Why waste a nuke or JDAM? You can effectively render that intersection inoperative with one solid VBIED on the deck of the overpass. Just crack open that span and drop all the wreckage below, blocking traffic in all four directions.
I can do that hours or fractions thereof before my bombers or nukes strike, to slow down first/military responders and leverage timed, larger effects.
Tripler
Dirty tricks, done relatively dirt cheap.
As an aside, look into diverging diamond intersections. Pretty cool.
That would work equally well as a motto on an SMU mission patch or a Twitter tag line.
Stranger
It’ll block straight-through and left-turning traffic, but not right-turning traffic. Some quickly-implemented u-turn crossovers would allow full, if slow, use.
Now that is a much more interesting conversation. For all the reasons you, I, and others have said.
Armed with a round dozen nuclear ICBMs of somewhat flaky and uncertain CEP & reliability, and only the reach to hit Alaska, Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington states, but no farther east, which 6 targets do you aim 2 each at? Or 4 targets with two and 4 more targets with one totalling 8 of which probably 6 or 7 get hit?
That’s obviously a suicide mission for NK if the US responds nuclearly in detail. So they have to hope concerns for US-caused radioactive fallout into SK and Japan, and/or a robust credible warning by e.g. the Chinese plus Russians that nuking NK will trigger a full-up world war, would stay the US’s nuclear hand. The NK plan / hope would simply be that this is the opening unanswered salvo in an otherwise conventional replay of the 1950s inter-Korean war. Meanwhile although the US would be sorely tempted to simply incinerate NK, they’re also confident they can prevail in a conventional war, and can always escalate later if this proves optimistic.
So where does NK aim?
Pearl Harbor for sure and, perhaps unexpectedly to laymen, Andersen AFB on Guam to kill the B-2 detachment there. The USN sub base in Bremerton WA, and maybe the USN base in San Diego, home of the Pacific Fleet. After that I’m kind of out of ideas for a pure counterforce attack on CONUS designed to hinder US offensive ops in Korea.
You’re not going to see conventional bombing during a nuclear war. Assets that can deliver weapons will be in extremely high demand and anything that can carry a nuke will be doing so. There are some fighter-bombers that don’t have nuclear weapon capability, so maybe you’d see a slight usage of conventional bombs, but they certainly wouldn’t be used for bombing the road network. Edit: I forgot the B1 force was stripped of its ability to deliver nuclear weapons as part of arms limitation treaties. I guess they could potentially do some conventional bombing, assuming there isn’t an easy way to reintegrate nuclear capability.
There will be transport targets in a nuclear war, but they’ll be more important than highway interchanges. There are too many, and the road network in the US is too resilient - in the vast majority of highway interchanges you’ll have the ability to either cross somewhere else off-road or simply route a different way on other roads. Major important transportation hubs like railyards and docks would be hit, along with bridges that would serve as major chokepoints for transport infrastructure, but not routine interchanges.
Nobody’s mentioned yet that the biggest interstate interchanges are in cities anyway? That’s why they put those roads there; to go through those cities. If you’re going to nuke a city anyway, of course you’re going to end up nuking interstates in the process.
The US could easily squish North Korea like a bug even without nukes, so long as they didn’t have China’s backing. Which, in a genuine nuclear scenario, I don’t think they would any more. US military doctrine is clear that we’d consider ourselves “allowed” to respond in kind to a nuclear attack, but we wouldn’t need to.
I did. {waves hands}
I still insist that the electric grid be decimated. The civilian population is far too numerous and spread out to bomb them into oblivion. Outside of bombs, nothing demoralizes cities like blackouts.
Hmm, it definitely is. I’m going to have to disagree with you, though I’m certainly not saying you’re wrong. There’s only one way to find out for sure, and as a dark joke on the study of nuclear warfare goes, it wouldn’t be scientifically conclusive since you couldn’t repeat the experiment.
A nuclear attack by North Korea would be a suicide mission, and that being the case I’d tend to think that the only real goal of the North Korean leadership would be to take the most people with them as possible. Which means targeting the largest population centers they can. Not necessarily even in the US, Seoul and Tokyo spring to mind as easy to hit targets.
A Cloverleaf closest to me is the interchange connecting The Garden State Parkway and the Atlantic City Expressway. Close by is the Atlantic City International Airport Complex, which includes the New Jersey Air National Guard 177th Fighter Wing, United States Coast Guard Air Station, Federal Aviation Administration Technical Center, and Federal Air Martials Training Center.
Atlantic City International Airport - Wikipedia
Obviously, Philly, AC and ACX are Hard Targets, but since such targets would have a great deal of defensive measures available to shoot down some number of ICBMs and bombs (via Patriot missiles and the like), a soft target may escape protection, thus stymieing movement of materiel in and out of ACX.
