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Comment by jgilias | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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