[AtE] Nuclear Target List

[acrosome]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

Since Cheyenne Mountain is "wanted on voyage", why not go with the consensus on missile tech - it was hit, but the warhead wasn't big enough to take it out. Doesn't that satisfy everyone?

As for the Unfortunate Implications of the effect on the population of sub-Saharan Africa ... you did imply that the virus could increase predisposition to pretty much any belief system, so you could quite credibly have a situation in which a mainstream religion was able to mitigate the worst effects leading to a surprisingly stable nation - for example, something like a virus assisted Protestant Revival creating an African flavoured version of the Early American Commonwealth or a Romanist one creating a latter day version of the Kingdom of Prester John. Even with your original premise, you don't need foaming barbarism.

I could probably do that with Cheyenne Mountain, yes. But as I mentioned I want it intact for s plot reason. I'll keep it in mind, though, as I have waffled around that issue.

Interestingly, I did think of something similar to what you propose for blacks in the south. If I can come up with nothing better I may do that. But I'd rather come up with something better (I.e. Something that isn't so much of a screw).

A gigantic Prester Kingdom in the south might be getting uncomfortably close to being one of those notirious Space Filling Empires, too.

[acrosome]

Originally Posted by tshiggins

In that case, it could be a real treasure-trove, or the base for a large and successful gang, or even the location of a reasonably successful settlement, if they could secure a reliable source of water (no streams run through the area, at all, IIRC, but it gets a lot of snow in the winter).

Hmm. Noted.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by acrosome

CANADA
1. CFB Winnipeg, Manitoba. *Canadian NORAD Region Headquarters.
2. CFB North Bay, Ontario. *Canada East Sector and Canada West Sector Sector Operations Control Centers (SOCCs).

Canada has not maintained and operated U.S.-owned nuclear weapons since 1984. The last of the U.S.-owned nuclear weapons that the U.S. maintained and operated on our soil were booted out between 1994 and 1998. All major Canadian cities are now NWFZs, though Canada at large is not a NWFZ.

That said, CFB Halifax regularly has visiting U.S vessels that are widely known to be nuclear-armed. Source: I used to live in Halifax. My grandfather (RIP) and father in law (RIP) were both navy men. My father used to work as a civilian technician at HMC Dockyard Halifax. (I have childhood memories of the sirens being tested because we knew we were a target . . .)

This is probably also true of CFB Esquimalt and CFS St. John's.

Someone with lots of nukes would point one warhead at each of these three targets. On any given day of the week, if the U.S. hadn't sortied its entire navy, hitting these targets would surely destroy at least a few U.S. vessels capable of delivering nukes.

Someone with a surfeit of nukes would hit CFB Goose Bay, CFB Bagotville, and CFB Gander, too, because there used to be nukes there and the runways are still useable. Canada's tinfoil-hat brigade thinks there are still nukes at all of the above sites. I doubt this, but if the person pushing the button were crazy enough, they'd blast those targets anyway.

Note that Canada still cooperates in nuclear weapons development and testing as part of its NATO and NORAD obligations. There are quite a few facilities across the unpopulated part of the nation that have been used for such work. They aren't especially secret . . . I just don't have time to research them. Someone who was really worried about experimental guidance or delivery systems being deployed from R&D sites would nuke those as well.

[Crakkerjakk]

Originally Posted by acrosome

Ah. I'm tracking. Maybe I will expand to a more broad counterforce target list that includes essentially every military base.

I'm reading on fallout, and the effects do decay much faster than I had thought. Reasonably safe travel through a zone is possible in a couple of months. It's just the long term effects of things like the cesium and strontium that are nasty. But that's long term.

FWIW, this is the approach I took. Every city in the US over 50k people gets at least one nuke, often multiple from MIRVs. All large dams, any intersection of interstates, all military and national guard bases, etc.

That said, if you're 2-3 generations (~60 years) past the war, dose except maybe at the crater centers (and near melted down power plants) is probably survivable, and while you have lots of thematically appropriate bomb craters and sagging buildings around them, nuclear explosions aren't THAT destructive, so you have lots of decaying cities/bases to explore, with more damage closer to the city center/important government or defense buildings.

And heck, since I posited TL 10 civilization before the fall (so I can have robots and useful beam weapons as super-loot/enemies) you can always just say "this one location I like managed to shoot down the incoming nukes with ABM defenses."

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by acrosome

... aggressively seeking and tracking opposing European SSBNs ... the first-strike works reasonably well at destroying European NATO’s strategic nuclear arsenal before a response can be mounted.

The nuclear European states do not have fields of robust hardened missile silos, so a counter-force first-strike is a viable tactic against them, so long as their (very few) SSBNs can be at least partially negated.

The limited SSBN response that is launched from a single surviving British SSBN is considered insufficient...

