The silos (and SAC) were put as far away as possible from the path of possible Soviet warheads- either land or sea based. This was to give the maximum amount of time to detect, confirm and prepare for a nuclear attack. Geography dictated that this be in the South Dakota/ Nebraska region. As for submarines they had two shortcomings: although improvements continue to be made to this day, their missiles were expected to be less accurate than land based ICBMs, meaning they could not guarantee the destruction of hardened targets in the USSR. And strategic planners constantly worried that some unforeseeable advance in underwater detection might make the boomer fleet obsolete overnight. We even spent billions on keeping a nuclear bomber force simply as a backup to the backup in a worst-case scenario.
Can you just imagine the world, if instead of all these nations spending uncounted trillions on nuclear war plans, defenses, bombs, so many fucking bombs, submarines, bombers, missiles, satellite surveillance, and all the rest, can you imagine what the world would be like if that time, energy, money and manpower was used to make the world a better place?
We would all have really high speed internet for starters.
I do remember, it was the California Men’s Colony, my husband worked there when we lived in Morro Bay.
However I grew up in Los Angeles county, and figured if someone wanted to nuke someplace it would have been the big city.
Near Albany NY. Looking at the map in the pdf, I’d have been toast. State capital and Watervliet Arsenal
I laughed.
The LGM-25C ‘Titan II’ wings were located at :
[ul]
[li]Little Rock AFB, Arkansas (308 SMW, April 1962 - August 1987)[/li][li]McConnell AFB, Kansas (381SMW, March 1962 - August 1986)[/li][li]Davis-Monthan AFB, Arizona (390SMW, January 1962 - July 1984)[/li][/ul]
The LGM-30A/B/G ‘Minuteman’ wings are/were located in:
[ul]
[li]Whiteman AFB, Missouri (351SMW, February 1963 - July 1995)[/li][li]Malmstrom AFB, Montana (341SMW July 1961 – Present)[/li][li]Minot AFB, North Dakota (91SMW, June 1968-Present)[/li][li]Minot AFB, North Dakota (455SMW 28 June 1962 - 25 June 1968)[/li][li]Grand Forks AFB, North Dakota (321SMW August 1964 - September 1998)[/li][li]Ellsworth AFB, South Dakota (44SMW November 1961 – July 1994)[/li][li]Francis E. Warren AFB, Wyoming, (90SMW, July 1963 – Present)[/li][/ul]
The one LGM-118A ‘Peacekeeper’ wing was located at Francis E. Warren AFB, Wyoming (400 SMW, 1987–2005) in retrofitted Minuteman silos.
The SM-65D/E/F ‘Atlas’ and HGM-25A ‘Titan I’ wings were located in various states including California, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, Wyoming. (Not sure that list is comprehensive; it’s just what I can recall offhand.)
The placement of silos was based upon strategic defensibility (i.e. being able to spread out enough to prevent fratricide or multiple silos being taken out by one hit, physical security), technical limitations (range of the booster vehicles, logistics of building and maintaining the silos and command centers, transportability), and in a large measure, availability of land. Placing silos in agricultural areas where land is cheap and ready access is easy is simple logistics and economics. Placing silos in difficult to access areas, those adjacent to population centers, or in areas with high value real estate simply isn’t practical. (Many of the Scowcroft Commission proposals had utterly ridiculous plans such as placing silos buried kilometers deep into the Rocky Mountains or on a massive underground subway system, and were eventually nixed when cost estimates came out so large that they would consume the entire GDP just to develop.) By the time of the deployment of the Minuteman system in 1962, the strategy in the defense world was that of deterrence; hence, there was no anticipation of having to actually use the weapons in a preventative (e.g. first strike) context or for any realistic chance of survival after a nuclear exchange. Note that despite application of deterrence theory the United States never fully adopted the games theory doctrine of Assured Destruction (the ‘Mutual’ was added later by critics of deterrence theory like Herman Kahn as pun on the acronym) and the tenets of Assured Destruction cannot be practically met in reality.
