Is there any point to a retaliatory strike in the event of nuclear war?

The worst places to be would be near missile silos or runways capable of being used by strategic bombers, as those would be targeted by surface bursts. Air bursts would be used for pretty much all other targets. No matter where you would be, it would be a good idea to build a fallout shelter in the crisis-period before the nukes start flying. If you're near something that would be an actual target, and for some reason can't evacuate, a blast shelter should be built instead. Fallout shelters protect from overpressure better than houses, but you'd still be killed in one near an explosion.

Provided you have stored up a good supply of water before hand, that shouldn't be an issue. You should still have some left over after the fallout decays enough to allow limited outdoor excursions to either find or dig for water, which can be purified from fallout via settling and a homemade earth filter, while boiling and either iodine or a low-level hypochloride like Clorox can be used to kill microorganisms. Getting food would be the bigger problem, which is why Nuclear Survival Skill recommends a shelter have at least a full year's supply of grain, beans, powdered milk and the like. Cooking oil, salt, and multivitamins should be in an even longer supply. Vitamin C should be in as long a supply as can be kept.

In any kind of large scale nuclear attack on the U.S., the Soviets would not bother with bombers, cruise missiles or even sea launched ballistic missiles. The overwhelming majority of their warheads and virtually all 95% of their megatonnage is tied up in ICBMs. Sea launched ballistic missiles have reliability and targeting issues (even late model Soviet models) and the tiny number of Soviet bombers, not worth the trouble.

A nuclear war for the Soviets would be an all ICBM affair against the U.S. with their SLBMs and any air dropped weapons saved for the aftermath or for followup attacks in the long term. Or for attacks on "minor" combatants.

SLBMs could be detonated high above the US to spread EMP and attempt to disrupt US communications. Bombers, as you said, would likely be used in follow up attacks on targets whose ICBMs either missed or didn't go off for some reason.

Surface bursts would also be used against underground targets, whether civilian or military, because those are (obviously) harder to destroy.

Boulderdash.

In 1985, the Soviet Union had a total of almost 10,497 deployed strategic warheads on platforms that could reach the United States. Of these, 7,154 were ICBM warheads. 2,377 and 966 were warheads on submarine-launched missiles and strategic bombers, respectively.

Most Soviet SLBMs of this time were just as reliable as their American counterparts. They would likely be assigned soft targets, which don't require a high-degree of accuracy. There is no reason to suspect they would not be used in a Soviet nuclear attack.

Any potential American air defenses will have already been destroyed and/or disorganized by ballistic missile warheads hours before the first Soviet bombers reach American air space. In such a case, it would make sense to give them targets that might not be worth an ICBM or SLBM warhead.

This is contrary to Soviet nuclear doctrine (at least, in the 70's and 80's), which rejected the idea of preserving large numbers of warheads for follow-up attacks as they viewed nuclear war as both a "all or nothing" affair and as unsurvivable at a national level (hence, rendering the "long term" rather pointless).

Besides, the real threat that a nuclear sub poses is that someone out there, there are nukes that you can't destroy in a first strike and can be used in case the nation-state that owns it is somehow destroyed before it can retaliate with its ICBMs and bomber assets. The bomber's threat was supplanted on the strategic level by ICBMs, but if it can get stationed within range (like, say, Cuba to the US or Japan to the Soviet Union) then it can be used on a tactical level in case of a ground war/"limited" nuclear war or it can be another wave of threats.

Which all goes back to commitment to retaliate. "Yeah, I have other ways to attack you. Yeah, they may not be as effective as my primary way. But it's still another way I can murder you and atomize everything you have ever loved if dare to attack me and my friends. And I can still do that even if you manage to kill me first."

I always considered Soviet information about their "nuclear doctrine" to be disinformation. Used for influencing western opinion and not a good roadmap to how they would actually conduct a war.

The "all or nothing" (basically the "everyone dies") nuclear doctrines sounds a lot like disinformation promoting the idea that they believed that a nuclear war was unwinnable and that they thusly would not launch one.

