Cold War History
I'm a fan of reading about and exploring the history of the arms race between the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
YouTube is a great asset in this - there are many documentaries and films produced within the US Defense Department with material that is now declassified.
The Department of Defense came up with requirements for weapons systems, scientists at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore designed the physics, and then during the period that atmospheric testing was allowed, lugged the prototype warheads out to Nevada, Christmas Island, and Bikini, and proceeded to vaporize entire islands in the testing process.
Many of the hydrogen (fusion) weapons that were developed in the 1950s and early 1960s were absolutely enormous - as delivery technology was still not very accurate, they had to compensate by building weapons with huge yields that would still destroy a target even if it were several hundred or thousand meters off target. Some of the largest weapons were thousands of times the explosive power of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Over time, missile guidance became more accurate, and yields were reduced to trade off warhead weight for more fuel and longer range. It was discovered that many smaller weapons, detonated at the optimum height, would do much more damage to a "soft target" than one big one, so missiles that could carry multiple warheads were developed, and target planners distributed the destructive power. A target like a bomber base or city might have been hit by dozens of moderate-yield weapons in a complex pattern, designed to maximize blast damage.
A small mercy is that cities outside of seats of government like DC and Moscow were never considered to be "primary" targets, as the goal would have always been to eliminate the enemy's capacity to wage war, not kill civilians for the sake of killing. Unfortunately, many militarily significant targets are located near or within cities, so even in a "limited" conflict civilian casualties would easily reach into the millions.
"Hard targets" like missile silos, buried underground and protected by thick layers of steel-reinforced concrete and shock absorption systems were a problem, and very accurate earth-penetrating weapons were required to strike them effectively, as anything other than a direct hit would be useless.
Strikes on these targets would've created the most significant longer term danger to survivors of such a war - ground explosions throw millions of tons of radioactive dirt into the atmosphere, and prevailing winds would drop this fallout onto many population centers. For many weeks after this fallout landed it would be suicide to be without shelter for any length of time - radiation levels from fallout on the ground and on roofs of buildings, etc. would be high enough to cause certain death to an unprotected human with mere hours of direct exposure.
A few giant weapons were held in reserve for striking extremely hard targets such as the Cheyenne Mountain complex. It's believed that the Soviets had earth-penetrating warheads with yields of dozens of megatons, precisely timed to follow each other into the crater the previous left, built specifically for burrowing into and vaporizing the entire mountain.
Contrary to popular belief, "neutron" or "enhanced radiation" weapons were not designed to "kill people but leave buildings intact." They were designed to be used tactically, primarily in battlefield situations where tanks and other armored vehicles were the target - these vehicles were designed to be extremely resistant to heat and blast effects.
It's possible that Western civilization could recover from a "limited" nuclear strike, but it would be enormously difficult. The book "War Day" by Whitley Striber published in 1984 explores what the years after such a conflict might be like: people deal with the grief of losing so many friends and relatives, the United States breaks apart into closed nation states and warring factions with rail once again becoming the primary means of long-distance travel (Amtrak finally becomes financially self-sufficient!), pandemic illnesses and famines that that kill as many people as the war itself did, the total collapse of the electronic banking system and financial institutions (only hard currency or barter is accepted, the US dollar suffers such enormous deflation that a house can be purchased for $100 in gold coins), attempted genocide of Whites by Hispanics, attempted genocide of Hispanics by Whites, and the eventual beginnings of new cold wars and expansionary interests between the superpowers which survived the war relatively unscathed, such as Japan, the UK, China, and Brazil.
It's perhaps a little comforting to hope that given human nature to screw things up, any kind of war involving nuclear weapons would immediately cause such massive confusion and indecision that the conflict would rapidly draw to a close, simply because nobody would be able to communicate or figure out WTF was going on. I certainly hope that's the case...but if computers are put in command of everything and no humans are actually in the loop, all bets are off. And it's shocking just how close we came on a few occasions, where the fate of the world legitimately rested in the hands of some half-asleep Russian in the middle of nowhere, staring at a green terminal and saying to himself "Oh shit."
(This post was last modified: 05-24-2016 01:50 PM by XPQ22.)
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