Let's say that country A has 1,800 nuclear weapons.
And let's say that country B has 18 nuclear weapons that can reach country A with 1 square mile accuracy.
And further let's suppose that these two countries are in a nuclear conflict.
Is it possible that country B could "win a nuclear war" and force country A to end the war on highly unfavorable terms, despite having only 1% of A's nuclear arsenal?
The real answer is that it is entirely possible, if country B's arsenal is survivable (hard to find and well defended) and country B can take more pain than country A.
What this brings up is a realization that nuclear war is in some ways similar to a negotiation, rather than straight war like most conventional war. The reason for this is a unique ability of nuclear weapons to deliver a lot of pain over a long distance. Thus, nuclear weapons can hurt countries directly, as opposed to conventional weapons, which have to first work against their militaries.
It can boil down to "he who shoots first wins" or "he who blinks looses"
ONE large nuke could neutralize many countries - but if B hits A 1st, and A figures there is nothing left to lose, b could be totally obliterated within hours - wiped right off the map - with a lot of colateral damage all around. (ie - if NK hits the USA first, and USA retaliates, SK and half of Asia would be SERIOUSLY affected - including China and Japan
Japan's Army leadership made a similar judgement in 1941. They soon discovered that their military couldn't prevent our submarines from sinking all their shipping and our bombers from burning their cities. By the end there wasn't much left to nuke.
Like the Norks the Japanese dug in deep and prepared for a long resistance. My father told me the surviving defenders on Okinawa would come up from their bunkers to watch and cheer his Air Corps unit's baseball games. They knew they had lost but were too indoctrinated with Bushido to surrender.
And that's why we can't nuke NK...EVER. Best you can do is a surgical strike against one little prick. I can't believe it hasn't been done already. Anything else is the end of the world as we know it.
Amazon.com: The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (9780674017146): Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi: Books
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looks interesting, too. Khan sounds like quite a guy.
$896 used? Sucha deal!
Downloaded.
Too bad their Emperor didn't make the call earlier. That was one helluva way to test our two new nuke technologies, but better a couple hundred thou than a million between both sides. It worked.
I worry that NK or Paki will get too rambunctious and light one off. One is led by a bipolar child, the other by fundi Islamics.
Amazing.
I found a whole bunch of strategy books available on KU for free and I'm making my way through them from Sun Tzu and Thucidides forward.
Precisely. This negotiation with NK seems to require the addition of some 9mm pieces of copper clad lead from one of Poindexter's General's BaekDuSans rather than a nuke. At least that's my hope.
If SK doesn't evacuate Seoul before the ball begins, they'll lose it to enough NK missiles to take it down to bedrock within minutes of the party starting. But how good is NK's anti-aircraft?
Will China bomb a mile-wide border at their border to tell NK that they will not be accepting any refugees? They seriously don't want any of them. (_smart_ concept, that.)
I'm just starting _America: Imagine a World Without Her_ by Dinesh D'Souza. HE is the type of immigrant America needs. Brilliant.
20:51:05 -0600 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:
Can a country which is highly dependent on a technical infrastructure which is in turn dependent on a rather fragile electrical grid survive an EMP attack? And can it retaliate against a country which essentially has no such comparable infrastructure?
How do you bomb back to the stone age, a society which for most intents is already there?
-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although far too often, Age travels alone."
Yes, ESPECIALLY Japan, as they are downwind from N. Korea. If the US were to launch a heavy counterstrike at N. Korea, it is hard to know what would happen. Would that strike so discombobulate their chain of command that nothing else would be launched? Does the US know a lot about where these weapons are stored, so that most of those storage sites or the sites they had pre-planned to launch from would be unavailable? (Good chance we know a lot more than we let anyone think we know.)
Also, we have anti-missiles that can shoot down ICBMs in the early launch phase, but we have to have those assets really close to the launch site. You can bet if the balloon went up, these assets would be moved in really close, to have a good shot.
I have no doubt whatsoever that if N.K. launched an ICBM at a US territory, there would be a massive counterstrike that would leave Pyong Yang obliterated so that an entire 25 mile radius looked like ground zero at Nagasaki. I'm sure there is a war plan alread loaded into the Minuteman LCC computers for just this scenario. You think Trump would hesitate to do it?
Pyong Yang is NOT stone age, and it seems the rulers there are fine if the rest of the country IS.
If the US did a major counterstrike on Pyong Yang, it would not be stone age, it would be totally wiped out.
As for our ability to deliver such a counterstike after an EMP attach, I think the US has worked REALLY hard to make sure that they could do so. Certainly, the Trident subs would not be affected, and supposedly they have standing orders to retaliate if they can determine that the US has been nuked. The Minuteman missiles and their launch control centers are underground, so even if their wire-line command network is popped, they should still be operable. Maybe they don't even use the wire-line stuff anymore. They have satellite, HF and VLF backup communications. Plus, the one last scheme is a Minuteman missile with a tape recorder and a VHF transmitter that can be launched vertically over North Dakota. It can be fed an Emergency Action Notification from a number of sources including the "TACAMO" aircraft, and then will broadcast that message to the launch crews for several hours before falling back to earth.
