Off Topic discussion initiated in LRS-Bomber to look at...

[XanderCrews]

Tell us more about how the nuclear war will be over in a half hour

Quite simple. Both sides launch several hundred long range ballistic missiles from land and submarine, which each deploy 8-12 warheads of several hundred kT yield, which arrive in <30 minutes.

Nuclear wars were meant to last anywhere from 5-12 years.

Go read WarDay by Whitley Strieber. It will explain why no waged nuclear war is over in an hour, let alone a year. It's a quick 500 pages.

exactly.

McRaptor, if it is over in a half hour, why do we need PCPs? Hostage cities? or second strike capability along with pauses? You are confusing MAD with modern NUTS. which both sides had switched to be the 1970s. Both sides realized MAD was unfeasible, something you still don't seem to understand.

Which is what tells me you don't know what you are talking about. You are giving concepts from the 1950s and 1960s and trying to shoe horn into concepts that were no longer held by both sides WHEN THE COLD WAR ENDED 20 years. You are two eras removed from today's reality. Yet you continue to "put us in our place" while you clearly lack even basic knowledge of nuclear strategy.

[mcraptor]

Getting caught sucks doesn't it?

For the record, I've responded to all your questions about Type II deterrents and the use of Pershing I/IA/II missiles deployed in Western Europe, which were intended precisely for that kind of deterrence. Such missiles can strike within <10 minutes (II) and <5 minutes (I/IA). I still say that such a thing would escalate all too quickly but hopefully you can see that a job which bombers require hours to do can be done in minutes. That's not to say that bombers don't play a part, but it's a secondary role and not the preferred method of delivery. PM me if you want to continue this.

[mcraptor]

Tell us more about how the nuclear war will be over in a half hour

Quite simple. Both sides launch several hundred long range ballistic missiles from land and submarine, which each deploy 8-12 warheads of several hundred kT yield, which arrive in <30 minutes.

Nuclear wars were meant to last anywhere from 5-12 years.

Go read WarDay by Whitley Strieber. It will explain why no waged nuclear war is over in an hour, let alone a year. It's a quick 500 pages.

I guess it's all hypothetical but people's resolve might be catastrophically altered when:

several hundred million people are laying burnt on the streets;
their country is on fire;
the atmosphere is unbreathable;
remaining people are dying from cancer;
the sun is blotted out;
nothing can be grown;
all factories are destroyed;
most engineers are dead;
most laborers are dead.

People will be more worried about surviving than fighting over some kind of pseudo ideological bullshit that they never fully understood in the first place. All of a sudden there'll be a huge realisation that by fighting they all lost and that they were all infinitely better off before they started fighting.

I sure as hell couldn't be assed fighting a nuclear war for 12 years even if it were possible.

[mcraptor]

McRaptor, if it is over in a half hour, why do we need PCPs? Hostage cities? or second strike capability along with pauses? You are confusing MAD with modern NUTS. which both sides had switched to be the 1970s. Both sides realized MAD was unfeasible, something you still don't seem to understand.

Which is what tells me you don't know what you are talking about. You are giving concepts from the 1950s and 1960s and trying to shoe horn into concepts that were no longer held by both sides WHEN THE COLD WAR ENDED 20 years. You are two eras removed from today's reality. Yet you continue to "put us in our place" while you clearly lack even basic knowledge of nuclear strategy.

I've already addressed this.

A hypothetical Soviet assault on Western Europe was to be met with copious amounts of SRBMs and MRBMs, hence their deployment there. Frankly I think that any use would have quickly ramped up though.

I think I admitted somewhere that bombers might play a lesser part in mopping up but they're much like an emergency diesel generator compared to the main power grid (ballistic missiles). Anything you can do with a bomber, you can do with a ballistic missile, only 10-20 times faster.

Nuclear strategy is also an oxymoron. If you find yourself in a nuclear war, your strategy has failed. The only workable strategy with nuclear weapons is one of deterrence. Using them means they've failed in their function.

In summary I guess it's useful to have a strategic bomber capability but what we have is fine. AGM-129s don't require replacement. Arguably Minuteman IIIs and Trident D5s do though, as do Ohio Class submarines. So I wouldn't concern myself with the secondary stuff when the primary stuff needs looking at.

[count_to_10]

Tell us more about how the nuclear war will be over in a half hour

Quite simple. Both sides launch several hundred long range ballistic missiles from land and submarine, which each deploy 8-12 warheads of several hundred kT yield, which arrive in <30 minutes.

Nuclear wars were meant to last anywhere from 5-12 years.

Go read WarDay by Whitley Strieber. It will explain why no waged nuclear war is over in an hour, let alone a year. It's a quick 500 pages.

I guess it's all hypothetical but people's resolve might be catastrophically altered when:

several hundred million people are laying burnt on the streets;
their country is on fire;
the atmosphere is unbreathable;
remaining people are dying from cancer;
the sun is blotted out;
nothing can be grown;
all factories are destroyed;
most engineers are dead;
most laborers are dead.

People will be more worried about surviving than fighting over some kind of pseudo ideological bullshit that they never fully understood in the first place. All of a sudden there'll be a huge realisation that by fighting they all lost and that they were all infinitely better off before they started fighting.

I sure as hell couldn't be assed fighting a nuclear war for 12 years even if it were possible.

So, that isn't actually what happens in the aftermath of a nuclear war.

[mcraptor]

So, that isn't actually what happens in the aftermath of a nuclear war.

Let me guess. Does the ice-cream man come in your scenario?

[count_to_10]

So, that isn't actually what happens in the aftermath of a nuclear war.

Let me guess. Does the ice-cream man come in your scenario?

