The Nuclear Game(s) by Stuart

[MKSheppard]

The Nuclear Game I

When a country first acquires nuclear weapons it does so out of a very accurate perception that possession of nukes fundamentally changes it relationships with other powers. What nuclear weapons buy for a New Nuclear Power (NNP) is the fact that once the country in question has nuclear weapons, it cannot be beaten. It can be defeated, that is it can be prevented from achieving certain goals or stopped from following certain courses of action, but it cannot be beaten. It will never have enemy tanks moving down the streets of its capital, it will never have its national treasures looted and its citizens forced into servitude. The enemy will be destroyed by nuclear attack first. A potential enemy knows that so will not push the situation to the point where our NNP is on the verge of being beaten. In effect, the effect of acquiring nuclear weapons is that the owning country has set limits on any conflict in which it is involved. This is such an immensely attractive option that states find it irresistible.

Only later do they realize the problem. Nuclear weapons are so immensely destructive that they mean a country can be totally destroyed by their use. Although our NNP cannot be beaten by an enemy it can be destroyed by that enemy. Although a beaten country can pick itself up and recover, the chances of a country devastated by nuclear strikes doing the same are virtually non-existant. [This needs some elaboration. Given the likely scale and effects of a nuclear attack, its most unlikely that the everybody will be killed. There will be survivors and they will rebuild a society but it will have nothing in common with what was there before. So, to all intents and purposes, once a society initiates a nuclear exchange its gone forever]. Once this basic factor has been absorbed, the NNP makes a fundamental realization that will influence every move it makes from this point onwards. If it does nothing, its effectively invincible. If, however, it does something, there is a serious risk that it will initiate a chain of events that will eventually lead to a nuclear holocaust. The result of that terrifying realization is strategic paralysis.

With that appreciation of strategic paralysis comes an even worse problem. A non-nuclear country has a wide range of options for its forces.

Although its actions may incur a risk of being beaten they do not court destruction. Thus, a non-nuclear nation can afford to take risks of a calculated nature. However, a nuclear-equipped nation has to consider the risk that actions by its conventional forces will lead to a situation where it may have to use its nuclear forces with the resulting holocaust. Therefore, not only are its strategic nuclear options restricted by its possession of nuclear weapons, so are its tactical and operational options. So we add tactical and operational paralysis to the strategic variety. This is why we see such a tremendous emphasis on the mechanics of decision making in nuclear powers. Every decision has to be thought through, not for one step or the step after but for six, seven or eight steps down the line.

We can see this in the events of the 1960s and 1970s, especially surrounding the Vietnam War. Every so often, the question gets asked "How could the US have won in Vietnam?" with a series of replies that include invading the North, extending the bombing to China and other dramatic escalations of the conflict. Now, it should be obvious why such suggestions could not, in the real world, be contemplated. The risk of ending up in a nuclear war was too great. For another example, note how the presence of nuclear weapons restricted and limited the tactical and operational options available to both sides in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In effect neither side could push the war to a final conclusion because to do so would bring down nuclear attack on the heads of the "winners". Here, Israel's nuclear arsenal was limiting the conflict before it even started. Egypt and Syria couldn't destroy the country - all they could do was to chew up enough of the Israeli armed forces and put themselves in the correct strategic position to dictate a peace agreement on much more favorable terms than would be the case. But, the Israeli nucear arsenal also limited the conflict in another way. Because they were a nuclear power they were fair game; if they pushed the Egyptians too hard, they would demand Soviet assistance and who knew where that would lead?

So, the direct effects of nuclear weapons in a nation's hands is to make that nation extremely cautious. They spend much time studying situations, working out the implications of such situations, what the likely results of certain policy options are. One of the immense advantages the US had in the Cold War was that they had a network of Research Institutes and Associations and consulting companies who spennt their time doing exactly this sort of work. (Ahh the dear dead days of planning nuclear wars. The glow of satisfaction as piecutters are placed over cities; the warm feeling of fulfillment as the death toll passed the billion mark; the sick feeling of disappointment as the casualties from a given strategy only amounted to some 40 million when preliminary studies had shown a much more productive result. But I digress). This meant that a much wider range of policy options could be studied than was possible if the ideas were left in military hands. These organizations, the famous think tanks had no inhibitions about asking very awkward questions that would end the career of a military officer doing the same. This network became known as The Business. We're still out here.

So. What were nuclear weapons good for? It sems they are more of a liability than an asset. To some extent that's true but the important fact remains, they do limit conflict. As long as they are in place and functional they are an insurance policy against a nation getting beaten. That means that if that country is going to get beaten, its nuclear weapons have to be taken out first. It also means that if it ever uses its nuclear weapons, once they are gone, its invulnerability vanishes with it. Thus, the threat posed by nuclear weapons is a lot more effective and valuable than the likely results of using those weapons. Of course, this concern becomes moot if it appears likely that the NNP is about to lose its nuclear weapons to a pre-emptive strike. Under these circumstances, the country may decide that its in a use-it-or-lose-it situation. The more vulnerable to pre-emption those weapons are the stronger that imperative becomes.

This is why ICBMs are such an attractive option. They are faster-reacting than bombers, they are easier to protect on the ground and they are much more likely to get through to their targets. This is why modern, advanced bomb designs are much more desirable than the older versions. In the 1950s the Soviet Union had a nuclear attack reaction time of six weeks (don't laugh, that of the US was 30 days). The reason was simple, bomb design in those days meant that the bomb, once assembled , deteriorated very quickly and, once degraded, had to be sent back to the plant for remanufacture. Bomb assembly needed specialized teams and took time. This made a first strike very, very attractive - as long as the attecker could be sure of getting all the enemy force. It was this long delay to get forces available that made air defense and ABM such an attractive option. In effect, it could blunt an enemy attack while the assembly crews frantically put their own bombs together and got them ready for launch. As advancing bomb design made it possible to reduce assembly time, this aspect of ABM became less important.

What this also suggests is that large, secure nuclear arsenals are inherently safer than small, vulnerable ones. A large arsenal means that the owner can do appalling damage to an enemy, a secure arsenal means that no matter how the enemy attacks, enough weapons will survive to allow that destruction to take place. Here we have the genesis of the most misunderstood term in modern warfare - MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. (Another point of elaboration here - MAD is not a policy and has never been instituted as a policy option. It's the effect of policies that have been promulgated). Its widely believed that this suggests that both sides are wide open to unrestricted destruction by the other. This is a gross over-simplification. What the term actually means is that both sides have enough nuclear firepower to destroy the other and that the firepower in question is protected in such ways that no pre-emptive strike can destroy enough of it to take away the fact that the other country will be destroyed. MAD did not preclude the use of defensive systems - in fact it was originally formulated to show how important they are - but its misunderstood version was held to do so - with catastrophic results for us all. One implication of this by the way is that in spite of all the fuss over the Chinese stealing the W88 warhead design, the net beneficiary of that is the United States; it allows the Chinese to build a much more secure deterrent and thus a more stable one. Also, looking at things purely ruthlessly, its better for one's enemy to make small clean bombs than big dirty ones.

Aha, I hear you say what about the mad dictator?

Its interesting to note that mad, homicidal aggressive dictators tend to get very tame sane cautious ones as soon as they split atoms. Whatever their motivations and intents, the mechanics of how nuclear weapons work dictate that mad dictators become sane dictators very quickly. After all its not much fun dictating if one's country is a radioactive trash pile and you're one of the ashes. China, India and Pakistan are good examples. One of the best examples of this process at work is Mao Tse Tung. Throughout the 1950s he was extraordinarily bellicose and repeatedly tried to bully, cajole or trick Khruschev and his successors into initiating a nuclear exchange with the US on the grounds that world communism would rise from the ashes. Thats what Quemoy and Matsu were all about in the late 1950s. Then China got nuclear weapons. Have you noticed how reticent they are with them? Its sunk in. They can be totally destroyed; will be totally destroyed; in the event of an exchange. We had a Chinese Officer here once on exchange (billed as a "look what we can do" session it was really a "look what we can do to you" exercise). We got the standard line about how the Chinese could lose 500 million people in a nuclear war and keep going with the survivors. So we got out a demographic map (one that shows population densities rather than topographical data) and got to work with pie-cutters using a few classified tricks. We got virtually the entire population of China using only a small proportion of the US arsenal. Our guest stared at the map for a couple of minutes then went and tossed his cookies into the toilet bowl. The only people who mouth off about using nuclear weapons and threaten others with them are those that do not have keys hanging around their necks. The moment they get keys and realize what they've let themselves in for, they get to be very quiet and very cautious indeed.

