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

Both sides were going to light up any strategically important targets in neutral countries under threat of falling into enemy hands. Such as oil refineries airports radar stations major ports and rail links etc. Both sides. So being neutral only meant being nuked twice in that regard.

In the end it's the damage to infrastructure that will be the biggest killer. Loss of mechanized argiculture when fuels are prioritized to the military and such.

1. It would still save significant numbers of people, which I think would be worth it.
2. I don't know how realistic their plans were, but the Soviets dispersed and hardened their industry for just such a purpose i.e. something as simple as burying industrial equipment in sand bags would allow it to survive up to 300 psi.
3. Any civil defense plan worth its salt would include giving instructions to people on how to farm and garden (as well as how to minimize the effects of fallout on crop growth), distribute non-hybrid seeds for farming, and give instructions on how to purify water from microorganisms via both chemical purifiers and boiling as well as how to get rid of fallout in water via settling and using simple earth filter.

Heh, I'm not even from there, I'm else where on the west coast.. Just know the area there, and its in the middle of nowhere, with no interesting targets, and a decent agriculture base. Lots of places like that in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, even in northern and eastern California. Fallout is going to be the biggest problem, but how severe will it really be I just don't know.

An effective civil defense system for a nation like the United States could not just be a "government mandated, top down system". You have to have millions upon millions of people being willing to buy into it and be willing to play a role.

You're talking about people who are born and raised in a city learning the skills to move into the countryside, learn to grow food and filter water. And that simply wasn't likely.

Remember, in World War Two the U.S. govt. had trouble getting coastal cities to even turn off their liights at night so as not to silouette merchants ships to German U-Boats operating off the coast.

Finally, The Soviet Union was three times the size of the U.S. with only 10% more population so dispersal was far more viable.

Since the soviets had problems feeding themselves and running industry during peace time you can place their civil defence plans as unworkable at best.
Its not like ww2 where help would come from people who were not bombed everyone is in the same state.
The plan was MAD if you start selling the idea you could fight and win a nuclear exchange or it would not be too bad that upsets a lot of people.

That was because all of the food and industry was going towards the military and civil defense genius.

So the queues for bread would be shorter after the apocalypse.

The glories of military first spending at work.

They'll all die. The problem is before they die they are going to swarm and totally eat out rural areas that might otherwise have a chance at gearing their lifestyles down and surviving.

The scientist in me hates it but when you review the history of the Cold wars its enough to make you believe in the Anthropic principle. The natural laws of the universe are set up the way they are because otherwise there wouldn't be sentient creatures to ask why. An asteroid didn't hit the earth sometime after the dinosaurs because otherwise we wouldn't be here to ask why. The Cold War didn't erupt into a full scale exchange because if it did we wouldn't be here to discuss it on spacebattles.com! Its enough to make a person want to go back to church.

I've 3 questions I want to put to the forum

1. Are we really just two simultaneous crazy military people away from an SSBN from any of 5 countries (UK, France, China, Russia, USA +/- Israel) launching a full strike at any point in time. Is there no other authorisation required? At points in relatively recent history there have been whole military units that went berserk. I hope the psychological profiling on those brave men and women is grade A1!

2. An ethical question. Say for instance Russia and the USA become good friends and work together to control Islamic terrorism. Then a huge earthquake or whatever hits Moscow, a gas explosion goes off (so big light flash, earthquake and pressure) and the Dead Hand system accidentally triggers a full launch. Gorbachev Junior immediately phones in to profusely apologise as the 14,000 warheads leave their silos. What should the USA do? Or alternately, Tommy Lee Jones decides to take over the USS Ohio instead of the USS Missouri and Steven Seagal isn't around to stop him. He launches all 24 Trident IIs. Harrison Ford dials in hurriedly from Airforce One to apologise. What should Russia do?

3. If history teaches us anything it is that nations and civilisations eventually rise and fall. Sometimes peacefully, sometimes not so peacefully. Is it actually possible for any of the major nuclear armed powers to fail and decline peacefully? Or will the nations just reach for the doomsday button in their twilight days?

