A misconception above to be cleared up:
The Supersonic Low-Altitude Missile (SLAM) was never intended to cruise in standby mode in peacetime- for one thing it had no provision for landing or recovery of its nuclear payload. Back when people still had doubts that reliable ballistic missiles of intercontinental range could be built*, air-breathing missiles such as the Navaho were intended to be a backup in case the ICBM programs failed. The SLAM would have been the ultimate cruise missile. In addition to effectively unlimited range, it had so ridiculously much engine power to spare that it was intended to cruise at Mach 3 at treetop level, making intercepting it next to impossible. The fallout from its exhaust was incidental but unavoidable- the design relied on an unshielded reactor with air flowing through it. Like more conventional designs, it became obsolete once ICBMs proved themselves.
*The prospect that ICBMs might never be practical was based on two concerns: First, that guidance systems simply couldn’t be accurate enough at that range. Second, missile designers were loath to use staging- from their point of view it was doubling the chance that the missile would fail. The Atlas ICBM pushed the technology to the absolute limit to avoid having to use staging, and required a minimum weight warhead with less than truly global range.
The common thread is how uninhabitable irradiated land can be, whether said radiation comes from a reactor accident or fallout from city-killing sized nuclear warheads is immaterial.
I’ve bolded the important word in your sentence. In an all out strategic exchange, why would both sides limit themselves to airbursts in order to reduce the amount of fallout? Concern about killing more of the other side’s civilians after you’ve tried to kill as many of them as possible by nuking every city they have? Even in a limited strategic exchange, most of the military targets require ground bursts anyway. Call it the law of unintended consequences; hardening all the launch silos for ICBMs to maximize their survivability means the warheads targeting them are going to be set for ground bursts, not air bursting 6 miles in the air which the silo covers could survive. In the worst of the irony, the silos are almost certain to be empty by that point anyway. The best way to protect an ICBM is to launch it.
The nuclear weapons which were used on Nagasaki and Hiroshima scarcely qualify as tactical nuclear weapons today. Hiroshima was 13-18kt, Nagasaki 20-22kt. In a strategic exchange during the Cold War each and every city in the US, USSR, and Europe could expect at a minimum to be hit by several 100kt MIRVed warheads.
It isn’t clearly implied what happens after the film ends; the end sequence is of melting celluloid images of the crew of the Bedford and a shot of a mushroom cloud as the credits roll. Escalation to war, and said war being nuclear can certainly be implied as all that the higher ups are going to know is an American frigate was destroyed in a nuclear explosion, not that the Bedford fired first when a jumpy ensign misheard his captain saying “if he fires one, I’ll fire one.”
Planning for and preparing for emergencies is never pointless. If you happen to be at ground zero then you are fucked, no matter what you do, but if you aren’t then planning and preparation might be what saves a lot of peoples lives.
If you are at ground zero you are fucked, as noted…but if not then it seems rational to take steps. And civil defense preparations were more than just telling kids to duck and cover. The internet we are all enjoying right now was one of the things that came out of that planning, so I don’t see how anyone can say that it was ‘pointless’.
No. Assuming a full out exchange between the US and Soviet Union (as well as all allied powers to both sides), it still wouldn’t be pointless as there would be literally millions of survivors in both countries. No planning means that many, many more of those survivors would die than if you did no planning at all and just say ‘well, we are all fucked’ and let things play out however they would. For one thing, even in 1984 not all of the nukes are going to go off or hit their intended targets…hell, no one really knows what would happen in the event of a full on exchange of nuclear weapons, and even though both sides claimed huge numbers of weapons a certain percentage of them wouldn’t work or would otherwise fail (the nukes would fail to initiate, the missiles would blow up or fail to launch, the guidance systems would fail, etc etc…not to mention that a large percentage of guys would disobey orders and not launch). For another, not every part of the country was targeted equally, and many places in a continental sized nation like the US or USSR would be unscathed or reasonably intact. And even in places hit fairly hard you’d have survivors.
I’m pretty sure the radiation from a nuclear weapon fades quite a bit more quickly than the stuff that comes out of a nuclear power plant that kabooms.
Maybe, but the Cold War is over now. Wikipedia gives estimates of Russian warheads in the low thousands. I’ve heard estimates that there are ~19,000 cities in America.
