Rafael wrote:
My mistake. I'm browsing on chrome on a desktop now. Taptalk shows the quote was attributed to me. I very much do not know if two, so-called well-placed cloud bursts could indeed cause the death of every man, woman, and child in North America. Having not read about them either, I'm not exactly sure what a cloud-burst is nor do I suspect it is capable of discriminatingly killing, say only men, versus men, women and children, thus making it much scarier.
Well, for one thing I've never heard the term "cloud-bursts" before. Two high-altitude bursts could indeed do an immense amount of EMP damage and possibly kill quite a few people through the direct consequences of EMP and quite a few more through less-immediate effects from loss of power over wide areas and loss of computer control equipment, but it would certainly not even come close to killing everyone on the continent.
If that were actually true, it would completely invalidate the deterrence philosophy of both sides, and place an insurmountable premium on a first strike - such that nuclear war would almost certainly have already occurred. If you could strike first, you could completely wipe out your enemy with just 2 weapons, and thereby absolutely prevent him doing the same to you. You wouldn't need the immense numbers of weapons of the Cold War - just a few hundred, since even a defense system that had a, say, 99% intercept rate, and sufficient ammunition to assure that even against a full-scale attack would be worthless against just 500 incoming warheads - you could be near-certain that 5 warheads would survive, so even with a 60% dud rate you have a very high chance of getting those 2 bursts. No such defense system has ever even come close to actually being constructed, either, by any party, so the real number needed would be far less. The need for counterforce versus countervalue, tactical weapons - all nearly completely invalidated because you could wrap all your effects up in one nice 2-warhead package.
Even if "every man, woman, and child on the continent" does not include people in hardened shelters (since we don't need to be that pedantic) who could launch a counterstrike, it still calls into question why anyone ever bothered with bombers or tactical weapons - bombers trying to scramble are certainly not hardened, and tactical forces could simply be eliminated by a few more such bursts.
This incident highlights why the idea that a few high-altitude bursts could wipe out a nation's population isn't too likely. The Soviet warning system signalled a single inbound ICBM, followed by 4 more. Petrov knew that a US first strike would involve hundreds of missiles, not just 5. If it were really possible to wipe out a country with a few airbursts, an attack with 5 missiles on an otherwise calm day would be a viable strategy, relying on the enemy's confusion over the small size of the strike, or maybe just not noticing such a small number of launches at all, to succeed. Worse, at that time in 1983 KAL 007 had been shot down a few weeks prior, so tensions were high already, and if a few airbursts (even if it takes 3 or 4 to kill everyone in the Soviet Union accounting for its size and different shape) were credible, Petrov could not reasonably have discounted the threat as he did.
In fact he received (at least some) praise for his actions - surprising in the Soviet military establishment, where making a difficult, but correct, decision like that could be punished simply to divert attention from failures of the system - either the official failures of the political-military system, or technical failures of the hardware in question.