As for the reasons behind the nuclear triad of land-based ICBMs (Atlas, Titan, Minuteman, Peacekeeper), sea-based SLBMs (the Fleet Ballistic Missile–Polaris, Poesiden, and Trident families), and strategic nuclear bombers (B-45 ‘Tornado’, B-47 ‘Stratojet’, B-52 ‘Stratofortress’, B-58 ‘Hustler’, FB-111 ‘Aardvark’, B-1B ‘Lancer’, B-2A ‘Spirit’) is ostensibly for survivability–if some first-strike or defense capability can disable one leg, the others will still be viable–and flexibility of response but in reality it was largely about intra- and inter-service rivalries between the Navy, Air Force (bombers), and Air Force (missiliers). The Army pretty much got shafted as its only nuclear capability were domestic nuclear interceptors like the Nike family, short and intermediate range weapons like Honest John, Sergeant, and Persing, and nuclear sapping charges.
That is a fairly superficial answer because there are nuances such as that the FBMs did not have sufficient accuracy for counterstrike up until the Trident C-4, but in general the arguments were largely drawn along service lines. However, I will note that of all of the nuclear response capabilities, the Navy FBM program is by far the most expensive, and replacing all land-based weapons with an equivalent FBM capability would be extraordinarily expensive (more than the cost of all other Navy programs combined, the F-35 perhaps notwithstanding).
This is an ‘interesting’ statement, because it belies not only an ignorance of the history of history of the Cold War and the various cultural, political, and strategic impetuses behind it, but also of the technology of modern computing and networking which has a legacy which is directly traceable back to Cold War-era strategic systems and specifically to the Minuteman II guidance set and the Semi-Automated Ground Environment (SAGE) networked defense surveillance and control system. These two programs are widely responsible for advancing the technology for modern microcomputing systems and wide area networking, which would have otherwise had such a high cost threshold (tens of billions of dollars) that no commercial entity would have ever had the capital to invest in the development by themselves, nor was it obvious circa 1965 that there would be enormous financial and social benefits arising from what was at the time a fairly narrow field of applicability for computing systems.
It is very likely without the investment in these technologies which was driven beyond any fiscally rational sense at enormous expense to the nation by the fear and paranoia that underlaid the entire Cold War conflict. Certainly, technology powerhouses like Bell Labs, Lawrence Livermore National Labs, Xerox PARC, et cetera would not have existed without the funds made available to directly or indirectly support technology development for military weapon and surveillance systems. The same is true for many other technologies we have today, including GPS, long range fiber optic and cellular communications, Earth weather surveillance and communications satellites, much of our bioengineering and pharmaceutical technology, et cetera.
One can argue whether some of this technology has really made the world a better place, but it has certainly opened up more opportunities, allowed greater communication and education, and offers at least the chance to combat disease and poverty provided that someone is willing to take up the mantle and invest the comparatively modest amount of money and effort required to, say, combat malaria or ensure clean water resources for developing nations. That it takes the threat (or perceived threat) of war to bring out our ability to advance the state of technology which eventually trickles down to improve the quality of life of the population is certainly regrettable, and there is no arguing that much of military development and procurement is enormously wasteful, but without these swords we would not have this technology to beat into the plowshares of modern computing, the Internet, et cetera.
Stranger
Thanks as usual for the detailed reply Stranger and Lumpy on the silo point, rather naively I figured it was just a money issue.
Incidentally I found some more maps from FEMA in the late '80s that might be of use as the other one I found was a bit small, here’s one showing the fallout risks, here’s a bit of a bigger one for potential attack sites and, since we have a lot of California Dopers, here’s a close look at the Golden State.
Y’know what really grinds my gears? We spent all that money on the nuclear weapons and never even used 'em! What a waste.
Well, we used them twice. Not exactly a proud moment in human history.