One anayst from The Business was asked what Saddam Hussein would have done if Iraq had possessed nuclear weapons in 1990. He replied that he didn't know what he would have done but he did know what he would not have done - he would not have invaded Kuwait.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks Stu for a really interesting essay. I have a couple of questions:

(a) Is it possible for our NNP to go back? The reason I asks, is that over the next decade or so several new NNP will develop, to my understanding. Now these countries are likely to have a very limited nuclear weapon capability, but will have all the problems that you have mentioned. Therefore, it would seem possible that getting ride of the nukes would make sense.

(b) On Russia, we know that their nuclear weapon capability is lower than what it should be. This is partly due to the lack of uranium ore. Now considering this and the US NMD is their a change the Russian could believe that their ability to massive destruct the USA and its allies will be lose? If so, what actions could Russia take? Would it be in the West best interest to help Russia with maintaining its nuclear weapon level?

As a side note. I am very interested in what you do. I know from previous post that you read/review a lot of material on defence related matters, in particular air-defence systems. But what do you do with this info? Do you game it or do you write computer codes? On something like the Thailand carrier, I believe this was seen to be a better choice than MPA (Maritime Patrol Aircraft). How was such a decision made? Was it say like a small good made up of people form different fields. One working out the cost, others operational capabilities etc. Then a comparison made why possible.

The South Africans are a unique case. They had a window of opportunity in which they had nuclear weapons, thought through the problems and realized the conundrums but nobody knew they had them. So they had the opportunity to stick the genie back in the bottle. The Russians know very well that any attack on the US is national suicide for them; so they won't. Their policy on strategic weapons is up to them and our best course is to leave them to it. In most cases, the best course of action is to have another drink and go to sleep.

I'm what's called a systems analyst for want of a better term. I look at defense programs, try to work out what they are supposed to do, how they are supposed to work, what their objectives are and how they fit into the general scheme of things. I work for an independent Research Association (better known as a think-tank) that does nothing else other than that. The Thai Carrier, the Chakkrinareubet, was something I actually worked on so I know some of how the decision got put together from the inside. In the final analysis what we do is to look at all the various possibilities and try to come up with logical answers. Back in the 1980s I did a lot of work for a different company that was heavily involved in nuclear strategy. We did a lot of studies on planning nuclear attacks and how nuclear weapons are used.

I know about South Africa, but could have their undertaken such an action if it was know that their had nuclear weapons. I did not mean to imply that Russia would attack the USA. Thou since I live in Australia, it really does not overly concern me. What I was trying to ask, would Russia feel concern that its nuclear force is possible becoming too small and therefore unsecured to possible external threats. In so doing Russia undertake an action, that it feels it must, to gain access to the resources that it needs to maintain its nuclear force.

What about the terrorist that is a nuclear power, but owns no country as his (or at least no country he cares about in the final analysis) to be defeated? Doesn't his strategy boil down to finding the most opportune target(s) and attack schedule(s), and not much else, since he only ever acquired the weapon(s) in the first place in order to use it(them)?

The problem with missiles is this; once they are fired, they are on their way. Nothing can stop them (in the sense that the launch decision is final; contrary to many people's opinion, ICBMs do not have a destruct system - ones fired on range testing do but operational ones do not) and nothing can prevent them striking their targets. The other problem is that they are very fast-moving and give the forces on the other side very little chance to decide what is happening and why. If a launch is detected now, the President has less time to make his decision over future action than most people to chose their meal at a restaurant.

Thrown into that is the inevitability of the whole thing; a missile fired means a target hit. Unless the wretched thing malfunctions of course but nuclear weapons are not a good place to start relying on luck. So the simple fact that a missile is on its way means that a country is about to have some fairly catastrophic damage inflicted on it. But is that all? Is that first missile the start of a salvo? Is it aimed at the deterrent forces on the ground - so that any response will be ragged? Without going too deeply into the dynamics of the decision (that would take a book rather than an answer to a question on an essay), the odds stack so that if a missile is inbound, it requires immense faith and courage not to return fire. That's step one.

Now we go to step two. The nation that has let one fly either by accident or design. Its government knows that the "other side" has imemnse pressure on it to return fire, that the odds in the decision-making process stack in favor of opening fire. If they hand around and wait to see what will ahppen, the rest of their forces get caught on the ground - and destroyed. So they require immense faith and courage not to continue firing.

Step three - the nation that is being fired on knows that the other guys are working on the basis that the odds stack in favor of continuing firing. That ends it; they know the other guys will open fire so even if they had decided not to, they will reverse that decision. The guys who fired first know that so, even if they had decided not to fire, they reverse that decision.

Everybody fires, everybody dies. More or less. Both sides know it so they don't bother with the question. One flies, they all fly. The only question is the timing.

How does BMD figure into this? It buys time. A single missile inbound can be shot down reasonably easily. So if a single inbound is detected, it can be shot down - stopped from reaching its target. That takes the dreadful time squeeze out - both sides can afford to wait to see what happens. The side that is being shot at can see what developes and also contact the other side and ask. Not a joke - that may be the most important single step. The side that let one fly by accident knows that the other side are going to wait so they can also afford to do so. And the whole situation is a lot cooler.

If a terrorist group gets hold of one or more devices, that is quite correct - and we have a deadly dangerous situation. All the terrorist has to do is deliver them - that may be more difficult than it sounds. However, the terrorist has to get them first; building one themselves is not really very likely. they should be able to build a gun-configuration device but it would be very heavy and cumbersome. An implosion configuration device would be much more compact but is almost impossible for an outsider to build undetected.

If a state provides a terrorist with a device, that is a different thing. If we capture the device intact then we can trace it to its owner in hours - possibly minutes. Even if its initiated we can get enough information to trace in in a few days. Then the nation that supplied it has a LOT of explaining to do.

How terrorism and nuclear weapons interact is a matter of intense study right now - and very lucrative it is. In very general terms, very general, it seems that the key to the situation is the states that have nuclear arsenals and may be thinking of handing them over to terrorists. It has to be shown to be the case that the result of even thinking about doing that is a terminal mistake for the country in question - and Iraq is a key example in that respect. Arguably, it may be better if SH didn't have an active program - if his destruction was the effect of "might have one" it adds considerably to the deterrent lesson.

In essence, the world has gotten to be too small for putting up with allowing "plausable deniability" from nations indulging in behind the scenes terrorism. You can put up with the "Red Brigades" backed indirectly by the Sovs cause it's actually a response to, and a way of getting around the nuclear deadlock. The current situation is just the opposit. It appears certain parties feel that by spreading out the sourcing, they can avoid the consquencies. Kaddaffy seems to have woken up to the fact that that is not true. Maybe the recent confession on TV in Pakistan means they have too... but I doubt it. I figure a good 50-50 chance nukes will fly before we are done.

I would put the odds a lot higher than that; if you remember, I've been saying this thing will go nuclear before its over from 9/11 onwards. This is one of the reasons behind the treatment of Taliban and Al Quaeda prisoners as illegal combatants - their organizations are not nation states and do not have the rights of nation states. Treating their personnel as if they were, or extending to such organizations the rights of nation states has some fairly nasty implications.

[MKSheppard]

The Nuclear Game II

Unfortunately planning a nuclear strike isn't just a matter of working out which cities to destroy. In fact it isn't even a matter of working out which cities to destroy. In fact, you don't target cities at all per se. You bomb things. First stage is to work out a series of objectives. Normally discussions of such things rotate around strategies being either counter-force or counter-city but its a lot more complex than that. At the last count there were about 30 distinct targeting strategies that could be adopted. As an example, there could be:-

Counter-military - aimed at destroying a country's armed forces. Such a strike would be aimed at things like arsenals, ports, airbases, military training sites etc

Counter-strategic - aimed at taking out a country's strategic weapons force. This would hit the ICBM silos, SSBN ports and bases, the SSBNs themselves, bomber bases, nuclear storage depots etc.

Counter-industrial - aimed at destroying key industrial assets and breaking the target country's industrial
infrastructure

Counter-energy - aimed at destroying a country's energy supplies and resources plus the means for distributing them.

Counter-communications - aimed at disrupting and eliminating the target country's communications (radio, TV, landline, satellite etc) communications systems.

Counter-political - aimed at erasing the target country's political leadership - note this is MUCH more difficult than it seems and is very dangerous. Killing the only people who can surrender is not terribly bright

Counter-population - aimed at simply killing as much of the enemy population as possible.

There are plenty of others. One of the things that gets done at this level is to think up targeting strategies, work out the target sets associated with that strategy and the resources needed to eliminate that target set. Based on that we can then work out if that particular target strategy is an effective use of resources. Note also that adopting one particular target strategy does not preclude simultaneously putting another into play.

