blunders.)

Bush's words, not mine

Repeated by you in an attempt to prop up something you are failing to otherwise articulate.

Oh I fully agree that the invasion was unjustified and brutal, and as he was the chief in command, he was the person who decided to do that.

Although I wouldn't compare them directly. They are very different personalities, have different motives, etc

Huh? I mean bush was still reelected 2 twice. You are comparing a war that started 2 years ago to one that that lasted twenty years, obviously they'd get more eyes on the problem. At this same stage during the Iraq war (2 years in), bush was very popular, his Congress support was as strong as it ever was and he got reelected.

In both cases, the war had massive support in its domestic population, patriotism clichés were used to drum up support etc. It doesn't matter if there is a better separation of power in theory in this case, since it didn't prevent half a million to a million people from dying due to the Iraq war. It only matters for Americans so that they can feel better about their institutions

> doesn't matter if there is a better separation of power in theory in this case, since it didn't prevent half a million to a million people from dying due to the Iraq war

Yes, war is bad. That doesn’t mean all wars are the same, nor that nothing can be learned from them. Comparing the checks and balances on the Kremlin with those on the American President is wrong; it creates a world model which won’t make good predictions.

I'm obviously not saying they are the same. I'd still take the american system 100% of the time, no hesitation. My point is that said system becomes much more similar to say, the Kremlin when it comes to foreign wars since they both basically have full support at home so democracy isn't especially relevant. Sure, that support then dies down usually but Americans and Russians seem to have a history of supporting wars with no hesitation. That makes the usual massive advantages of an American system based on separation of powers much less important.

So my point is that at the end of the day, for the people on the receiving end of those wars, they don't really see the difference and aren't protected by an American style system. If anything, it gives the veneer of "good intentions", whereas the Russian Kremlin doesn't. So it makes stuff like Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, wars based on lies etc go unpunished. No one sanctions the US for example.

United States builds their identity through their enemy. It started in WWII and worked so good that they almost immediately adopted communists as their new enemy. When Soviet Union eventually surpisingly collapsed despite US constantly proping them up as credible enemy, they started losing identity. Fortunately, accidentally seeded terrorist groups cropped up and did significant enough damage. US eagerly elevated them to the position of the new main enemy providing all the necessary PR. Even the name Al Qaeda was pretty much invented by US trying to figure out who hit them. Before US started using this name it was a name of random training camp.

As nice and safe the terrorists were as an enemy, everybody knew that it won't last long. It just wasn't convincing and terrorists, apart from few events, were pretty much worthless.

So US naturally picked next solid enemy, China for their next hopefully long and prosperous cold war.

Having an enemy is super important for US politics, their industry and social structure. It gives them excuses for protectionism. It gives them ability to have an alternative to increasingly impoverished civilian customers when it comes to stimulating innovation and industrial growth. It allowes them to give jobs to people that in purely civilian economy wouls just raise unemployment and unrest. All the culture of US is soaked in hero/villain dynamics that consolidates society and prevents from asking too many questions in the presence of a villain.

The problem now is that US is starting to drop the ball. World caught up with their advantage of being the only major economy not damaged by WWII. Unfortunately the current US enemy is on more capable side. So this time, maybe for the first time, the US is in the real danger. Maybe isolationist tendencies of Trump and his fans are not such a bad thing. Maybe US should go back to pre-wwii state. Times when US could credibly pretend they are on top of things, not just bit ahead of the pack, are pretty much over.

Kind of right, kind of not. There are unarguably factions in the US that consider fascists like Putin to be friends, not enemies, and would happily consider an international alliance.

And US force-projection has few defences against the kind of subversion of key figures that Putin has decided to specialise in.

The US will continue in some form. But the post-Enlightenment liberal/rationalist/progressive current in the US and Europe is in deadly danger.

Putin is trouble for US because they are used to picking their own enemy. And now they already have one, thank you very much. So Putin is very much a superfluous nuisance. I'm sure there was one faction that considered pivoting from China to Putin, but it doesn't seem very strong. The stronger faction is just hoping that it will end one way or the other soon enough so they can come back to fully exploiting potential of having China as the enemy. While for Europe the threat is existential if not in the short term then surely in mid to long term.

Many countries with local ambitions smell blood in the water and they start to pop up their heads. Putin is the largest one, but there are so many recently. US has pretty much no hopes of maintaining control over it all. It's not even trying. It divested from Ukraine, tentatively invested in Israel, pretty much ignoring everything else.

> Having lived through MAD

It's still going on, and things are more unstable with Russia and the US Republicans opposed to treaties or disarmament and embracing aggression and violence on principle, and China adding a third nuclear force to balance.

> still can't believe this century got off to a start so bent out of shape over mere terrorism.

that would be because nukes are completely useless against anything assymetrical

Terrorism has brought down governments, or nearly so.

Shining Path in Peru is a great example. It doesn't take many bombings (that don't even kill people) to bring a system nearly to a halt.

It's one reason why Singapore has very strict security rules targeting terrorism. Not because of mass casualties, but because of the instability it would bring, dragging down the economy, creating social unrest.

Terrorists aren't stupid. They know terror works.

At least for 1956, we know that one side was only targeting its enemies. There's long been debate over if the nuclear powers would lob a few warheads in the direction of some of neutral countries to prevent them from becoming hegemons in the post nuclear war world.

Totally plausible. Actually even more plausible as a way to draw neutral countries into the war because in all-out exchange there would be no way to be 100% sure whose warhead landed on your head.

In the 60s the US contemplated nuking China in response to a Soviet strike on the US:

"In 2012, the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP) declassified an important document on the pre-delegation instructions approved by President Lyndon Johnson in early 1964. Under the instructions, if the Soviet Union or China launched a nuclear attack on the United States that knocked the president or his successor out of action, making communication impossible, U.S. commanders-in-chief of unified or specified commands (such as Strategic Air Command or European Command) had the authority to retaliate against the entire Sino-Soviet bloc, even if some Soviet allies or China had not launched an attack."

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2018-0...

Apparently Vienna was an early Soviet target: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/13...

But I don't think it was about the post-nuclear-war hegemony, it was more immediate. There was always the risk that e.g. Swedish airfields could be used by USA (with or without Swedish approval) to bomb e.g. St. Petersburg.

That's one of the reasons why Sweden has lots of stretches of highways that can be used as makeshift airbases. Especially during the cold war there were many.

https://www.mil-airfields.de/se/list.htm

Same in Finland, with fuel and weapons caches AFAIK. You can find recent youtube videos where they are used in readiness exercises. They close down the motorway for a few hours.

I wonder if south america would have been hit...

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