So, I think an EMP would not take out the command authority to launch a counterstrike. Now, the REST of the country would be in a MESS! But, these scenarios of absolutely nothing more sophisticated than a donkey cart being functional are, I think, way over the top. Certainly, anything with big antennas or long wires (broadcast stations and the power grid) are going to go out, and need some level of repair. But, I suspect a lot of cars may survive, at least partially, and a lot of infrastructure, like trucks and trains will survive to some extent. (Yes, the entire train signalling system will be shot, but I think the locomotives will be running or be able to be gotten running within a couple days.)
"The Starfish Prime electromagnetic pulse also made those effects known to the public by causing electrical damage in Hawaii, about
1,445 kilometres (898 mi) away from the detonation point, knocking out about 300 streetlights, setting off numerous burglar alarms and damaging a telephone company microwave link."
Nukes against EMPs would win every time, except if it happens, everyone loses. Subs would be safe, and each sub (US, Britain, Russia, France, and India) could take out half the world, so a single country would be no large task.
With traditional carpet bombing.
Right, and ditto for most of the Middle East, China, India, and others.
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. 4 small nukes launched from ships stationed at the corners of the US (ME, FL, WA, CA, or maybe one larger one from the west side of TX toward OK) would takes us down without any chance of being intercepted in time.
A week or two later, 50M-100M could be dead. Some would die from accidents at the time of EMP delivery, others to panic, other to gang violence, others to YOU HAVE/I WANT murders by otherwise normal people, others to fried medical implants, etc. As soon as food runs out, the killing begins in earnest.
It also might kick off Gunner's Great Cull.
Yes, those and undersea ULF transmitters. The EMPs would probably knock out many satellites, too, with no safe re-entry vectors.
Everything plugged in will fry. Computers, TVs, microwaves, ranges, stoves, fridges, washers, dryers, pumps, light bulbs, transformers, many power lines. Many vehicles, especially pre-EFI and pre-electronic ignition would likely run, maybe even more.
Major transformers would be unable to be rebuilt/built since they require massive power to run the industries producing them. Pretty much everything which hasn't been hardened by the military, like 1/4 of their bases and most of their vehicles, would fry.
The problem is that most of our systems are JIT, meaning that if the
31 trucks don't restock the Walmart within 3 days, it will be bare of food.
It's always best to determine the WCS, then hope for a lesser scenario. I'm wondering if an EMP will dust my solar panels and batteries, but I have replacement switches and controllers.
World War II was different because there was no nuclear weapons (until the end). Nuclear weapons actually did what I was alluding to, specifically, raising the level of pain for Japan so much as to force immediate surrender.
Now there are nuclear weapons and North Korea can inflict pain on USA remotely, outside of the theater of operations.
If NK's arsenal and operational control is survivable, and half way accurate, then NK can win the war by inflicting too much pain on the US (nuking several cities) and forcing it to surrender, despite our obvious military superiority.
The question facing our decision makers, may come to "we lost Chicago and Houston, is it worth it to continue destroying North Korea".
It may sound crazy, but it is not. North Korea can lose 80% of its population, but force the US to surrender, pay reparations, and so on, in case IF it is able to inflict unbearable pain on us.
Now if the US actually loses that war, the terms of surrender will be atrocious, and it will not be an honorable surrender.
I am surprised that these quite simple issues are not even discussed publicly, even though it could easily come to just this scenario.
Along those lines there was an interview with Ho Chi Minh published in a French magazine, very early in the war, in which the interviewer asked Ho whether he thought that N. Vietnam could win a war with the "greatest industrial power in the world". Ho replied that of course they couldn't win the war but they could prolong it until politically the U.S. would not be able to continue.
But, on the other hand, the Germans almost literally destroyed Stalingrad in 1942 and the Russians continued to fight for three more years.
WHAT? If we lost two cities, SK would be an island shortly thereafter, whether China liked it or not. Talk about waking sleeping giants...
No, it cannot. Our military and our people do not know the word "unbearable".
Evidently, we think totally differently than you, Ig. The USA cannot lose to Korea, even if it lost =eighteen= cities to NK nukes. As soon as a single hit was scored on a US city, Trump would be on the horn to neighboring countries telling them to move their populations away from the border which would be glowing sand from the 40th to the 45th latitude and the 125th to the 128th longitude. Or possibly just hot from several hundred neutron bombs. He might even use tactical nukes to blow down any further launches if he saw a trajectory for the mainland USA.
This is no longer a game, Ig. He'd have to make most of the million+ NK troops go away before landing anyone, depending on what he'd used to bomb them. This is for all the marbles, since for the US to lose yet another war would be curtains for any power we maintain in the world today. For the world's sake, we can't lose.
I know a little bit, yes, I read a fair amount of stuff about nuclear weapons. And Russia news, as you might have guessed. But nothing beyond what you would get from reading the Internet.
I think that if country B used any or all of its 18 nukes, it would be bombed out of existence. If any of B's weapons managed to survive, they would be useless as there would be no one to launch them.
The U.S. and Russia at one time had enough nuclear weapons to put the top 1 inch of soil of the entire world into space
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