Inconsistent fallout maps

[Lumpy]

@Ludovic

“Need answer fast!”

- YouTube

[Colibri]

@jtur88

I’m only 200 miles downwind from the Mexican border, which is the only country I can think of at the moment that is actually at risk of a nuclear attack.

Moderator Warnng

jtur88, you know that political jabs are against the rules of General Questions since you’ve received warnings for them before. This is an official warning. Continuing to do this may bring your posting privileges under discussion.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

[Colibri]

@beowulff

WTF?

@Weisshund

Who is Nuking Mexico?
More importantly Why?

@SamuelA

Donald Trump. He might if the dick waving contest got out of hand. Honestly this scenario is unlikely, but apparently there are no actual checks preventing Trump from picking up a phone and ordering a nuclear strike basically anywhere and at any time.

Everyone else can drop the hijack.

[Lumpy]

Also: new targeting fuse means submarine missiles formerly incapable of doing so can now destroy Russian ICBM silos: http://thebulletin.org/how-us-nuclear-force-modernization-undermining-strategic-stability-burst-height-compensating-super10578?platform=hootsuite

that program has implemented revolutionary new technologies that will vastly increase the targeting capability of the US ballistic missile arsenal. This increase in capability is astonishing—boosting the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three—and it creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.

As a consequence, the US submarine force today is much more capable than it was previously against hardened targets such as Russian ICBM silos. A decade ago, only about 20 percent of US submarine warheads had hard-target kill capability; today they all do.

Russian planners will almost surely see the advance in fuzing capability as empowering an increasingly feasible US preemptive nuclear strike capability—a capability that would require Russia to undertake countermeasures that would further increase the already dangerously high readiness of Russian nuclear forces.

Since with the new super-fuze, the probability of kill against these silos is near 0.9, the entire force of 100-kt W76-1/Mk4A Trident II warheads now “qualifies” for use against the hardest of Russian silos. This, in turn, means that essentially all of the higher-yield nuclear weapons (such as the W88/Mk5) that were formerly assigned to these Russian hard targets can now be focused on other, more demanding missions, including attacks against deeply-buried underground command facilities.

A very small number of Russia’s major leadership command posts are deeply buried, to protect them from direct destruction by nuclear attack. The US military would likely reserve the highest-yield warheads for those targets.

So: Russia fears the US might launch a preemptive attack, and that it might work. Solution: Launch everything if tensions escalate.

Dayum, I haven’t been this worried about nuclear war since the 1980s.

[SamuelA]

@Lumpy

Also: new targeting fuse means submarine missiles formerly incapable of doing so can now destroy Russian ICBM silos:

This is just a theoretical increase, though. Since nobody built some silos to Russian standards from blueprints, fired an ICBM with the new fuse from a submarine at them, and then checked the radioactive crater to see if the silo survived, that 0.9 is just a guess. It could be catastrophically incorrect, or the Russians could have hidden silos and missiles that aren’t known to the U.S., and so on. This is one heck of a gamble to take.

This is true for all the nuclear arms stuff. Say you hear that the Russians are unprepared, and thus a first strike is likely to succeed. Are you going to be the lives of hundreds of millions of people on that report?

And how do you define “winning”. A mere few million Americans die because only a few Russian missiles hit? Yeah, what a victory.

[Lumpy]

@SamuelA

or the Russians could have hidden silos and missiles that aren’t known to the U.S., and so on.

Doubtful; that’s what reconnaissance satellites are for. The closest they have to that are mobile missile launchers, and the USA could now use it’s Minuteman III missiles to blast entire regions the launchers were believe to be somewhere in.

Since nobody built some silos to Russian standards from blueprints, fired an ICBM with the new fuse from a submarine at them, and then checked the radioactive crater to see if the silo survived, that 0.9 is just a guess.

There’s probably an engineering limit to how hardened a missile silo can be. Basically, even if the ICBM was sitting in a hole in a giant block of steel, the warheads would still hit close enough to destroy it. It still has to have a door that can be opened to let the missile out, so the silos can only be so deep.

This is one heck of a gamble to take. This is true for all the nuclear arms stuff. Say you hear that the Russians are unprepared, and thus a first strike is likely to succeed. Are you going to be the lives of hundreds of millions of people on that report? And how do you define “winning”. A mere few million Americans die because only a few Russian missiles hit? Yeah, what a victory.

The fear is that Russia will adopt a launch on warning policy, and any “incident” could lead almost immediately to a Russian launch.

[SamuelA]

@Lumpy

Doubtful; that’s what reconnaissance satellites are for. The closest they have to that are mobile missile launchers, and the USA could now use it’s Minuteman III missiles to blast entire regions the launchers were believe to be somewhere in.

This is all probabilities stacked on guesses. Nobody can conduct a controlled experiment. Generally, in the real world when your information is incomplete and based on several stacked assumptions and the enemy team is deliberately obscuring information…generally it’s very likely something is critically wrong.

Think of the chain of what you are proposing :

1. You’re assuming that spy satellites can see any such construction, and that the NRO didn’t ignore a project that looked like an oil well installation or some other legitimate industry. Satellites have a limited field of view for high resolution imagery, it’s a myth that they can observe all of russia at anything more than a negligible resolution at the same time.