Dust can make things cooler, but it won't "blot out the sun", and, while it would reduce crop yields, it won't eliminate them. The radiation won't be giving people cancer in in less than decades, and, due to the fact that most will be H bomb air bursts, there won't be much in the way of localized contamination either.

[mcraptor]

So, that isn't actually what happens in the aftermath of a nuclear war.

Let me guess. Does the ice-cream man come in your scenario?

Dust can make things cooler, but it won't "blot out the sun", and, while it would reduce crop yields, it won't eliminate them. The radiation won't be giving people cancer in in less than decades, and, due to the fact that most will be H bomb air bursts, there won't be much in the way of localized contamination either.

That's totally inaccurate scientifically. The dust and ash unleashed is likely to parallel a large volcanic disaster, which have historically blotted out the sun or at least blocked most of it. It may not be totally dark but it'll likely be close.

Gamma ray exposure, fast moving particles and dust sucked up, as well as exposed clouds could all give people radiation sickness and forms of advanced cancer in days or weeks.

Material can be made radioactive by indirect exposure by the same mechanism.

[count_to_10]

Um, no.
You would have to detonate them on the ground to get that kind of dust in the air. In air bursts, all of the radioactive material goes up into the upper atmosphere, where it spreads out over a large area -- and fades into the existing background.
I would be far more worried about the economic system of the world collapsing as pretty much all of the worlds centers of production get flattened. That is more likely to starve people to death than the direct environmental effects.

[mcraptor]

Um, no.
You would have to detonate them on the ground to get that kind of dust in the air. In air bursts, all of the radioactive material goes up into the upper atmosphere, where it spreads out over a large area -- and fades into the existing background.
I would be far more worried about the economic system of the world collapsing as pretty much all of the worlds centers of production get flattened. That is more likely to starve people to death than the direct environmental effects.

The implosion caused sucks dust up regardless of whether you airburst it or not and the massive gamma ray burst will will damage the atomic structure of material, plus the neutron radiation, and the water vapor in the atmosphere itself. It's probably difficult to fully comtemplate the effect of 10,000+ nuclear warheads going off, ranging from 100kT to 30MT in yield. Whole continents will be on fire afterwards with nobody to put them out, they will just burn until they run out of stuff to burn through. Surely you saw the dust on 9/11 when just 2 buildings collapsed. Rotting corpses will probably give rise to epidemics. Just about everything electronic will be out of commission, whether directly affected by the blasts or not. Nobody will give a sh*t about fighting anymore. The only fighting done will be to survive - that will be the only 12 year fight after a nuclear holocaust.

[count_to_10]

So, you do realize that it is neutrons that can make stable elements radio active, not gamma rays, right? In an air burst, very few of the neutrons find a nucleus that they can make significantly radioactive. No, whole continents will not be on fire - though there will probably be a number of forest fires. The Navies will survive for a number of months unhindered. Whether fighting continues afterward depends on the exact circumstances.

[madrat]

Mount St. Helens erupted only 1000 times more powerful that an A-Bomb. I'm pretty certain there will be survivors and society will mold itself according to its resources.

[mcraptor]

So, you do realize that it is neutrons that can make stable elements radio active, not gamma rays, right? In an air burst, very few of the neutrons find a nucleus that they can make significantly radioactive. No, whole continents will not be on fire - though there will probably be a number of forest fires. The Navies will survive for a number of months unhindered. Whether fighting continues afterward depends on the exact circumstances.

Gamma rays can ionize atoms and molecules and cause cancer. Surely everyone knows that?

Anything flammable will burn. Any buildings with paper, plastic, rubber and furniture will burn relentlessly until all sources of fuel are spent.

Navies unhindered? Really? Did you not know that most Soviet anti-ship missiles could be nuclear tipped, as could torpedos. A few submarines is about all you'd have left, maybe.

Mount St. Helens erupted only 1000 times more powerful that an A-Bomb. I'm pretty certain there will be survivors and society will mold itself according to its resources.

Which is only 15-20MT, or less than one SS-18 with a single RV option.

St. Helens was relatively small.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_la ... _eruptions

The most recent supervolcano, but far from the largest:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory

The Toba supereruption (Youngest Toba Tuff or simply YTT[1]) was a supervolcanic eruption that is thought to have occurred sometime between 69,000 and 77,000 years ago at Lake Toba (Sumatra, Indonesia). It is recognized as one of the Earth's largest known eruptions. The related catastrophe hypothesis holds that this event plunged the planet into a 6-to-10-year volcanic winter and possibly an additional 1,000-year cooling episode. This change in temperature is hypothesized to have resulted in the world's human population being reduced to 10,000 or even a mere 1,000 breeding pairs, creating a bottleneck in human evolution.

[count_to_10]

Gamma rays don't do anything to people that wouldn't be dead already from the blast.
You can't just compare energy between nukes and eruptions as far as dust goes -- basically all of the eruption goes into pushing dust around, while very little of the nuke's does.

[mcraptor]

Gamma rays don't do anything to people that wouldn't be dead already from the blast.

Not so. With increased distance gamma radiation becomes more prevalent than neutron radiation and leads to beta particles being released from other atoms it meets. Furthermore the neutron radiation mutates the nuclei of the surrounding matter. Factor in the dust of radioactive material released by the bomb itself and a very large amount of radioactive material is released into the environment. The neutron radiation is definitely the primary concern.

You can't just compare energy between nukes and eruptions as far as dust goes -- basically all of the eruption goes into pushing dust around, while very little of the nuke's does.

And the volcano is in one area, nukes will be spread over 2 or 3 continents; about ten thousand megatons of them, with dust and ash from everything they obliterate and smoke from anything in the resulting fires.