I'm pretty sure that if the captain and his first officer on a nuke sub start talking about launching missiles in earnest when nobody else in the crew has any reason to believe that there's any reason to do so, there will be questions asked, so I think you need more going wrong than just 2 crazy people.

Can't happen that way IIRC. Dead Hand is activated at the equivalent of DEFCON 1, so only when a crisis has reached a point where they would expect an attack at any point in time. I doubt it would be running in that situation.

Hm...limited retaliation? Fire exactly 24 ICBMs at equivalently valuable targets?

But really, both of these accident scenarios hinge on how credible / unusual the excuses are. If they accept an excuse, they have committed themselves to accept all excuses that are just as good as the one they accepted, because that's how their later reactions will be predicted.

And just because I write excuse doesn't mean that it's untrue. The same problem exists whether it really was an accident or not.

Well, the Soviet Union did decline and fracture without firing nukes.

According to the book "Big Red" which details life aboard an Ohio class submarne (U.S.S. Nebraska), even if the captain and first officer agreed on launching a nuclear strike, all it would take is one or two members of the crew flipping the right switches to completely bollux a launch.

Dead Hand has IIRC NEVER been completely automated even during the later years of the Colc War.

The U.S. and the Soviet Union have treaties and protocols dealing with an accidental or "lone wolf" nuclear launch.

The likelihood of a nuclear attack being launched against someone is probably greatest from a nation like Pakistan and that would certainly be against India primarily. So though millions might die on the subcontinent, it would not be the end of the world.

Thats about the same as saying "Welp you fell out of the boat but you don't know how to swim so your fucked" and as the same solution. You learn said skills before your life may depend on them. As for fallout contamination its not that hard to deal with, especially as fallout wouldn't necessarily go everywhere its predicted given whats shown is merely the range of possibilities and actual footprints would depend on the conditions at that specific location and time to determine. There's many spots that would never see any even in a full on exchange, or at least not any amount to be of significance to the post strike recovery period.

Pretty much this, the reason the Soviets had a much more effective CD program was they could go "Do this OR ELSE", while we had to go "Please do this thank you" and if the people didn't want to..well we were kind of screwed. Which is part of what killed the program in the first place as people would rather imagine dying 'in a second' when the bombs hit and any thus steps and cost for what came afterwards was unnecessary then the reality they'd probably end up surviving and thus those same preparations they scorned as useless would likely make the difference between survival and a miserable drawn out death. People tend to ignore things that can disrupt their lives and pretend they'll never happen until they do then act both shocked and betrayed when reality slaps them hard in the face.

An example of this sort of thinking:
"I don't need flood insurance as it'll never flood here." *Flood happens* "We couldn't have known it'd happen, why didn't (Insert Scapegoat Group here) do something to prevent this tragedy!?"

The real tragedy to me in a disaster isn't that it happened, its that many of those who often are hurt or killed could have been saved had they actually tried to do something about it rather then stick their head in the ground until it was too late.

They had some stockpiles yet but for it had gigantic issues for anyone who might have needed it post strike. First off they had been run down since the 60's so there wasn't nearly enough for the amount of survivors even in the most pessimistic cases, its positioning to deal with disruptions to the transportation network was lacking as was the overall training to use it, and most critically in terms of food we never had an official strategic grain reserve. Instead we just had whatever was in the silo's at the time that hadn't been sold yet and only had a surplus due to the government subsidizing grain prices to heavily. Depending on when the balloon might have gone up there were years where there wouldn't have been much in them, and even if they were full to bursting if you can't get it to where its needed its not doing you any good. Before mechanized transport this is why you could have localized famines inland where one county could be starving while the one next door was running a surplus as with animal power there was a very hard limit on how far you can transport a load of grain before they start consuming more then is actually transported. Post strike you have to assume your transport network is going to be disrupted at least initially and officially the government said they could get food transport up and running in two weeks or less but personally I find that hard to believe given all the problems they'd have to cope with. Smashed road and rail networks, disrupted fuel supplies, support personnel dead missing or plain not showing up for any number of reasons, disrupted bureaucracy, etc.

