Nuclear War: How Bad Would It Be?

[Loren Pechtel]

The only situation I am aware of where tactical nuclear weapons are a superior option over conventional weapons is against massed armour.

There are plenty of situations I can think of.

For example, suppose F22, F35, and a bunch of other aircraft operate from an airfield in Poland. It would be very difficult for Russia to get close enough to cause significant damage before the forces in the airfield can respond and destroy the attacker. But what if a rocket launcher fires a barrage of 0.5 kt nukes at the airfield. Some are intercepted, 2 or 3 get through, and all of those advanced aircraft are gone, alongside a bunch of people and any big radars they have.

In general, tactical nukes are pretty good at destroying any sort of fixed facility, airfields, radars, command and control facilities, and so on. Also, in an artillery duel, the side firing nukes has a significant advantage all other things equal - if other things aren't equal, it may compensate for less accuracy. They're also good against large naval targets.

Nukes aimed at ships are tactical, but nukes aimed at airfields would be considered strategic.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

God, i used to hate Minimum Alert Posture. Two hours in a starter's crouch. Knowing if i go pee, THAT will be when they call it away...

Don't they give you something like the piddle packs they give pilots? I'd have thought something of the sort would be standard for anything that needs to sometimes maintain a high state of readiness. Somebody about to piss themselves is not going to be functioning at anything like 100%.

 

[Keith&Co.]

God, i used to hate Minimum Alert Posture. Two hours in a starter's crouch. Knowing if i go pee, THAT will be when they call it away...

Don't they give you something like the piddle packs they give pilots? I'd have thought something of the sort would be standard for anything that needs to sometimes maintain a high state of readiness. Somebody about to piss themselves is not going to be functioning at anything like 100%.

No, we just walk down the passageway and use the head. The ship is in high state, meaning each watchstation, but they're usually in teams to swap out. Almost no one person is the only stationed man on whom our lives depend.

Don't tell the CO i said that....

If battlestations goes on too long, people rotate positions. Battlestations Supervisor to Computer Operator, COMP to MTRE, MTRE to Announcer, ANCR to SUPR.
Weps leans against thge targeting safe and 'meditates' on SIOP...

 

[bilby]

I remember a cartoon from the 70s.

There is a picture of a Russian speaking at the UN. A bubble from his mouth has the words 'Russian scientists have proven radiation is good for you!'.

A bit of cherry-picking and the bear is right.

I was knowingly exposed to some radiation earlier today, the net effect being beneficial. Dental x-rays.

They used to put a lead blanket over you. I think the current dental machines have a lot less energy.

They still use the lead blanket. And note I said cherry-picking.

The exception would be neutron bombs. Neutrons penetrate anything and will destroyy living things without power physical damage to the environment. The ultimate WMD

Neutron bomb - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

No physical damage but they leave behind quite a bit of neutron activation.

Neutron bombs make a pretty sizable explosion. They would level a city, if they were dropped on one; The idea of 'kills the people and leaves the buildings standing' seems to be about one part misunderstanding and one part propaganda, and wasn't corrected with any great enthusiasm by the military, because it serves as a useful smokescreen for their actual design purpose - the medium term elimination of tank crews.

The idea was that you could detonate such a bomb over the massed Soviet tank battalions as they pushed into West Germany, and any surviving crews would be dead before they reached the Rhine, despite being protected from heat and blast by their vehicles.

I am not sure if even a prototype neutron bonb was ever actually assembled; I suspect that it never even got off the drawing board.

Back in the Cold War, a lot of plausible-but-expensive weapons were designed (but not built) by NATO, in the hope that the USSR would waste huge amounts of cash and resources building and deploying at least some of them, in the mistaken belief that their enemies already had them in the field.

Neutron bombs seem to have been one such weapon. You could easily make one, but its value as a weapon seems to be little better than that of pre-existing weapons, so it's unlikely that anyone actually bothered (at least on the NATO side).

 

[Keith&Co.]

Neutron bombs seem to have been one such weapon. You could easily make one, but its value as a weapon seems to be little better than that of pre-existing weapons, so it's unlikely that anyone actually bothered (at least on the NATO side).

We used to carry nuclear torpedoes.
Their use was pretty much suicide. You could not shoot a target far enough away to survive the blast except, maybe, if there was a harbor with a small mouth, and as you drove past the mouth, you shot the torpedo into the harbor, then went to battle short to get behind the peninsula to protect you from the blast.
I forget the actual numbers, but someone realized that there are like six harbors in the world where this could work, most of them ours or an ally's.

