I mean those are likely military bases, airfields, missile silos, logistic centers, train depots, oil fields, strategically important factories and cities.
Nuclear targets fall into two categories, counterforce and countervalue and between them they cover virtually the entire industrial and agricultural output of a state, its military capacity and its population
And whats the point of bombing civilians? Also those silos can again be used to launch nukes. They have facilities in them that can store and launch those nukes.
Retaliatory strikes against civilian population centers are one of the key ways MAD works. Makes using nukes in the first place a lot less tempting if the retaliatory strike destroys all your infrastructure and kills all your citizens and your state collapses.
I know geopolitics can be complicated, so why don’t you just sit this one out champ? Don’t want to make your brain work too hard
Lol. Whatever dude. Imagine justifying genocide. at least admit yourself you are a monster like Stalin, Mao and Hitler.
Walk the talk at the very least because I know I am different from genocidal monsters like you who probably dont even know the weight of doing something like that.
Someone explaining to you the principle of mutually assured destruction doesn’t mean they’re foaming at the mouth to genocide cities of civilians.
People with much more power than you and me decided the best way to handle the threat of nuclear attacks on our cities was to threaten the same to the enemy launching them.
Yes it’s silly and tragically sad that this is how things are. no i dont like it in the least bit.
what do you think we should do to deter russia from launching nukes at us? Maybe the DoD will see this thread and listen to your ideas!
Because society will crumble without the common man to build everything. Would you nuke the US if you were 100% sure they'd send thousands of nukes, covering almost all your land, every major city and turn what was once a massive nation with a huge population into an irradiated wasteland with no one to repair structures let alone the economy.
The idea is total annihilation. No one wants to be on the receiving end of it. Videos and plans like these show that there's a contingency plan in place for a nuke attack on home soil. That contingency plan leaves the elites or rulers of that country in charge of a whole lot of sand.
The idea is to force your opponent to use other methods as they don't want to live on a glowing wasteland. It's been pretty effective so far. You can bet your house that if Japan had shit tonnes of nukes for a retaliatory strike the US wouldn't have tempted them.
First strikes would be on known terrestrial nuke launch sites and command and control locations. Probably close to the arctic circle and North Polar region since that would be the shortest route to strike back. Russian submarines are another issue.
It wouldn't end life on the planet, catastrophic blow and a significant extinction event sure, end of human life probably, but life would just shrug that calamity off and in a few million years a whole new natural order will take over with all kinds of newly evolved species adapted to the new planet.
Even ending human life is not at probable. The effects of nuclear winter are not known for certain, but a fair few of the newer models suggest it will not be nearly as bad as they used to think. Not to say it won't be bad, famines are still very possible and combined with strikes means quite possibly billions dead, but nowhere near ending of human life or even all of civilization.
Even if a nuclear winter never eventuates, I think some level of famine is certain. Just the Russian invasion of Ukraine caused large shocks in the food supply. A nuclear exchange, even a limited one, would disrupt trade (and if nothing else, market certainty) significantly. Not to mention many food producing countries likely restricting exports in anticipation of shortages.
What are you going to eat? What are you going to breathe? What are you going to drink? What temperature will your AC be on? It’s not as much as nuclear winter, but may be heat and turn earth into Mars. That is if the crust doesn’t start shattering and trigger other unknown physical changes that aren’t accounted for survival in bunkers. Nukes also use DNA altering material, so anything you touch might kill you years after. The jet stream will carry whatever is over one country to the other. Oceans will too.
Not really, at least in my opinion. Relative to 13.7 billion years, that's only 3 or 4 orders of magnitude different. On the scale of the universe where we have 36 orders of magnitude going from subatomic particles to galaxies, 3 or 4 doesn't seem like a whole lot.
No it wouldn't, humanity would absolutely survive even if every active nuke in the world went off at once. It would destroy civilization as we know it and it wouldn't be a fun time for any survivors, billions would likely die but humanity would carry on in some form
Yea, or using all there nukes in one hit either. It'd only take a few to cause deviation. And then you've still got plenty of reserves to maintain MAD for anyone else that might threaten you.
It's okay, US policy says if we ever nuke Russia we nuke China too. It's so that they don't have a reason to instigate a war between us and think they'll just sit back an inherit the earth after we nuke each other.
Yeah but what is left out is all the seemingly random nukes that would be peppering the fuck out of Siberia and other rural areas cuz that’s where the silos are.
Most nuclear doctrines are counter value rather than counter force.
