Possible targets include bases for armies, air forces and navies, factories, oil refineries, ports, railroad marshaling yards, communications hubs, airfields, power plants, and even major bridges. That leaves 3,000 warheads for the global military-industrial complex, which is a surprisingly small number when you consider the scale of the problem. But I'm going to be conservative and estimate that a quarter of the global stockpile is going towards such targets. That in turn will meant that these are ground bursts, which changes the damage profile (much worse to be right at ground zero, but 5 psi radius falls to 2.1 miles with the W88), but also causes vastly more fallout. 3 Each might well get two warheads, given that they're high-priority and well-hardened. ICBM silos are of particular note here, with the US having 400 and the Russians about 170. But most of these targets are in remote areas, so a lot of warheads are going to fall where there aren't many people. Obviously, the highest priority is to try to take out the enemy's nuclear weapons and command and control systems, just in case you catch them napping and can avoid getting nuked yourself. Notably absent is a direct interest in killing the opposing population, although people tend to live near infrastructure, so it is going to happen. Broadly speaking, we can expect nuclear weapons to be aimed at one of three types of targets: strategic (nuclear) targets, conventional military forces, and industrial/infrastructure targets. Obviously, the actual plans are highly classified, but there's enough in the public domain to let us make some informed guesses. To put this another way, each bomb can destroy an area of 34.2 square miles, and the maximum total area destroyed by our nuclear apocalypse is about 137,000 square miles, approximately the size of Montana, Bangladesh or Greece.īut of course the bombs won't be spread out evenly in a manner calculated to maximize the total area covered by a 5 psi radius, which brings us to the matter of targeting. If you want to see how this would look in your city (or somewhere you don't like very much), Nukemap is an excellent tool, although it defaults to shooting at the center of cities, which is flashy, but not how targeting actually works (see below). For a civilian target, the most important number here is the 5 psi radius, which we can approximate as "destroyed", and all but the smallest cities are more than 7 miles across. Even 1st-degree burns are unlikely past 8.5 miles or so, and to get slightly sick from radiation would require being within 1.7 miles. If we take the American W88 (455 kT) as representative of this range, if slightly on the larger end, my handy nuclear bomb slide rule 2 gives severe damage to typical buildings (5 psi overpressure) out to about 3.3 miles and light damage like broken windows (1 psi) out to about 10 miles. In practice, most strategic nuclear warheads today are in the 300-500 kT range, with tactical weapons being smaller. Many of the scarier numbers come from unreasonably large bombs, the vast majority of which have been retired. Or between MOAB and an 8" artillery shell. To put it in other terms, the ratio between these two is approximately the same as the ratio between Little Boy and MOAB, the most powerful conventional bomb in the American arsenal today. The biggest-ever American nuclear test, Castle Bravo, was a thousand times more powerful than Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The obvious next question is what each of those bombs can do, which in turn requires us to remember that not all nukes are the same. Note that this is a worst-case all-out nuclear war, and there are potential off-ramps short of it even if there was, say, a tactical nuclear exchange in Eastern Europe, although they aren't certain. 1 Some of these won't work, or will get shot down, but we can assume that other nations and the surviving stockpile weapons will bring the total back up. Worth adding to this are the Chinese (380 warheads), the French (280) and British (120), for a global total that we can round to 4,000 warheads for simplicity. Arms-control treaties limit both nations to 1,550 deployed warheads, although FAS estimates 1,588 for Russia and 1,644 for the US, probably due to slight differences in definitions. Denying the other side this time is undoubtedly a major objective of both nation's nuclear forces, so in practice, we should instead look at deployed warheads. The majority of these are in the reserve stockpiles of the United States and Russia, which are there in case the current arms-control regime fails, and would take time to deploy. After peaking at around 70,000 warheads in the mid-80s, it's fallen to only 12,700 according to the Federation of American Scientists. We should probably start with a look at the state of the global stockpile, because it's fallen dramatically in the last 30 years.
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