When you drive around the Minot area, it’s easy to spot the silos from your car, just based on the fencing and “keep out” signs.
I was driving through that area years ago with a friend from Ontario. He saw all the fences and warning signs and asked what they were for.
I said “nuclear missile silos.” He didn’t believe me at first until I explained the role of Minot Air Force Base.
So much for concealment. :rolleyes:
When I lived in Nebraska, we were told Omaha was #3 on the list, after Washington and New York.
With Strategic Air Command near Omaha, made sense.
Now I live near Pearl Harbor, the closest major military installation to China and North Korea.
Did Guam finally tip over?
Whiteman AFB, home of the B2 and former home of ICBMs, abuts the little town of Knob Noster, MO.
I was visiting Knob Noster Police Department not too long ago and took notice of their emergency siren activation console. Tornado…Fire…Nuclear attack.
Yeah, forget the siren. All you bastards are gone.
Lancaster/palmdale California why ? because 90 percent of any new aircraft made either is built or starts here
Until the mid 90s anyone from the “soviet bloc” couldn’t even come here … I learned all of this when for a class project I got some visitor material from the Romanian embassy it was mostly tourist propaganda but I had a few people inquiring on if I knew anyone there and the like at school and a teacher whos dad worked ta the "skunk works " told us about a lot of weird security stuff they used to have around here that a lot of people didn’t generally know about
QUOTE=Sicks Ate;19848223]Whiteman AFB, home of the B2 and former home of ICBMs, abuts the little town of Knob Noster, MO.
I was visiting Knob Noster Police Department not too long ago and took notice of their emergency siren activation console. Tornado…Fire…Nuclear attack.
Yeah, forget the siren. All you bastards are gone.
[/QUOTE]
yeah same here its also why until I graduated from hs we had nuke drills …
You base your doubts in reliability of Russian launcher based on? Empirical data? Intelligence reports? You gut feelings:rolleyes:
The Russians have been regularly testing their deployed systems and AFAIK from open sources, no one has cast any doubts as to their reliability. The have been in the business 50 plus years.
The silos are visible from outer space, so why not?
If war with Russia or China breaks out, it won’t be manufacturing that saves us. We’ll fight (and probably win, but perhaps lose) with the Navy and the Air Force we already have built. Lockheed Martin is producing something like 45 F-35’s a year. If we hit a point where those 45 aircraft matter one way or the other, then we’ve already lost the war (and the factory).
Silo locations are explicitly and implicitly given up as a result of the verification provisions of various arms control treaties.
And we have stuff no one knows off, all hush hush. We’re not stupid to fall for the arms control horseshit. The other countries ain’t either.
Hell, silo locations are visible from main roads. They’re usually located adjacent to some farmer’s field. They aren’t hidden underneath fake volcanic lakes or in disguised skyscrapers (even though those and many other bizarre basing concepts were proposed by the Scowcroft Commission) and there is no practical reason to conceal them since early warning systems will detect a large scale incoming attack in plenty of time to launch a counterattack.
You clearly have no idea what you are talking about. It is not remotely logistically possible to construct silos and deploy hundreds of ICBMs in secret in a country where people can move freely and observe military and contractor activities at will, even prior to commercial satellite imaging.
Stranger
Here are some considerations I didn’t see discussed:
Because different delivery systems have different ranges and flight times, there will of course be different targeting priorities.
Whatever gets hit first will likely get hit the hardest because more systems will be operational early in the conflict.
The ultimate political goal is to protect your population, so you want to destroy enemy capability first.
Having said that, here are my guesses on priority based on my own reading:
I would put 1-4 on the ‘definitely hit’ list, #5 on the ‘almost definitely hit’, and #6 on ‘nearly almost definitely hit’.
In summary, you wouldn’t want to be caught on either coast. Your best shot is to be located in the interior of the continent with plenty of supplies (depending on your personal definition of ‘best’, as surviving a nuclear holocaust may not be on your bucket list).
Even a cursory understanding of the subject (i.e. I looked it up and have followed along with this subject for years), the history of their nuclear arsenal post-Soviet collapse and their budget. What do you base YOUR assertions of regular testing and deployment on for the bulk of their legacy systems? Think about just the last part of your assertions here and put it in terms of budget and budget priorities over that last 50 years…then consider that the US, with something like 100 times their budget for nuclear weapons ALSO has issue maintaining and validating their legacy systems. Then maybe do some freaking research of your own on this subject before rolling your eyes. If you actually want a cite next time, ask instead of jerking your knee, though better yet is educate yourself on a subject before looking like an ass.
If you somehow know about secret military weapons, why are you talking about it on a open message board?
This is real life, not a James Bond movie.
In fact, a major nuclear power has a really great way of hiding nuclear missiles without having to resort to trying to build secret silos. It’s called a “submarine.”
Will B-1 bases be a target? If so, then Beale AFB in California, which is near the little towns of Marysville and Yuba City, would be a target.
There are no guarantees that a nuclear warhead sitting in a hole for a decade is necessarily going to go bang just as designed, or at all. They’re devilishly complex devices requiring special materials and engineering; despite continued efforts for reliability, they’re probably a lot less reliable than the rocketry component of the weapon.
And I’m guessing that probably applies even more for the Russians, with a smaller budget for these things than the US has.
Couple that with the fact that, especially in the 10 or so years after the fall of the Soviet Union their military budget was even thinner (and that even in the lead up to that the Soviets were never what you might call rigorous about maintenance anyway) and you have a gap that certainly lead to a non-zero number of nukes and launch vehicles potentially failing or going astray when and if they were ever used. What is that number? No idea…and I seriously doubt the Russians know either, especially about the old legacy Soviet systems (they probably have a lot more confidence in the newer systems they have built since of course). Like I said, even the US isn’t that sure about some of the older legacy systems or nukes, and we have and had the budget to maintain stuff a hell of a lot better than the Russian Federation did or even does to this day.