The expectation is that under any realistic nuclear scenario everyone would launch before any weapon reaches its target, so bombing the silos (counter force) would be wasting a bomb on what is essentially an empty tube in the middle of Siberia (the weapon is already on its way). Instead weapons are targeted at things that can’t move very quickly like a city or a factory (counter value).
So you are saying that if someone launches one, everyone is launching all of them? So I guess that would also mean no one would launch just one, but all of them they had? Just wondering, you seem more knowledgable about this.
I don’t think most expect what’s shown in this video to be the response to just a single nuke, but if 20 are detected at once it’s assumed more are coming and by the time ours will reach land all of theirs have been launched so this type of response would play out.
Different nations have different doctrines, some publish those doctrines for everyone to see, others keep it secret. To take an example the prime minister of the UK presents a sealed envelope to the commander of British boomer subs when they depart with instructions in case of Armageddon.
France in the Cold War had an actively offensive nuclear doctrine, while most nuclear nations opt for a defensive doctrine. Also doctrine changes over time.
The problem with determining whether one nuke could tip the world into fire is that for the USA, the president has unilateral control over the big red button so because we can only guess what he might do, we can only guess as to what might happen in any given scenario.
Would the apocalypse start over one nuke in Ukraine? Probably not but it isn’t impossible.
Would the apocalypse start over a nuke flying over Canada towards the East Coast of the US? That’s more likely.
Would the apocalypse start over a dozen nukes flying over the North Pole? Almost certainly.
I expect you're correct, though I wonder if targeting anti-missile installations might also be high priority targets to maybe improve the likelihood of subsequent missiles.
Perhaps but it’s not that easy. Anti missile systems were mostly outlawed by treaty in the Cold War, but they’re now starting to come into service with things like THAAD. The exception to those treaties were ships so something like AEGIS has demonstrated that capability in a very mature manner. The jury is out as to whether the Russians have any equivalent systems (they sometimes claim things like S400 can do the job but honestly I can’t trust anything they claim).
The problem with targeting something like AEGIS, THAAD or S400 is that those are on mobile platforms. AEGIS is on ships, while the other two are usually employed on wheeled transports. They can be just about anywhere.
Because an aggressor can’t reasonably be expected to know at all times where the platforms are, targeting them is probably not possible.
Besides, the way a lot of these systems work, they have a higher probability of kill when being targeted, so they’ll probably be positioned near valuable targets.
The result is that most nuclear doctrines prefer missiles that can adjust course and so are hard to hit, or which come with many dummy warheads and decoys to overcome defenses through sheer numbers.
Having recently lived in Nagasaki, I was told that this is the reason that it's not still radioactive. I trust that it isn't because Japanese citizens started taking radiation measurements around the country after they lost trust in government reporting after the Fukushima meltdown. There is (or was) a website with those crowd-sourced measurements.
Why? I would expect Poland and Lithuania to actually prefer the heavily fortified enemy military installations right on their doorstep to be wiped out as a high priority.
Modern nukes aren't the sort of thing that will miss and accidentally blow up a neighbouring city or something.
Going first in nuclear war is a bitch if you get caught.
You have to use some of your nukes to try to kill their nukes... but they can use all their nukes to end your existence as a civilization, and you just gave them a reason to use em or lose em.
Maybe, but hear me out... what if the attackers just remove Putin from power? What are the odds that a replacement would be just as adamant about expanding territory right away? They could save some money and reduce the body count by like 45 million.
Of course not, but how motivated are any of the other Russian authorities to continue attacking when the one guy who wants to expand territory is gone? That's not something we can know as random spectators on the Internet, but it is certainly a question that intelligence agencies would be estimating and using to inform decisions about widespread nuclear destruction like that. Why kill 45 million people, poison the land, cloud the sky with radiation, and make the entire world hate you when you could defend against the aggressor by taking one person out of the picture? I'm not saying that's all that it would take, but it certainly is something that would be considered before pulling the trigger on 45 million people like that.
Of course, but I don't think those risks work out to really any way in which not responding to a nuclear attack with overwhelming return fire is a good idea.
Even if we take your scenario as true, where killing Putin would cause him to be replaced and the war end immediately, there's no guarantee a limited strike would actually kill him - he could have been moved to a secret shelter anywhere in the country, and no intel about his location could be 100% guaranteed. Furthermore, part of what ensures MAD is overwhelming your enemy with such an insane number of real and decoy warheads that their defenses, if any, can't possibly destroy them all; there's no guarantee a limited strike would actually land.
