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Comment by dismalaf | Hacker News Reader

The US has at least 799 operational THAAD interceptors. Source: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12645/2

56 Aegis BMD equipped ships. Source: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/weapons/RL33745.pdf Japan also has 8 equipped ships.

Operational land-based Aegis BMD sites in Poland, Romania and the US.

Given how well Russian technology has performed in Ukraine versus American technology, I'd put money on American tech. I'd also put money on the US having systems that aren't public knowledge.

Russia's sabre rattling has grown increasingly unhinged and frequent which suggests they feel the same way.

Edit - should mention, it's thought that Russia has ~300 operational ICBMs. Also, I don't think our systems would be 100% effective. But I think they'd be effective enough that the US would survive.

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So let's say the US could shoot down everything Russia throws at them, could tell apart all of the decoys, intercept every single MIRV warhead and take out every other secret weapon Russia may have deployed. It doesn't take many hits to take out a big chunk of the US population and wipe out its economy, so that would have to be done at 100% success rate over large parts of the country.

Europe cannot do anything remotely like that, so close to everything west of the Ural would burn and pretty much everyone there would die, hundreds of millions of dead and God knows how many more further to the east. The soot from burning cities and forests would darken the whole northern hemisphere for several growing seasons, large parts of the US population would probably just freeze or starve, more so if the US has been hit as well. And that leaves out fallout dispersal, especially from the inventories of nuclear power plants hit with nukes and so on.

There simply is no winning an all-out nuclear war.

> The soot from burning cities and forests would darken the whole northern hemisphere for several growing seasons

There's already been over 2000 nuclear warhead detonations and nothing remotely like that has happened. In fact, the fallout isn't noticeable at all. Granted, the tests were in remote locations, but all the planetary effects people worry about haven't happened at all.

> Europe cannot do anything remotely like that

Several European nations do have missiles capable of taking out ICBMs, on top of US Aegis sites, seaborne Aegis sites, Patriot batteries, etc...

> There simply is no winning an all-out nuclear war

Depends on what you consider winning. I agree it's bad. But equally bad is allowing dictatorships to do whatever they want because they have nukes. Which is where we're at. One day it's Ukraine, the next it's Lithuania, then it's Romania, Finland or Poland. Or maybe Taiwan. Then Japan. And so on. Where do we draw the line?

> already been over 2000 nuclear warhead detonations and nothing remotely like that has happened

They said "soot from burning cities and forests." Nothing about fallout.

This hits a lil closer to home. This summer I lost my home when half our town burnt down in a 32,000 hectare forest fire. The other half is untouched and there's not even soot on the town, nevermind into the atmosphere. Massive amounts of boreal forest burn yearly. So their scenario is pure speculation with zero basis in reality.

> Massive amounts of boreal forest burn yearly. So their scenario is pure speculation with zero basis in reality.

It's speculation shared by nuclear and climate scientists.

15 million hectares burned in Canada alone in 2023. We average over 2 million hectares of burnt forest per year.

Some quick maths. 15 million ha is 150,000km2. Tsar Bomba blast area was 16km2. It would take over 9000 Tsar Bombas to burn as much forest as only Canada's 2023 forest fire season.

Maybe provide some source for your assertion...

> Tsar Bomba blast area was 16km2. It would take over 9000 Tsar Bombas to burn as much forest as only Canada's 2023 forest fire season

The fire burns beyond the blast area.

Also, urban fires produce

> Maybe provide some source for your assertion

Sure [1][2].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK219184/

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00794-y

Link 1 is talking about blast effect which is a different topic altogether, link 2 is paywalled and is a magazine, not anything scholarly.

> Link 1 is talking about blast effect which is a different topic altogether

One, no—it’s about fire effects. It’s in the title.

Two, you literally cited blast area to estimate burn area.

Three, do you need a source for fires being able to spread? If I toss a match into a dry forest, is the area of the matchhead a predictor of particulate volume?

What I'm saying is... Tens of millions of hectares burn all the time, far more than all the nukes on earth would likely set on fire (since most of the populous cities on earth are on the coasts, and there's roads, farms and prairies surrounding most, not forests), so this idea that nukes would start forest fires that launch soot into the air that end civilization is pure fiction. There's zero basis for it, tens of millions of hectares worldwide burn yearly and it's barely noticeable if you don't live next to it.

comparing forest burning with a city of millions of people burning is such a nonsense, it is funny how you keep doubling down

> Tens of millions of hectares burn all the time, far more than all the nukes on earth would likely set on fire

Totally wrong. You’re still comparing forest and urban fires, and assuming you’ve calculated a burn mass from blast effects alone.

> There's zero basis for it

So you still haven’t read the first source. The one with “superfires” in the title.

> Given how well Russian technology has performed in Ukraine versus American technology, I'd put money on American tech

Capable of carrying 1,185 warheads. Plus decoys.

The “T” in THAAD stands for terminal. That means the warheads and decoys must be targeted separately. We’d need thousands of THAAD interceptors to even begin to feel comfortable about surviving, as a republic, a Russian nuclear exchange. (To say nothing of such an exchange immediately leaving us intensely vulnerable to China.)

Our missile defences protect against rogue nuclear states. North Korea. Some day, Iran. They are not intended to defeat MAD.

> The “T” in THAAD stands for terminal.

Yes. Terminal means the downward phase of a ballistic missile's flight. THAAD can target them before they reenter the atmosphere. That's the point.

And other BMD systems are designed to target them in the earlier phases of flight.

> THAAD can target them before they reenter the atmosphere

Not relevant. They've already separated. That means you have to count warheads and decoys, not missiles.

THAAD cannot intercept ICBMs…

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