If a nuclear war happened, which place in the world would be nuked the most?
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Kenneth Reese, dad, nurse, vetern
Updated Apr 8
Many of the answers would be correct if this question was asked in 1987 but, it's 2017. And in 2017 if there is one place on Earth that's going to get utterly saturated with nuclear weapons it's Murmansk in Russia.
The region around the city of Murmansk is home to the Russian Northern Fleet which not only includes most of Russias surface ships and their nuclear weapons but also most of Russia's SSBNs, a heavy rocket depot and storage silos for large but undisclosed number of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons. Everything is just scattered enough to warrant its own weapon or two
In the current era no one is going to prioritize targeting silos. Why is that you might ask? Because it's basically impossible to “sneak attack” silos. Launches from the Russian mainland are harder to initially verify but give you more lead time. Launches from subs give you less lead time but would be picked up and immediately verified by hundreds if not thousands of radars and satellites. Back in the 80’s it might have been possible for the USA to 1st strike the Soviets but with the qualitative and quantitative improvements to the OKO satellite in the late 80’s that window closed.
If the Russians were dumb enough (and contrary to what others may say the Russians are not dumb) to attack those silos then close to a thousand weapons would blow a 400 empty silos to hell and the fallout would wipe out most of the east coast population centers which leads to..
Contrary to Hollywood and RAND the objective of a 1st strike is not total annihilation or even compete disarmament, both of those are effectively impossible. The goal is to break your enemies will to fight. You inflict just enough damage to make your enemy second guess their ability to “win” and begin to doubt the ability of their government to protect them. At the same time you leave their cities intact so you can hold them hostage with your second strike forces. You also leave their government alive because, duh some one has to be alive to surrender. It comes down to this; after a 1st strike your enemy is going to have a S**t ton of weapons left, more then enough to destroy you.
A successful 1st strike means you convinced him to not use those weapons.
An unsuccessful strike means he launches his 1st strike force at your conventional forces and second strike force. And in the case of the USA that means we unload our use em or lose em ICBMs 1st while our bombers scramble.
That means smart Russians would concentrate their early attacks on bombers bases because bombers, even with advanced warning can not escape quickly enough. The area around those bases would also be saturated in an attempt to destroy bombers that just took to the air. The other major targets would be our SSBN ports. Kings Bay and Kitsap naval bases along with their support facilities would get hit hard
Sun Apr 16, 2017 10:07 am