So lets look at a typical targeting problem in an average sort of strike. We are going to give the capital of Outer Loonyistan a really thorough seeing to. Now we don't just explode a bomb in the center of the city and say bye-bye. Believe it or not that won't do any real good. Initiate a 1 megaton device over the center of London and 95 percent of the cities assets and 80 percent of the population will survive (this means that, proportionally speaking, Londoners will be better off after a nuclear attack than they were before it took place. (This was the basis of at least one Get Rich Quick scheme proposed in The Business). So we start by selecting a specific targeting strategy. Now we have to estimate the weight of attack Asylumville is likely to come under if that strategy is adopted. To do this we first work out how high Asylumville stands with regard to other potential target areas for that particular strategy. This is usually done by a careful assessment of what targets are in that area as opposed to similar target areas in other parts of the country and assuming the available warheads are distributed according to the target density in that area. Then we assess how many warheads are likely to be inbound and crank that into the priorities we've established to see how many are likely to be fired at Asylumville. It'll be a lot fewer than you think. This means is that we have to look very carefully at the city, its geography and the distribution of its assets in order to work out how to take it down.

Now we need some maps. We need a standard topographical map, demographic maps and asset/resource maps. Take the targeting strategy and the likely target set associated with it and plot them on that map. Now think out how hard that target set is going to be to destroy. The problems now become apparent. Some targets are best attacked by surface bursts, others by high airbursts. Some, very hard targets need almost direct hits to destroy them; others are so small (and so hard) that hitting them is very difficult.The sort of things we might look at hitting, depending how we do things, are communication facilities, railway marshalling yards, factories, oil refineries, government offices, military bases For example, if the target strategy is anti-communications, amongst the primary targets will be airfields and railway marshalling yards. They are notoriously difficult to destroy, the attacker needs big warheads and needs to ground burst them so the target is physically scoured from the ground. There is a lot of thought needed here; you'll find there are far more targets than warheads so you'll have to allocate the warheads one way, then try to work out the effects. To give you some idea of how that list grows, there are something like 50,000 priority nuclear targets in Russia. Some of them are weird and tucked right out of the way (one of the most critical non-military targets in the USA is where you would least expect it). Now many of that 50,000 target list will be virtually on top of eachother. One bomb will get several of them. That pulls the list down immensely, probably to around 3,000 - 5,000 targets.

OK back to working over Asylumville, the capital of Outer Loonyistan. If its like most other capitals, it'll probably merit a total of between five and ten devices to take out all the things we want to. One of the key tools used here is a thing called a pie-cutter. I've mentioned this in the past. Its a circular hand-held computer. You set the verniers on it to the specifics of the weapon used (altitude of burst, yield etc) and it gives you a series of rings that show the various lethal effects of the bomb to certain distances. Put it down on the planned impact point and you'll get what the bomb will do. You won't get a pie cutter (they are classified equipment) but you can make your own from publically available data using tracing paper and compasses. . We end up with a map of the city after being worked over. Normally, at this point somebody says. Dammit we didn't get [insert some key assets] and we start again. Your first shot at targeting will be stunningly disappointing so you play games with warhead types and yields and with burst locations until you get as many of target set as you can. Take that marshalling yard; sounds easy doesn't it? Believe me railway marshalling yards are a whirling son of a bitch to take down. They are virtually invulnerable to airbursts; we have to groundburst a blast directly on the yard. 800 yards outside and you might as well not have bothered. The problem is those yards are not that big. So now we have a problem called CEP. This stands for Circle of Equal Probability. This is a measure of the accuracy of the missile and is the radius of the circle that will contain half the missiles aimed at the center of the circle. That means that half the inbounds will fall outside that circle. Now we have a second concept; the radius of total destruction, the radius within which everything is destroyed. Its astonishingly small; for a 100 kt groundburst its about 800 yards (now see where the marshalling yard came from). Now if the RTD exceeds the CEP we're probably Ok, if it doesn't (and in most cases it doesn't) we've got problems.

What all this ends up with is we have to fire multiple warheads at single targets in order to be sure of getting them. This is a complex calculation since the optimum number of warheads for Asylumville will depend on the attack pattern and priorities. But we'll eventually end up with number that represents the best compromise between destructive effects and warhead use. To estimate the effects on the area as a whole, take your demographic map, plot the event points, altitudes and yields on that map and apply your pie-cutter set for overpressure. The overpressure needed to destroy various types of building are public record (US houses are very very soft and vulnerable) so you know roughly what will be destroyed up to a given distance. Note that the blast circles will overlap in some places. Blast also isn't logical; ground irregularities will funnel it is some directions so that an area close in may be unscathed while others much further away will be flattened.

Now we have to get them there. Missiles are not terribly reliable and a lot can go wrong. A Rectal Extraction figure suggests that only about 60 percent of them will work when the blue touchpaper is ignited. So we have to add extra warheads to allow for the duds. To give a feel for the sort of numbers that we're talking about, the British calculated that they needed 32 warheads to give Moscow a terminal dose of instant sunrise. In other words, the British nuclear deterrent took down Moscow and that was it. That's why so many devices are needed - the inventory evaporates very fast.

[MKSheppard]

The Nuclear Game III

When we've been discussing nuclear weapons, we've always been working under the presumption that the historical situation applies and that we won't see a nuclear exchange. Lets look at the grim side of the equation now. The sirens are going and the National Emergency system is screaming its head off. What's the world going to be like in 25 minutes time? One thing we have to make clear before we start. We're talking about the biggest cataclysm in human history. When we say things like "doing well" or "doing badly", those terms are relative.

Any country can be divided into two parts. The "A-country" is the big cities, the industrial and population centers and the resource concentration they represent. Big cities got to be that way because they are in desirable locations, near good ports, river crossings or mountain passes. When the city goes, so does the locations. The "B-country" is everything else. In effect the A-country represents big vulnerable collections of assets gathered into single spots. The B-country represents dispersed ranges of resources spread over large areas. This is a very important distinction. The relative value of the A-country and the B-country depends on the country and society involved. However one thing is constant, the support and supplies that the A-country needs to survive comes from the B-country. Given time, the B-country will rebuild the A-country. The survival of the B-country is, therefore, critical while the survival of the A-country might not be. Now, the primary asset of the B-country is its population; they are the ones who will generate resources from the B-country and turn them into product. So, the critical thing for a post nuclear environment is population. Save as much of that as we can and we're a jump ahead. That sounds eminently humanitarian. In reality it has awful consequences but we'll come to those later.

The extent to which the A-country can be rebuilt and the speed with which that can be achieved depends on the damage inflicted on the cities. Its generally assumed that the cities will be totally destroyed write-offs but, in reality, the situation is by no means so simple.

There's a few things that are important here. One is that big devices are a rarity. There are no 100 megaton devices, very few 25 and 10 megaton devices and not all that many 5 megaton weapons. The largest devices in widespread use are 1 megaton weapons and the majority of strategic weapons are in the 350 -150 kiloton bracket. 50 kiloton strategic weapons are quite common. The reason is quite simple. The destructive power of an explosion is distributed in three dimensions (actually four since the time component is very important) so the destructive power of a device is directly proportion to the cube root of its explosive power. Even worse, the destructive effects of a device are like many other distance related phenomena; they obey the inverse square law. Double the distance from the blast center and the effects are reduced by a factor of four. Therefore, a 1 megaton device is not 1,000 times as destructive as a 10 kiloton device, its ten times as such and those effects attenuate rapidly with distance. However, very big devices are MUCH heavier than small ones and consume disproportionate amounts of fissile material. Put all this together and its much more productive to have a large number of small devices than a small number of large ones.

Another is how the devices are used. The radius of destruction of nuclear devices is actually quite limited; this is a natural outgrowth of working on the inverse square law. Even with one of the "big" 1 megaton weapons, its fury is largely spent by the time the blast wave has reached ten miles from center. The smaller devices have lesser radii although the workings of the cube power rule mean that those radii are not as small as the difference in explosive power suggests. Nevertheless, the relatively limited effect of the devices shows that the general civilian presumption that ground zero for a nuclear strike on a city will be the city center is likely to be wrong. The devices will be targeted onto specific parts of the city that are judged to be of especial value. These may actually be in the suburbs or other peripheral areas.