This doctrine is expressly contradicted by the Soviets spending billions to develop and build hardware such as the Typhoon nuclear submarines which were reportedly built and purposed with surviving the initial nuclear strikes and being used against targets later.

When in doubt, hardware trumps announced doctrine.

Don't ask me where I heard it because I honestly can't remember. But I thought I read somewhere the the real strategic system that made an all out nuclear war very unlikely were the Poseidon missiles deployed on U.S. submarines in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Polaris was far less a threat.

True, they only had 40 kiloton warheads. But there were 128 on every submarine. I remember hearing (might've been NATO's Navies on History Channel) that the Soviets never figured out, in even their most optimistic scenarios how they could prevent a minimum of 2-4 Poseidon submarines from launching their missiles cleanly.

Which meant that even allowing for failures and reliability problems, at least 200 nuclear warheads would be thundering in on Soviet cities. Even allowing for Soviet civil defense and small warhead size the Soviets would be looking at as many as 40 million dead. Worse than World War Two in a matter of minutes.

I heard that the idea of "worse than World War Two" had a powerful impact on Soviet thinking.

Because it isn't like the Cold War is over and we now have access to otherwise classified Soviet documentation of the time, is it?

The Typhoon-class submarine, like pretty much all missile submarines ever, was built to ensure that the Soviets could not lose their strategic nuclear weapons to a NATO first-strike. Its ability to hide for long periods of time in no way contradicts an all or nothing doctrine.

It was last updated in 1987, so its information could be out of date, but Edward Teller's foreword to Chester Kearny's Nuclear War Survival Skills is much more optimistic about Soviet losses. He states, "The Russians, having learned a bitter lesson in the second world war, have bent every effort to defend their people under all circumstances. They are spending several billion dollars per year on this activity. They have effective plans to evacuate their cities before they let loose a nuclear strike. They have strong shelters for the people who must remain in the cities. They are building up protected food reserves to tide them over a critical period.

All this may mean that in a nuclear exchange, which we must try to avoid or to deter, the Russian deaths would probably not exceed ten million. Tragic as such a figure is, the Russian nation would survive. If they succeed in eliminating the United States they can commandeer food, machinery and manpower from the rest of the world. They could recover rapidly. They would have attained their goal: world domination."

Their actual, post-Cold-War revelation stuff is considerably scarier than what they broadcast or we derived. The three that jump out at me are Perimeter (doomsday machine), Biopreparat (flagrant violation of Biological Weapons Convention) and their lack of distinction between different classes of arms (conventional versus NBC is a NATO distinction, not a Russian one).

The Soviets were Class-A bastards and they were methodical as all hell.

"Weapons of mass destruction" is derived from a Russian term, though:
Wiki

Actually, conventional vs chemical was never a Soviet distinction. They did come around to making the distinction between nuclear and conventional warfare in the 1970s, but they never believed in any such thing as a limited nuclear war. The Soviet view on bio-weapons were something of a different story from either nukes or gas...

How come the US never bothered to implement a real civil defense program like the Soviets did? Did Congress just think it wasn't worth the money or effort?

Winds are mostly prevalent from the north west, so most of the fall out is going to be blowing south east of all those places you mentioned.. Second of all, Okanogan is isolated from Seattle and the heavy population area of the I-5 corridor via the Cascades, which will thin the crowds down so to speak. And Okanogan legion airport has 1 paved runway, of 2533 feet.. not even long enough for fighter craft to operate off of I'm afraid. And I'm not particularly sure Omak would be anything higher then a tertiary target (If that) given that it also has a single paved runway of 4667 feet.. which at best could sustain fighter operations. considering what was based out of fairchild most of time it wouldn't do as a dispersal field.

