[Cog]

Even degrading a Russian counter-attack by 90% doesn't gain us a great deal. A few hundred warheads landing on critical infrastructure like oil refineries or nuclear power plants would result in the death of a lot of people. Not because of the blast or even the radiation but in the chaos that would follow. We really can't do without those energy slaves working for us 24/7.

If I were an enemy war-planner I would target every refinery and major power plant and simply let nature take its course in the aftermath.

[GregT]

Even degrading a Russian counter-attack by 90% doesn't gain us a great deal.

What's with the 'us' Cog. If you think for one second that those in charge care about you one iota, you are sadly mistaken. You are nothing more than a tax slave, or cannon fodder. Take your pick.

[onlooker]

Exactly they had command and control bunkers and installations such as the impressive NORAD, sitting deep inside a mountain fortified with extra heavy doors and barriers all throughout the cold war. I do not recall us little people having anything similar done for us.

[Tanada]

Exactly they had command and control bunkers and installations such as the impressive NORAD, sitting deep inside a mountain fortified with extra heavy doors and barriers all throughout the cold war. I do not recall us little people having anything similar done for us.

To be fair in the era from 1945-1962 the US Civil Defense system was not absent. Geiger counters, food and water and medical supplies were assembled, stored and maintained in shelters outside of the actual blast zones where survivors could seek shelter and remain until the fallout radiation fell to safe levels. It actually only takes about three weeks unless the bombs are designed to be especially dirty, which would only be useful for killing civilians.

Then after the Cuban Missile Crisis the USA/USSR adopted a new approach, Mutual Assured Destruction. If civilization was going to be destroyed there was no point in sheltering survivors to come out into the 'new stone age' so the budget for Civil Defense was eliminated, the stockpiled food water and medication was either sold off as surplus or just left to age in place. I know this personally because when the movie The Day After came out I did a term paper on preparation for the scenario in the movie. My old High School had never taken down the Fallout Shelter signs,


So for my term paper I interviewed the head of the school Administration who was responsible for that location under the old law. Their remaining preparations were a stack of old army cots and canned WW II surplus food that was about 20 years past expiration in 1984. Nobody ever drilled or even reviewed the safety manuals of what to do in the event of an attack, the medication had all been thrown out when it expired in the late 60's to keep anyone from playing around with it and the 'food' was stuff like Army rations in olive drab painted cans they just forgot about and never got around to disposing of. I think they probably pitched everything after the interview because it was kind of uncomfortable.

[onlooker]

Interesting Tanada, what about that whole routine of duck and cover that I believe they even drilled the students with, too seek cover under the school tables. I wonder how widely that was practiced and if people at that time, really believed it would keep them safe. This is all nostalgia because of MADD, but nevertheless the threat of a nuclear detonation even from rogue terrorists remains. I also heard accounts of survivors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the accounts are horrific as they literally paint a hellish picture. I know I personally would rather die instantly than be a so-called survivor. Anyway, not sure all these preparations would have sufficed for the majority of victims but at least they had that.

[seahorse3]

These aren't only the ramblings of a former ambassador. Back in 2006, a piece put out by the highly influential CFR said a nuclear first strike by the US was winnable

http://professorsmartass.blogspot.com/2006/04/us-thinks-first-strike-on-russia-china.html?m=1

[Tanada]

Interesting Tanada, what about that whole routine of duck and cover that I believe they even drilled the students with, too seek cover under the school tables. I wonder how widely that was practiced and if people at that time, really believed it would keep them safe. This is all nostalgia because of MAD, but nevertheless the threat of a nuclear detonation even from rogue terrorists remains. I also heard accounts of survivors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the accounts are horrific as they literally paint a hellish picture. I know I personally would rather die instantly than be a so-called survivor. Anyway, not sure all these preparations would have sufficed for the majority of victims but at least they had that.

If you understand what duck and cover is actually for then it is the best thing you can do at that moment in time. Here is how Duck & Cover works. You see an intense light reflecting on objects in front of you. If you have the misfortune of facing the flash you are blind and in intense pain and are probably dead because you can't react fast enough. However if the flash is to the side or behind you, you only see the intense light reflected and it does not blind you. You then Duck, as in you get down on the ground with your feet pointed towards the flash if possible, and you cover the back of your neck with your hands. Praying is optional. Then anywhere from 1 to 60 seconds after the flash of intense light the shockwave passes over your location with hurricane force winds and wind thrown debris. About 10 to 60 seconds after that shockwave the return shockwave passes back over you going towards the detonation flash point. After the second shockwave passes you are to get up, and head for your closest fallout shelter.