So how does a nuclear device destroy things? The primary effects that result from the initiation of a device are (in no particular order) a light flash, a heat flash a blast concussion wave and a sleet of direct radiation. In fact, of these the last is of relatively little significance. The range of the radiation is very short and is further attenuated by the inverse square law. Its only significant within the areas where blast and heat are already lethal. If thermal blast and concussion have already reduced you to the size, shape and color of a McDonalds hamburger, irradiating you as well is incredibly superfluous. Thus the direct effects we are interested in are light, heat and blast and they do arrive in that order. The further an observer is from the point of initiation, the greater the gap between them. This is very important. The flash of light that will blind a victim close in serves to warn a potential victim further out. Once a few miles out from ground zero, the light flash tells the population that a device has gone off and its shadows show them sheltered areas from the next effects to arrive. If an area is shadowed from light, its shadowed from radiant heat as well. The heat flash is the first really destructive effect to hit. This is direct radiated thermal energy; like light it travels in straight lines. It will set anything inflammable on fire to a considerable distance from ground zero. Interestingly, it won't set non-flammable things on fire and, for example, must enter a house via windows etc before setting that house on fire. If the windows are masked (for example painted white), the heat flash is unlikely to set a brick-built house on fire (US-style frame houses are a different matter which is why it makes me uneasy living in one).

Last to arrive is blast. Unlike light and heat, both of which travel in straight lines, blast can be funneled by structures, deflected and masked. The windows we carefully painted white are history; smashed by the blast wave and its associated wave front of debris but they've done their job. The heat flash has gone. Houses are actually quite well designed to resist pressure from outside - its pressure from inside that gives them problems. Again, if you can keep the blast out you've got a good chance. Impossible close in to ground zero but progressively easier as we get further from that point. Closing the shutters on windows inside the house is good; even taping the glass in a lattice pattern is astonishingly helpful. Compared with military targets, civilian structures have relatively low damage resistance. In the language this is called protection factor (PF) - most civilians can, with a few minutes warning give themselves a PF of around 40 - meaning they are 40 times more likely to survive than an unprotected civilian. In other words, even though the structures surrounding them are soft and weak, there is a lot they can do that will greatly increase their chance of survival. Note that - even when the sirens are going off, there is still a lot you can do that greatly increases your chances of surviving - provided you have a chance of surviving in the first place.

For all intents and purposes, the effects of initation are generated in the center of the device initiation and travel outwards evenly in all dimensions to produce a perfectly symmetrical sphere or fireball. Now think of the geometry of this. If the device is initiated at ground level, a so-called ground burst, half of all that energy will go into the ground, scouring out a crater but effectively being wasted. More goes skywards. Some will be reflected down towards the earth but very little; effectively that energy too is wasted. The only energy that is actually useful is that produced in a narrow segment around the equator of the spherical ball produced by the initiation. Thus, for this type of attack ground bursts seem very inefficient. They are.

So what do we do about it? Again, think of the geometry. If we lift the detonation point into the air, the segment of the sphere that will spend its energy destroying valuable things is increased and the amount that scours out a crater gets smaller. Keep thinking along these lines and we reach a point where the sphere of the fireball doesn't quite touch the ground at all. In this case almost all the energy from the lower half of the fireball destroys valuable things and none goes to digging a crater. This is called a low airburst and it remains a low airburst as long as the altitude of the point of initiation of the device is less than the diameter of the fireball. If the point of initiation of the device is at an altitude greater than the diameter of the fireball it's a high airburst. If the intention is to knock down cities, low airbursts are the most effective way of doing it.

We haven't mentioned fall-out. The dreaded stuff that destroys humanity. Well, there's a reason for that; the device has only just been initiated, there isn't any fall-out yet. Fall out is caused (mostly) by debris from the ground being sucked into the fireball, irradiated and spewed out of the top. This radioactive plume coalesces in the atmosphere and falls back to earth. It's a mix of isotopes of varying half lives. The most vicious of these isotopes have short half lives and are gone in a few hours. The milder ones can hang around for millennia. Now the blast and heat throw debris outwards, where does the debris sucked into the fireball come from? Answer is the crater scoured in the ground by the energy from the device that went into said ground. But hang on, we've just discovered the best way to knock a city down is to use an airburst that doesn't crater the ground. Doesn't that mean no fallout? That's right, airbursts are relatively clean from a fallout point of view. They do generate some fallout from atmospheric dust and water vapor and a bit more (some very nasty) comes from the debris of the device but not as much as legend holds.

All this means that dropping a nuclear device on a city doesn't necessarily destroy it. In fact, an acquaintance of mine, Peter Laurie, used to start off his lecture on such things by suggesting that 1 megaton device dropped on London would do only trivial damage to the city. After the lynch mob had been brought under control, he'd put a pie cutter on a demographic map of London and prove the point. That device would leave approximately 80 percent of the population and a stunning 95 percent of its assets undestroyed. To be fair, that includes people and property slightly damaged but repairable. The catch is that London wouldn't have been hit by one but by several (in fact four 350 kiloton and two 1 megaton weapons in one particular attack plan). This would still leave a substantial proportion of the population and a larger proportion of their assets intact. The implication of all this is that despite being subject to concentrated attack, the A-country isn't totally destroyed (although its society is) and remains a storehouse of people and good.

So what's been going on in the B-country. One attack pattern is to hit the nuclear weapons stationed out there. These are mostly silo-based missiles. The only way to destroy those is to initiate a device directly on top of the silo and scour out of the ground. In other words, a ground burst. And they create fallout. This means that a counter-force strike is inherently much more dangerous to the survival of the population than a counter city strike. Weird isn't it. Attacking the population gives them a reasonable chance of survival while restricting the target plan to military targets radically decreases that chance of survival. It's a point we've seen happening over and over again - when dealing with nuclear weapons we often end up going places we never thought we would. The B-country also gets hit by counter-city strikes but the dispersed nature of the population reduces their direct effects.

OK so its over. The devices have ceased to arrive and eventually, probably after some 36 to 48 hours the all clear
sounds. What happens now? From now on we're looking specifically at the USA.

We have to get the B-country working again. The cities are not places to live. Without their support infrastructure, they will become plague pits and charnel houses. They have to be evacuated and the people distributed in the B-country to make up for losses there. In the B-country people are ambling around with Geiger counters plotting what's hot and what isn't. At this point life gets grim. We triage the population. One triage is condition. Who cannot be saved, who can only be saved with massive (and probably impractical) effort, who can be saved with the means available and who will recover without treatment. On top of this is another triage. The population is prioritized according to need for protection. Pregnant women and children are top, young women of childbearing age second. Young men third, older men fourth, old women bottom. This is ruthless and brutal but its essential for survival. Given a choice between saving a young woman who can bear children and an old woman who cannot, we save the potential mother. We do the same with food. Food and water are checked for radioactivity. The clean food goes to the children and young women, the more contaminated food to the lower priority groups. That old woman? She gets the self-frying french-fries.

In this situation the US has a terrific advantage over the rest of the world. Its called the Second Amendment. The B-country population is largely armed, sometimes quite heavily. They do exactly what Founding Fathers envisaged - provide a body of armed people whom the local authority can assemble to maintain order. (The Supreme Court may argue that interpretation of the Second Amendment but by now they are doing so with the people who wrote it). In a more general sense, post-holocaust fiction usually has gangs of outlaws preying on the defenseless citizenry. Interestingly that doesn't seem to happen. In disasters people tend to work together rather than against each other (for example in US urban disasters Hells Angels biker gangs have made sterling contributions to relief efforts using their bikes and riding skills to get emergency supplies through to places others can't). While lawlessness and disorder do occur, the ease of forming a civilian militia (using the term properly here meaning something very much like the Sheriff's Posse beloved of Westerns) brings that situation under control. Other countries are unlikely to be so fortunate.

So we're in a race. Can we rebuild the B-country so that its firstly self-sustaining without the services provided by the A-country while the stockpile of pre-attack assets survive. Can we reconstruct a working society fast enough so that we can feed enough people to keep going? Can the surviving women bear enough children (and survive doing so) to replace the death toll. For the loss won't stop with the attack. Diseases we consider trivial today, measles, chickenpox, influenza, will be mass killers. No medical treatment. Unless your lucky enough to be where some medical facilities have survived, a broken leg that gets infected is likely to be a death sentence. Its possible to look on this world as a 17th century US colonial environment and there's a lot of truth in that. The downside is that the colonial pioneers didn't have the decaying charnel houses of the cities to worry about.

Winning that race is vital. Lose and we're extinct. The population drops like a stone as disease, radiation and injury take their toll. Then, it should bottom out and start to recover. Teams of older men and infertile women go to the cities to recover what they can. The radiation levels continue to drop. Fortunately we don't have to worry about nuclear winter, that's been largely discredited (the atmospheric models that were used were far too simplistic and the reality seems to be we may actually get a more temperate and less changeable climate out of things - somebody once described it as a Nuclear Autumn). The ozone layer also won't be a problem - it'll regenerate fast enough and the effects of the bombs may actually be beneficial.