Nuclear war would be quick but probably not two-hour spasm quick. Both sides would start by hoping to take out C&C facilities, land based silos and airbases in a counterforce strike. Probably an initial exchange, a pause while what’s left of both sides takes stock and reevaluates, then a follow-up wave.
This was written in 1982 by Viktor Suvorov, a pseudonym of Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun, allegedly the highest-level defector to the West from the USSR. Bear in mind a lot of what he wrote has proven to be untrue, so take it with a grain of salt. The Axe Theory:
For decades, Western military theorists have unanimously asserted that any nuclear war would begin with a first stage during which only conventional weapons would be used. Then, after a certain period, each side would begin, uncertainly and irresolutely at first, to use nuclear weapons of the lowest calibre. Gradually, larger and larger nuclear weapons would be brought into action. These theorists hold varying views on the period which this escalation would take, ranging from a few weeks to several months.
Being unopposed, this theory was to be found in the pages of both serious studies and light novels-the latter being fantasies with happy endings, in which a nuclear war was brought to a halt in such a way that it could never recur.
The theory that a nuclear war would take a long time to build up originated in the West at the beginning of the nuclear age. It is incomprehensible and absurd, and it completely mystifies Soviet marshals. For a long time there was a secret debate at the highest levels of the Soviet government-have the Western politicians and generals gone off their heads or are they bluffing? It was concluded that, of course, no one really believed in the theory but that it had been thought up in order to hide what Western policy-makers really believed about the subject. But then the question arose: for whose benefit could such an unconvincing and, to put it mildly, such a silly idea have been dreamed up? Presumably not for that of the Soviet leadership. The theory is too naive for specialists to believe. That must mean that it was devised for the ignorant and for the popular masses in the West, to reassure the man in the street.
…
Many years passed and I became an officer serving with the General Staff. Suddenly, as I studied American theories of war, I came to an appalling realisation. It became clear to me that a modern American cowboy who is working up to a decisive fight will always expect to begin by spitting at and insulting his opponent and to continue by throwing whisky in his face and chucking custard pies at him before resorting to more serious weapons. He expects to hurl chairs and bottles at his enemy and to try to stick a fork or a tableknife into his behind and then to fight with his fists and only after all this to fight it out with his gun.
This is a very dangerous philosophy. You are going to end up by using pistols. Why not start with them? Why should the bandit you are fighting wait for you to remember your gun? He may shoot you before you do, just as you are going to slap his face. By using his most deadly weapon at the beginning of the fight, your enemy saves his strength. Why should he waste it throwing chairs at you? Moreover, this will enable him to save his own despicable life. After all, he does not know, either, when you, the noble hero, will decide to use your gun. Why should he wait for this moment? You might make a sudden decision to shoot him immediately after throwing custard pies at him, without waiting for the exchange of chairs. Of course he won’t wait for you when it comes to staying alive. He will shoot first. At the very start of the fight.
…
The philosophy of the Soviet General Staff is no different from that of the horsemen whom I had watched riding the desert. “If you want to stay alive, kill your enemy. The quicker you finish him off, the less chance he will have to use his own gun.” In essence, this is the whole theoretical basis on which their plans for a third world war have been drawn up. The theory is known unofficially in the General Staff as the `axe theory’. It is stupid, say the Soviet generals, to start a fist-fight if your opponent may use a knife. It is just as stupid to attack him with a knife if he may use an axe. The more terrible the weapon which your opponent may use, the more decisively you must attack him, and the more quickly you must finish him off. Any delay or hesitation in doing this will just give him a fresh opportunity to use his axe on you. To put it briefly, you can only prevent your enemy from using his axe if you use your own first.
…
The “axe theory” was put forward in all Soviet manuals and handbooks to be read at regimental level and higher. In each of these one of the main sections was headed `Evading the blow’. These handbooks advocated, most insistently, the delivery of a massive pre-emptive attack on the enemy, as the best method of self-protection. This recommendation was not confined to secret manuals-non-confidential military publications carried it as well.
But this was trivial by comparison to the demonstration which the Soviet Union gave the whole world at the beginning of the 1970s, with the official publication of data about the Soviet anti-missile defence system. This whole system was, in reality, totally inadequate, but the idea behind it provides an excellent illustration of the Soviet philosophy on nuclear war. By contrast to the United States, the Soviet Union had no thought of protecting its strategic rockets with an anti-missile system. The best protection for rockets in a war is to use them immediately. Could any one devise a more effective way of defending them?
The “axe theory” was put forward in all Soviet manuals and handbooks to be read at regimental level and higher. In each of these one of the main sections was headed `Evading the blow’. These handbooks advocated, most insistently, the delivery of a massive pre-emptive attack on the enemy, as the best method of self-protection. This recommendation was not confined to secret manuals-non-confidential military publications carried it as well.
