Seriously, if someone decides to nuke the US, where would they start? Almost certainly Washington DC and NYC. The US is too big to bomb in its entirety.
Maybe I should move to Boise, Idaho or something. I don't think they're going to get bombed, and it seems nice.
> The US is too big to bomb in its entirety.
Russia has ~5500 warheads, so maybe not every square inch but certainly several cities and other locations in each state.
First, nuclear forces: ICBM and IRBM silos and their C2, nuclear weapons storage, strategic airfields and ballistic-missile submarine bases. (This is why nuclear arsenals escalate against each other. The defensive role of missile silos is both deference and to soak up the enemy’s nukes.)
Second, leadership: command posts and communication.
Third, other military: barracks, supply depots, marshalling points, airfields, ammunition storage, tank and vehicle storage.
Fourth, military industry: ammo, tank, APC factories; refineries; railyards and repair facilities. Steel, aluminum and power generation.
Fifth, population centres. (You don’t want to nuke New York if that could have taken out a silo that will flatten a dozen of your cities.)
In summary, somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere :).
So, attacking them just means they launch everything at you while also wasting your nukes.
By useful I mean you can do significantly better than saying if it’s targeting the middle of the US, east, or west coast. Though it’s quite a large area.
If you’re doing a first strike and aren’t a moron, you conventionally strike the early-warning radars first. Ideally in a plausibly-deniable way.
There’s no plausibility deniable way to take these systems down in practice.
Nuking full siloes is the point of a first strike. So yes, you’re relatively safe near a silo field if America is launching first and the adversary assumes or knows that every silo launched perfectly.
I’m not saying nobody would ever target a missile silo, just that they aren’t particularly high on this list of targets.
The target list is obviously conditional on a nuclear war happening. Unless your position is the U.S. is invulnerable to a first strike, then the silos should stay at the top of the list. (Even in a second strike you hit them and hit them fast. If there was a launch error you get a tremendous defensive ROI in taking them out.)
Even France and the UK has 4 nuclear subs, the US has what 14 ballistic missile submarines?
That’s incoherent with this thread, which started with someone asking what would happen “if someone decides to nuke the US.” Not if France launched a suicidal first strike on America.
The realistic scenarios for America getting nuked are a first strike from a rogue state, first strike from Russia or China, and second strike from Russia or China.
First strike from a rogue state is basically nuclear terrorism; it will probably target a population centre or something close and hittable, e.g. Guam for Pyongyang. First strikes from Russia or China would target silos. (Unless theatre-based, e.g. hitting Guam and our Japanese airbases ahead of an invasion of Taiwan.) Second strike would mean silos are probably empty, though not necessarily, these are hundreds of decades-old mechanisms in who knows what condition of readiness, but sure, if the American first strike is comprehensive and flawless, and the enemy omnipotent, we’d probably not see too many nukes go at silos. (You would at other nuclear infrastructure.)
So in general, no, if we’re in wide-scale nuclear war the planners who thought about this for decades in the Cold War may not have missed that launched tubes that have launched are now empty.
Obviously by definition someone can attack first, however:
“First strike capability is a country's ability to defeat another nuclear power by destroying its arsenal to the point where the attacking country can survive the weakened retaliation while the opposing side is left unable to continue war.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_strike_(nuclear_strategy...
So yes in theory sure a first strike would take out nuclear silos, but neither side believed they could preform a successful first strike. It’s a theoretical goal, not something that seems to have been possible barring the very early days of the Cold War before ICBM’s existed.
Which then brings up the question of what exactly you target if you assume thousands of nukes will hit you regardless of what you aim for.
Grim times ahead for sure but i'm not that stressed considering that something like 70% of russia's population is in the west of the country, very, very close to europe
He's already talked about invading Greenland, what's to stop him from trying to invade somewhere else, somewhere with more firepower to fight back? All it would take is Fox News or OAN to start running stories about how the US is actually entitled to the land of France. It's not like it matters if there's any truth to it.
Is it? I mean I don't think they could legally refuse (if use of force was authorized by the president and congress)? So it would still effectively be a military "coup" and those can obviously still happen in authoritarian countries.
There's a handy map in this article:
* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/who-would-take-th...
* https://www.newsweek.com/safest-us-states-nuclear-war-attack...
In the US, the west coast and Florida seem to be the best candidates from fallout. See also perhaps:
* https://www.mirasafety.com/blogs/news/nuclear-attack-map
* https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/yc0ho2/us_cities_a...
It's a 7700nmi trip:
* http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?MS=wls&DU=nm&P=KJFK-NZAA
Not many private jets (or even commercial ones) can do non-stop:
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prep...
I'm a non-believer when it comes to these sorts of things, but if anything was to convince me otherwise it'd be watching Trump speed run us towards another World War these past few weeks.
I think the concern is that telling Ukraine to surrender their land after they were invaded by Russia will give Russia the confidence to start attacking other European countries. Traditionally, NATO would have protected us from that happening, but with Trump upsetting all our NATO partners, I'm kind of concerned that that won't help this time.
I've been listening to a lot of French news lately and France is already talking about needing to build more nuclear weapons and to extend nuclear protections across Europe, as the US has in a short few weeks completely alienated all of our allies from the past 80 years [2].
So, I don't know, seems like we're closer to everything going to shit globally than in any other time in my 40+ years.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-will-work-firmly-a...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/how-realistic-is-france...
I think it's unlikely the Russians would nuke somewhere like that as they only have two decent cities which would be hit in retaliation. It's more likely if they went nuclear that they'd hit troops in Ukraine. Biden issued a lot of threats to Putin if they did that but under Trump I'm not sure much US retaliation would happen.