 

[steve_bank]

A Russian representative said yesterday if war breaks out between NATO and Russia it will be nuclear.

The udea that a nuclear war would be fought without attacking cities is absurd.

Near SAeattle there is the nuclear sub base in Bremerton a prime target,there is also Joint Base Lewis-Macord. Fallout on Seattle woud be inevitable. The same in La and Sf. Texas as well.

I doubt the Russians and Chinese would have any reservation about attacking cities.

 

[steve_bank]

Neutron bombs seem to have been one such weapon. You could easily make one, but its value as a weapon seems to be little better than that of pre-existing weapons, so it's unlikely that anyone actually bothered (at least on the NATO side).

We used to carry nuclear torpedoes.
Their use was pretty much suicide. You could not shoot a target far enough away to survive the blast except, maybe, if there was a harbor with a small mouth, and as you drove past the mouth, you shot the torpedo into the harbor, then went to battle short to get behind the peninsula to protect you from the blast.
I forget the actual numbers, but someone realized that there are like six harbors in the world where this could work, most of them ours or an ally's.

Have you seen the movie Bedford Incident?

 

[Keith&Co.]

Nope. Sub movies hit different after sub school....

 

[skepticalbip]

Back in the Cold War, a lot of plausible-but-expensive weapons were designed (but not built) by NATO, in the hope that the USSR would waste huge amounts of cash and resources building and deploying at least some of them, in the mistaken belief that their enemies already had them in the field.

And some systems that were not that plausible but really damned expensive. Reagan's SDI proposal has been credited to have been a major contributor to the collapse of the USSR because it helped to bankrupt the Soviets trying to come up with something to counter it.

 

[steve_bank]

Nope. Sub movies hit different after sub school....

It was fiction about a Cold War standoff between a Soviet sub and a NATO destroyer. The NATO captain who was virulently

I think there will eventually a nuclear war. anti communist had his crew hyped up and on the edge. Someone accidentally launches an anti sub weapon. As soon as it hits the water the sub launches a nuclear torpedo.

Putin with his propaganda control of Russian media has a lot of prople thinking NATO is an imminent threat. Putin is a worse case unhinged dictator.

Sooner or later it is inevitable.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Neutron bombs make a pretty sizable explosion. They would level a city, if they were dropped on one; The idea of 'kills the people and leaves the buildings standing' seems to be about one part misunderstanding and one part propaganda, and wasn't corrected with any great enthusiasm by the military, because it serves as a useful smokescreen for their actual design purpose - the medium term elimination of tank crews.

They actually could be used to kill without appreciable damage. Not against tanks, but against stuff like airbases.

Yes, at it's heart a neutron bomb is a hydrogen bomb. However, the Earth has seen hydrogen bombs and yet we are still here--survival is obviously possible. It comes down to distance--far enough away, the bomb doesn't blow you up. That's the nature of the neutron bomb--it's optimized to put as much energy as possible into neutrons. It will cause radiation kills considerably farther than it will cause blast kills.

(Which was also the issue with the repeated butt of jokes: the Davy Crockett. Dial-a-yield atomic artillery. At max yield it would cause a radiation kill at a longer range than the weapon would fly. That wasn't actually a problem, it was expected that while the weapon was in flight the guy who fired it dove into a foxhole. The other effects of the bomb would be minor at that range and you didn't need to get much below the surface to have plenty of shielding against the neutrons.)

The idea was that you could detonate such a bomb over the massed Soviet tank battalions as they pushed into West Germany, and any surviving crews would be dead before they reached the Rhine, despite being protected from heat and blast by their vehicles.

It wouldn't work too well against tanks--tank armor will stop a lot of radiation and you need to deliver over 10 Sieverts to take them out of the battle. In the 5-10 Sievert range you make things worse--you get walking dead. Under those conditions they aren't going to get treatment, you just left a bunch of guys in decent shape but who know they're going to die. Expect kamikaze attacks as they try to take you with them. (And it's even worse on the battlefield--under about 30 Sieverts and you created not-as-healthy kamikazes.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

We used to carry nuclear torpedoes.
Their use was pretty much suicide. You could not shoot a target far enough away to survive the blast except, maybe, if there was a harbor with a small mouth, and as you drove past the mouth, you shot the torpedo into the harbor, then went to battle short to get behind the peninsula to protect you from the blast.
I forget the actual numbers, but someone realized that there are like six harbors in the world where this could work, most of them ours or an ally's.

