For a start, that article assumes the USSR is hit by over 6,000 nuclear weapons, with another 6,000 being lobbed all over the place, seemingly with the sole purpose of padding out the number of deaths. Unless you have a reason for this exchange to devolve into lobbing nukes at random non-nuclear powers on the other side of the planet?
I remember asking once what would be the biggest metropolitan area to survive intact, i.e. neither side wastes a nuke on it.
Tokyo? BOOM!
Guangzhou (aka Canton, China)? BOOM!
Seoul? BOOM!
Dehli? Well, if the Indians and Pakistanis go at it… BOOM!
Mumbai? Ditto… BOOM!
Mexico City? Hmmm… maybe survives, but possibly downwind from strategic American targets, doesn’t go unscathed.
New York? KA-BA-BA-BOOOOM!
…and so on down the list. The biggest South American metro centers are Buenos Aires and Rio, and I don’t see either of them being considered major or even secondary strategic targets. When the dust settles, Brazil and Argentina may be poised to become the economic centers of the postwar world.
If the U.S.S.R. launches on the U.S., it follows that the U.S. NATO allies are next - they don’t have anything to lose by launching their own nukes in accordance with their own doctrines, along with third-party nuclear powers who make themselves a target by virtue of possession. I’ve also no doubt that the major non-nuclear allies of the U.S.S.R. and U.S. would be targeted, simply for completion’s sake if nothing else (I doubt any official policy states this though, for obvious reasons).
Granted, I left the background deliberately vague in the OP - all you know is that the U.S. is about to be hit. I leave it to the better informed to decide how it likely would go down across the globe, my interest is in attitudes to retaliation. It is important in considering how the hypothetical pres would be contributing to the state of the post-war world through action or inaction, but again I’d do best leave this to the better informed.
MAD doctrine would require me to say yes to the hypothetical. Retaliation must be undoubtable.
But the truth is, at that point, we’d be dead anyway. Why repay evil with evil when there is literally nothing to be gained? Americans have committed genocide, we break treaties and ignore international norms as a matter of course, we are nasty pieces of work. But if it’s all over for us, we have no reason to fight on. If an enemy got that jump on us, why salt the earth further?
I bet most of us who say that we’d retaliate, because saying it’s necessary for MAD to work, would in that moment really say, “never mind, we lost.”
By admitting that, I may have just doomed my country. Oh, well, MAD is stupid on its face anyway.
I see crap like this all the time…but never legitimately in quote tags. I think we both know why, and what it really adds to this conversation.
One of the unfortunate side effects of allowing the U.S. to build bases on foreign soil is that they, too, become targets. Add to that the missile-carrying subs that are probably being tracked(anyone happen to know where they are?), and the potential target area on our side alone is bigger than you imagine.
Is the world totally without worth if our country does not survive?
Well, I know it’s without worth if I don’t survive.
The devastation of nuclear war has been vastly overstated consistently in this thread in order to make the hypothetical an easy one to solve, a solution where you can pat yourself on the back and assure everyone that you’re not as barbaric as the people who’d choose to retaliate.
Which is understandable, since the popular conception of it is almost entirely wrong, it’s reasonable for people to be misinformed. But if others come in and try to point this out, and they’re just ignored because hey who needs facts and reality in the middle of a circle jerk back patting, it’s a little frustrating.
My “7 times over!!!11” thing is slightly hyperbolic except that it’s actually something that’s popularly believed and is part of the same misunderstanding the pervades the rest of the thread.
As far as specific quotes, do you want me to quote every time in this thread people just assumed that the entire US population would be dead, and that a counterstrike meant ending the human race?
As for nuclear winter - the public perception of nuclear winter comes from the original TTAPS paper which was heavily influenced by disarmament advocacy. They essentially plugged the most pessimistic numbers into their calculations to get the most extreme result. Incidentally, we have a small scale real world test for their numbers - the Kuwait oil fires set by Iraq dumped enough petroleum smoke into the atmosphere that by their predictions would’ve caused worldwide cooling. They even came out to predict during that time that the crop output over Asia would be significantly disrupted. Those things didn’t come to pass.
There were a lot of academic reviews and papers which were critical of the TTAPS report, probably the most famous being Nuclear Winter Reappraised (which needs a login to see the paper, I wasn’t able to find a free copy), which plugs in more realistic variables, which concludes that there would be some degree of cooling but the worst of it only for a week or two and even then not that severe. Not even close to an extinction event.
As for the actual casualties of a war - it depends on exactly which of the strike plans both sides were using, amount of warning, weather conditions, all sorts of stuff. But even then, neither side expected to kill 90%+ of the population of the other on day one. More like 20-40%. NATO doctrine wasn’t even to target population centers, but to attack targets that would hamper the ability for the other side to continue war. There were no NATO nukes targeted with the idea “well, lots of people live here, so we have to nuke it” - targets would be military bases, launch facilities, command and control, transportation hubs, etc. So while lots of cities would be flattened (the Kremlin and the White House would be obvious targets, for example) - the targets wouldn’t actually be the civilian population but the militarily useful targets next to them. As for the poster in the thread who suggested every major city in the world would get nuked just for good measure… why? Do you really think “well, time to bomb Sydney I guess!” was a big part of either side’s plan?