Personally, I’d prefer to never use them again, dismantle as many as we can stand, and apply the salvage and technology to more progressive purposes like non-carbon emitting energy production, space exploration, medical research, et cetera. I can’t disagree that the effort that went into producing nuclear weapons and associated technologies was to an end that is not really noble or wise. But it is also necessary to admit that much of the technology that we now have in our daily lives has been commercialized at a fraction of the cost needed to develop the underlying capability because of all of the research and development which was previously done, regardless of the motivations. I hope that our future will be based on more foresight and with a more direct path to beneficial technologies than just a spinoff of weapon development and surveillance programs. But I don’t see that coming to pass any time soon. If anything, as a culture, we have become more focused on weapons and the application of political pressure via technology versus looking forward to applications that benefit humanity (or even our own nation) as a whole.
Stranger
S M Stirling wrote two SF novels in his Lords of Creation series, in which Venus & Mars resemble the exotic planets of Classic SF, teeming with life. We’re still competing with the Russians, but the funds go into a Real Space Race, instead of increasingly expensive weapons systems. Therefore, we get those technological advances. And some stirring interplanetary adventures!
Quite an attractive Alternate Reality.
–Yeah, your list assures me I’d have been Immediate Toast in my preschool years. Might have died a more lingering death if the bombs had fallen in my later childhood.
Mom bought us dogtags from an ad on a Carnatian Milk carton. With Our Name, Her Name, Our Address & “C”–so our charred remains would be sprinkled with Holy Water. Nowadays, people fear kidnapping molesters–in the Good Old Days, it was Nuclear Annihilation. (I don’t think I was supposed to realize what those ID’s were for, but I did; little pitchers have big ears.)
Correction: Angry Mutant Hillbillies.
Is there any other kind?
Yes, I honestly believe that they wouldn’t, because they didn’t. World War III was averted not by MAD, but by the fact that, for the most part, people really are fundamentally decent.
[Quote=Jack Handey]
I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.
[/quote]
One guy didn’t. I would not ascribe fundamental decency to very many Soviet officials at all.
That is true as far as it goes–and certainly, the Soviets, while institutionally paranoid, were no more willing to initiate a nuclear exchange than we were–but the problem is that the amount of time to assess a potential attack and respond before any response is overcome by events that there may not be time for fundamental decency or compassion to override blind panic. This is exacerbated by automated systems and regimented procedures for response which may override or be carried out before there is time for a more measured response. An exchange of nuclear weapons can result in the immediate deaths of tens of millions of people; further death from radiotion, disease, and famine of hundreds of millions more; loss trillions of dollars of property and industrial capability; and the potential destruction of nations.
Stranger
I grew up in central Vermont so I likely would have been fighting off looters and zombies while waiting for the fallout to blow in from Boston, NYC and Montreal.
I lived in Toronto
Most people don’t realize that its a port, a rail head and has an airport thats long enough to recover B-52 bombers, and thats not counting any near misses. We also had this really big building, that would make a dandy IP reference for a soviet bomber pilot.
So the golden horse shoe would definitely be feeling the love, the only question is if was a target in the first wave, or second.
Declan
I grew up less than ten miles form the pentagon. Yeah, I’d have been a pile of ash.
Less so, actually. The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library/Museum in Ventura County includes a multimedia exhibit which is disgustingly proud of The Gipper’s response to the Soviets’ announcement to the world that they discarded their First Strike plans: We will keep that option on the table. I was in a college course that focused on Nuclear war and the technologies and policies surrounding it, and we were still stunned by that response.
Gee, thanks, Mr. K! The closer detail assures me that I really wouldn’t have melted after all when the missiles blasted Pt. Loma and Miramar. Unfortunately, I would have been downwind and if the nuclear hurricane didn’t sweep the neighborhood away it would have dusted everything with irradiated victim-dust, leading to slow agonizing deaths all around me.
An’ I STILL ain’t cleanin’ that up!
–G!
I never did like Reagan, but not taking that announcement from the Commies at face value was the right call. They were lying SOBs and never said anything without ulterior motives. Their remnants that are still running the Russian show (Shirtless Vlad, for example) carry on that tradition.