The Glade 4.0

So, out of curiosity...

If the US lost its collective mind and decided to embrace "nuke the site from orbit; it's the only way to be sure" as our Middle East / anti-terrorism policy, would we even have the military capacity to do it? Do we have the nukes to basically insta-kill the vast majority of the population from Morocco to Pakistan? What about just the core from like Egypt to Afghanistan?

This is going to take a while to answer; I'll try to get to it in the next few days.

I promise though, it's not going to be fun to read. Not as in it's going to be one of my lengthy replies (even though it may be), as in....

Think about what you really just asked me.

The question is not "can we kill most of the people in the Middle East". It's "what's going to happen and what's the world going to look like as the B-52s are turning for home".

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Yeah, I'm not saying it would be wise or even remotely moral. I was just kinda sitting around, thinking about genocide - you know, as one does - and it occurred to me that I'm not even sure we could do it if we wanted to.

My morbid curiosity is going to drive me crazy.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
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The short answer is, "We can." The U.S. nuclear arsenal is still sufficient to meet a goal of mutually assured destruction should things escalate into a global nuclear conflict. Whether or not we should, however, is a completely different question. There's no way we avoid provoking a Russian response, particularly since they have a heavily vested interested in the Middle East. And if the Russians fire, so do the Chinese. It also means India and Pakistan likely get off some pot shots at each other. Things would be nasty. And there's no way to protect Israel from the fallout.

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Ok, to be perfectly honest this question is so complex and involved in terms of its implications that I don't have time to even start on - A potential scenario could easily fill a book.

Suffice to say that this question assumes some fundamental change in political realities worldwide; therefore projecting possible responses is almost entirely guesswork. As to simply causing essentially extinction casualties in the wider middle east/mudlim world - yes it can be done without a great deal of trouble or excessive expenditure of munitions.

The simplest way to put this is that because the middle east is heavily deserted, people tend to live in communities around lines of travel. If you look at a map of ISIS control that's why it seems like thin bands connecting blobs. Those empty spaces are... empty.

Also, prevailing winds carry radiation east from the Mediterranean.

What this means is that you can attack capitals and other major cities - in actuality, targeting a combination of oil refineries, power plants, airfields, and air defense sites. Off the cuff, I would strike initially with ICBMs at any sort of worthwhile air defense batteries and groundbursts on major runways to get that radiation spreading all over. Then the bombers would come in and attack any urban centers not already devastated by explosions at their local airfield or missile site. I'd prefer to hit during Ramadan so as to catch as many pilgrims in Mecca as possible - and if we're doing this, Mecca and Medina are getting hit pretty hard. After this, weather helpfully spreads radiation east, away form Israel and towards Iran and Pakistan.

Thinking about the major countries in the middle east I figure less than 50 ICBMs and two dozen bombers should be sufficient to put them back in the 7th century they want to live in - whoever's left that is.

Now if you mean ensure the death of every last person in the middle east, in the initial strike itself, that's a whole different matter, but I think killing off most people in every major urban center, totally eliminating their ability to conduct modern industry or meaningfully defending themselves, and killing quite a few of the survivors with radiation over the next few year and oh by the way - demonstrating that Allah cannot (or will not) stop the Americans from destroying his holiest sites utterly.. I'll settle for that if we're going to pursue this course of action.

Also, I'd try to get the Indians in on it, striking Pakistan first. After that.. well, I didn't use submarines for a reason. They're surging to sea, so the Russians and Chinese know we have plenty left and they need to think long and hard if they REALLY want to retaliate for this act of total barbarity.

I say total barbarity in terms of today's realpolitik. If a situation appears where there is real likelyhood of this actually happening, the definition of "barbarity" has probably changed.

Think of it in terms of... Independence Day or something. If you are up against genocidal aliens that intend to wipe you out completely then genociding them first is not only morally acceptable, but your moral imperative. The idea of not doing so in pursuit of abstract principle is simply obstinacy for the sake of winning arguments by fools who know perfectly well they won't actually face genocidal alien monsters.

This doesn't even scratch the surface of the after effects. Huge numbers of Arabs will never be able to reproduce even if they survive; far more birth defects will appear. What happens to Europe with middle eastern oil unavailable for hundreds of years (at best)? It goes on and on.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

That's a technology issue. If it needed to be resolved, it would be.

Thanks, DE. Yeesh - 50 ICBMs and a couple dozen bombers, eh? I would have though a lot more would be needed. Almost boggles the mind to think how much damage we could do if we just unloaded our entire nuclear arsenal at the region.

Exactly. what happens to Europe? What does that solution look like? How long does it take? What other (positive or negative) side effects an consequences does it have? What happens in the meantime?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

It's important to understand that in most third world/developing countries things tend to all congregate in the capital or another large city for convenience. There isn't a lot of transportation, communications, electrical, and other infrastructure across the countryside so its much easier to go to the capital if you have anything important to do.

