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Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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