A lot of the casualties would come after the initial strike of course, from fallout (although this is also greatly exaggerated in the public perception - fallout would drop to relatively safe levels rather quickly, with about 99% of the radioactivity gone after two weeks) and more importantly just from the general collapse of civilization. But even so, depending on the scenario, even in the targetted countries, there would be a whole lot of survivors. And the aggressor country would have a strong interest in making sure they wouldn’t regroup to be able to retaliate. More strikes would come days - weeks later, crushing the survivors, if you were to leave the nuclear strike ability of the enemy intact.
The hypothetical is easy if you just assume no matter what happens the entire world is going to end anyway. But in reality those assumptions are far off and the actual question is messier than that.
I think that this is the most pertinent reason for launching a counter attack.
I objected when you tried to deflect the issue by talking only first strike when counting casualties, and now I further object when you talk about first day casualties. How about the projected deaths from a week out? A month? A year? A somewhat savvy person such as yourself has a pretty good idea where the U.S. has bases abroad, where the other major political states have their bases abroad, which major and minor powers are likely to take advantage (or react out of fear and/or hatred) and launch what they’ve got, etc.
And speaking on what they (and we) have got, let’s not forget biological weapons. If a nuclear war gets underway, the chances that someone will release bioweapons skyrockets.
I used to talk and think about this a lot. I worked in the navigation center on an FBM so the discussions weren’t entirely academic.
While there were a few (very few) people that said they would refuse to launch or try to screw the accuracy, the bulk of the sailors, including myself, decided as follows:
Our friends, family, and most everyone we’d ever even met were either already gone or just about to be.
The people that did it wanted to remake the world into some kind of Stalinist third world shithole like North Korea or the USSR.
The upshot was “Hell yeah, make the rubble bounce.” The US might wind up as some kind of third world power but the nicest present we could give the rest of the world would be to remove the assholes that started this crap.
Testy
Which is fine, if it’s a limited strike. But H-bombs have a lot of fallout. On reflection, I could probably justify one ICBM (each ICBM has multiple warheads) at the enemy’s capital, just to destroy those who destroyed me. But total war? Against a large country? Nah, too much collateral fallout. I’m a rather vindictive person; but the interior landmass of an enemy country is not my enemy, the political head is.
Do we have any way to tell if missiles headed our way are in fact nuclear?
At any rate, my short answer is if it’s China or Russia, no. I don’t believe they’re crazy enough to do it and it would have to be an incredible glitch, or incredibly successful terrorist action. No sense nuking the people who will probably help what’s left of us rebuild.
It’s harder to project the casualties going out further. It depends on a lot - what strike package did they use? Lots of airbursts? Did they focus on counterforce, using a large amount of their weapons to killl the American weapons and military? What are the prevailing weather conditions? How much warning/how prepared was the general population? What emergency services survived?
My point is that we could get out of a nuclear exchange with over a hundred million people alive with some semblance of civilization. If you do not disarm the power who decided it’d be worthwhile to kill the first hundred million citizens, why wouldn’t they continue to strike at their leisure to keep attacking the last hundred million? Think of this proposition from the perspective of a survivor: Ok, we got nuked and tens of millions of people are dead, large swaths of our infrastructure and technology are gone. But fallout isn’t heading this way, we were out of the range of the immediate blasts, and we’ve got some food stored up - looks like we might be able to survive. Oh, wait, the Soviets did some recon and figured out what wasn’t hit hard enough, so they’re sending a second batch of nukes our way. Awesome. I’m sure glad the president was enlightened enough not to kill their future ability to attack, because that would’ve just been barbaric.
You have the option of using air burst strikes which cause relatively small amounts of fallout - dirt isn’t being kicked up into the air. Also, the political head may be your target, but his remaining military forces are part of the territory. His reserved land nukes are in the middle of the country. His military bases can still strike out at you. Why is the retaliation limited to striking one man? Are you trying to get retribution against him, or are you trying to keep them from being a continued threat?
There’s nothing else that would look like a nuclear attack. There aren’t conventional warhead ICBMs (although the US has looked into creating these). You can’t mistake a series of giant infrared blobs from the launches and then a bunch of missiles coming in at mach 25 from space on radar as anything else.
I don’t mean to pick on you in particular, but there is a phenomenal level of ignorance in this thread overall about the motives, means, technologies, and results of the strategy and use of nuclear weapons, and your brief post, while hardly unique, is almost completely in error in the assumptions and statements.
First of all, thermonuclear weapons (the hydrogen or “h-bomb”, so named because the bulk of the yield comes from D-T fusion of the “Secondary” that is triggered by the small fission “Primary”) typically has less fallout per energetic yield than pure fission weapons. This is both because the fusion products themselves are “clean” (although subsequent tertiary fission reactions may provide significant radioactive material, especially in the case of “saltation” jacket, specifically designed to create harmful isotopes) and because they are often delivered for air burst at higher altitude to maximize the damage radius. Ground contact or penetration weapons create more fallout by both attaching radioactive products to ground matter and activating fissile material.