There might even be two or three bigger cities, but it's still not a lot and it's relatively easy to knock out several soft targets with a single device. Hard targets like railyards or runways require groundburst to physically scour them out of the ground, but in this case our position is that we're basically just nuking middle eastern Islam back into the 7th century they want to live in, so the two forms of attack are pretty complimentary - an airburst knocks out a city's power, groundbursts at its railyard and 1 or 2 on the runways.. 4 devices per city. If you really want to be thorough you can double up in case a warhead malfunctions but that's probably not necessary - for B61 or W78 warheads we're looking at 300 to 350 kiloton yields, or 20+ times the power of the Hiroshima explosion. Even just attacking air defense sites on the outskirts might do the trick especially if we also groundbursted on a few runways, and the ground bursts in our scenario are as much to spread fallout around as to actually kill the runway so...

A Minuteman III carries up to 3 warheads. A B-52 or a B-1B (I wouldn't use B-2s for the same reason I wouldn't use the Tridents) can pretty easily carry a dozen weapons of various types - possibly more (publicly available numbers are almost certainly inaccurate. There's treaties in place about how we actually arm them and the B-1B is presently relegated to conventional roles due to treaties, but if we're already nuking the entire ME away, who gives a rats *** about the niceties of arms control treaties? We're looking at 425-450 warheads total; that's 100 cities at my 4 warhead apiece allocation with 25-50 to play with for unusual targets, and that's not even considering if the Israelis just say **** it and get in, or if India decides its a golden opportunity to deal with Pakistan permanently. (This doesn't mean we'd target exactly 100 cities with exactly 4 warheads each - some would go to things like oil fields and such; it's just an illustration of how few warheads you actually need to attack these targets)

The Middle East lends itself to this because the countryside is so generally uninhabitable in so much of it - it concentrates people and things, making them easier to attack. After we've hit all this, what's left? Some areas might be (relatively) lucky and have some infrastructure left but it's not going to be self sufficient. What you basically have left is Bedouins roaming around and stunned survivors seeking whatever aid or succor they can - with fallout raining all over them.

Obviously some of the population will survive, but as a culture and a modern area of the world the middle east will have ceased to exist - it will be pre-Crusades again only with radiation.

As for the non-middle-eastern muslims - Indonesia, maybe (depending exactly how it plays out) Indian muslims, those in the Phillipines possibly even Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan the message is simple. "You see that? Go on, just keep up the bullshit. We have plenty of warheads left."

Heck we can just use ones in the stockpile and not even touch the deployed warheads. ICBM airframes are in short supply, but **** them. ICBMs can go the way of the do-do as far as I'm concerned.

As for unloading our entire arsenal that'd rapidly fall victim to diminishing returns. After a while you're basically just shifting rubble around and wasting ammunition. A lot of the Cold War targeting scenarios actually fell victim to this with massive redundancy on targets or targeting things like road junctions in nowhereski Siberia just to have something to target. Some targets like ABM/SAM sites, runways, submarines pens and naval bases, military bases, and most of all ICBM silos and command and control facilities yeah you want to hit those 2, 3, 4, 5 times apiece attacking a country like the US or Russia, other stuff like targeting every individual turbine at a power plant just got ridiculous.

In the ME scenario you proposed we don't really need more than token attacks to destroy defenses, and in planning against Russia the population was an afterthought - we were attacking everything you can think of already so killing the population was just a given, not an objective. In your scenario we're trying to kill the population, but we still attack things so that we don't just kill a lot of people - we deprive the survivors of things they need to mitigate the effects or recover.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fallout/commen ... d_war_ama/

This similar thing was on Reddit. Some nifty linkies in there.
http://imgur.com/Qcw6aCR

http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

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Holy shitsnacks!

lol



Looking at the locations, the 2000-warhead scenario is a counterforce attack by the Russians - hence the high concentrations near ICBM fields and other military and command-and-control facilities. The 500-warhead scenario is a retaliatory strike since it ignores the ICBM fields entirely, but targets places like... well, where I live in south Texas which has triangles but no dots. In that scenario the ICBMs have already been launched and bombers are on their way to the target and they're just spreading pain around in retaliation.

Another example - look at the Georgia-Florida line right by the Atlantic. See the 2 dots at the state line with the trinagles just south of them? The counterforce strike is targeting King's Bay where the Ohio SSBNs live - the retaliatory strike ignores that and targets Jacksonville to the south.

Note that the image isn't clear as to how many warheads a dot or triangle represents, nor does it estimate yield.