But this was trivial by comparison to the demonstration which the Soviet Union gave the whole world at the beginning of the 1970s, with the official publication of data about the Soviet anti-missile defence system. This whole system was, in reality, totally inadequate, but the idea behind it provides an excellent illustration of the Soviet philosophy on nuclear war. By contrast to the United States, the Soviet Union had no thought of protecting its strategic rockets with an anti-missile system. The best protection for rockets in a war is to use them immediately. Could any one devise a more effective way of defending them?
Bolding mine.
There’s no evidence of any weapons systems, Patriots or otherwise, that would be effective against any non-negligible fraction of ICBMs. You know those “hypersonic” Russian missiles that were giving Patriots some difficulty? ICBMs come in an order of magnitude faster.
There are no MIM-104 ‘Patriot’ missile batteries operational within the United States, and these systems are only designed to intercept theate-level ballistic missiles. The only operational ABM system that is even ostensibly capable of intercepting an ICBM is the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense System(GMD) with interceptors at Ft. Greeley (near Fairbanks, AK) and Vandenberg Space Force Base (near Lompoc, CA). With ~30 interceptors between them, they are only intended to take out launches from a ‘rogue nation’ in the East Pacific (i.e. North Korea), and even their capability in that regard is questionable at best. There are no specific protective systems for Philadelphia, Atlantic City, or anything else on the Eastern Seaboard, and these cities are in no way ‘hard targets’ in terms of their ability to absorb a nuclear attack.
In wargaming simulations, nuclear conflict rapidly advances to a full salvo launch of all land-based nuclear weapons followed by bombers, because any delay may result in a loss of counterstrike capability. Submarine-launched weapons (SLBMs) may be held in reserve if there are sufficient successful launches of ICBMs to give confidence in the destruction of all further response capacity but they are frequently also launched to assure maximum destruction of war-fighting capability. In essence, once a global nuclear exchange begins, there is really no reason to not go all-in as soon as possible least any portion of the remaining arsenal be disabled.
Stranger
Right turns only? That still gives me the delays I need. All I need is an hour’s worth of time, or a mass congregation of people, to pull another similar (or bigger) stunt to cause even more mass panic and harassment on responding services.
If you think Spetznaz hasn’t already identified chokepoints and where to hit us, you’re fooling yourself.
It already is . . . 
Tripler
Oh man, the targetting fun we can have!
But that’s just it: how does nuking a city that manufactures trucks going to have the slightest impact on how powerful a nuclear launch that city’s nation can perform? And would the USSR really have escalated to a full strategic nuclear attack simply because an invasion of West Germany in 1980 failed?
Von “Strangelove” Neumann, game-theory and Manhattan Project pioneer, figured it was best to pre-emptively nuke the enemy before they had a chance to build up their strategic arsenal. War is inevitable, after all. As he said in 1950,
If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?
That was his point, they wouldn’t have escalated to a nuclear attack because a conventional attack failed. The’d have launched a nuclear attack, not a conventional one. Again, there’s a lot that he wrote that has turned out to be untrue, possibly because he was telling his Western hosts what they wanted to hear, but there is some evidence in the body of published Soviet works on the topic of nuclear warfare that they at least considered immediately going nuclear/biological/chemical in the event of WWIII, and pretty much on the basis he lays out. There’s no point in waiting to ‘escalate’ if the fight is going to end by using the deadliest weapons anyway.
What features confer/revoke a plane’s ability to deliver nuclear weapons? If I’m going to air-launch a cruise missile, how would I (my plane) even know what that missile’s warhead is (conventional or nuke)?
B-1B Lancer > Air Force > Fact Sheet Display (af.mil)
The United States eliminated the nuclear mission for the B-1 in 1994. Even though the Air Force expended no further funding to maintain nuclear capabilities, the B-1 was still considered a heavy bomber equipped for nuclear armament until 2007. The conversion to conventional only began in November 2007 under the original START treaty and was completed in March 2011 under the New START treaty. To make that conversion possible, two steps were taken:
During the first step a metal cylindrical sleeve was welded into the aft attachment point of each set of B-1 pylon attachments. This prevented installing B-1 Air Launched Cruise Missile pylons.
During the second step two nuclear armament-unique cable connectors in each of the B-1 weapons bays were removed. This prevented the pre-arm signal from reaching the weapons.
Rockwell B-1 Lancer - Operational History
The B-1B no longer carries nuclear weapons;[38] its nuclear capability was disabled by 1995 with the removal of nuclear arming and fuzing hardware.[119] Under provisions of the New START treaty with Russia, further conversions were performed. These included modification of aircraft hardpoints to prevent nuclear weapon pylons from being attached, removal of weapons bay wiring bundles for arming nuclear weapons, and destruction of nuclear weapon pylons. The conversion process was completed in 2011, and Russian officials inspect the aircraft every year to verify compliance.