That lethal? Playing with the old Harpoon game they could generally be used by taking a reasonably long range shot then hauling ass on a reciprocal bearing. Of course that made quite a racket and if your target had any friends around there would likely be more torpedoes in the water--an the AI had no sense of self-preservation with any weapon.

 

[skepticalbip]

(Which was also the issue with the repeated butt of jokes: the Davy Crockett. Dial-a-yield atomic artillery. At max yield it would cause a radiation kill at a longer range than the weapon would fly. That wasn't actually a problem, it was expected that while the weapon was in flight the guy who fired it dove into a foxhole. The other effects of the bomb would be minor at that range and you didn't need to get much below the surface to have plenty of shielding against the neutrons.)

Yeah, the military does provide some weapons that only someone in a kamikaze frame of mind would actually use. I refused to carry white phosphorus grenades along with my other ammo because the burst radius was about five yards greater than the average person could toss it. Plus if a round penetrated the casing it would cover whoever was carrying it with burning phosphorus.

 

[Keith&Co.]

We used to carry nuclear torpedoes.
Their use was pretty much suicide. You could not shoot a target far enough away to survive the blast except, maybe, if there was a harbor with a small mouth, and as you drove past the mouth, you shot the torpedo into the harbor, then went to battle short to get behind the peninsula to protect you from the blast.
I forget the actual numbers, but someone realized that there are like six harbors in the world where this could work, most of them ours or an ally's.

That lethal? Playing with the old Harpoon game they could generally be used by taking a reasonably long range shot then hauling ass on a reciprocal bearing. Of course that made quite a racket and if your target had any friends around there would likely be more torpedoes in the water--an the AI had no sense of self-preservation with any weapon.

Harpoon was a ship-killer. The nuclear torpedo was for taking out a task force.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

The only situation I am aware of where tactical nuclear weapons are a superior option over conventional weapons is against massed armour.

There are plenty of situations I can think of.

For example, suppose F22, F35, and a bunch of other aircraft operate from an airfield in Poland. It would be very difficult for Russia to get close enough to cause significant damage before the forces in the airfield can respond and destroy the attacker. But what if a rocket launcher fires a barrage of 0.5 kt nukes at the airfield. Some are intercepted, 2 or 3 get through, and all of those advanced aircraft are gone, alongside a bunch of people and any big radars they have.

In general, tactical nukes are pretty good at destroying any sort of fixed facility, airfields, radars, command and control facilities, and so on. Also, in an artillery duel, the side firing nukes has a significant advantage all other things equal - if other things aren't equal, it may compensate for less accuracy. They're also good against large naval targets.

Nukes aimed at ships are tactical, but nukes aimed at airfields would be considered strategic.

While there is no precise definition of what a tactical vs. a strategic nuclear weapon is, usually the considerations are power and range of whatever system fires it. If the airfield is attacked by artillery rockets with less than 1kt warhead and less than 500 km of range, I doubt it will be considered strategic. However, in any event it's a matter of terminology. My point is that there is a realistic scenario in which Russia uses very small, short-range nukes in large numbers to compensate for the US superior non-nuclear tech.

 

[steve_bank]

Strategic is global, tact cal is local. A battle is tactical, systematic destruction of infrastructure is strategic.

The bombing of Japan was startegic. The goal was the sytematic destruction of the ability to manufacture weapons and wage war,.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

Strategic is global, tact cal is local. A battle is tactical, systematic destruction of infrastructure is strategic.

The bombing of Japan was startegic. The goal was the sytematic destruction of the ability to manufacture weapons and wage war,.

Aircraft like B51, B1B, B2, B21, etc., are strategic bombers, and have very long ranges. Aircraft like F22 or F35, or AH64 are generally not considered strategic, and have much shorter ranges, so unless they are backed by tankers, they need to operate from a platform near the theater of operations, like an airfield or an aircraft carrier. Targeting one such platform I think would not be considered strategic even if it's a fixed platform. But as I said, pick your terminology, my point would be the same: small and short-range nukes, as opposed to big, long-range nukes.

 

[steve_bank]

Some military trivia.

During WWII the B17 and B29 were considered strategic. One of the problems that Germany had was they did not have a strategic bomber comparable to the Americans and the Brits. Time over target and bomb loads limited the amount of damage they could do to British military infrastructure. Fortunately.

Post war strategic aircraft generally meant the long range large scale delivery of nuclear weapons. The Strategic Air Command and the B52. In the 60s SAC had nuclear armed B52 groups consonantly circling just outside of Russian airspace. There was an electronic system to order an attack, the basis of the book and movie Failsafe. The B52 with electronic countermeasures was designed to penetrate Russian air defenses. The Russians never developed an equivalent in performance.