Dock and Cover was never about protecting you from radiation and fallout, it is to protect you from the shockwave and shockwave thrown debris. If you survive the shockwave and you were far enough from the detonation point that you did not get a high radiation dose directly from the detonation Duck and Cover gives you the best chance to make it to a fallout shelter before the fallout arrives in your location. Fallout radiation from a one day war lasts three to four weeks before it decays to safe levels, that is how the physics work despite Hollywood propaganda to the contrary.

BTW at least through the 1990's the US military was still teaching Duck and Cover in training manuals on how to survive an attack involving weapons of mass destruction. If you think Hollywood knows better than the Army and Marines on how to keep people alive more power to you. I don't.

[Cog]

The amount of warheads actually available to be used by Russia and the USA has been reduced significantly over time.

Russia has 1648 warheads that can be deployed immediately
The USA has 1538.

http://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/N ... whohaswhat

Both countries have other warheads which could be used if they were brought out of storage and conditioned.

But when I did some rough calculations on what it would take to completely destroy an industrialized society, I came up with about 400. I used 100 warheads to destroy every nuclear power plant, 100 warheads to destroy the largest conventional power plants, 100 warheads to destroy the largest refineries, and 100 warheads to destroy our largest seaports and airports. That number pretty much eliminates the ability of a society to refine petrol and to generate electricity for a very long time. Most of your populace would starve to death or kill each other for food after a 400 warhead exchange.

According to this link,https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pnp_cap1_dcu_nus_a.htm there are 140 refineries in the USA. Destroy those and what do you think happens to the USA? Refineries are not an easy thing to build over night. Even if you worked 24/7 the rest of the country starves to death in the interim.

[Tanada]

These aren't only the ramblings of a former ambassador. Back in 2006, a piece put out by the highly influential CFR said a nuclear first strike by the US was winnable

http://professorsmartass.blogspot.com/2006/04/us-thinks-first-strike-on-russia-china.html?m=1

To quote Land of Confusion by the band Genesis,

There's no such thing as a winnable war, its a lie we don't believe any more...
https://youtu.be/1pkVLqSaahk

Whoops I meant Russians by Sting,
https://youtu.be/IuhuyiQbMU0

[onlooker]

Cog that sounds about right but this all gets complicated considering radiation sickness, destroyed and ablaze infrastructure etc. Also, how prepared and equipped is a society to deal with such a devastating event. Tanada as always gives us great in depth analysis. I wonder Tanada how prepared or not is let us say a city Iike New York city is , which I live near too, to deal with let us say the explosion of a briefcase size nuclear weapon or even a EMP attack? I mean in terms of containing casualties and being able to recover and rebuild in a reasonable period of time? Just curious and yes I admit a little apprehensive knowing NY is always viewed as a desirable target.

[Tanada]

Cog that sounds about right but this all gets complicated considering radiation sickness, destroyed and ablaze infrastructure etc. Also, how prepared and equipped is a society to deal with such a devastating event. Tanada as always gives us great in depth analysis. I wonder Tanada how prepared or not is let us say a city Iike New York city is , which I live near too, to deal with let us say the explosion of a briefcase size nuclear weapon or even a EMP attack? I mean in terms of containing casualties and being able to recover and rebuild in a reasonable period of time? Just curious and yes I admit a little apprehensive knowing NY is always viewed as a desirable target.

Personally I think everywhere outside of military bases is unprepared because when the Civil Defense program ended Hollywood adopted the theme that we are all dead if a war happens. Given that we are all equally unprepared the best long term survival strategy would be to 'head for the hills' in theory, however those hills don't have a lot of farms and food storage depots to sustain a high population.

City folks have a very Hollywood view of what life in rural areas is like. The Andy Griffith town that was self sufficient died with just in time delivery models about 30 years ago. My little town has about two weeks worth of food in the one grocery store located here, and about half of that is fresh meat/eggs/dairy/vegetable/fruits that require refrigeration because they are fresh, not preserved in any fashion. Next add in the hordes of college students flooding in from BGSU just walking the 6 miles from campus to our town and that two weeks worth is more like two days. The main products of this town are canned tomatoes and sauerkraut, and they are not stored here. As fast as they fill up a semi trailer with canned goods it gets on the highway and heads out to the distribution network. I don't know about you but I don't expect a trailer or two of canned goods to last long in the event of a catastrophe with 2,000 hungry residents and who knows how many University students passing through.

