Quote:
Originally Posted by Irish Wolf
Anchorage might well have taken a few nukes... I doubt they'd have targeted any other major cities in Alaska, though - no real strategic reason to do so.
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Fairbanks has an air force base (a fighter squadron and tanker squadron) and two army bases (an infantry division and an ABM launch site). It's also a transportation hub for most of the state (including the Trans-Alaska Pipeline to Prudhoe Bay), and the economic center of the interior (including the northern terminus of the Alaska Railroad down to Anchorage, and the Tanana River connecting to the Yukon and to the southeast. Historical river transport routes might well return to importance in a post-apoc setting with lower industrial and energy output).
A minimalist surgical strike focused on warfighters only might give it a miss, other than Fort Greely, at least if your war plan lets you ignore the fighters because you're not sending your bombers that way. Any attack that's trying to affect economics and long-term military capability, or just sheer revenge / spite / MAD would probably hit Fairbanks as well.
FEMA's 1990 "Nuclear Attack Planning Base" document is a county-by-county list of their expectations of nuclear attack effects in the entire US at that time. Since that's a 500-page monster document, and scanned images so not searchable,
here's an image of Alaska that's supposed to be based on that report. It shows four nukes in the Fairbanks area, compared to only one each on Anchorage and Juneau (and six others elsewhere in the state, including one on Kodiak Island). So Fairbanks rated a third of the total warheads dropped on the state, at least according to 1990's FEMA.