I was reading the following message in another thread:
—QUOTE—
I remember hearing about Flight 93 and thinking how much more horrible (Christ, could it have been more horrible?) the images on CNN would have been if they included a collapsed Capitol Dome and a burning White House.
I don’t think the military response would have been as reasoned and careful as it has been so far; I think the first shots of the war would have been fired by USS Ohio.
—END QUOTE—
Of course, the current USS Ohio is a nuclear-capable sub. This made me think… could the US use its nuclear arsenal to depopulate the middle east if it decided to do so?
I realize this would be the stupidest possible course of action. I realize this would also be the least ethical course of action any nation would have ever undertaken.
I am only asking this as a technical question. I remember Cold War anecdotes that either we or the USSR had enough nukes to destroy the planet multiple times over.
The most powerful man in the global sphere is not the president of the united states, not the king of all the oil fields but the captain of an American Nuclear Submarine.
They are in fact the most dangerous weapon in our arsenal and the weapon most capable of mass destruction. No one knows where they hide, no one can see them, but if unleashed, they are the most formidable monster on our planet.
Terrorists weapons of mass destruction are mere sling shots compared to the power and range coming from our subs…and there are a lot of them…
Oh Yes, we could easily blanket the world. A few Humans might survive in very isolated spots, but the fallout would kill most everybody. The bomb blast just blows away a city or so. The USA could easily blow away all the MidEast. However, that would et Israel as well. Nukes are not precision weapons.
Yes they are. They may not be able to fly through a window as supposedly some of our more fine tuned conventional missiles can.
Ballistic missiles have their accuracy measured using something called Circular Error Probable (CEP) where 50% of all missiles fired are expected to fall within that circle. The SCUD missile used by the Iraqis had a CEP of 1 kilometer which is lousy for a conventional warhead but quite sufficient for a nuke against all but the most hardened targets. US ballistic missiles IIRC have a CEP on the order of 10 meters making them hard target capable. For a nuke that’s just flown several thousand miles 10 meters is VERY good and quite sufficient in the accuracy department.
And no, we could not “blanket the world”, not even at the height of our nuclear power, and certainly not now. Not even with the Russians helping.
US warheads, by-and-large are sub-megaton. There are a few ‘crowd pleasers’ left, but for decades, the US has relied on supremely accuracte delivery systems. Russian weapons are fairly large, but their systems are still reasonably accurate.
This doesn’t mean we couldn’t kill a lot of people, but the 'nuke the world to ashes" bit is way over the top.
True enough. I doubt we could even ‘blanket’ the Middle East with overlapping circles of destruction. However, you don’t really need to do that. We could easily target all major cities and fallout would take care of a good portion of the rest. There’d still likely be some people living after such an attack but the overall effect would be one of almost total devastation and major depopulation. The Middle East wouldn’t likely be a part of the world anyone could comfortably live in for a long time after such an attack. In effect, the Middle East would be effectively blown away.
[sub]Now someone tell us how we would expect to run our cars sans the oil the Middle East provides if we nuked the area.[/sub]
Not to belittle the issue, but the bit about “blowing up the world” and/or “wiping (insert nation/people/large area) off the face of the Earth” is hyperbole.
Nuclear weapons are the most potent form of distilled destruction we’ve managed to develop, but they don’t cause that much destruction. A good sized hydrogen bomb will destroy a city, and we should fear that capability, but the 50% lethality area from one weapon is measured in thousands of meters from the blast point, not in hundreds of kilometers.
An attack on say, Afghanistan, with nukes would result in hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of fatalities, and it also would result in thousands of casualties in downwind areas (other countries) over time, but at the end of it, there would still be an Afghanistan.
Likewise, even at the height of the Cold War, if the USSR and US had ever gone at it with their whole arsenal, billions of humans would still be alive afterwards… mostly in the southern hemisphere.
smiling bandit is correct that the people would be isolated, but they would be isolated because of the collapse of transportation systems and civilization, not because there aren’t lots of humans still alive.
Please note that I am not belittling this potential holocaust; just pointing out that nuclear weapons kill lots of people and obliterate cities, but the sheer size of the Earth and of the human population would allow many to survive.
Easily. The USA imports roughly twice as much oil from Canada and Norway than it does from the Middle East. It gets oil from lots of other countries too…
I’d give you a cite, but you’ll have to wait until Monday-- I’m moving house.
A pattern dispersal of nuclear weapons designed to create a super firestorm could, in fact destroy the middle east.
We did it in Dresden with conventional weapons. We studied the results very carefully, and learned how to plan the strike patterns to enhance the effect.
Were it’s weapons all targeted and dispersed with that result in mind, a single American Nuclear Submarine could destroy almost every square inch of an area the size of Texas. The denser the infrastructure, the wider the area that could be firestormed. Asphalt, steel, and the insignificant humans would just be fuel. An elliptical target zone, and precise time and distance targeting make the effective destructive power of even nuclear weapons an order of magnitude higher.
Never underestimate the ability of the Defense Department to destroy.
By the way, we don’t, to my knowledge, have such targeting options in our SIOP. But we have the understanding, and the hard numbers to design such an target option in a matter of hours, and implement it within days.