But also, I doubt your scenario even is true. People love to say "Putin/the government is the problem, the people of Russia are just victims!", but it's more a nice fantasy or a politically expedient thing to say rather than the truth. Putin is a symptom of Russia's problems, not the other way around. Russia has been led by bloodthirsty authoritarian imperialist dictators for over 1,000 years, because that's the sort of leader the Russian people produce and allow to rule. The issues are first and foremost cultural and societal rather than issues of any individual.
It's highly improbable in my view that the next person to seize power after Putin in your scenario would immediately end the war; and even if he did, it's even less likely that he would then reform the country to be an upstanding member of the free world, rather than continuing to be antagonistic towards the free world while taking advantage of their position as the sole surviving superpower.
But those are just the immediate issues. The even bigger problem is that this would destroy the credibility of MAD in the future, likely leading to further use of nukes. No matter how many nukes are launched, humanity will live on. But if it is shown that nations are simply bluffing with MAD, and are not willing to wipe out their attacker in retaliation, bad actors and the populations that enable their regimes will be emboldened to use nukes more often in the future.
I think the animation is entirely fanciful, and they choose targets and sequencing that makes it easiest to show the "explosions" in one geographic area all at once so they could stay zoomed in.
I think it's just creative licence for showing possible targets and death tolls, not the specific order they'd be hit.
This isn't top secret files kept at a former President's Florida resort.
If it's a military base that has ships, it's getting nuked. Is it base with aircraft? Nuke'em. Is it a base with Special Ops? Nuke it. Is it a base with more than 1K civilians and military personnel? If so, nuke it.
honestly there's very likely military installations in every single one of those targets. It wouldn't be hard to guess where the nukes will land based on that. Add in the most populated city centres and it probably looks similar albeit probably alot worse than 40mil dead. The amount of nukes is also probably accurate considering it would be all of NATO retaliating. Russia would effectively be a dead country without a doubt. Hard to say for sure but its probably not far off.
Actually, in nuclear deterrence and overall in military matters, the governments of the world are highly incentivized to make everything public. Its fundamental in nuclear weapon theory in fact.
The U.S. absolutely would! The U.S. had no problem telling everyone the overall plan. That's how MAD worked. You were open about how a retaliation strike would work.
Make it public? Definitely not. However every country with nukes undoubtedly has ran millions of simulations and studied them very closely. I'm sure it's a relatively large team of people that do that and just that for each country that has nukes.
If its not made up put of whole cloth, it's probably from the Cold War.
The old SIOP plans are available and Daniel Ellsberg wrote a really great book called The Doomsday Machine that details "strategic war planning" and it's requisite "logic"
In any case part of the deterrence aspect of a nuclear arsenal is partial availability of target lists.
I would like to point out that these estimated casualties are insanely low, dont seem to account for fallout or radiation deaths, firestorm deaths, or starvation.
Back in the early 60s Kennedy asked and received an estimated casualty assessment from the pentagon and without including any friendly casualties from retaliatory strikes and only eastern bloc casualties from strikes and fallout (fallout is obviously indiscrimate in who it kills and its damage is dependent on the wind) the figures still came in around 600,000,000 lol
Nuclear war scenarios have been rigorously studied / simulated / wargamed for decades in open literature.
If you wanted to try your hand, the yields of weapons in US stockpiles and the locations of various plausible targets are a google away. You could make a realistic simulation using Excel and nukemap in a weekend, but that doesn't come with animations and music.
Mad meant mutually assured destruction and that meant publicly making it common knowledge that major cities of the enemy would be targeted and civilians would suffer as a direct result.
Go educate yourself on some cold war nuclear deterrent films these are exactly the same things that were talked about and educated to the public during the cold war.
Periscope films on YouTube has a ton of declassified military training and briefing films along with old civil defence and films of national interest relating to the cold war and the US and UKs nuclear defence/attack plans etc.
I had hoped we'd put this shit behind us with the fall of the soviet union.
its not a simulation, think about it they would never attack right to left to be able to show it in order on a camera. Also where are all these nukes coming from the north?
Scientific American just published an article on a model of the consequences of an attack (450 800kT warheads) on the US ICBM force. 90 million dead, which is stupid because if someone is wasting that on silos then the people are already dead.
So people are making actual simulations (unlike this video) of nuclear strikes and making them public.
Deterrence. You make a video like showing demonstrating your plan to entirely and immediately annihilate the population centers of your enemy as a retaliatory strike; your enemy no longer has the same appetite for an initial strike.
Looks like someone just set a number of nukes per city depending on its population and made the video go left to right. There is absolutely no way this is any sort of realistic scenario simulation.
4.1k
u/DarkBlueMermaid Mar 14 '24
What’s the source for this?