I think even our missiles are estimates to take ~10 minutes (give or take a couple) to hit their targets. Also, as long as you were a few miles from the intended target, you’d have a good chance of surviving the initial blast.
Caesium-137 has a half life of 30 years, strontium-90 28.8 years. They don’t particularly care if they were produced from a nuclear blast or a reactor meltdown (power plants don’t “kaboom”).
I’m afraid I don’t understand your point. The OP asks
The mid-1980’s was the height of the Cold War in terms of the size of nuclear arsenals, with the Soviet inventory peaking at ~45,000 warheads in 1988. The only way you reach a total of 19,000 cities in the US is due to the varying way states define cities legally. I live near a city with a population of 4,500 or so. Woodford Mills, Tennessee is legally a city and had a population of 296 as of the 2000 census.
The irony dates back to WW2 - in order to protect civilian populations from air raids and bombings, one had to protect them with heavy anti-air defense. Thus making them valid (and legal) military targets. Air defenses in place, large cities now looked like prime defensive ground to protect vulnerable military infrastructure - thus making them even better military targets ! Genius !
The Cold War presented us with yet another of those military intelligence catch-22s : in the event of a nuclear exchange, most of Europe would be smouldering glowdust except for the vast, barely inhabitated northern expanses of Norway and Sweden where only the mad and the Finn dwell and drink themselves into oblivion. Those would remain relatively untouched. And had quite a bit of mountains, too. What better place to dig nuke-proof ammunition and equipment dumps for the reinforcement waves coming from the US ?
So that’s what NATO did. To this day, there still are bunker complexes out there designed to equip naked divisions top to bottom - weapons, uniforms, ammo, vehicles, artillery pieces oh my.
Yup, you guessed it, making them prime value nuclear targets.
I had a great time researching this one of the odd semesters I was sober in college. American strategy was to target military and industrial targets, transportation centers, ports, etc…Soviet strategy was to target any town with a population over 10,000. The USSR was quite active in dispersing military and industrial targets away from major population centers. We weren’t, in addition the Soviet arsenal lacked the accuracy of ours so they planned to even things up by launching more and bigger bombs at each target. Podunk was as doomed as NYC, and our casualties were going to be much higher than theirs, although the Brits and France were a sure bet to even up the totals. A one megaton airburst over a modern city causes heavy blast and thermal damage over 640 square miles. Draw a couple dozen target circles that size over LA or the DFW area and it is no joke to be on the ground. John Hersey’s book Hiroshima tells the stories of people who survived that bomb. Don’t poohpooh those 1st nukes, the highly accurate warheads we MIRV are even smaller. If it ever happened, don’t worry, Mexico will come through just fine and their efficient government will be happy to take over things here when we’re gone…
I’ve always wondered what preparations Ireland (north and south) had made for WWIII. I don’t know if Belfast was a Russian target but Dublin and other cities are in neutral Ireland, would that have meant they’d be left unscathed? I could imagine a horrendous scenario where Ireland is left pristine but then has to deal with thousands upon thousands of refugees from Britain and the continent. I wonder if any of the governments of the day had planned for such an occurrence.
Oh and as to the Civil Defense aspect of things, I heard a long time ago (and it makes sense to me today) that the entire concept of “sheltering in place”, “duck and cover”, “everyone out into the halls against the lockers” was not intended to provide protection, but to allow any survivors / “rescue” crews to more easily retrieve and identify the bodies. This applies to tornadoes as well.
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I’ve always wondered what preparations Ireland (north and south) had made for WWIII. I don’t know if Belfast was a Russian target but Dublin and other cities are in neutral Ireland, would that have meant they’d be left unscathed? I could imagine a horrendous scenario where Ireland is left pristine but then has to deal with thousands upon thousands of refugees from Britain and the continent. I wonder if any of the governments of the day had planned for such an occurrence.
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Does the wind blow from England to Ireland ? If so, not to worry my friend, you’re just as thoroughly fucked as the colonists !
Then again, I would expect at least Northern Ireland to catch a few anyway, just in case there’d be caches from Gladiodug somewhere in the emerald hills.
It’s not like the area around Chernobyl is an insta-death zone. The last of the remaining reactors at the plant wasn’t even shut down until December, 2000. People are still working, every day at the plant, to help decommission it. Granted, these people don’t live in the exclusion zone, but 5 days a week, 8 hours a day they’re working in what you seem to believe is a nuclear wasteland.