Our grain silo's are only used to store the harvest for at most a few weeks before that also is loaded onto semi's and driven off to Toledo where Nabisco has a big facility that processes the grain into crackers and corn chips and such.

IOW I am just as over the barrel as you are in the event of a breakdown of transportation. That being said I would not trade for all the gold on Wall Street because if something happens in NYC on that scale the chaos is more likely to kill than just the event itself. Remember how everything shut down for days after 9/11? Something like a suitcase nuke or EMP would be weeks or months of shut down in the best case scenario, and a rebuild the civilization from scratch scenario in the worst case. My slim chance of survival living in this semi rural location are a lot better than suburbanites near any big city in the event of a breakdown in social order. An average city has something like one law enforcement officer for every 150 people, and that counts all the reserves and volunteers they could trust to help out. Even if they are willing to shoot looters on sight they would be completely overwhelmed if chaos ruled the day. Look at Baltimore or Saint Louis for a minor example of how fast a mob of rioters can tear things up. What little stored food there is would be fought over and a good percentage destroyed in the process.

Back in 2004 I lived in a small city, then I joined this place and remembered just how bad peak resources could be. In 2010 I moved as far as I could afford to go from major population centers, but I don't kid myself. The biggest factor in a post event survival scenario is do the authorities maintain order or not. In chaos you are pretty much on your own and your chances are somewhere between Slim and None, and Slim left town. If Chaos does not get controlled quickly all those fools playing mob rioters are just as dead as you are, the difference is they don't know it quite as soon as you do.

If you are at all concerned about an event in NYC you should get just as far away as you can afford to get, along with any family you can convince to join you. Otherwise just accept the fact you have little chance of surviving any chaos causing event. Once you accept that you can do like Bobby McFarrin suggested, don't worry be happy.

[AgentR11]

I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.

You do realize just the ships in the Caspian can kill that many?
Do we have subs in the Caspian?

Russia should put a pair of boomers in Lake Baikal and just settle the idea of being able to take out all their subs for good. Or maybe there is one there already? lol. Nah, but they could, maybe do maint at Severobaykalsk; they have full rail connection, and a suitable shoreline configuration there. LA, Seattle, San Francisco, Portland, as well as Guam/Hawaii are all easy kills from there with Bulava... East coast might be out of reach; but who really knows the maximum range on an SLBM... Could also use a smaller variant of an SSBN, less need for silence, just need to be able to sit at a safe depth and wait... Four small ones, you could have two under, one in dock, and one in its long term maintenance. Anyone happy to have say 8 Bulavas, with 6 nukes each, killing all the US cities on the West coast? I think that's a bad trade no matter how much we make the Russian's suffer.

That said, I suspect the 90% is valid for both sides on an unanticipated first strike action. It is however no where near enough to make a nuclear war survivable for industrial civilization. Of course words such as these just validate to the Russians that NATO's purpose is not defensive, but rather, it exists to kill and dismember Russia. There is also another, longer term problem. If our ABM and cruise missile defense systems advanced to the point of honestly being a problem for Russia (though I doubt that is actually possible), Russia holds a card that can not be defended against; they can kill the world with detonations within their own borders. No missiles required. Just a grid on the tundra of nuke in a hole, underneath a nuke in a tower. A few thousand of those, and the human population would be down to some thousands in a few years after use, and it'd be all over; irrecoverably.

For now though, I'd read any comments of "we the US are awesome and we can prevent or shoot down x-odd number of Russian missiles any time we want" as simply a reaction to how quickly nuclear war worries arose once that Russian jet was shot down. Westerners are soft and squishy and we like our chocolate bars and air conditioning; we want to be arguing about pay and taxes and football, not worrying about seeing a nuclear fireball go off over the nearest downtown... Its better most believe Russia can't hurt us; or they'll get rowdy and break things; and that would make the 1% uncomfortable. No?

