Just saw some Fallout discussion, and while I don’t play, it led me to this thought.
I’m aware of the differences in air burst and ground burst and the differing amounts fallout caused. As I understand it ground bursts would be used against missile silos. But I didn’t know which would be used against ports, air ports, or military bases. That’s my question. How resistant or “strong” or whatever term you want to use should something be to merit a ground burst (presuming the intent of the attacker isn’t “as much fallout as possible” but rather to destroy the target).
My understanding is that air burst is the default for everything except targets built to survive an air burst. Only missile silos or bunkers built to similar specifications warrant a ground burst, everything else will be destroyed or rendered useless by an air burst.
Depends on what the SIOP is. Everything pretty much was wood and paper in Hiroshima, so an air burst pretty much took out the whole city. Do that to New York now, and you might only be looking at a few blocks total destruction. So if you want to kill the big apple, your going to be using several mirv’s, or about 24 warheads.
Fallout is a separate issue, you want the target gone. Its nice to reduce the footprint of the fallout, but that’s more political than anything else. Ground burst is good for scraping rail yards and port facilities.
Uh, no.
One decent-sized thermonuclear airburst would wipe out all 5 boroughs of NYC.
The diameter of the fireball itself is about 3 miles for a 1 MT explosion.
And most warheads now are <500 KT, and wiping the buildings off the map does nothing for the city subway, and especially nothing for the rail head. Add in La Guardia and Kennedy airports, the brooklyn naval yard, and anything else I may have missed.
Nope I stand by my original, only several city blocks total destruction per one standard warhead.
MIRV warheads are outlawed by treaties, and the US decommissioned its last ICBM MIRV in 2014:
MIRVs are still allowed on SLBMs.
You can use this simulator and select various cities, yields, and air vs surface burst. A typical 300 kiloton warhead wipes out a lot more than “several city blocks”. Try dropping one on Atlanta:
I picked Toronto, and the Soviet Topol 800kt as it would be the most likely weapon. Ground burst was a couple of blocks, but the same weapon on air burst was several city boroughs. They must have updated the website, as the old one was denominated in mt warheads, but all I got from this really was the projected radius of the blast.
For a ground burst, the targeting was piss poor, using google maps obviously , the CN rail yards are only marginally affected and the port might get singed, but none of the on / off loading would be long term affected. The financial and entertainment districts are toast.
Air burst gets more area, but the effects are harder to gauge. Pragmatically like Hiroshima, the majority of the housing in the effected area is wood, so I am expecting a fire storm and a shit load of casualties, but none of the hardened areas of the city would really be non functional for long.
I would more expect the city to be a bomber target anyways, but it would be nice if they allowed the site to be tweaked for more than one weapon and delivery system.
If you go to nukemap, and detonate a 1 megaton airburst 10,000 feet (the optimal height to maximize the 5 psi overpressure footprint) over LaGuardia Airport, the fireball hardly makes it outside the bounds of the airport itself, although the 5 psi overpressure curve (blast) goes about as far as Yankee Stadium to the north, and roughly where 96th hits Central Park on the east side, where the Queensboro bridge connects to Roosevelt Island, Throgs Neck Bridge, and to about the Bronx zoo.
Ultimately though, the choice between airburst or surface burst depends on whether you’re trying to wreck a large area via blast/heat, or whether you’re trying to destroy something hardened/underground. Against a city, an airburst is clearly the better choice, as you can maximize the 5 psi overpressure footprint (5 psi is about the blast level that destroys most non-hardened buildings). But if you were trying to destroy hardened/underground targets like a bunker, or missile silo or something like that, you’d want to actually have the detonation occur in contact with the ground to couple that blast to the ground itself and hopefully collapse it.
Or more ghoulishly, if you want to generate an outsized amount of fallout, you want to use a surface burst, as all the ground material caught up in the fireball (dirt, rocks, buildings, etc…) will basically be vaporized and irradiated, and fall back to earth as fallout. With airbursts, only the material that composes the bomb itself falls back as fallout, which is typically very diffuse and not local, as it’s typically caught up in the mushroom cloud and carried into the stratosphere and distributed over a very wide area.
i) Its a communications link in what is the U.S’s primary economic center and port.
ii) Subway lines and stations were used in WW2 as makeshift shelters for both general population and VIP’s. The London Undergrounds Central Line was heavily used this way during the Blitz.
By the way, why is everyone using one or two strikes on NYC as what’s going to happen. Unless you are posting from some bizzaro universe where the Strategic Rocket Forces is having a go slow strike during a nuclear war, a major urban center like NYC, Moscow, London, Beijing, Mumbai, Karachi, Paris et al is likely to be struck multiple times. And by multiple, you are looking at anywhere from a few dozen to several dozen strikes.
I think it started when Declan said/implied that a Hiroshima/Nagasaki sized airburst would have a footprint of “** a few blocks total destruction**”, presumably because NYC is primarily glass, concrete, stone and steel, not wood and paper like Hiroshima.
Then **beowulff ** countered with a wildly inaccurate estimate for the power of a one-megaton warhead, claiming “One decent-sized thermonuclear airburst would wipe out all 5 boroughs of NYC”, which isn’t true.
I responded by pointing out that a one megaton airburst has a fireball that barely extends outside the airport and that the area under the 5 psi footprint is nowhere near the entire 5 boroughs.
According to that sim, ground burst came in at what I expected, but underestimated the air burst foot print. The initial blast would be the main thing, but by the time you move to both the shock wave and the heat wave, they would follow the path of least resistance as they radiate out.
For an air burst, I don’t remember reading if the blast forced air down, or it the majority of destruction due to secondary effects was due to vaccum.