I think maybe we’re saying the same thing. I said command and military targets are primary targets. You’re saying they’re priority targets. We probably mean the same thing.
Keep in mind the reason there’s a difference between assigning a place as a target and actually destroying that target. Exploiting this difference is the reason for choosing your primary/priority targets. It doesn’t matter where missiles are assigned to strike if you hit their silos before they’re launched.
The Greenbrier Resort has a bunker underneath it that would’ve served as an emergency capitol in the even of nuclear war.
I agree with this 100%. Stay away from the I-79, I-77, I-64 areas. Everywhere else there will be rednecks picking off the occupiers..
Dépends. France’s nuclear Policy during the cold war was specifically to target population centers rather than military assets. Given that France coudn’t “compete” with Soviet Union in number of warheads, nor in military assets, the concept was to make any attack against France as painful as possible, no to disable its command centers or missile silos.
I don’t know what the UK Policy was, nor what is China’s policy. But given that China too has way less nuclear weapons than the USA, it could be similar to France’s, making New York the first target.
Anyway, even without military assets, destroying New-York would probably harms the USA much more than destroying any random missile silo or military base. So, it’s certainly a valid target.
Pretty sure the war plans envisioned nuking things like railyards, airports, tank farms, ports, bridges, etc… Infrastructure things that make it hard to move or build things.
Even if nobody centered the crosshairs on say… Central Park, they’d still end up nuking all sorts of stuff right across the Hudson, and across the East River. NYC would still be screwed in any event.
Sort of, using made up numbers to illustrate what I mean: there are three categories of targets in order of priority, command/control, military, and economic/civilian. Say there are 50 command targets, 150 military targets, and an infinite number of economic targets. If there are 1,000 warheads/warhead packages to assign 50 go to command targets, 150 to military targets, and 800 to economic/civilian targets. In this case the priority target is command targets, but the primary targets are economic/civilian. If there are only say 75 warhead/warhead packages to assign 50 go to command and 25 to military targets. In this case command is both the priority and the primary target. In the Cold War there were far more warheads than there were command or military targets to assign them to, so most of them were targetted at economic/civilian targets.
Indeed, which is why the logical thing to do to protect your missiles from being destroyed in their silos is to fire them. Before he started writing a lot of pure nonsense about Stalin being behind WW2 later in his life, Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun (pen name Viktor Suvorov), a Soviet defector, wrote on this in Inside the Soviet Army :
Here’s site that lets you overlay the effects of various nuclear weapons over Google Maps.
No, a nuclear bomb will not destroy the planet. However a typical ICBM nuke would obliterate most of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and parts of NJ along the Hudson.
The 100 MT Russian Tsar Bomba would destroy or damage most of Long Island and Eastern PA. It’s not really a practical weapon though. More of a “how big can we make these things” test.
German war plans envisioned winning both world wars. Plans don’t always work out.
But the point isn’t just harming the United States. Blowing up a missile silo in the middle of North Dakota does minimal damage to the United States. But the Soviet Union also wants to prevent harm to the Soviet Union and blowing up that missile silo did that (assuming they could do it before the missile launched).
That’s why command and military targets had the highest priority. The Soviets had to destroy them before they were used. But a target like Manhattan isn’t going anywhere - you can put that on a follow-up list.
The problem is you’re treating offense and defense like they’re two unrelated issues. The military/command targets you’re targeting are the other side’s nuclear attack capability. Every one of his warheads you hit means you get to cross one of your cities off of his target list. You’re defending your cities by attacking his military.
Which is a serious issue. That’s why you target command capabilities as well as actual military capabilities. If you could be sure of hitting every military target instantaneously, you wouldn’t need to target the opposing C3. It wouldn’t matter what orders were given if you’ve eliminated their ability to carry out those orders.
A real nuclear war wouldn’t have been instantaneous. But it would have been really fast. The time period between the first detection of a nuclear attack and the attack itself would have literally been a matter of minutes. So a few minutes of confusion could make all the difference. Disrupting the opposing command system could be the difference between missiles being launched and missiles still being in their silos when your missiles arrive.
There’s also the caveat that there’s no one-nuke-per-target limit. If you have 50 command targets, you’re not going to use 50 nukes on them. You’re probably going to use more like 150. Target six nukes on Washington, DC, maybe ten on Cheyenne Mountain (lower priority than DC, but harder), and so on. Nukes aren’t 100% guaranteed effective even on their own, and there’s always the chance that your enemy has some sort of missile defense that will stop some further percentage of them.
I’m pretty sure that’s the right way.
I’m not treating the two as unrelated issues. The military and command targets I’m describing are not purely enemy nuclear capable targets. The command/control targets include the political apparatus of the enemy as well as military command targets. While some of them are those that will be giving orders to nuclear forces, it includes military headquarters of all types. By military targets I don’t mean purely nuclear capable military targets, I mean any military target at a fixed location, or mobile targets at a currently known location. This includes everything from National Guard armories to POMCUS sites to military airbases to Corps headquarters to battalion depots if they are still at depot or their location in the field if they have left barracks and the position is known. While the other sides ICBM silos will no doubt also be targeted, doing so won’t cross off a city from the enemy’s target list; they will no doubt have already fired the missiles and the only thing hit will be empty silos.