It's a side point, but you seem to be assuming the UK and France have larger nuclear forces than is actually the case. The UK has not had long-range land-based missiles since the Thors went back to the USA, and the French have not had any since 1999. The French still have air-launched nuclear weapons, but the British haven't since 1998.

The pre-announced strike would have to have been from a submarine, probably one that was not on patrol but put to sea to launch it, since that avoids giving away the location of the boat on patrol.

Both countries maintain one SSBN on patrol at a time, out of four each, with a second one at sea during changeovers, and have only a single base for their SSBNs, which is readily targeted. They'd try to surge more if a major crisis was already happening, but circumstances would dictate if they could actually put a boat out for a proper patrol.

[AlexanderHowl]

A TL10 civilization is capable of using advanced fusion weapons, so there would be little reason for nuclear fallout to occur. The hypothetical limit for an advanced fusion weapon would be 10 MT per metric ton and, combined with the improved rocketry of TL10, you could have 10 50 MT warheads on 300 metric ton ICBMs (more smaller warheads would be inefficient because they would cause cannibalistic explosions). The impact of an exchange of 5000 50 MT warheads would reduce the temperature of the Earth by 10 degrees Celsius for a decade, assuming equal amounts of ground and air bursts. Plants stop growing for ten years except for microscopic plants and around 99% of the human species dies. The Mountain may survive, but the people inside will starve long before they can grow food, at least unless they had fusion generators and large open spaces for growing their own food.

[mlangsdorf]

Aren't 50 MT bombs inefficient in themselves? Blast radius doesn't go up linearly with tonnage, so aside from a couple of large bombs intended to destroy extremely hardened targets, I thought modern doctrine was a MIRV with 10 warheads destroys more area than a single warhead at 10x the weight.

Looking up some possibly dodgy numbers, I get a 10 warhead MIRV of 50 MT each doing heavy damage out to ~45 km, and a 100 warhead MIRV of 5 MT each doing heavy damage out to ~63 km. Heavy damage is the 5 psi overpressure level, enough to destroy most civilian buildings. Multiple warheads are also better for spreading out the thermal pulse.

Presumably a TL10 civilization is capable of synchronizing their fusion weapons such that a 100 warhead MIRV doesn't encounter cannibalistic explosions.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

Aren't 50 MT bombs inefficient in themselves? Blast radius doesn't go up linearly with tonnage, so aside from a couple of large bombs intended to destroy extremely hardened targets, I thought modern doctrine was a MIRV with 10 warheads destroys more area than a single warhead at 10x the weight.

Very large nukes are even less efficient: much of the energy gets used up blowing upper atmosphere off into space.

The USA never made anything like the Tsar Bomba because it was inefficient and very hard to deliver. The Russian Proton rocket was first designed as an ICBM that would have delivered a Tsar Bomba-based warhead, but sense dawned in time - the cost of a silo for it would have been ridiculous. But that's why Proton uses storable liquid fuels.

[Crakkerjakk]

My solution for the above was to flap my hands wildly and talk about how the original AIs were originally designed to maintain the nuclear weapon systems, and kept doing so after they were mostly obsolete and ignored by the humans, and when the balloons went up over resource scarcity due in large part to climate change the AI's finally got to execute all those old launch routines.

Really, I was just trying to get to "reign of Steel, but with less organized AI overminds covering smaller areas and mostly focused on scavenging from cities and fighting amongst themselves while ignoring humans, plus enough tech for caches of power armor and man portable beam weapons, oh and also I want radiated zones and some sort of weird mutation inducing effects so I can have freakish animals and mutant gangs. And also some primitive TL 5 human societies managing to live in the cracks, with a few higher TL enclaves scattered here and there."

[acrosome]

Originally Posted by johndallman

It's a side point, but you seem to be assuming the UK and France have larger nuclear forces than is actually the case. The UK has not had long-range land-based missiles since the Thors went back to the USA, and the French have not had any since 1999. The French still have air-launched nuclear weapons, but the British haven't since 1998.

The pre-announced strike would have to have been from a submarine, probably one that was not on patrol but put to sea to launch it, since that avoids giving away the location of the boat on patrol.

Both countries maintain one SSBN on patrol at a time, out of four each, with a second one at sea during changeovers, and have only a single base for their SSBNs, which is readily targeted. They'd try to surge more if a major crisis was already happening, but circumstances would dictate if they could actually put a boat out for a proper patrol.

Hmm. I thought they both still maintained air-delivered nukes. But Britain only has the subs now? Huh.

At any rate, all subs would have sallied during the tensions, so there would be more than one out on patrol. I did know that Britain had four SSBNs. Yes, the punitive strike would have been from subs- I didn't mean to imply that they were land-based ICBMs.

So, the French no longer have Pluton, eh? Good to know.