But beyond that, people do live in the exclusion zone. They aren’t supposed to, and they have higher rates of cancer than most, but it’s not like they keel over and die.
The only people who actually died from acute radiation sickness at Cherbonyl were 31 first responders who were very close to the plant while it was on fire and throwing up all sorts of sludge. The increased number of deaths due to cancer is much harder to quantify. There have been some studies among the liquidators (who range for people who were at the scene very early and thus received high doses of radiation as well as the many more people who worked to clean the site in the months and years that followed who received much more moderate doses) that have even been unable to detect any statistically significant increase in cancer rates. The trouble with estimating is that while lots of people were exposed, the increased risk for any individual is quite small. The Chernobyl Forum, a group made up of various UN organizations, estimates up to 4,000 excess cancer deaths among 5 million exposed. Other groups (mostly ones ideologically opposed to nuclear power) have released higher estimates, but even the Greenpeace report (with the high-end estimates coming from non-peer reviewed sources) says 200,000 premature deaths, on the high end.
The main cancer risk from nuclear fallout is thyroid cancer (iodine-131 is concentrated in the thyroid), but this is also relatively easy to minimize the risks of with iodine pills (which does require a civil defense plan to be in place). Thyroid cancer was the only cancer which saw any statistically significant increase in the areas affected by the Chernobyl disaster.
Everyone has all these awful ideas of how even if you survived a nuclear attack, you’d die a slow, horrible death in the next few days. That’s simply not true, for most people. Those close enough to the bomb to get enough radiation for acute radiation sickness are likely killed by the blast. For everyone else, well no, fallout’s not healthy, but you’d be able to go outside, farm your land, and get on with your life. Anarchy? Maybe. Food production would be way down, both due to lack of infrastructure plus nuclear winter. Mass starvation’s a definite possibility, depending on how many the bombs took out directly.
But I think that a billion surviving even an all-out nuclear exchange is not unlikely. In the U.S., about 80% of the population lives in urban areas. Assume they all die, that’s 60 million in the U.S. alone who survive the initial bombings. Worldwide, only about 50% of people live in Urban environments, according to the UN (I don’t know what their definition is). Some of those will die from radiation, but starvation’s the bigger worry by far.
That’s ridiculous. In both cases (tornadoes and nukes), it’s to protect you from structural damage if parts of the building come down. No, you won’t survive a direct hit from a nuke, and an EF-5 tornado going right over your house has a chance at killing even the most prepared basement dweller. But not all schools would be at the epicenter of a nuke blast, and not all tornadoes are EF-5. The concrete walls of your school might well protect you from a 1 Mt nuke going off 5-10 miles away, and if you’re under a desk, you’re protected if part of the roof collapses on you.
Where did I say it was an insta-death zone? You are also incorrect that people are working there 5 days a week, 8 hours a day. Aside from the fact that they are wearing NBC gear while working,
Fallout’s not healthy but you’ll be able to go out and farm your land? If you want your crops to kill you, go for it. Otherwise you’ll have to remove several inches of topsoil from all of your farmland before you go about planting anything. Let’s also hope you happen to have a working oil well and refinery a couple of miles down the road, as modern industrial farming uses a lot of internal combustion engines. Good luck getting gas and diesel for them when the entire infrastructure that gets fuel to your farm, and then your crops to the general populous has been destroyed, from the ports to the railroads to the interstates which used to pass through those smoldering remains of cities. Mass starvation is a certainty, not a possibility. Your average everyday first world citizen has no idea how to go about keeping himself fed aside from going to the supermarket, which isn’t going to getting any more food ever again.
This isn’t even touching nuclear winter, which if it turns out to be true makes all of this a moot point:
American strategy was to target population centers as well. Where do you imagine these industrial targets, transportation centers, ports, etc are located?
The smallest MIRVed warheads are in the 100kt range (Trident I, 100kt per MIRV, 8 MIRVs per Trident). That’s 5-10 times as powerful as the bombs used on Hiroshima or Nagasaki; the larger of the two only had a 20kt yield.
Hey, fair’s fair : if your land is a mineshaft and your crops are mushrooms, you’re probably fine. Regrettably I don’t believe it’s possible to cultivate trumpets of the dead underground, as would have been appropriate.