The ugly side of life continues. Abortion and contraception are likely to be highly illegal. We MUST have those babies. There will be more than enough parents who have lost their own (or have received too high a radiation dose) to look after any that are unwanted. Women are enslaved by their reproductive systems again. Don't like that but there is nothing we can do about it. The social pressure on women to have children will be immense in both material and moral senses. Women who can have children get the best of everything, the cleanest and best food, the most comfortable housing, the most careful protection. Women who can have children but refuse to do so will be social outcasts (and in this sort of society to be an outcast is virtually a death sentence). We're likely to see a situation where women of childbearing age are "protected" by severe restrictions ("don't go outside the house, the radiation may harm your babies" gets abbreviated to "don't go outside") . This is a grim and disturbing picture; we take an old woman out of her house and throw her in the snow to provide shelter for a pregnant mother and her children - then lock her in. Newborn babies obviously damaged by radiation are likely to be killed on the spot. That may or may not be justifiable but I think its inevitable.

No electricity, limited medicine, almost no dentistry, no travel - we really are back to the middle ages. The fallout patterns and other things shift so its likely we'll see communities having citadels they can retreat to if necessary. Gasoline runs out cars will go; we're back to horses for transport. Fortunately we don't need factories to make more horses. Justice by the way is run by Judge Lynch. Don't expect to attack a woman and survive. Guns are also a declining asset. As the ammunition runs out we'll be making weapons in blacksmiths shops. Its interesting to see what the designers will come up with, using modern know-how with 17th century assets. We'll probably see bows and arrows come back into fashion - and that means metal body armor.

Eventually when conditions permit, our new society moves back to rebuild the A-country. It'll be a long, long time before there is another Federal Government (such things need technology to survive - a calculated guess is that it would take two centuries before a powerful central government evolved again - if it evolves)

----------------------------

Fortunately we don't need factories to make more horses.

Mares of foal bearing age (depends on the individual), might need to be treated like women of child bearing age, as would stallions. Geldings can take their chances outside, especially once they've reached an age where they are no longer capable of working.

My only worry would be that as in the main they live outside horses and indeed other farm animals may suffer from some of the effects of the bombs.

The UK, being a small landmass stuffed full of targets, is not likely to do as well as the USA in many ways. However I think some form of society would survive, though the country would probably be reduced to around a dozen little fiefdoms based on the Home Defence Regions.

[MKSheppard]

This was posted by Stuart on 1/2/2002 in a thread on the Soviet National Command Authority. I've put it here since it's relevant to the Nuclear Game.

OK; lets start from the ground up.

There has always been a problem with nuclear weaponry; its destructiveness and the undesirability of giving some very junior officer in the back of beyond power to use it is not a happy combination. Destructiveness implies that the weapons should be held under a tight centralized control. The problem then becomes, what happens when the center that exerts that control is gone?

The obvious answer is to protect the center. The Soviets did this by two ways. The first was physical protection. They took the geolith of Zhiguli (Sea Skimmer found you the photograph of the site - those hills in the background are actually part of a solid homogenous piece of rock) and dug under it. That digging started in 1935 and has never stopped. Zhiguli started with a command post alternate for the Kremlin and has become steadily more important over the years. As bombs got bigger, the Soviets dug deeper.

The other way of protecting the center is Maskirovka. The art of strategic deception is one the Russians take very seriously and apply it right across their whole military infrastructure. Every map, every railway guide, every data entry is falsified. Cities shown on maps are sometimes tens or hundreds of miles from their true positions. Some are not shown at all. Some "cities" are, in reality, villages. Roads may or may not be there and may or may not go where they are shown to. Any statistics in a Russian encyclopedia or which use Russian official information as a source are worthless. They are all part of Maskirovka. One part of that Maskirovka was to grossly overstate the importance of Moscow itself. As a target or strategic objective, Moscow is worthless. There is nothing there that isn't duplicated and/or replicated elsewhere. For western eyes, Moscow is the Holy Grail; take the city and Russia is beaten. To the Russians, Moscow is a giant decoy and warhead sponge. These days its there to draw fire from Zhiguli.

Massive protection and Maskirovka will only take us so far. It has to be presumed that the center of centralized control will be found and will be destroyed (the Russians must have been pleasantly surprised that the importance of Zhiguli remained undetected as long as it did). Now this is an important thing. The individual components of the US and Russian nuclear arsenals are almost identical (the differences are insignificant compared with their similarities); they don't have anything we don't and vice versa. The significant differences lie in how the bits are put together. The US answer to the vulnerable center problem was to construct a network of alternate sites that could take over command in the event of the original center getting a terminal dose of instant sunrise. To the Soviets, an alternative center is anathema; an alternative power center can very easily become a rival power center and the Soviet system only survived because it didn't tolerate rivals. They had to find a different way around things.

That different way was Perimetr. What the Russians did was construct an automated command control system that absorbed the evidence, analysed its implications and made the strategic decisions. This automated system took information from ground stations, from satellites that spotted the thermal signatures of missile launches and tracked the ballistic path of missiles as they flew (After the first few seconds of flight, we know exactly, to within a few inches, the ballistic trajectory that missile will follow - we know just as exactly where it will be twenty minutes after launch - suddenly a light should have clicked on - thats why its no big deal to shoot down an inbound ICBM. Put a man in the right place and tell him when to swing and he can hit the darn thing with a baseball bat). The Russians had identical satellites, the catch was that theirs didn't work as well - you have no idea how much I don't like using the words "nuclear command control" and "doesn't work very well" in the same sentence. Perimetr used information from OTHB radars, from direct scan radars, anything that could be brought in. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it should. Soviet Warships had a command system called "The Second Captain" that took all the information from the ship's sensors, evaluated the tactical situation and decided on the correct course of action. It then presented the decision to the human captain for validation.

Perimetr was activated by the football (another case of an identical system to the US being used for a different purpose). Once working, Perimetr was continuously analysing data and making strategic decisions.

It did not carry out those decisions

What it did was it presented the decisions to a human authority for review and validation. Only if the Perimetr decision was validated would the system proceed to the next stage. No validation; the system resets and starts again (ie failed-safe). There was a priority list of those who could validate the perimetr decisions. Top was Zhiguli; if that didn't respond Perimetr went to the next; if it got static as a response, it went to the next until somebody answered the phone. If nobody did, the system shut down and reset. I don't know the exact structure but I presume that there was a different tree of stages depending on who Perimetr contacted. If it was Zhiguli then the system would follow one route; if the most senior level to respond was the Navy SSV-33 or a 941, it would follow another, if it was Soviet Air Force airborne command post it would follow a third. Each route would lead it to another point where a human authority would be presented with a decision and asked to validate it. Validation would be lead to the next series of steps, failure to validate would reset the system and it would try again.

The best way to envisage this is as two ladders side by side with the humans on one and Perimetr on the other. The decision goes down the Perimetr ladder with each step being validated. No matter how many holes are blown in the human ladder, Perimetr keeps looking for somebody who can validate its decisions. Yet on the human ladder, each step is distinctly in a hierarchy so there are no "alternatives" in the western sense. The "alternative" is an automated machine that is (presumably) a highly dispersed and networked system that is multiply redundant and can take serious damage before its functionality is impaired.

[MKSheppard]

Nuclear Game IV - Virtual Attrition

Archivist's Note: This was never an official "Nuclear Game" post, but it fits extremely well with the rest of NG, that I made it "unofficially" part of it.

--------------------------------------

We might; what we're talking about is a thing called "virtual attrition".

Take Country Apple.

Country Banana wants to use its air force of 100 aircraft to attack Apple. Each aircraft has four bomb racks so the air force can carry four hundred bombs. Faced by this threat, Apple installs an air defense system equipped with surface to air missiles. Haha Says Banana. I have just purchased jamming pods for my 100 aircraft that can negate your surface-to-air missiles. The catch is that each jamming pod occupies one bomb rack, reducing the bombload per aircraft from four to three. So the Banana Air Force can now only drop 300 bombs, equivalent to the full load of 75 aircraft. The Apple defense system has effectively neutralized 25 aircraft without firing a shot.

Virtual attrition is a real swine, its continually catching up with us in unexpected ways. Its quite possible that the losses from virtual attrition will be high enough to neutralize the offensive force completely. It is possible that the costs imposed by virtual attrition will be so high that the economy of the victim can't support them.

A good example is the UK nuclear deterrent; by the mid-1970s, it had been almost completely neutralized by existence of Soviet defenses (note, not the defenses themselves but the fact of their existence). It doesn't even really matter whether the defense works or not; the fact that it exists is enough to start the virtual attrition ball rolling.