If you want to get an actual idea based on this map, select an actual Chinese or Russian warhead size (800KT is a good choice if you're not sure) and find a likely actual target in your area. Figure out is it a hard target (surface burst) or soft (air) and set off the nuke.

For example, my house just barely escapes an 800KT explosion over the McAllen airport. A more likely surface burst leaves us well outside blast effects, and we live in sort of a "sweet spot" where we get relatively little direct radiation from the blast, but the fallout cloud would mostly pass up and over us and land in the less-populated areas north of the Rio Grande Valley and south of San Antonio.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

True, but I figured a dot/triangle was a single warhead or maybe just a couple. The triangles are basically "**** You Too!" strikes. Its interesting as a civvy to not really know where important things are, and to say "Damn Russia, why hate on North Dakota so much?" But, there's a lot of missile fields up there though yeah?


Yeh, I got bored with that and dropped a dozen Tsar Bombas (design) on the west coast. Although, where I live, I'd likely be just outside the primary and secondary effects of a strike on Nellis AFB with normal warheads.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Without their background data you'd have to count up the dots or triangles and see how close your number was to 2000 or 500. If you've got less, it isn't too hard to figure out where they're doubling up, particularly in the 2000 warhead scenario - they're going to double up on ICBM silos and bomber bases. ICBM silos are built to withstand immense overpressure and are well spread out so you're going to need a near direct hit to guarantee killing one and each one needs to be killed individually.

ND has plenty of missile silos as well as B-52s at Minot AFB so yeah.. it's going to get a lot of attention, and since there's going to be a lot of groundbursts there's going to be radiation all over the place afterwards.

As for the retaliatory strikes it really comes down to "**** you too" if they're ever actually fired, but there's a paradox there. If they hever have to be fired, they failed in their mission of deterrence and firing them serves no purposes beyond vengeance (which to be fair is perfectly understandable if you're already getting the **** nuked out of you). The problem is that you have to be absolutely willing to fire that pointless retaliation because if you aren't, you have no deterrent and are basically inviting attack.



I airbursted a 9 megaton device on Mecca mainly because the thread started with RD asking about that sort of thing. 1.1 million casualties and I don't even remember how many injuries. We don't have B52s any more; the last was disassembled in 2011, but if there were 2 or 3 we just never quite got around to disassembling and this scenario somehow came to play out...

By the way, if you want to think about a cold war scenario, imagine the dots and the triangles at the same time, and then multiply by anywhere from 3 to 10. Both sides had so many warheads that even a hugely successful counterforce strike would still leave thousands of retaliatory devices landing on you.

With these numbers, we could actualy survive the either of these scenarios as a nation, (although make no mistake it'd be a very unpleasant sort of "survival") especially when you consider that expected dud rates for Russian devices could be quite high - some estimates over 25%. The irony of this is that this makes a war more likely - there's less assurance of destruction.

In some ways we have the worst of both worlds, where we have the policies of the later Cold War that lead to MAD, but we don't have enough devices to create the certainty of total destruction on both sides that made deterrence so effective for 40 years. There's bright spots in that we do have some defensive systems now, but they have a long way to go before we're at a point where nuclear war is not a MAD scenario. Right now, all they do is cushion the blow a little bit. Effective battle management would become impossible in the opening stages since missile defenses would be the first things targeted and they don't have anything like the capacity to stop that many incoming missiles.

(Maybe I missed it but I didn't see Alaska or Hawaii on that map of targets)

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Speaking of nukes, this is a pretty awesome inadvertent time-lapse of that Trident launch near San Fran the other day:



Amazing that some random dude with a camera happens to catch this footage and it's almost immediately available for all the world to see online, whereas 30 years ago it would have been a Soviet agent's wet dream.

Oh yeah, one other thing with the Tsar Bombas...

In addition to the fact that the actual device was absurdly heavy and required a special plane to carry it, it turned out that devices that large are actually pretty wasteful - they blow a lot of energy up into space. Design improvements probably could have overcome the weight issue; we had the same thing going on with earlier fusion weapons but once you get the design right they're subject to drastic economies of scale. The B41 was the most powerful weapon the U.S ever deployed at 25 MT, and only weighted a bit over 10,000 pounds which also made it ridiculously efficient in terms of yield-weight ratio - far more so than Tsar Bomba, even using the design yield rather than the test yield.

As delivery systems got more accurate the need for immense warheads went away. It became more effective to attack multiple targets with smaller MIRV warheads than to use one really big one and only hit one target per missile. The same applies to aircraft; lighter weapons can attack more targets. Even if you're attacking a single target or a group of targets, multiple warheads are sort of like a cluster bomb - you're going to get all kinds of neat effects and more efficient energy distribution if you attack a target with, say, 4 250KT devices as opposed to a single 1MT warhead you'll generally get more damage from the former. Bigger warheads are still useful for attacking hard targets, though and if targets are really close together a single bigger warhead may still be lighter than several smaller ones.