The problem is there is plenty of time between an inbound nuclear strike being launched and detected and its arrival. By the time your own ICBMs reach the enemy’s C3 assets, they will already have made the decision and given the orders to launch their own ICBMs in retaliation. This is also why there would be no planned follow-up attack after a first wave. Everything that could be fired would be fired as the situation is use it or lose it. Again, with the exception of assets such as SSBNs which wouldn’t be vulnerable to loss, or at least not as vulnerable as fixed ICBM silos.
Indeed, that’s why I said warheads/warhead packages. The package could be more than one warhead, and as I said, I was using entirely made up numbers solely to illustrate what I meant by the difference between priority and primary targets.
Actually those numbers are very low. By the end of the Cold War, the US had something like 40 missiles (thats missles not warheads) targeted against Kiev alone. The Moscow region had over 2000 warheads allocated including a significant portion of the SLBM force of the US, the entire UK arsenal and lots of French warheads. And thats just Western warheads. Israeli and Chinese Warheads were assigned to Moscow as well. Apparently the warplan code name was “Moscow can go straight to hell”.
I have no doubt that the Soviets (and the Russians today) gave at least as much love to the Washington Metro area.
Then it appears we are talking about something different. Primary targets are not anything that has a flag painted on it. Primary targets are targets that can fire nuclear weapons or can give orders for nuclear weapons to be fired. You don’t waste time shooting at any other targets until you’ve hit all of those. (Or until you know the target has carried out its mission. You don’t waste weapons on sites that have already launched their weapons or given their orders. Nobody would bother shooting at a known empty silo - it’s just a hole in a field now.)
All other targets come afterwards.
“Plenty of time” is a relative term. You might have thirty minutes tops. That’s how long it takes an ICBM to fly between Russia and America. So you’ve got thirty minutes if you happened to see the launch and your opponent only uses ICBMs.
Of course that probably wouldn’t have been the way a real attack would have happened. Most likely we wouldn’t have detected their missiles until they hit the BMEWS line and they were already halfway here. So figure maybe fifteen minutes. For the ICBMs anyway. Sub-launched missiles have a shorter flight path. They can go from launch to target in under ten minutes. A lot under if you’re talking a coastal target like Washington. A President might have been woken up at 3:00 Am and told there was what appeared to be an incoming missile and he had ninety seconds to decide what to do and give any orders.
Do you really think decisions to launch a full nuclear attack get made in ninety seconds? Or even ten minutes? Look at all of the times we’ve come close to a nuclear war. Something happened that made people think there might be a nuclear attack but they weren’t sure. In every case there was paralysis and confusion. Which was a good thing because none of these were actually an attack. But what if one of them had been an attack? A lot of warheads would have been hit on the ground while people were still trying to figure out if they should launch them or not.
Hmmm…
I’m rethinking my earlier statement that a nuclear bomb wouldn’t cause cataclysmic damage to any city. I still believe that is correct, but others have rightly pointed out that attacks on major cities would involve multiple warheads. In that case total destruction is possible so I concede and withdraw back into my shell. :smack:
That’s equivalent to saying that you’re never going to target anything at all other than those targets. If you’re going to hit a target at all, you’re going to launch on it without waiting for the first wave to hit.
I just checked for the city I live in – a very, very large city – using the Nukemap linked to above, and simulating the 3.3 megaton Chinese bomb. The air blast radius (more or less 100% fatality rate) would cover half the city, and the thermal blast radius (3rd degree burns) would cover the other half.
Granted, that’s one of the bigger bombs, but still, playing around with some of the smaller yields all I see is catastrophic damage and massive fatalities.
starts building bomb shelter
There’s a Dilbert comic strip where the Pointy-Haired Boss is giving Dilbert a list of jobs he’s supposed to do. Dilbert says he’ll do all the jobs but he wants to do the most important ones first. So he ask which jobs are the most important. The Boss says they all are.
If you make everything your first priority, you no longer have priorities.
That comment doesn’t even make sense and is kind of ignorant. By “war plans” I mean things like the old SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan), not some other kind of plan.
My point was that even if the urban areas aren’t specifically targeted for maximum civilian deaths, most urban areas will suffer greatly due to infrastructure targets that are in or near the urban areas, and those kinds of things are almost certainly targeted, hence my comments about NYC.
And if urban areas are targeted directly, it’s still very likely they’ll be hit by a bunch of smaller warheads in a pattern rather than one or two big bombs. When you’re destroying cities, anything over 3-5 PSI overpressure is overkill, so the most destructive way to do things is to set up your incoming RVs in a pattern of airbursts to maximize the area subjected to that 3-5 PSI overpressure. There used to be a diagram that I can’t currently find, that showed the difference between one large warhead (Titan II) on Leningrad vs. an entire Trident missile worth in a grid pattern- the Titan II warhead utterly vaporized the center,but the Trident pattern destroyed more of the city overall, even if it didn’t totally vaporize any one area.