Simple question that shows how these things can go.

Country Apple has 100 ballistic missiles for 100 targets in Country Banana. In the absence of a defense, Apple knows and can plan on the 100 missiles hitting 100 targets. Country Banana builds a defense system that is 30 percent effective so Apple can assume that 30 of its 100 missiles will be shot down on the way to the target. Now we have the catch; which 30?. Remember ICBMs can't be retargeted in flight. Apple can't just add 30 missiles to replace the 30 likely to be shot down because it has no idea where to point them it doesn't know which 30 Banana targets will have been protected by shooting down the Apple missiles. However, there is a way around this. If Apple targets two missiles on every Banana target, there is only a 9 percent chance that both will be shot down. The problem is that this means that (a) Apple is accepting almost 10 percent of the enemy targets will survive even this revised attack and (b) Apple must either halve the number of targets it wishes to attack or double the number of ICBMs in its inventory.

Now you may think that all Banana has to do is double the number of interceptors to counter the added missiles. Could do that but there is a better way. Banana is run by a nasty, sneaky, devious set of strategists who set up their defense system so that 25 of the 100 targets in their country are defended by four interceptors each and 75 are left unprotected but the defenders design the system so the attacker cannot tell which targets are defended and which are not. So, the attacker has to assume all the targets are defended by four missiles. Four 30-percent accuracy missiles mean that a single attacking missile has only a 0.24 percent chance of penetrating the defense (ie the defense is 99.75 percent effective). To be certain of hitting the target, Apple must fire five missiles at each of its 100 targets in Banana. Every missile less than five it allocates to a target means accepting that there is an increasing chance the attack will be defeated.

Of course life is very much more complicated than that, but the complications are only developments of the same way of thinking.

[Belushi TD]

From Stuart -

(one of the most critical non-military targets in the USA is where you would least expect it).

One of the things I regret about never having made it to an HPCA meet up is that I never got to ask Stuart where/what the non military target that is in a place you'd never expect was. I assumed he would not answer me, but I always had the faint hope that he would.

I have always had a suspicion that it was one of the internet nodes, at one of the various colleges. Maybe the one at Cornell? Anyone have any ideas? Or am I asking finger breaking questions?

Belushi TD

[Poohbah]

From Stuart -

(one of the most critical non-military targets in the USA is where you would least expect it).

One of the things I regret about never having made it to an HPCA meet up is that I never got to ask Stuart where/what the non military target that is in a place you'd never expect was. I assumed he would not answer me, but I always had the faint hope that he would.

I have always had a suspicion that it was one of the internet nodes, at one of the various colleges. Maybe the one at Cornell? Anyone have any ideas? Or am I asking finger breaking questions?

Belushi TD

The Internet would route around the destroyed node.

My guess is the Old River Control Structure in central Louisiana. You destroy the port of New Orleans because the Atchafalaya would immediately capture the Lower Mississippi River. New Orleans wouldn't be a port anymore, they would lose their water supply, Morgan City and several other towns on the Atchafalaya would be wiped out, and the loss of barge traffic would be crippling to the Midwestern economy, with global implications for food supply.

[Craiglxviii]

Stuart Slade said:
Bunk is a pretty fair description.

The "nuclear winter" theory was predicated on a series of hypothetical models that had been constructed by a group of "concerned scientists" led by Carl Sagan who constructed a computerized model of earth, cranked in a series of hypothetical statistics on the effects of nuclear weapons and then claimed that the results from that model constituted "facts".

There were a number of serious problems with this process.

One of them was that, when the hypothetical effects of nuclear initiations were cranked into other models of earth, they didn't produce the results Sagan had reported.

In fact, the results reported by Sagan's group were only achieved when his particular model of the earth was used. This was a remarkable thing so people looked at Sagan's model to see how it differed from the rest. The answer turned out to be quite simple. The model Sagan had shown to the world press to “prove” the danger of “nuclear winter,” depicted the earth as being a barren ball of rock with no mountains and no oceans. Oceans, as Sagan well knew, act as gigantic energy flywheels that moderate temperature, helping cool adjacent continents in summer and warm them in winter.

Sagan, in other words, knowingly committed deliberate scientific fraud. He cooked up a phony computer model to concoct the phony “nuclear winter” results he wanted for political reasons. It subsequently became apparent that he had avoided using the already-available NCAR computer climate model precisely because he knew it would not produce the “nuclear winter” he wanted to sell to gullible journalists and an ignorant public.

Once that point had been realized, Sagan's assumptions were examined in greater depth. It turned out that none of the people in his group of "concerned scientists" were nuclear weapons experts. What they'd done was taken some generalist public sources, cherry-picked the ones that suited them and used them without examining how the various nuclear weapons effects interacted. Again, there was a healthy dollop of deliberate scientific fraud here. Where effects didn't give the results required, they were exagerrated or morphed until they did. By the time the critique was over, "nuclear winter" as a concept was totally discredited; today its a touchstone.

If somebody starts to spout forth on the dangers of "nuclear winter" they're nutcases. Sagan's credibility never recovered; he never got another hearing from the serious nuclear weapons and policy community.

However, one useful thing did come out of all this. In order to examine the probability of Sagan's fairy stories, people cranked real data on nuclear weapons into real atmospheric models. The results were actually quite interesting (there is a novel currently being posted in HPCA called "Anvil of Necessity" which draws on that work).

For those who like grim details, the following was the nuclear exchange used as a basis for these studies.

The US was presumed to have been hit by 5,800 warheads witha total yield of 3,900 megatons. Nuclear devices initiated in Europe totalled 3,300 with a total yield of 1,200 megatons The USSR was deemed to have been hit by 6,100 devices having a total yield of 1,900 megatons. China got hit by 900 devices witha total yield of 1,300 megatons. By way of comparison in TBO, Germany got hit by 232 devices totalling 8.6 megatons.

Other areas receiving at least a dozen warheads include Canada, North and South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Greenland, Puerto Rico, India, Israel, Australia, Guam, Cuba, Syria, and Egypt. Other countries got single devices, mostly on their capitals.

Nobody didn't get hit by something.

This massive exchange used about half the global strategic and theater nuclear arsenal; about 10% was launched but did not reach a target and 30% was destroyed on the ground.

By the time we finished there were 10,000 nuclear weapons left in the arsenals out of the 67,000 that we started with.

Initial casualties were 400 million dead; by the time things had worked out, this increased to 1.2 billion.

Welcome to my world.

The smoke clouds from the fires etc peak three days after the exchange. Essentially, they would spread to form a doughnut shaped band around the world that would essentially cover North America, Europe and the USSR.

This smoke (actually, its particulates rather than smoke) cloud consisted of 1,500 million tons of dust, 25 million tons of smoke from vegetation, and 80 million tons of smoke from cities and other manmade sources. It is very important to note that the last type of smoke has the greatest impact: smoke from petroleum and petroleum products is particularly effective at absorbing sunlight. Altogether, about 0.4 cubic km (0.1 cu. mi.) of dust and smoke is in the stratosphere.

The general effect (and this is the peak remember) would be to reduce sunlight intensity and temperature by a degree comparable to an overcast day. That's a general comment, if the observer is downwind of a stricken target, the intense plume from the smoke generated by large continuing fires will reduced mid-day light levels to that of twilight. The average peak temperature will be reduced by around 13 degrees F.

However, there is a peculiar effect here; average trough temperatures will be increased by roughly the same amount (for exactly the same reason that a cloudy night is warmer than a clear one; the smoke clouds also tend to hold warm air in. That was an effect that Sagan and his crew deliberately suppressed.

Within ten days, the smoke/particulate concentration would decline rapidly although smoke in the upper atmosphere still absorbs much sunlight. The primary effect ceased to become temperature and the gross temperature changes would already be a thing of the past. Instead, the patchyness of the initiation effects would cause unusual weather conditions including strong winds in some coastal areas (in effect we've dumped huge amounts of energy into the climatoscene and that starts to work its way out).

A curious predictable phenomena is that dense fogs would develop over the oceans and along waterways. Another interesting effect is that the ozone layer would be reduced by nearly half yet nearly all of the Earth's surface would receive less solar ultraviolet radiation than before the war. The reason is curious; although smoke levels would be dropping rapidly, there would now be a thin veil of very fine high altitude particulates that effectively act as a block to UV radiation.

The sunsets will be incredibly beautiful.

Twenty days after the nuclear exchange climatic effects would have peaked. By this time, areas alongside seas, oceans and other large bodies of water would have effectively returned to their pre-exchange temperature sets. High-altitude areas woudl actually be warmer than before the exchange, sometimes dramatically so. At an altitude of 40,000 feet, the air termperature would be no less than 70 degrees F higher than normal (!!!)