The current US ICBM fleet of LGM-30G “Minuteman III”, while originally designed to carry three Mark 12A reentry vehicles containing the W-78 warhead, have now been retrofitted to carry the Mark 21 RV with the W-87 warhead from the now decommissioned LGM-118A “Peacekeeper” missile in compliance with START II provisions. The UGM-133 “D-5 Trident II” SLBM does carry 4-5 Mark 4 or Mark 5 RVs, but each RV is targeted at different targets.
If some nation launched an unprovoked attack on the United States, it is highly doubtful that the leaders who ordered such an attack would remain in unprotected buildings in known locations such as a capital or defense facility. They would most likely move to a hardened shelter or airborne command post, and thus even a “limited” attack upon a city would simply serve to kill hundreds of thousands or millions of innocent civilians. In fact, nuclear weapons are by their very nature indiscriminate weapons, and there is no practical manner in which they can be applied that does not provide both immediate and persistent hazard to many innocent people. This notion of precise targeting of the responsible parties is antithetical to nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction; by their very nature and intent such weapons pose a vast threat to the population as a whole, and the entire ethical argument for their existence is predicated on the concept of total war, i.e. that the logistical and industrial support for a war effort is justifiable as an equal target to military personnel and materiel.
The basic point that appears to be missed by the majority of respondents in this thread is that nuclear weapons are not practical battlefield weapons in the military sense at all; the implications of use, residual hazards, and scale of damage forces arguments for the use to be beyond the scope of a military commander, hence why the chief executive is called upon to render a decision for use. They are, for any practical purposes, political bargaining chips, and their value even in that context becomes negative if they are actually used against an opponent with the capacity to respond. There is no practical situation in which it would be practically better to initiate a nuclear attack than to prefer some other action; conversely, there is no situation in which a party was under imminent threat of nuclear attack that it would be worse (for the outcome of that party) to not respond in kind and with every asset available that could not reliably and securely be held in reserve.
Those familiar with game theory will recognize this scenario as being a situation without stable equilibrium, and from a purely mathematical standpoint, early advocates of pre-emptive attack upon the Soviet Union, such as General Curtis LeMay, were absolutely correct: to maintain the advantage we should have struck the Soviets while their capacity to respond was negligible. From a humanistic and moral standpoint, it is obviously wrong to use nuclear weapons in any situation, as regardless of how finely you attempt to target these weapons, you will kill more innocent people than responsible decision-makers, and in any modern scenario you are unlikely to achieve a significant destruction of the opposing arsenal before they opponent can launch back at you, which simply compounds the scope of death and destruction.
In short, there is no ethical argument for responding, and no practical argument for not responding. Which means that you are wrong if you do, ineffectual if you don’t, and dead either way, which is a pretty hopeless scenario any way you look at it.
Stranger
Well, H-bombs are only “clean” by comparison to fission A-bombs. The fallout is still pretty vile, given that the energetic yield is mind-bogglingly high. The collateral damage is immense & potentially wide-ranging. That’s why I would prefer not to use them at all, & if forced to by game theory would stop short of total annihilation if at all possible.
I think there’s a reason that the USSR & the USA didn’t blow each other up, beyond the threat of MAD, & why the USA has not nuked Iran since 1979. A reason beyond “morality” considering what was done by great powers to Cambodia, Vietnam, El Salvador, etc. Some weapon strikes would be so big that using them would actually redound against one’s broad self-interest, & a sort of global interest, more than permitting one’s enemies to survive.
So if we’re already dead, do we fire in a last stab? Maybe. Do we annihilate the entire enemy resource base? No, I doubt it, because not only do we have nothing to gain, but whatever hope for humanity exists has nothing to gain from courting widespread atomic pollution.
Nukes are mostly a bluff. No one wants to conquer a radioactive wreck nor the poor country downwind from it.
Really? Hitler and his regime would have wiped every country off the planet that resisted if given the chance.
The Third Reich was not an historical anomaly by even the tiniest bit. And regimes capable of launching a nuclear strike are just as capable or annihilating their own people so your 50 years of rule doesn’t really apply.
Of course this is all going to be speculation but I don’t think Hitler or anyone would have the capability of ruling the world. There simply isn’t enough people for one country to do that, even if you take China and India and combine them into some superstate. You’re still going to have mostly normal folks running the day to day operations halfway across the world. You can’t simply kill everyone because you’re still outnumbered, and there is no way that everyone from the leader to the ordinary soldiers are going to be as fanatical in upholding the regime’s values.
The speculation was that, given the chance (IE: possessing nuclear weapons) he would have continued to do exactly what he was doing which was killing the people he personally didn’t like by the millions as efficiently as he could. It’s not speculation that he did just that without them.
If it took destroying Germany in a retaliatory attack to stop him then so be it. We already destroyed one city with conventional weapons and would have continued to grind the country up if it came down to it.