Tris
“For something that was supposed to make war unthinkable, we seem to spend a whole lot of time thinking about this.” ~ A NATO strategist, who prefers to remain nameless ~
well, how much damage we could do depends on what you count in your numbers. When the numbers of nuclear weapons are mentioned in treaties, etc. they refer to the amount of nuclear weapons ready for launch. Often its simply the launch vehicles themselves, not the number of nuclear warheads. There are many others stored away as ‘reloads’ for the silos. At least, thats what I remember from my force planning class, I’m at work so can’t really check all my sources.
responding to the hijack - Any use of a WMD against the US would cause us to retaliate in kind. Even if it were used on military forces in the field. I think that would awaken something very ugly in the American public that is best left alone. At that point certain states would cease to exist probably overnight and if you think the US is overbearing now, it wouldn’t be a spot on what would be the end result of such an attack.
I don’t doubt that you know more about the issue than I do, but how would such a firestorm be created?
The difficulties of engineering a firestorm of that magnitude dwarf the effects of bombing on Dresden and Tokyo. How could a firestorm that lasts over such diverse terrain sustain itself long enough to burn over such a distance?
There have been hypotheses advanced about large meteorite impacts creating such large-scale firestorms, but no-one can really be certain how such a large-scale firestorm would work, since none have been observed in human history.
Could you link to some information about this technique?
Well, I am probably going to have to shoot myself for having mentioned it in the first place, since all my sources were of the “shoot yourself” kind. Those were all pre internet sources, though, so I have no links.
Best I can recall, minus numbers, the method works like this. You set your burst height high, and your dial-a-burst to the slowest burst time, to maximize radiated heat, rather than blast. (small percentage, but big numbers when you deal with hundreds of kilotons) Then you place the bursts in a shape, and timing, that allows the overlap of the expansion of superheated air in such a way as to deflect the individual fire storms from the outer periphery in towards the center of the area. This concentrates the superheated material in the middle of your targeted region, and after the peripheral blast front collapses, allows the influx of additional oxygen containing air to flow over the superheated fuel in the outer ring. Timing a second round of bursts to “tamp” the reduced periphery with a new shock wave, and thermal pulse finishes off the process. The term flammable gains a whole new meaning in this environment, and stuff you would not think of, like concrete, begins to burn.
A meteor strike has only one center, or a small number of centers more or less in a straight line. Not a likely configuration to set off a firestorm. But two hundred multi-kiloton blasts, targeted in precision specifically to achieve the effect are a whole 'nother thing entirely.
Tris
Rule of Reason: “If nobody uses it, there’s a reason.”
Well, even small nukes are dangerous and expensive overkill in small-unit fights. Nukes make poor and exceedingly expensive bunker-busters too, and for the same reason: Too much ‘bang’. Small nukes are really only for use in large main-force battles
Not to mention the seriously negative political results. You hear the crap said about the US now, while we still have a foothold on the high moral ground. Can you imagine the effect (fallout?) if we were to start nuking things, even a bunch of caves…?
now if the US started to actively use its Neutron Bomb collection. . . .
Ahh, unfortunately we only have 43 of the suckers left, one of the few treaties with the ussr that we actually bothered to more or less follow.
The best thing is that given their rarity, almost no one would suspect WTF had gone on.
A Neutron Bomb would leave Just a large pile of dead bodies, no other signs of what had gone off. (well that and any microbiologist would be able to notice the distinct cleanliness of the place. )
It worked in Dresden and Tokyo with conventional weapons because there were considerable fuels to burn and burn for an extended time.
Even with the massive energies of nuclear weapons, how does one sustain a firestorm in the Middle East? What fuels re going to burn for an extended time?
I was just wondering that (What would you burn in the middle east? The lush rainforests?), when I realized that, if the intent of the Genocidal Nuclear Campaign™ was to merely depopulate the middle east, you wouldn’t NEED to ignite the entire place, just the built-up populated areas.
I found the nearest thing to a population density map of the Middle East online here and and here. If you’re going after the population as a primary objective, you might only have to use the infrastructure and buildings in the urban areas for the fuel for the firestorm, since the densest concentration of people (in the more developed countries of the region, anyway) would be in the cities anyway, not distributed evenly over the entire country.
Depopulating the “rural” areas (e.g. The great seas of sand dunes), fallout would probably be the weapon of choice. Either from the cities themselves, or even perhaps just from nuking suitible stretches of terrain that are in the proper “upwind” position from the targeted areas, after factoring in wind direction and whatnot.
My $0.02, anyway. Take it as you will. And keep in mind that I’ve had to take a LOT of allergy medication today.
Actually, “Neutron Bombs” are nukes. Excuse me: “Enhanced Radiation Weapons”. If we were to pop one of them off, the whole world would know about it in hours. Enhanced Radiation Weapons are just as useless in small unit infantry combat (such as in Afghanistan) as a conventional nuke: WAY too much overkill.
A Neutron Bomb is a Thermonuclear Bomb. It goes bang rather noticeably. The enhanced radiation effects make it far more lethal to Chordate life, and that lethal radius is greater, proportionally than an non-enhanced bomb of the same blast radius. But it still is not hard to figure out what happened when something goes flash, bang, in the upper atmosphere, and every gamma ray detector in the hemisphere gets pegged at it’s maximum.
This is not a stealth bomb. (For that, you have to go to Rocky, and Bullwinkle’s “Hush-a-bomb.”
Tris
" The worst policy is to attack cities. Attack cities only when there is no alternative." ~ Sun-tzu ~
