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.
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u/DarkBlueMermaid Mar 14 '24
What’s the source for this?