US + Russia Sign Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty

[Deepcrush]

*Spit drink alert!*

[BigJKU316]

The sonic boom you just heard was the point doing a low level fly by.

The issue is people vastly over-simplify nuclear weapons. By the end of the Cold War you could pretty much use up the whole of the British stockpile going after high value targets in Moscow due to the number of hardened targets there and the defensive systems in place.

Now if you just want to level major urban areas then 1,500 or so is probably more than enough. However at least on the US side they are not really targeted in that manner. You can use up a surprising number of warheads for what seems a very simple task, such as hitting pretty much any hardened target.

The point is those 1,500 warheads don't go nearly as far as most people think unless the extent of your plan is to airburst them over major population centers.

[Tyyr]

I am very well versed in nuclear ordnance and it's employment. It's been something I've studied rather voraciously since I was about ten. I was a weird kid. What I made was largely a joke.

However if I need to alliterate the point I will. Full scale nuclear war is simply unwinable. It doesn't matter how accurate your nukes are there is no way to guarantee that you can get them all, certainly not after the invention of the SLBM. You can't "first strike," someone and actually make it work, travel times and tracking systems were too good to do that in the sixties, never mind today. As such you cannot wipe out your opponent's ability to retaliate against you and "win". Even a single sub's worth of missiles can cause incalculable damage to a country. Even in the heady days of the Cold War when both side had warheads numbering in the tens of thousands there was no way to "win" a nuclear war. Any scenario would likely have devolved into straight out city busting especially since the Russian's targeting systems were so shitty. They had no way to go counter force so their only option was "Try and nuke our missiles we nuke your cities," even from the get go.

I could bring a country like the US or Russia to it's knees with fifty warheads. You don't need 1,500 or 5,000 or 15,000 to do it. That's just overkill on a grand scale. I mean if you're looking for prompt casualties then sure you need that many but you can wipe a country out with maybe 50. Probably left if you're really picky about how you target them.

You airburst a few over large population centers. New York, LA, San Diego, Atlanta, Miami, Philadelphia, Washington, Salt Lake City, Portland, Kansas City, Dallas, Detroit just to name a few. You don't have to even physically destroy the entire cities. A single airburst over an area will generate enough raw damage, infrastructure loss, and mass casualties that the entire city will cease to function. Picking the right cities will paralyze the country as major ports, river crossings, airports, and financial centers are either destroyed or deserted. You create so much devastation that it cannot be coped with, so many injured you can't care for them all (seriously, there aren't enough burn ward beds in the entire country to deal with even a single small nuke in a populated area) and you let the burden of destruction drag the country down. Take a look at what happened on 9/11, two buildings destroyed in NYC and the Pentagon damaged and the country went into a mini-recession and we're still dealing with the political fallout. What happens if instead of two buildings in one city you flatten a square mile or two in a dozen cities? Take a look at Katrina, a single city, a slowly evolving problem, and not even the mass casualty situation and the city still hasn't recovered.
I could turn this nation into a third world country with a dozen nukes, fifty just to be sure of it. Same with Russia or anyone else. No nation on earth is set up to handle that kind of devastation and survive. 50, 500, 1,500, it's largely irrelevant. It's still more than enough to do the job a dozen times over.