With the proper preparations in place via an actual CD program many of those who would have otherwise died can survive. Even personal preparations could vastly increase their odds. It'd still be bloody and horrific but survival would never be impossible much as some pessimists and nuclear disarmament activists falsely thought otherwise.

With the same transportation network that was likely smashed to hell and back if your assuming a worst case full on exchange? They'd have to move on foot for the most part through rough country and with whatever they can scavenge or carry out, the average person is going to find that a hard but doable task however it will vastly limit how far they can move until they become a non-issue via any number of grisly ends. Those that were evacuated pre-strike might lead to issues..mainly in that the plan was "here house these people for a bit" with no real allowances made on the federal or state level to deal with the influx of potential refugee's or sustain them if things actually went pear shaped and said host communities were left to fend for themselves even for a short time.

Still cheaper and saner to not fight than try to plan to deal with the consequences.Hence everyone getting nervous when USSR had a bad harvest and some red neck senator starts going on about let the reds starve.

Exactly. Just because you can survive something doesn't mean you generally want it to happen in the first place. Its better to look at such measures as insurance no difference then the policies covering your health, home, car etc. You pay into them every so often and hope you never need them but if things go south and you suddenly do you'll be glad you got them.

Then you get into the politics of the thing when the policy is MAD trying to mitigate the effects is counter to MAD.so no civil defence means you believe in MAD.

That's not true. There isn't a government policy named MAD, its merely the term that evolved to describe the policies various governments developed to ensure victory, or at least a stalemate in a nuclear war.

A critical first strike could demolish the launch capabilities of the victim, thus, increasing the risk of a first strike and thus war. "MAD"would help reduce the chances of a first strike winning the war outright and giving the attacker an undeniable advantage in the battlefield. If Civil defences existed which could mitigate the damage and help ensure the nation is able to fight back, then yes, it would had been endorsed.

There's the "1983: Doomsday" alternate history project.

I rather enjoyed "Alas, Babylon", a roughly 1960 book detailing the life of a Florida town after a nuclear war. Granted, I'm pretty sure nuclear stockpiles were smaller and more vulnerable back then, but it definitely has a theme of reconstruction and picking up the pieces.

I've read it. It is still basically an "everyone dies" scenario. It also takes a huge liberty at suggesting that the Soviets would "launch everthing!!" just because they detected five inbound Minuteman ICBMs

No, no it's not. On the Beach is a "Everybody Dies". Chrysalids is a "Everybody dies". In 1983: Doomsday people start rebuilding within a decade of the war. Also, some can correct me if I am wrong, but the Soviets would do exactly that if they detected that there was five nukes heading for them.

Petrov was not a nuclear strategist yet even he realized that there was little likelihood that the U.S. would be launching an attack with only 5 missiles. Five hundred perhaps but not five.

There is no reason to believe that the Soviets would "launch everything" just because they detected five incoming missiles. The ailing, dying Andropov might've ordered it but many Soviet generals were made of sterner stuff and would probably resisted the urge to fire until actual nuclear weapons exploded on Soviet soil.

Are you fucking kidding me?! Do you not know what the words "Mutually Assured Destruction" means? As soon as the Soviets detected nukes heading for them, they'd be launching a retailiatory strike. No one will be waiting for those nukes to hit and go off.

Edit: You do realize that Minuteman ICBMs carry three independent warheads each, right? That's 15 nukes heading for 15 targets. And you think that the Soviets would do... nothing?

You are confusing MAD with Launch Under Attack, which is not a necessary component of it. MAD is entirely compatible with riding out a nuclear attack.

They did, in fact, do nothing.

Except they did just that with any number of the false alarms that occurred during the cold war because to be blunt even 15 warheads is pretty piddly when your a country that covers 1/6th of the worlds landmass and said strike is going to do jack all to your ability to retaliate with overwhelming force. Better to take the risk, especially when there hasn't been any additional visible action on your opponents part to prepare for a first strike past the status quo of not starting a war that would make WW2 look like a warmup in terms of body count in exchange for potentially losing a handful of targets who's loss won't cripple you in any significant way before retaliating. Especially when its an open secret that your early detection system is spotty and has been known to give false alarms from thinking something as simple as sunlight under specific circumstances was an ICBM launch.