Surface temperatures far inland will drop by around 20 degrees F but this is a transient phenomena.

The critical thing is light level; although the veil of fine high-altitude dust doesn't have a critical temperature effect, it cuts light levels by around 25 percent, ensuring that crops fail.

Within three months, temperature effects are virtually over. Worldwide, peak temperatures will have been reduced by, at most, 2 degrees F while trough will be increased by the same amount.

This will shorten crop growing seasons a bit but since the crops are failing anyway it won't make much difference. This temperature change will persist for two or three years. by which time the atmosphere will have been purged of dust and smoke.

The best way to describe the real climate change would be that a state of "nuclear autumn" would become widespread. In other words both the high and low ends of the temperature spectrum would be shaved so that things tend to the "median" situation.

[Zen9]

A good example is the UK nuclear deterrent; by the mid-1970s, it had been almost completely neutralized by existence of Soviet defenses (note, not the defenses themselves but the fact of their existence). It doesn't even really matter whether the defense works or not; the fact that it exists is enough to start the virtual attrition ball rolling.

Sort of, but this was never just that game for the UK.
From Day.1 the acquisition of nuclear weapons was for two reasons.
To deter the Soviet threat
To deter US betrayal

The virtual attrition only works if you believe it.

[MKSheppard]

Archivist's Note: This was never an official "Nuclear Game" post, but it fits extremely well with the rest of NG, that I made it "unofficially" part of it. It was recovered from an old SQL backup.

Nuclear Game V: MRVs, MIRVs and MARVs

There is a lot of confusion about the various different types of multiple-headed missiles and I thought it would be helpful if they were examined in a bit more detail. Usually, these three are considered to be onward developments of the same basic theory which is quite incorrect. In reality, they were all developed independently for different reasons.

Multiple Re-Entry Vehicles (MRVs)

Why they exist

When Polaris was introduced in 1959, it was an extremely inaccurate missile, so much so that there was a very real possibility that it would miss a large industrial target completely. In order to overcome this problem, the first thought was to install a larger warhead. The problem was that the destructive power of a warhead is proportional to the cube root of its explosive power - in other words, to double the destructive power one has to increase the explosive power by a factor of eight. It quickly became obvious that was a losing game, it was much more effective to use three smaller warheads aimed so that they would form a triangle with their destructive radii touching. That offered maximum destructive power. So, a design was created where three warheads were installed on a bus that would release them over the target.

How it works

So, a missile is fired at a target. The bus then separates and, at the appropriate time, it releases it's three warheads (there can be more or fewer but three is optimum) and they descend to for the triangle around the target.

There was a problem. When delivering RVs, it's not possible to have a major change of course of the RV as it comes down through the atmosphere. Thus the angle through which the MRVs can be scattered is restricted. This, in turn affects the dispersion pattern of the warheads. If they are released from the bus too late, they don't get enough dispersion to form the proper destructive pattern. If they are released too early, the inherent inaccuracy of the system means that the dispersion pattern is too great - its quite possible that the target in the middle of the triangle would be untouched. Thus, the bus has to release its warhead in a very tight altitude band, low enough for accuracy, high enough for proper dispersion.

Effects on ABM

MRVs are often promoted as a way of beating an ABM defense by "swamping it", apparently on the assumption that each descending RV would have to be destroyed individually. In fact, this was not the case. Using nuclear-tipped ABMs, the relatively tightly clustered MRVs would be taken out by a single shot. However, even that wasn't necessary. The restricted release heights for the bus meant that the bus would be well within range of the ABM long before it released its MRVs and would be destroyed before it did so, either by a nuclear proximity burst or a direct hit on the bus. MRVs had no relevence to ABMs and did not affect the efficiency of an ABM screen. One ABM still took out one inbound missile, regardless of whether that missile had one warhead or ten.

Multiple Independently-Targeted Re-Entry Vehicles (MIRVs)

Why they exist

Although MIRVs are often regarded as a development of MRVs, in fact they come from a totally different logic. In a ballistic missile site, the missile itself represents only a small proportion of the cost of the system (usually 10 - 20 percent). The bulk of that cost is represented by the silo and the command control system that goes with it. That cost is dorectly related to the number of missiles, not the number of warheads on each missile. Therefore, it is much less expensive to built 100 missiles with ten warheads each that 1,000 missiles with one warhead each. All the money saved can be invested in making the silos much harder and thus more difficult to destroy (meaning the enemy must fire more missiles at them to guarantee their destruction).

How it works

The missile bus containing the warheads is designed so that it can make changes in its attitude and pitch between discharging warheads. It is then programmed so that, at the appropriate time, it can make those changes before discharging a warhead and can, thus, aim each warhead at a separate target. In theory it can aim all its warheads at different targets, in reality things are much more complex.

The problem is that the system has to discharge its warheads one at a time. It cannot discharge the whole lot at once. This puts a limit on how many it can discharge in the time available. Also, the degree of manoeuvering is strictly limited. So, the targets engaged by a single MIRV missile are limited toa relatively restricted footprint. Also, there are a lot more variable, many random and unpredictable, in aiming and discharging the MIRV bus which mean that MIRV missile-delivered RVs are a LOT less accurate than unitary RVs. So much so that if the launch distance is too far back from the target, the MIRVs are likely to miss by so much that they will be useless. So the distance at which the MIRV can discharge is severely limited. It should also be noted that the MIRV bus is very complex and very sensitive.

Effects on ABM

MIRVs are also often promoted as a way of beating an ABM defense by "swamping it", apparently on the assumption that each descending RV would have to be destroyed individually. In fact, this is, again, not the case. Using nuclear-tipped ABMs, the relatively tightly clustered MIRVs would be taken out by a single shot. However, the simplest technique of eliminating MIRVs is, once again, to kill the bus before it discharges its warheads. This needs some extended range - the effect of MIRVs on the Nike-Zeus program was to upgrade the Zeus interceptor so that it had the range necessary to kill the MIRV bus before it discharged its warheads. That's why the range was increased from 250km (more than adequate to kill an MRV bus) to 740km (way more than adequate to kill any projected MIRV bus. Also, as a bonus, it needed only tiny amounts of damage or disturbance to render the MIRV bus ineffective. Far from being a way of beating an ABM defense, MIRVs were only credible in the absence of ABMs of adequate range.

Manoeuverable Re-Entry Vehicles (MARVs)

Why they exist

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there came to be a lot of interest in hitting very precise targets with ballistic missiles. Existing systems just didn't - and by the laws of physics couldn't have that accuracy. The only way around it was to give the RV some form of homing device. This requires a much bigger and more complex RV that has course correction devices, fuel, sensors etc etc. By and large MARVs are either incompatible with multiple warhead missiles or at most, only a few such warheads can be carried.

How it works

The most common guidance system for a MARV is either radar or optical terrain matching. This system makes limited corrections to the RVs trajectory in its final stage of descent to correct its aim. By so doing, they have accuracies in terms of a few feet. Stories of "radically-manoeuvering MARVs" are the realm of science fiction, like spinning ICBMs and some other proposed devices, they do not and probably cannot be built. A MARV corrects is aim as it goes down, that's all.

Effects on ABM

Essentially none. The course corrections made by the MARV are not sufficient to evade an interceptor and to an interceptor, there is no difference between a unitary RV arriving in an unguided ballistic arc and a MARV. Both are essentially predictable targets.

Thus it can be seen that neither MRVs, MIRVs or MARVs pffer any real problem to a properly-designed ABM system. As long as the interceptor has the range to hit the bus before it unloads its warheads (a condition met by both Zeus-XE and Sentinal) then the missiles remain just targets. MARVs are not relevent to a missile defense. There are ways of making an anti-missile systems life more complex, but these aren't it.

===============

Scott Brim
Thus it can be seen that neither MRVs, MIRVs or MARVs offer any real problem to a properly-designed ABM system. As long as the interceptor has the range to hit the bus before it unloads its warheads (a condition met by both Zeus-XE and Sentinal) then the missiles remain just targets. MARVs are not relevent to a missile defense. There are ways of making an anti-missile systems life more complex, but these aren't it.

Could one of those ways be the future development of a new generation of supersonic manned bomber operating within a linked network of strategic weapons systems which employ both aircraft and ballistic missiles?