In VN B52s dropped conventional bombs on North Vietnam. They were used in the Gulf Wars.

Not well known today, in WWI the German Zeppelins were used as strategic bombers over England. The Brits struggled to figure out a way to shoot them down.

Strategic bomber - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

A strategic bomber is a medium- to long-range penetration bomber aircraft designed to drop large amounts of air-to-ground weaponry onto a distant target for the purposes of debilitating the enemy's capacity to wage war. Unlike tactical bombers, penetrators, fighter-bombers, and attack aircraft, which are used in air interdiction operations to attack enemy combatants and military equipment, strategic bombers are designed to fly into enemy territory to destroy strategic targets (e.g., infrastructure, logistics, military installations, factories, cities and civilians). In addition to strategic bombing, strategic bombers can be used for tactical missions. There are currently only three countries that operate strategic bombers: the United States, Russia[1] and China.

The modern strategic bomber role appeared after strategic bombing was widely employed, and atomic bombs were first used in combat during World War II. Nuclear strike missions (i.e., delivering nuclear-armed missiles or bombs) can potentially be carried out by most modern fighter-bombers and strike fighters, even at intercontinental range, with the use of aerial refueling, so any nation possessing this combination of equipment and techniques theoretically has such capability. Primary delivery aircraft for a modern strategic bombing mission need not always necessarily be a heavy bomber type, and any modern aircraft capable of nuclear strikes at long range is equally able to carry out tactical missions with conventional weapons. An example is France's Mirage IV, a small strategic bomber replaced in service by the ASMP-equipped Mirage 2000N fighter-bomber and Rafale multirole fighter

Strategic Air Command - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The Strategic Air Forces of the United States during World War II included General Carl Spaatz's European command, United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe (USSTAF), consisting of the 8AF and 15AF, and the United States Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific (USASTAF) and its Twentieth Air Force (20AF).

[4] The U.S. Army Air Forces' first mission in the Strategic Bombing Campaign in the European Theater during World War II included the VIII Bomber Command, which conducted the first European "heavy bomber" attack by the USAAF on 17 August 1942; the Ninth Air Force, which conducted the first Operation Crossbow "No-Ball" missions on 5 December 1943;[5] the Twelfth Air Force; and the Fifteenth Air Force, which executed bombing operations on 2 November 1943 during Operation Pointblank.

The Operation Overlord air plan for the strategic bombing of both Germany and German military forces in continental Europe prior to the 1944 invasion of France used several Air Forces, primarily those of the USAAF and those of the Royal Air Force (RAF), with the command of air operations transferring to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force on 14 April 1944.

Planning to reorganize for a separate and independent postwar U.S. Air Force had begun by the fall of 1945, with the Simpson Board tasked to plan, "...the reorganization of the Army and the Air Force...".[6] In January 1946, Generals Eisenhower and Spaatz agreed on an Air Force organization composed of the Strategic Air Command, the Air Defense Command, the Tactical Air Command, the Air Transport Command and the supporting Air Technical Service Command, Air Training Command, the Air University, and the Air Force Center.[6]

 

[Angra Mainyu]

Strategic is global, tact cal is local. A battle is tactical, systematic destruction of infrastructure is strategic.

The bombing of Japan was startegic. The goal was the sytematic destruction of the ability to manufacture weapons and wage war,.

Aircraft like B51, B1B, B2, B21, etc., are strategic bombers, and have very long ranges. Aircraft like F22 or F35, or AH64 are generally not considered strategic, and have much shorter ranges, so unless they are backed by tankers, they need to operate from a platform near the theater of operations, like an airfield or an aircraft carrier. Targeting one such platform I think would not be considered strategic even if it's a fixed platform. But as I said, pick your terminology, my point would be the same: small and short-range nukes, as opposed to big, long-range nukes.

(I meant to say B52, that was a typo). Anyway, that's regarding strategic bombers, but regard to strategic nukes vs. tactical nukes, as I mentioned I think the terminology I used was standard, but if not my point would be the same regardless of terminology.

 

[steve_bank]

What really matters is where you are when a nuke tactical or strategic goes off. If the Bremerton nuclear sub base is hit Seattle would probably be in the blast area. We'd certainly have radiation and heat effects.

My understanding in the 80s was tactical nukes meant field use for battle, Soviets vs NATO.

In the 50s-60s tactical nukes were tested, fired from a cannon. How long before it was safe for troops to ener the area was studied.