They tried, but it was either ad hoc, half assed or designed to fail. For example, mandating that all State Defense Forces should be medical, internal security or light infantry units in order help prevent invasion/preserve some semblance of societal order... then cutting off all funding and official ties to the National Guard Bureau, forbidding the purchase of military surplus by these organizations, etc.

There are a lot of fallout shelters in places like older Post Offices that have been converted to basements, cafes, and other functioning areas. There was a major push for individual families to be prepared. But for the most part when the US still retained the institutional memory of WWII Civil Defense the affects of nuclear weapons were not well understood, and by the time the Cold War was over it was either facing Beltway politics or general exhaustion by being told 'nuclear annihilation is nigh!' and not having it happen for over thirty years.

It is hard to get much national enthusiasm for something like civil defense when your homeland hasn't been touched by war since 1865.

Another was simply money.

And yet another was philosophical. Some thought that civil defense meant that if you were planning for the "aftermath" of a nuclear war that meant you had intentions of fighting a nuclear war and not just deterring one.

Finally, in terms of a nuclear war, civil defense is like missile defense systems. It works best if you strike first and "trim down" the other sides potential retaliatory strike.

And everyone knew instinctively that regardless of policy, the United States was NEVER going to be the first to launch a nuclear attack in the post WWII world.

My guess is differing experiences during WWII. The US was pretty much unscathed on the homefront, while the Soviets and China were devastated by the Germans and the Japanese. My guess is memories of that is what provided the political will to pay for a civil defense program in those countries.

Edit: And as Templar said, while both sides believed in MAD, the US was much more into it than the Soviets, and so didn't really want to pay for a "What if MAD fails" system.

Well, you guys are southeast of Vancouver...

Ah, yes then it probably won't get hit. The Soviets have enough warheads to go after every field that can launch bombers, but they won't waste their time going after every field that can support fighters.

This thread is fascinating in a macabre way. I've been inspired to finally look up some of the declassified Cold War nuclear game theory, research the Soviet Dead Hand failsafe, look up Able Archer and the Cuban Missile crisis. It is nightmare stuff and enough to make me consider moving the family to ... (?) New Zealand (?) Peru. Between the Cuban Missile Crisis, Able Archer and however many other close calls we had how close do people on the forum think we got to armageddon during the 30-ish years of the Cold War?

Say there is an alternate reality/universe for every possibility. In what percentage of the multiverse did we destroy ourselves during the cold war. I'm guestimating 50+%.

Apparently, Robert McNamara thought the chances of all out war during the Cuban misssile crisis alone was 30%.

I agree. 50% is probably about right. The odds might actually be higher in favor of a nuclear war having occurred.

One might argue that in terms of the "many universe" theory, we truly do live in the best of times.

Cuban Missile Crisis risk of an exchange is a lot higher in retrospect. The US was ignorant of Soviet tactical nuke deployments both on Cuba and in their naval fleet - most critically with the submarine we were harassing. Conversely, even most of the Politburo were ignorant of their large disadvantage in deliverable nukes.

It wouldn't work and cost billions build huge bunkers and stock piles of everything a city needs.They just end up being targeted them selves.

Also US attempts to abort the possibility of a nuclear exchange if the Soviets hit European targets in response to a US attack on Cuba where unsuccessful because there was too much inertia in the plans.

To be honest if you want to surrender rather than launch a retaliation in the face of nuclear aggression the only way is to not have a nuclear deterrent to any great degree.

At no point did Soviet civil defense plans involve putting everyone in a city in giant bunkers. Bunkers were built, but only for people who it was felt had jobs that were too important to evacuate. Everyone else would have been evacuated. And the US already had stockpiles capable of feeding large numbers of survivors. Its just that unlike the Soviets, we decided to keep it all near the farms rather than distributing storage throughout the country. And no sane country would waste a nuke deliberately targeting a shelter when there are far more valuable targets to hit.

The problem with Civil Defense:
1. It saves some people, but it's still a "You lost" number of dead
2. Industries are still blown to hell.
3. Those people are all going to die anyway due to food and water issues.