===============

Stuart:
That's one. Another is to develop a missile warhead that skims the atmosphere in a very depressed trajectory and can manoeuver as it comes it. That's a lot easier to write than to do. The Russians are testing (or attempting to develop, the degree of progress is uncertain) a warhead design that can do it but it certainly isn't in service yet. It can be done using a manned vehicle - that's essentially what the Dynasoar bomber was - but doing it automatically is a real pain. Also, simply doing a depressed-trajectory is enormously fuel-expensive; an RV like that needs a large booster and is essentially a single-shot proposition one warhead per missile). Since suitable boosters could carry between eight and fourteen normal RVs, that means the defense has virtually "shot down" seven and thirteen RVs without firing a shot. Doing a manoevering depressed trajectory shot is even more fuel-expensive and inflicts even more penalties.

===============

Scott Brim
Whether its missile defense on the one hand, or prosecuting the war on terror on the other, both seem to have something in common at a very deep level: Those who eventually prevail will be those who can most efficiently play the game of managing their available resources to maximum total effect.

===============

Sheppard:
Brainflash moment concerning Decoys...

I just realized this just now reading the posts this time:

The fact that MIRV busses deploy their RVs one at a time over a period of time completely defeats any attempt to "swamp" the radar with decoys, unless you release them at the same rate as real RVs.

You can't just spam out 10 decoys at once; that's too obvious, and the ABM system will say "hahaha, who do you think you are fooling?" and reject it as an obvious fake.

All this is another strike against decoys; they just take up space and are ineffective; better to either:

1.) use space from decoy deletion to add more MIRVs

2.) use space from decoy deletion to add more fuel to the missile to make it fly a "hotter" flight trajectory, shaving a minute or perhaps two off the overall trajectory between launch and impact.

===============

Zen9
Stuart, is it necessary to have the bus as such? All this presupposes the bus on seperation from the booster does the flying to a release point, which it seems as you describe it to be quite a distance and time for the bus 'flight'.

Assuming you produced MARVs the extra effort, cost and weight might be clawed back by uping the fuel in the MARVs and making them do the exoatmospheric flight completely. The logic of multiple RVs per booster in inescapable, but once their up out of the atmosphere why keep them nice and neatly together for a single interceptor to knock the lot out?

===============

drunknsubmrnr
You need the bus for a reasonably accurate MARV delivery. If you want to substitute a full-up maneuvering warhead for the MARV's, you won't be able to carry more than one of them.

===============

Kevin
Some missiles carry over ten warheads. Wouldn't you need more than one bus for that many? I'd think that some of these missiles could carry more than one MARV, though only two or three or so. Still, putting destructive power on target is the issue. If one warhead replaces ten, but can still destroy the target, have you lost much?

===============

Seer Stuart
Some missiles carry over ten warheads. Wouldn't you need more than one bus for that many? I'd think that some of these missiles could carry more than one MARV, though only two or three or so. Still, putting destructive power on target is the issue. If one warhead replaces ten, but can still destroy the target, have you lost much?

No, one bus does for the lot. The problem with MARVs is that they need a lot more volume than a normal RV so they are one per.

If one warhead replaces ten, what does one lose? The other nine targets that would have been hit.

===============

Seer Stuart

Stuart, is it necessary to have the bus as such?

Oh yes, very much so. Its the bus that does the manooeuvering to aim the RVs at their targets.

Assuming you produced MARVs the extra effort, cost and weight might be clawed back by uping the fuel in the MARVs and making them do the exoatmospheric flight completely. The logic of multiple RVs per booster in inescapable, but once their up out of the atmosphere why keep them nice and neatly together for a single interceptor to knock the lot out?

One simple word, accuracy. The accuracy of the RVs degrades dramatically with range. Remember the RV from a MIRV has no independent manoeuvering capability; one its been launched it is set. So the further it is aimed from its target, the less accurate it is.

===============

Sheppard

Stuart, are there any uhm.......publications that might talk about all this that have been declassified? If you have to wait until you're relatively close to the target to release your warheads because of kilotonnage (225 kt) and accuracy requirements; then it means you're very vunerable to an ABM system knocking down all of your warheads.

[Craiglxviii]

Superb work there in recovering this. Thank you. There was more commentary than I remembered!

Now. Somewhere on here we have some discussion on Soviet SLBMs flying on depressed trajectory shots (or rather, the targeting systems being unable to compute such shots and/ or the warhead electronics dying of heat death in this case anyway)… was that in this forum? If so and someone can link it to here, I’ll gladly buy that person a pint.

[MKSheppard]

Not Part of Stuart's original Nuclear Game, but this is a side thing that fits in:

IR Determination of Nuclear Weapons Yields by MKSheppard

So I was talking to the senior account manager at inputsolutions.com, to price scanning the roll of microfilm I got from the USAHR -- all four volumes of aircraft armament development for fighters and bombers from 1917 to 1962.

When he asked me what it was, etc; I told him, and he then says his dad was command pilot of a B-17 in WW2 -- 384th BG, out of grafton underwood -- did 35 missions.

(sidenote; when he said that; I asked - 1944-45?; and scored it right out the gate! I mentioned that's because early in the war it was 25; then it got raised).

He was also the combat trainer for his group; took guys out on milk runs for their first mission.

But this is where it gets real awesome.

After the war, he stayed in the USAF, and became a optical physicist.

So around the 1950s, he has an idea about using IR imagery to compute the yield of a nuke -- he writes a support paper; submits it, and gets support from the Pentagon. He basically went on to act as the program manager, lead engineer, etc all rolled into one for it -- it was a pretty small, tight program.

So they set up their equipment in an observatory in hawaii; and they set up the IR film, and wait for a Soviet nuke test. Well, when it happened, he was able to phone back to the Pentagon the yield of that test before the radiological sampling ships and airplanes could get and analyze their samples.

That got attention fast -- and the USAF quickly expanded the idea to a formal program, and now applications of this principle are found on satellites etc; and it can discriminate between a fission and TN device -- probably due to the slight time lag as each stage ignites.

Presumably, anything with a computer hooked up to a sensitive enough IR sensor can now do primitive yield calculations....

[Craiglxviii]

Not Part of Stuart's original Nuclear Game, but this is a side thing that fits in:

IR Determination of Nuclear Weapons Yields by MKSheppard

So I was talking to the senior account manager at inputsolutions.com, to price scanning the roll of microfilm I got from the USAHR -- all four volumes of aircraft armament development for fighters and bombers from 1917 to 1962.

When he asked me what it was, etc; I told him, and he then says his dad was command pilot of a B-17 in WW2 -- 384th BG, out of grafton underwood -- did 35 missions.

(sidenote; when he said that; I asked - 1944-45?; and scored it right out the gate! I mentioned that's because early in the war it was 25; then it got raised).

He was also the combat trainer for his group; took guys out on milk runs for their first mission.

But this is where it gets real awesome.

After the war, he stayed in the USAF, and became a optical physicist.

So around the 1950s, he has an idea about using IR imagery to compute the yield of a nuke -- he writes a support paper; submits it, and gets support from the Pentagon. He basically went on to act as the program manager, lead engineer, etc all rolled into one for it -- it was a pretty small, tight program.

So they set up their equipment in an observatory in hawaii; and they set up the IR film, and wait for a Soviet nuke test. Well, when it happened, he was able to phone back to the Pentagon the yield of that test before the radiological sampling ships and airplanes could get and analyze their samples.

That got attention fast -- and the USAF quickly expanded the idea to a formal program, and now applications of this principle are found on satellites etc; and it can discriminate between a fission and TN device -- probably due to the slight time lag as each stage ignites.

Presumably, anything with a computer hooked up to a sensitive enough IR sensor can now do primitive yield calculations....

Grafton Underwood? I drove past there this morning!

[MKSheppard]

Stuart's Nuclear Winter essay was originally posted long ago on Duchess of Zeon's Divine Salamis, FYI in response to this:

I remeber throughout the years hearing about nuclear winter and then I find out that the explosion of several volcanoes, Tamboro I believe is one, have dwarved the energy of every nuclear weapon in the height of the cold war. This has lead me to think that the entire concept of nuclear winter is bunk although I don't know what effects radiation would have. What are others opinions on this?

[MikeKozlowski]

Stuart's Nuclear Winter essay was originally posted long ago on Duchess of Zeon's Divine Salamis, FYI in response to this:

I remeber throughout the years hearing about nuclear winter and then I find out that the explosion of several volcanoes, Tamboro I believe is one, have dwarved the energy of every nuclear weapon in the height of the cold war. This has lead me to think that the entire concept of nuclear winter is bunk although I don't know what effects radiation would have. What are others opinions on this?

...At the very least, On The Beach ain't happening, even in a worst-case scenario. Nevil Shute had to badly bend reality and physics to get that to happen.

Now, having said that, deaths from radiation-caused illnesses will be horrifying in proportion to the new population level but it's not going to wipe out said population.

Mike