This was a thing earlier than people think; Polaris A3 had 3x 200KT rather than the single 600 or 1200 KT warhead of the earlier versions. Poseidon had up to 14 W68 warheads, which "only" had a yield of 40-50KT which seems really small compared to other contemporary warheads - but Poseidon was still not accurate enough for counterforce, and we're still talking warheads around 3 times more powerful than Hiroshima so if you want to kill a bunch of power plants and oil refineries and factories in a retaliatory strike, yeah 40 or 50 KT will do just fine, especially when there's 14 per missile, 16 missiles per submarine (on the classes equipped with Poseidon) and 31 submarines - and of course that's ONLY Poseidon. Using the 40KT number and a 10% dud rate you're still looking at 250MT spread all over Russia.

Also as an aside, people that actually work in the field of nuclear weapons call them "devices" (warhead or bomb refers to whatever the nuke is actually carried in) and they "initiate", not explode or detonate - because nukes have conventional explosives inside them, which are the part that "explodes" and there have been incidents over the years where there was an explosion but (thankfully) not an initiation. Nuke guys are remarkably peevish about the distinction. They're very entertaining folk to talk to, especially if you like black humor. If you think I can talk about this stuff in an abstract, cavalier manner, you haven't seen anything.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I'm strangely fascinated by this ****.

Time for some Fallout 4.

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Holy shitsnacks!

You might enjoy this series of books. It's an alternate history written by a very knowledgeable fellow. His writing is not the greatest in terms of eloquence but as an examination of "what would be the consequences if such-and-such were to have happened?" it's actually pretty good.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-One-Stuar ... 1430304952

I've read The Big One and the following 3 books; I haven't read the prequels or the later books, but if you're interested in what the world be like if triple-sonic bombers ruled the skies, it's worth reading. The books are best read with a determination to put your own views aside; while Stuart very definitely has his own views that show through in the book, the books aren't advocating them. Many portions seem like standard technothriller mil-wanking at first glance, but if you think about it carefully he's really saying "yeah, if history had gone like this, we'd have these problems instead of the ones we really face now - and massive nuclear strikes would be one of our few options to deal with them."

What's particularly interesting is that he predicts the rise of an ISIS-like state, only decades earlier than ISIS, and not due to interventionism... and he wrote the books where it appears well before ISIS was anything more than part of AQ-I. It's disturbingly prescient.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I just found an interesting Fox News article about how the rules of engagement are holding us back against ISIS. It seems some in the military are now advocating a nuke the site from orbit approach. Of course under Obama I can't see it happening.




http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/11 ... tcmp=hpbt1

They're not literally talking about nukes; what they're discussing is more that we're so afraid of civilian casualties that it's severely limiting our ability to accomplish anything.

In a large part that comes from this happy (and inaccurate) notion we have that everyone who's not an ISIS fighter or obvious radical is a moderate, and that the slightest hint of civilian casualties will turn them into an extremist.

ISIS could not really exist without tacit support and sympathy from the population. Even if the average person living under ISIS is not a flag-waving ISIS patriot there is still significant sympathy for their overall aims even if there is a level of disagreement with their more extreme methods.

It's much like the illusion that the average German secretly hated the Nazis and was just innocently caught up in WWII or the average Soviet citizen was a moderate that disliked the Communists. Even people that weren't that interested in being dedicated Nazis were not all that unhappy with how things were being run until the war started going badly for them; while a Russian might not have been all that happy with the Soviet government they still remembered what happened to them in WWI and WWII so if the Communists were going to protect Mother Russia from a (real or imagined) repeat they were perfectly ok with that. It's very much the same with ISIS - they're fed, clothed, supplied and recruit from people that may not be all that thrilled with ISIS per se, but are nowhere near as "moderate" as we like to tell ourselves when we're busy pretending this is all about bombing "brown people".

You can especially see this at work by looking at what happens when WE or our allies get hit; people that are worried we might do something about it talk about how "we" are responsible, or more subtly because of what <insert Western leader here> did. If you try to argue the same thing though "well, that was just our government, the average person obviously didn't support it because ~reasons~" they'll quickly point out whatever segment of the population DID support it and assert we deserved it. Yet mysteriously when looking at places like ISIS, they're populated by peace-loving moderates completely at the mercy of their bloodthirsty overlords and who have to be protected from our retaliation at all costs.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

First of all, I am not disagreeing with you. I just wanted to point out there is clearly a spectrum from avoiding civilian deaths at all costs, to using the nuclear option. I think the problem is Obama too far along the "avoid civilian deaths" side of the spectrum. In my opinion we should take stronger measures against any terrorist-controlled cities.

Fair enough.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."