[shortonoil]

<i>"I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops."</i>

20 million the first day, and another 250 million would starve the first year. The EMP affects, all by themselves, would wipe out any resembles to the civilization that we now have. In months the world would be closer to the "Road", than today’s "Main Street". If you are unlucky enough to survive the first strike you had better develop a taste for "long hog".

[AgentR11]

Bah, I reject this "unlucky to survive" mantra completely. I will be pleased and consider myself lucky to survive, regardless of the state of the world; and will contest the after conditions with full effort, to whatever end may come. I live far enough away from any logical targets that survival of the initial attack is reasonably likely. I have sufficient calories in the pantry and water on site to enable us to sit very quietly for that first couple weeks afterwards which I suspect will be the interval where much stupid will happen and many stupids will be removed from the gene pool...

We do have a 50/50 roll of the dice on wind distribution of contamination. Can't do much about that.

[shortonoil]

"Bah, I reject this "unlucky to survive" mantra completely."

The out come of such an event would be more horrible than the mind can conceive. Save yourself a bullet!

[AgentR11]

"Bah, I reject this "unlucky to survive" mantra completely."
The out come of such an event would be more horrible than the mind can conceive. Save yourself a bullet!

There's a reason I'm a doomer, my brain is really, really good at envisioning really, REALLY horrible things. I asked for an exchange at the counter, and they said, one per customer, as-is, good with the bad. I'd trade for a 100-115 brain with no auto-horror button in a heartbeat.

In such a world event, I expect to either live long enough to damage my lungs substantially with radioactive particulates, catch the flu, have it progress to a lung infection as it always does, then break a few ribs coughing, dislocate a disc shortly after that, and then die as my lungs fill with fluid while I'm completely conscious and aware, gasping for air in the mud... or... while fighting zombies with rifle and sword, take a bullet in my good shoulder/knee, and then die from a wound infection, fever, delusion, and some toxic shock as the whole thing goes septic. Hollywood says zombies require swords to kill, so I have a good, heavy, carbon steel cutter. RAGNAROCKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!! ow.

Of course, there are several dozen other equally hideous ways to die after nuclear Armageddon... Visualizing your personal favorite is left as an exercise for the reader.

None the less, contest it I will.

[Tanada]

My dad was the sort who always claimed he wanted to be under the first one if we had a nuclear war, but he was a WW II vet who grew up during the very lean times of the Great depression being loaned out to neighboring farms as cheap labor. The pay was feeding himself and his older brother, hungry growing teenagers my unemployed Grandfather was struggling to support.

As often as he said it I knew that if it came down to it and he didn't die in round one he would struggle to survive and help his family survive the aftermath, and great depression survival skills would have been a great asset. History might get written by the effete types in their ivory towers, but it gets made by those who survive events.

[ennui2]

Kind of warms the cockles of my heart to know some doomers are unashamedly looking forward to trudging the wasteland so they can finally prove their survivalist mettle against us "effete" types who lack the machismo required.

[AgentR11]

Looking forward to? You have to be kidding. As I said, I'd do nearly anything to eradicate those lines of thought in my mind, and I strive mightily to counter negative thought sequences; and even on top of that, I still get garbage like that injected into my everyday, go to the grocery store, thinking.

It is the absolute last thing I want, that future is excruciatingly painful, absolutely devoid of all merit, machismo, value, or valor. What I want is to simply ease out my days, in my little house, drinking coffee, watching my much more cheerful offspring go about her entry into adulthood, boyfriends, college, blah blah. Do you know how HARD it was to isolate those thoughts, for years, from visible behavior or comments that could alter her outlook on life in a negative manner? Friggin exhausting.

There is nothing GOOD about this viewpoint. There is no looking forward to it. There is nothing just or honorable to be found in the future that my mind's eye presents.

Nothing would make me happier than to end my days as an effete type, mocking myself for how wrong those unpleasant thoughts were (and would remain). However, even if we do dodge this Syria bullet (which still looks hideously dangerous to me), I'm still likely to live long enough to confirm my suspicions about climate change; there won't be any hiding the result by 2040; the models will have sufficient granularity, the data will KNOW how much heat is in the ocean, and the results will converge, and my hunch is that they'll converge to a state-change result that returns the Earth to its warm phase.

[onlooker]

Well said Agent, nothing would please us Doomers more than to be proved wrong. The problem is the facts and reality merit our nomenclature. I personally wish to hell it were not so.