I found that the scene in The Day After [1] where this comes out was one of the most frightening things I've seen. That and when the missiles leave the silos and you realize you have less than 30 minutes left to live.
They are the hammer and lots of them. If they fly, you can be sure it’s the big game. You are right, in about 30 minutes (probably less, when you take into account that the USA would only react with icbms) or closer to 10-15 minutes it’s Armageddon.
The first bombs would explode in the higher atmosphere and blind the electromagnetic spectrum aka radar detection fails and your only option is to fight back and hit hard in retaliation.
I don’t know if it’s (still) in service, but the USA had a rocket that would fly over the rocket fields and send the launch codes and fire the icbms. The fear was, that the soldiers were incapacitated and could not fire them itself. The backup.
Absolutely insane how in minutes everything would go to hell.
Truly terrifying as a citizen of a non-nuclear country that this is (or was) in place, and that a handful of countries (presuming they all have this capability) is willing to obliterate everyone else because they took it too far.
I flicked back a page of your comments and saw " .. here in Sydney."
I'm in Australia like, I presume, yourself.
The same country that has (along with multiple other installations) the Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Communication_Station_Ha...
which has always been a prime target in any first strike scenario .. given its primary function is communications with roving nuclear ballistic missile launch submarines.
Like it or not Australia's been part of the game since an Australian scientist first explained to the Americans how to build an atomic weapon and further convinced them that it was both feasible and essential.
A series of airplanes, called Looking Glass, was the first backup.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/DRC-8_Emergency_Rocket_Co...
They can't actually be sat there just waiting for a radio signal, can they? Just waiting for some kid with a Flipper Zero to end the world?
So not a dead man's switch, just backup one way comms system.
I'm just going to assume a hostile first strike makes satellite comms difficult.
[1] http://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~jdalbey/SWE/Papers/att_collaps...
Unforgiveable snark aside I suspect they would have used some level of authorisation ... although there was that strong rumour to the effect that the default silo launch codes were 000 for many many years.
Which was, of course, just silly .. military intelligence would demand at least eight zero's.
It is only recently (late last year an this year) that there is sometimes a strange feeling that one guy (Putin) could blow all this stability up by raising tension in our region to the point where European governments are talking about war right here.
This is truly scary because so far war has been a remote thing - we knew that people were fighting somewhere in the world and we had armchair compassion at lunch.
I noticed a palpable hatred toward Putin rising in my circles because of this tension raising. People are less interested in politics but rather in the fact that, to our horror, the idea of a war is being invoked.
It is really sad that such thoughts are for real and not just in a movie.
I assume such an armageddon would disrupt supply chains and cause social strife in other parts of the world, but are there parts where it would be business as usual? Africa? Maybe warlords would run out of ammunition, but they would still have machetes.