2. You’re assuming the submarine launched ICBMs are going to actually all fire. When’s the last time someone actually did a real world, empty the magazines test? What if there’s a flaw in the system?

3. You’re assuming all or nearly all the warheads will make it to the target correctly, when such a mission has never been done, and they will all detonate, and this new fuse which has never been tested on a live warhead will work every time, and it will increase probability of a hit.

4. You’re assuming the remaining Russian assets won’t get through any ABM defenses, or just a few will.

5. You’re assuming the Russians won’t be able to sneak some subsonic bears in and that the radar coverage has no holes. And that they don’t have spies or saboteurs or some other plan.

And like 5 other assumptions. Again, usually in the real world the higher you stack assumptions, the more precarious the conclusions become without the ability to conduct tests and make observations to verify your ultimate conclusion.

Plus, let’s say you have a bunch of 99% chances* in this assumption chain and you have a net 90% probability of success. Are you willing to pay the 10% cost of half of all living Americans dying in fireballs and of fallout poisoning later? This is one risky bet.

*totally unwarranted, there’s no way you can be this certain.

The same thing goes for the enemy, however. Whenever I hear about some big new spending program to buy more nuclear weapons so the Russians won’t even think they have a chance, I roll my eyes. Under what circumstances are the Russians going to risk everything if they *think *that maybe some American ICBMs are duds or that they aren’t ready to fire?

[Chronos]

Another difference I note between those maps is the time frame. Some of them are for a week after the attack, some are for two weeks, and some are long-term.

[LSLGuy]

@Lumpy

…
The fear is that Russia will adopt a launch on warning policy, and any “incident” could lead almost immediately to a Russian launch.

That fear would follow from what you read. If somebody knew nothing else about deterrence theory.

As well as SamuelA’s well-reasoned thoughts consider this.

Either country has sufficient SLBM capacity for a second strike at countervalue (= cities) targets. Even a totally successful first strike, devastating though it might be, still leaves the other side with an assured capacity to kill a decent fraction of your populace.

Knowing that, there’s not much need to launch on warning. Because the devastating first strike you’d be attempting to evade won’t be forthcoming. At least as long as your opponent is even slightly rational.

The folks that need to worry about US nuclear adventurism today are the Chinese, the Iranians, etc. The countries who could be thoroughly destroyed and who lack an effective second-strike response. They are at deterrence-theoretical risk of a bolt-from-the-blue first strike. Political and economical considerations, as well as basic human decency of the US NCA (less a couple of hotheads from time to time) are the best guarantors that this won’t come to pass.

Most of all, the US is a *status quo *power. Despite the uninformed ramblings of some folks on TV & twitter (it’s not a coincidence the name starts with “twit”) the current worldwide political and economic arrangements are tilted heavily in the US’ favor. We have far more to lose than to gain by adventurism. And most people in authority know that.

[nearwildheaven]

@SamuelA

Anyways, I have the impression that most Cold War era fallout shelters were grossly inadequate. I doubt many of them had a source of power that would be enough for several weeks to run filters. Today, you could do that inexpensively with solar panels and lithium-iron batteries, but back then it would have required a massive quantity of diesel fuel.

Or spare rad suits, or filters, or even geiger counters with adjustable range. They maybe had some food and/or a cellar to hide in. I read that a buried railroad tank car with sealed hatches could let you survive very close to ground zero, assuming you got into the thing and sealed the hatches before the weapons hit.

Not to mention what might pass for toilet facilities, which would be…interesting…if the occupants were exposed to radiation before they climbed in.

[nearwildheaven]

So, now that I tried Nukemap over my city, the default target for “Davy Crockett”, the smallest nuke ever known to have been detonated, was a neighborhood where something like this probably wouldn’t be noticed. I’m exaggerating, of course.

Earlier today, I finished watching a PBS documentary about the Oklahoma City bombing. Davy Crockett was not much bigger than this, although also radioactive.

[Hermitian]

@Lumpy

OK, here’s some results from image searches:

One good reason to question those maps: some of them don’t have Kings Bay Naval Base being nuked.

[Lumpy]

@SamuelA

This is all probabilities stacked on guesses. Nobody can conduct a controlled experiment.

. We periodically test-fire our missiles; we are pretty confident of their general level of performance. And every single time the government launches a satellite into orbit, we’re testing the accuracy of our guidance systems. To quote Cecil on what would happen after a nuclear launch was ordered “one presumes a fair amount of destruction would occur”.
Think of the chain of what you are proposing :

Plus, let’s say you have a bunch of 99% chances* in this assumption chain and you have a net 90% probability of success. Are you willing to pay the 10% cost of half of all living Americans dying in fireballs and of fallout poisoning later? This is one risky bet.

Again, you’re missing the point. It isn’t whether we think we could successfully carry out a preemptive strike- it’s whether the Russians believe we could. And as the linked article pointed out, with little fanfare or public notice the US nuclear arsenal now has effectively three times as much killing power as it used to. That’s gotta’ be worrying to the Kremlin.