Maybe back during the Cold War, when the Soviets were seriously considering ground-bursting thousands of warheads across the American corn belt to knock out missile silos, but that’s not the world we live in anymore. With modern C&C , they simply can’t realistically expect to destroy those sites before launch.
Can you link me to any sources or other analysis backing up the idea that silos wouldn’t be targeted in a modern-day US/Russia nuclear exchange? (I would suspect that, even if the optimal strategy may have changed, outdated Russian nuclear-war plans might not have been updated!) Since I live in Fort Collins, Colorado, around 40 miles from the hundreds of ICBM silos of the Pawnee National Grassland area, this esoteric issue of “nuclear sponge” strategy is very close to my heart!
40 miles away, the only way the explosions can badly hurt you is via fallout. It is relatively easy for informed people with, say, 72 hours of warning of the attack to protect themselves from fallout. They will be spending most of those 72 hours digging a trench, topping the trench with plywood or felled trees or such, heaping about 18 inches (maybe make it 24 inches for people in your situation) of dirt on top of that wood, then putting a sheet of plastic on top of that so that rain cannot wash the fallout into the trench.
If the fallout is very heavy, you have to stay in the trench/tunnel for 3 weeks. You can venture out for an hour after week one to scrounge for supplies if you want.
You can make the trench/tunnel in the yard of your home if you have a yard. In contrast, the only way for residents of, e.g., Berkeley, Manhattan or San Francisco to protect themselves that doesn’t involve hiring an expert and probably spending 100s of 1000s of dollars and many weeks of warning of the attack is to move themselves many miles away from their home before the start of the attack.
The really ugly aspect of the situation is that if you’ve prepared by digging yourself a fallout shelter and stocking it with food and water, you have to deal somehow with desperate unprepared people—great numbers of them if you’re in the wrong place. That is why, e.g., Switzerland made sure that everyone would be prepared, by having communal fallout shelters in its cities and requiring home owners outside the city to maintain fallout shelters in their homes, but even Switzerland stopping doing that after the end of the Cold War.
Can you link me to any sources or other analysis backing up the idea that silos wouldn’t be targeted in a modern-day US/Russia nuclear exchange? (I would suspect that, even if the optimal strategy may have changed, outdated Russian nuclear-war plans might not have been updated!) Since I live in Fort Collins, Colorado, around 40 miles from the hundreds of ICBM silos of the Pawnee National Grassland area, this esoteric issue of “nuclear sponge” strategy is very close to my heart!
40 miles away, the only way the explosions can badly hurt you is via fallout. It is relatively easy for informed people with, say, 72 hours of warning of the attack to protect themselves from fallout. They will be spending most of those 72 hours digging a trench, topping the trench with plywood or felled trees or such, heaping about 18 inches (maybe make it 24 inches for people in your situation) of dirt on top of that wood, then putting a sheet of plastic on top of that so that rain cannot wash the fallout into the trench.
If the fallout is very heavy, you have to stay in the trench/tunnel for 3 weeks. You can venture out for an hour after week one to scrounge for supplies if you want.
You can make the trench/tunnel in the yard of your home if you have a yard. In contrast, the only way for residents of, e.g., Berkeley, Manhattan or San Francisco to protect themselves that doesn’t involve hiring an expert and probably spending 100s of 1000s of dollars and many weeks of warning of the attack is to move themselves many miles away from their home before the start of the attack.
The really ugly aspect of the situation is that if you’ve prepared by digging yourself a fallout shelter and stocking it with food and water, you have to deal somehow with desperate unprepared people—great numbers of them if you’re in the wrong place. That is why, e.g., Switzerland made sure that everyone would be prepared, by having communal fallout shelters in its cities and requiring home owners outside the city to maintain fallout shelters in their homes, but even Switzerland stopping doing that after the end of the Cold War.