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Comment by cornholio | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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'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.

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